Varsoon TLE Server FAQ

That's your only sentence here that has any kind of value to 90% of us EQ2 players ... My suggestion would even be to implement a option to change YOUR OWN xp speed yourself without turning it on and off completely! I come from Treebeard LOTRO server and they were VERY successful with a system where players could make their individual game harder if they wished to.
There you get a title as a reward if you chose to play on a harder difficulty than normal. This could be done here easy!

We could have 75% 50% and 25% XP options with a title if you leveled to 50 on one of them without turning them off EVER... and so on ...

This will be a Free Trade server correct?
I just didn't see anything mentioned about that

The duration between releases combined with XP rates matching live servers makes me wonder if the difficulty of the mobs will be adjusted to be more challenging. If not, that's kind of unexpected and confusing considering feedback from Kaladim.

I'm happy for a fresh TLE considering the disappointment of L&L, but won't lie that I'd rather a far shorter duration and more difficulty, at least for raid encounters.

What's Happening on Varsoon?

Varsoon is a Time-Locked Expansion (TLE) server where expansions unlock automatically. This server will be very similar to the Kaladim TLE except that Varsoon will also be a Free-Trade server. Which means items that are normally heirloom, will be able to be traded with other players.

It... it's literally the very first blurb about the server?

Did you get bored before the second paragraph and just post your question?

Does no one here play alts?

And I for one don't want to spend most of my time hunched over crafting tables: thanks but no thanks. Been there, done that for 18 years now, since grey subcombines were mandatory, everything had weight, you had to make soul shard runs every time you died, and if even 1 player on your team died, the whole team got XP debt.

Bring on live's XP rates! Quit crying, folks, you do have XP sliders and the ability to shut off XP, you know! Use 'em or lose 'em....

What time is Varsoon supposed to launch on May 24?

The AA slider is non-functional until KOS, which is going to be 7+ months out if the projected unlock schedule is met. I'm very apprehensive of opinions on how TLE should be, when coming from people who clearly haven't played (pre-KOS) TLE.

Generally, it's whenever the servers come back up after the weekly patch. As for the exact time, that's anybody's guess. It might be right on schedule, or get delayed several hours. Once it even got delayed an entire day.

It's not mentioned in the FAQ, but the number of characters you can have on Varsoon is capped at 1, and as soon as you hit level 50, all the level 1-49 content becomes inaccessible. It's a new feature.

Disclaimer: the above isn't actually true. I wouldn't ordinarily disclaim my posts, but this is a FAQ so I'm not gonna rock the boat too much.

Please don't do this, leveling will be wayyyyy to fast. Atleast give the community a chance to voice their concern, do a poll vote or something and let people vote on how fast the experience progression should be.

Is it possible to elaborate on this? I understand people can freely disable their Combat XP slider. But from the looks of it most of the community seems to be in agreement that Kaladim was already leveling fast and now we will level even faster. And thats not even including what it would be like using any XP potions purchased off the market place.

What I am hoping when I say can you elaborate on this, is me purely (hopefully) Is that I am interpreting it wrong. Meaning the XP rate is the same as it was on Live at the time of the release of the original content. Not the actual rate that XP is at currently on live. In my eye it seems like that would defeat a major aspect of the TLE server by allowing the XP rate be the same as the current live servers.

I’m sure it’s a bad mistake from the FAQ writer. Doing current live XP rates on a RETRO TLE server would be very high on the list of dumb things ever done on a MMO

Seriously it is way to fast! I tested it and you are nearly lvl 10 at the end of isle of refuge and all quests are grey long before you can finish them so it would be ridiculous to even consider such a thing…

The Game has to give you a nice progression and you absolutely do NOT have to turn off your XP to make it right…

Accendo says; "Expansions will unlock approximately every 16 weeks, except for Desert of Flames, which will be 12 weeks. That means you'll experience 16 weeks of classic EverQuest II, 12 weeks of Desert of Flames, 16 weeks of Kingdom of Sky, and so on. Any content that was released in between expansions, including GU and Adventure Pack content, will be released 8 weeks after its corresponding expansion has been released. For example, 8 weeks after Kingdom of Sky is released, you’ll have access to Fallen Dynasty. Desert of Flames will receive Hunter’s Quests and items approximately 6 weeks after release."



- Im unsure how Varsoon will handle DoV and AoD. Its 2 seperate releases that time and time again have had their content, or lack thereof, mixed together to the point where some have called large parts of DoV for AoD, but unfortunately not the other way around.

It might even be the majority who use one(DoV) to describe the other(AoD) and you have often talked about content that would be released with AoD. - This had, imho, a near catastrophic impact on the playerbase on Kaladim, and it left the impression that the dev team didnt know what they had to work with.

AoD is NOT DoV. Skyshrine is NOT AoD. The Apprentices should NOT reward the players with recipes for gear with SF stats. And there should NOT be 8 months from DoV d1 to the release of Sleepers Tomb.

AoD was a "content free expansion" - It was arguably not even an expansion since the only content it brought to the game was the dungeon the players could make after original release. -, and a worldevent that have been available for all live-players, incl F2P. I am obviously talking about Frostfell here and small questline with eEolissi mar theme
Im unsure how Varsoon will handle DoV and AoD. this time around, Its 2 seperate releases.

The mistake was one of the main reason the last part of Kaladim turned into a bumpy mess with the final exudous as outcome, its one of the reason for the imbalance in gearprogression from SF > EOL.

AoD was a "feature pack" that opend for new mechanics, and it should be treated as such
It came with an overhaul of FP, apprentices, 20 additional AAs, BLs, Mercs, Reforging and.. I might be very wrong here, but ;the harvest pony. But thats it. It was elements that supplemented the game we alrdy had, and it was the reason the players could live with content drought at launch.
DoV is liked by many, but there is also a lot who dislike it, and the game lost a lot of players with that expack.. It was true at launch, and it was true on Kaladim. But DoV was unique in that it was the latest expansion for 1.5 years(ish), and it had not one, but 2 major gameupdates with additional content. There was roughly 6 months from launch to the release of Skyshrine, and apx 6 months from Skyshrine to Sleepers tomb, The drought was mitigated by the apprentices and the BLs that gave the players, tradeskillers and adventurer alike something good to grind, A lot of the content was superhard, and Plane of War wouldnt be unlocked on the server before the 3 gods, Rallos, Tallon and Sullon was defeated. The players had reforging so they could spend hours on finetuning and tests, The stats had a giant span from 90odd all the way to 180od near the end. There was in short; a lot of good stuff to mess with.

But you have shaved it down and blended it so noone can see the fine connections anymore. it has gone so far that Skyshrine is being called AoD and is believed to be an expack of its own. Apprentices on Kaladim has become borderline useless due to a re-balance on live. They where never brought back to former glory. The content was adjusted to match the players, and the players didnt have to adjust to the content. Reforging was removed, There was on short, almost nothing to mess around with.Y
You can almost objectively call it an true statement when peeps say DoV sux. It was nothing of what it was originally.

Should Varsson get as far as Kaladim, then we need this to be corrected in order to avoid the same heartbreaking end.
DoV needs to be tied back together to what it was. The apprentices has to be brought back to where they mean something, And while at it, the grind from the early part of the expansion must be reduced or made much more rewarding. There is noone who wants to grind 40k faction to be able to buy a necklace or a belt for one toon, and there is even fewer who wants to do it once for all the 4 factions. And then theres the players with multible toons, plate, chain, cloth who has to repeat the grind for all their toons. It just doent work.
Skyshrine is the midcontent of DoV, (following is not supported by any source and its purely speculation and qualified guestimates) And it somehow appear obvious that PoW and Sleepers tomb was the midcontent the original devs had in mind. SoE was in the process of shutting the game down in this period and the release of DoV was somewhat rushed. It shoulda been released with Drunder/Spire and arguably even Skyshrine/Whitered Lands open from day1.
We have Eastern Wastes, > The Great Divide with the Orchs- but we never got the Western Wastes and the connections between these. Its fair to assume that WL is what should have been the western Wastes, and Skyshrine should have been the counterpart to Kael. And as mentioned. Sleepers Tomb should have been the original midcontent with the dev having the opportunity to unlock PoW at this point, provided the servers wouldnt have them unlock through raidkills.

The DoV as many(somewhat rightfully) see it is a thin cop of water with no meat. But a lot in that grp will at the same time tell how much they like SS. You (the current devs) HAVE to adress this, Kaladim would (if the roadmap had been executed flawless) be well into ToV now, and we can get there again. But we NEED you to compress and concentrate the content.
We cant go without updates in 8 months while we chew at something that should have lasted 2. And that 2 shoulda been full of fresh adventures with our BLs, and daily ts quests for apprentices that gives us kool recipes, helpful potions and materials to make some kickass gear,
I dont have the golden solution. But it could be something in the area of what has been mentioned partially alrdy; release Drunder/Spire from d1. Give us the apprentices in SF rather than DoV, OR bring the stats up where they belong, - Accept the longevity and repeat what we had originally. Give us 2 major content updates, SS/PoW and ST.
Respect the important role of the apprentices that serves the purpose of brining the entire server together, from the lowlvl tradeskiller to the fully geared raider with 4 high-demand toons.
Accept/respect we dont have all the time in the world on a TLE and reduce the reaserchtimers even more, Make the products they come with relevant again - We need something to look forward, We need what could be the last part of the expack to be fun, we need the grind designed so it gives us a smile instead of a headache, we need a reason to stay,
And DoV doesnt become better or worse because of a name.Doesnt matter if its called AoD or DoV. What matters is how the content is released - Its judged by what we get from it

Short historic list for references - I know i have left stuff out, and im probably also wrong in some details, but

GU59 was the release of the 8th expansion; DoV and flying
GU60 Drunder, Spire, Battlegrounds
GU61 SaberonsPalace, Sunken city. Fae/Arasai "wing quest",AA overhaul/revamp
GU62 AoD, with AAs,BLs,Mercs, DM, Apprentices, FP revamp, racial quests,
GU63 Is where the misunderstanding is rooted(Ithink) - We get a major content update after AoD has been released, and anyone who say Skyshrine was released during AoD is therefore 100 % correct, To make the confusion even deeper, AoD also gets an update here - However. AoD did not grant acces to SS or PoW/Sleepers Tomb.
GU64 PoW is unlocked on all servers(slack Freeport!!) without first killing the triplets
GU65 The 9th expansion; Chains of Eternity is released.
We cant have a period of what was initially intended(guestimate) to be 1 year of content + the featurepack tossed in a blender and poured out as if it was 2 expacks. And we can definately not have the first ½ of that blender mix stretched to cover what under normal circumstances would have had 2 full expansions. Its just not ok

I would argue the opposite.
The exp should be throttled to match the reduced timeperiod we have available, I dont want to spend too much time grinding the same dungeons for exp when I only have 12-16 weeks til next expack,

I only played a few months on FG, and one of the reasons was the extremely slow lvling

Thanks so much for the new TLE. I cant wait for it. As others have said it sounds like the xp rate will be WAY to FAST and the expansion releases way too slow. Thats why i left kaladim xpac unlocks were so rediculously slow. The xp rate was okay, even arguably too fast, and this will be faster than that??? Once i max lvld serveral alts, which took maybe a month, i cancelled my eq2 sub and went to another game. Sounds like 6 months into this or less, ill be doing the same thing.

I join a TLE to take a slow ride. I joined it to group and play a social game with others, not to get max lvl in 3 days and log out for the next 3 months. why accomodate those who just wanna max lvl super fast and take away grouping, content, questing and dungeons etc from the rest of us? thats what youre doing by making the xp so fast we out level everything in days. what a shame.

if some ppl wanna solo through the content super fast you could give them agnostics with turned up xp, or you could allow them to simply create max lvl "geared" toons from day 1 because from the "raiding" comments thats all they want, and leave the rest of us alone with vanilla xp rates or close to it .

As for xpac unlocks, running the same content over and over and over for months and months ie one xpac for 16 weeks at a time is just way too slow. Thats just too slow especialy considering the xp rate. many will be done and most will out level all the content on multiple alts in no time flat and cancelling the sub to play something else.

No sir I read all of it, but completely missed what the second paragraph said. Thank you

I for sure hope that Rhoks is correct, that the xp rate is matching the rate on live when it launched.

This is the best suggestion I've read regarding the xp.