Pretty sure there are like 200-words-or-less that would make this server wildly more engaging and retentive. Been told provided feedback is useless, but I guess we'll see. All of these have justifications that I'm happy to post below. Also totally fine getting entirely ignored, or even better: Flamed by people who disagree. Itemization: Restrict hunters to dual-slots only (earring, ring, bracelet, charm) and increase sig/epic weapon ratings to hunters levels. Add rarity modifiers to total item power. Fabled should get a flat +20% over treasured, 10% over legendary, etc. Loosen up the item generator so it can give you double of one blue stat (not pot/crit) and none of another, on a "4 blue stat" piece of gear, ie 10 DPS or 4 Cast Speed, instead of a useless combined 5DPS 2 Cast Speed item. Reduce the ability mod caps back down to +50%, instead of the current +100% Consolidate mount tiers. All mounts should be fall distinctly into solo/quested, heroic/pack, or raid/crate categories. Restore "cross-tier gear overlaps", allowing some power to carry over between expansions and allowing a larger power spread between weakest and strongest items in a tier Balance: Lean towards overtuning content, then balance towards midcontent. Patch on patch days, not on-the-fly when a guild asks. If the expac isn't cleared by midcontent release, that's fine. Alternate progression paths defined the best content in this game. Work on this, or work on that. Double-triple mob auto attack speed. Take power proc off gebs and corruption and other out-of-era items, and balance mob HP around reduced power pools. Increase mob cast time by 2x-4x for most abilities, giving time to prepare for / react to them. Do 2-4 day spawns for contested/avatars, at the quickest. Increase cost of patch kits and mender bots fees dramatically Let them decide what can or can't be done based on what should or shouldn't be done, of what the players actually want. Express your desires, not your (very low) expectations. It's too late for many things, but not all things. For the rest, there's always next time. EDIT: A picture is worth a million words, so I'm a liar
Itemization: Restrict hunters to dual-slots only (earring, ring, bracelet, charm) and increase sig/epic weapon ratings to hunters levels. This prevents what is a decent casual-player catch-up, retention mechanic and power boost from dominating slots with otherwise interesting loot. Also fixes the inescapable tank xbow scenario, as well as addresses the shortcomings of scout dps at the moment. Them doing both would prevent scouts from losing a sizeable chunk of auto DPS, which scouts desperately need every drop of right now. More importantly, if scouts *DO* lose any auto attack DPS, then Ability mod becomes king for every class in the game, with auto stats having a much weaker baseline to modify. Ability mod used to be powerful for every class, but the caps were significantly lower for everyone but sorcs and preds, and even many pred abilities were capped fairly easily. Ability mod was also present in large quantities when it came into normal itemization, with most people being capped within the first week of RoK. That just isn't the case here, and if auto attack stats on gear are meant to be Add rarity modifiers to total item power. Fabled should get a flat +20% over treasured, 10% over legendary, etc.. This is sorely missing right now. Not only does itemization currently fall into super-marginal upgrade territory, there is nothing exciting about receiving a fabled item versus a treasured one. Most of the stats modified by item rarity (resists, mitigation, protection, and weapon rating) are entirely meaningless for most classes. Apply those same differences to the primary and blue stats across the board and rare loot might mean something more than whatever proc it may have. Loosen up the item generator so it can give you double of one blue stat (not pot/crit) and none of another, on a "4 blue stat" piece of gear, ie 10 DPS or 4 Cast Speed, instead of a useless combined 5DPS 2 Cast Speed item.. This will address the issue of wildly useless stat combos dropping. Basically there are only 3 pieces of gear right now: MA/DPS/Flurry/Haste, Abil Mod/Cast Speed/Reuse, Max Health. There are very few pieces that hybrid those 3 sets of stats (A few Abil Mod / MA pieces, for example) that are meaningful deviations. The rest are hot garbage and objectively worse than something else that can be obtained from a similar source. Nobody on the planet wants Haste/Cast speed. Nobody will flex into DPS/Mitigation. At least with this, there is another facet to itemization. Taking something with 10 DPS mod and another item with 5 Haste, instead of itemizing two identical 5 DPS mod / 2.5 haste items is a way more fulfilling approach, and gives you far more options as a player within a given tier. Obviously the minmax potential is higher, but at the benefit of being railroaded not quite as hard. Reduce the ability mod caps back down to +50%, instead of the current +100%. Currently, there isn't a good argument to not just completely dump into ability mod for most classes. Most of this is because, at some point, the ability mod caps were changed. Especially for enchanters, bards and tanks, this is giving huge DPS boosts which really make a class like brigand feel awful close to a fast cast ench or dirge in terms of output, with significantly less utility. I like classes being able to compete, but doing so should involve more than just dumping into a single stat. This also makes it feel like there is a loot drought, and every person is waiting in line for ability mod gear. Predators, sorcs, and priests should be the only one seeing meaningful gains from stacking ability mod. There's a whole separate issue with summoner stat sharing that should probably halve their gains from ability mod across the board (akin to lifetaps halving their gains from ability mod because it affects two different components of the spell) but that can be balanced around elsewhere. Consolidate mount tiers. All mounts should be fall distinctly into solo/quested, heroic/pack, or raid/crate categories.. I have no words for the situation with mounts right now. It's so bad, collapsing everything into 3 simple tiers is the best possible solution, at least in terms of conceptualizing how they should be balanced power-wise. You can make them different, but these should be the rough power categories. The benefit of the paid mounts should be their scaling, not their entire-set-of-raid-gear, leaps-and-bounds benefit ahead of everything, forever. Restore "cross-tier gear overlaps", allowing some power to carry over between expansions and allowing a larger power spread between weakest and strongest items in a tier. There currently isn't much room for progressing gear within a given tier. It feels very on-the-rails and measured to prevent any meaningful gains from expac start to expac finish. Even worse, the absolute worst gear in a following expac is immediately better than the absolute best gear from the previous expac. This means all the farming done in the last quarter of an expac, especially the harder mobs that hopefully manage to survive until close to the upcoming expansion, provide literally nothing of use. That gear can't possibly be powerful enough, within the measured space of gear progression within a tier, to motivate people to pursue it. It's getting replaced by mastercrafted on Day 1. This is not the way.
Balance: Lean towards overtuning content, then balance towards midcontent. Patch on patch days, not on-the-fly when a guild asks. It's true that under current circumstances, there may not be enough outlets for people to improve for there to be a meaningful gradient to progression. With any of the above itemization changes, and/or a hopes that itemization is more meaningful in the expac, there should be some tangible gains from "Farm up, practice up, and try again."You can't unkill mobs in an expac. If you undertune initially, and then buff the mobs, the thrill of the first kill is entirely gone, and the loot expectations are locked in. If there isn't time to hone a mob in on good balance, let people cut their teeth on it and get pulverized for a while. As long as mobs don't have trillions of HP, precarious zergy fights that punish people for not watching cast bars or doing anything but stacking glass cannon gear are fine. People really need to stop projecting their low expectations of what the "inferior average player" can do, or wants to do. They're more capable and motivated than most of the elite players I've met. If the expac isn't cleared by midcontent release, that's fine. Alternate progression paths defined the best content in this game. Work on this, or work on that. About half way through an expac, there was always a wall being hit. Some mob you just weren't pulling together to get killed. Midcontent like Shard of Hate, Munzok's and Underfoot did an excellent job of not just giving you something else to work on (that might give, with enough pressure), but provided loot that upgraded hard-to-obtain slots. This would eventually give you an opportunity to overcome the previous wall you were facing, and removed much of the linearity from raid progression. On TLE, it seems like the pattern is: Clear expac, do nothing for 7 weeks, clear midcontent, do nothing for 7 weeks. That makes player retention pretty brutal. I'd be willing to bet that most casual players are more likely to step away from the game because raid content being on farm by bots and every guild flooding the broker makes it entirely meaningless for them to do any heroic content. Every heroic thing short of a select few masters and a small handful of rare ability mod gear have been at vendor-price on the broker since prior to midcontent DOF. If raids weren't immediately on farm status in entirety, that wouldn't be the only gear of value. Double-triple mob auto attack speed. Especially from a tank perspective, I could write about this for days. Philosophically, tanking should go like this: Mob lacks debuffs on pull rapidly smashes you down to 25-50% hp before you stabilize somewhere 25%-75% HP or lose the tug-o-war. Fluctuations in debuffs and mob hit rates should push you between those two numbers, and if you can get things under control you should be constantly pulled down from full to 60% or so. Throughout the fight, events should take place (profession abilities, aoes, scripted direct damages, adds that need attention (and debuffs) or death touch style mechanics) will cause you to burn your tools to keep yourself from slipping to death. This encouragement of the HP-Tug-o-War means that a failure doesn't feel like bad luck. It feels like you actually failed to deliver more HPS than the mob delivered DPS. The tension is way higher, and it rewards proactive and reactive gameplay. Also makes wards less powerful and HoTs/reactives more powerful, a welcomed change from the "have a shaman or die instantly" meta. Under the current system, heavily reliant on intermittent giant hits and one-shotting AoEs with shoddy, interruptable timers, it feels like luck. Your entire presence as a tank is trying to mitigate the probability that you randomly die. This is why paladin HP pools are so powerful right now -- Our chance of randomly dying is lower. If damage was distributed more smoothly, the larger focus would be on who takes the least damage *per second*, which would shift the favor towards guardian mitigation (becoming more meaningful as a result), and brawlers who would be able to stand in at huge advantage, passing the mob off before they (the only class that should), get unlucky and die. Mobs attacking faster and doing more auto attack DPS means you can balance aoes around killing or debilitating scouts, without making tanking trivial. Barakah/Siyamak are one of the best feeling fights in the expac as a tank because their auto attack elemental barrage attack *emulates the first scenario described above*, even disregarding the % based nature of their attacks. Take power proc off gebs and corruption and other out-of-era items, and balance mob HP around reduced power pools. These are just wildly out of era, and change the gameplay entirely. When we talk about fights being "too long", we should mean "Fights are too long because power can't sustain for that long", not because we're literally falling asleep at the keyboard. If mana was more of a struggle, DPS efficiency would come down, heals would be spammed less, auto attacks would be worth more, and everything could be balanced from that baseline. While this would be a pretty huge undertaking, it's the *primary* weakness of t5/t6 and probably t7 gameplay. It' why the entire game has been boiled down to damage divided by cast time, and pressing every button every time its up. Increase mob cast time by 2x-4x for most abilities, giving time to prepare for / react to them. Too many gameplay mechanics punish you for the sake of punishing you right now. Mob special attacks and abilities should be powerful, they should be something you don't entirely ignore, but they should be something that you *can act upon* should you choose to do so. There is virtually nothing you can do right now when you are fighting a named and two adds who all cast assault at random. In order for it to be powerful enough to be meaningful, it basically has to catch you by surprise. At that point, it just feels insurmountable. Same with things like godking's power/armor gutrip/throatslice whatever. You can stand there and do literally nothing if you want any shot of interrupting them from being cast. If they were 1s instead of 0.5s, it just feels more engaging. You could actually not die instantly if the cast begins while you're in recovery time. Do 2-4 day spawns for contested/avatars, at the quickest. This is ultimately one of the more frustrating parts of this expac and base game. I'm happy to see that a PUG has stepped up to tackle the contested dragon regularly, but the frequency and attendance floor are at serious odds from a gatekeeping and accessibility standpoint. I don't personally think Vox should have been so easy to lockdown, though the effort put forth was pretty minimal by the competition, and that certainly increases in likeliness as long as people are remain interested. If your goal is to not have people interested, idk, but mobs spawning every 2-4 days still seems like an event rather than a chore. Twice a day with expansive BIS loot pools just seems like madness, an intentional act of attrition causing burnout. It encourages "lets kill it 20 times in 2 weeks, preferably during double loot, and then never have to do it again" instead of "I can't wait for it to spawn again so we have a shot to contest it with whatever group of people we manage to get online in time" Increase cost of patch kits and mender bots fees dramatically There is no death penalty in EQ2TLE, and we're desperate for a plat sink. This targets the tryhardiest of raiders who can't be bothered to go back to town and repair, which is the only real speedbump in smashing your head against a raid mob for hours.
I agree with pretty much everything, although I would say if they restricted hunters to dual-slots, that would probably eliminate the need to buff the epic/sig weapon ratings, since they'd no longer be competing with hunter weapons.
I agree with almost every point as well. Things I think are pivotal are the itemization changes specifically regarding hunters, mounts, and progression as well as re-itemizing some of the HQ items like GEBs. The reason I think these are pivotal changes is that they actively take away from the soul of what TLEs were created for -- giving you that desire to attain nostalgic items, content being fully experienced and not trivialized by Hunters, and making mounts a nominal stat increase, not something that contains multiple items worth of stats. The AB mod changes were odd when they happened, not sure why it was changed in general, so I'm okay with it coming back to the way it was as well. I know it's going to be a decent amount of work and things will probably be unbalanced, but maybe we can hash them out during the first half of KoS.
This point was originally an either/or scenario, since the chances of them making the hunter change were slim, and the chance of buffing weapon ratings was slim. While either change would fix the problem somewhat, the shotgun approach seemed best. If they pluck things out at random from the feedback here, they'll have two things to pluck from, both of which would address the domination of hunters weapons in certain slots. Them doing both would also prevent scouts from losing a sizeable chunk of auto DPS, which scouts desperately need every drop of right now. More importantly, if scouts *DO* lose any auto attack DPS, then Ability mod becomes king for every class in the game, with auto stats having a much weaker baseline to modify. Ability mod used to be powerful for every class, but the caps were significantly lower for everyone but sorcs and preds, and even many pred abilities were capped fairly easily. Ability mod was also present in large quantities when it came into normal itemization, with most people being capped within the first week of RoK. That just isn't the case here, and if auto attack stats on gear are meant to be viable, then weapon ratings need to remain high (or honestly go slightly higher, since the xbow hit rate bonus will be lost)
Also for bonus points, continue to change a solid handful of ItemIDs so entire zones can't be written off by gathering old gear links on launch day. Most of this gear has been changed since classic anyway, so it's already "new", but taking away the entire discovery aspect is brutally boring. It basically becomes a shortest-distance-between-two-points assessment by every tier of player to hit their goals in as little time as possible, returning to the braindead krono farm in anticipation of the next expansion. Obviously this requires a degree of trust that the loot is actually desirable, because opening up a box of unknown dung still stinks. As long as enough loot is unknown, there is a chance that the next time you go into a zone, you could pull out something decent that truly is a disco, not just in theory.
Didn't provide any commentary on class balance in here really, because I assume its an obviously dead horse at this point. Though, if it needs said: Make summoner pets die to aoes again, or check their damage at T1.5/T2 otherwise, since microing a pet might provide *some* kind of effort requirement on their parse. And throw warlocks a bone for the curse of darkness nerf. And make paladin group heal a 30s cooldown (Preferably with a buff to the heal amounts of the other heals, since their long cooldowns are a carryover from % based heals and way undertuned for TLE HP pools)
