CoE loot comparison - solo vs heroic

I was afraid a page with this kinda stuff would pop up. Don't worry players, SOE will nerf solo zone loot into oblivion soon enough, it's up there now to get everyone(including soloists) to go running to buy the expac, but give it a month(at most..) and SOE will nerf the solo zone loot due to too many threads like this. I have 2 opinions on this

A: You should be able to play the game the way you want and get the same benefit as other people that play the game the way they want/find easier, IE: some people are in big guilds with regular groups and have no issues with every time they hop online having someone go "HEY <INSERTNAMEHEREINCAPS>!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and immediately inviting them to do a dungeon-crawl,but some of the less popular people in the same guilds that don't get invited by the mainstream cliques aren't as lucky or there's some people sittin in there own guilds or in dead guilds that have to put up with either the incompetence or complete lack of available PUGs and therefore find it an easier route to run zones solo. Course then there's people that work on call and such and simply can't afford enough reliable time to run group instances.

B: People group and raid and run endgame zones all so they can beef their toons into virtual eq2 gods(that all get prayed to by other players and begged for their AA specs) just so they can SOLO the top group content. So you see, ultimately the majority of people are in this game for soloing, why kill it for the people that prefer/are stuck with soloing?

They put better loot in group zones because player retintion is better if players group it has absolutely nothing to do with risk/reward. I haven't gotten the new xpac yet but in the past the gear progression treadmill was discouraging if you fall behind it becomes difficult to catch up to where most are grouping.

I fall in the... I do not have the time to be a reliable group member so having the chance at some good loot via solo zones keeps me busy

Now I do in some cases set my AA to raid mode depending on the class I am soloing with for the rare occasions I can afford the time to group

Yes you only get one piece from solo instances (and sometimes nothing worthwhile), compared to one every named in a heroic.

But, you're sharing it in heroics with 5 others. Quite often you get nothing, as I'm sure it's been said before.

The random nature of the crate is no different to the random nature of an ornate chest imo.

Lets look at the past xpacs loot, as its the only one that actually gave loot on the solos rather than a shard or faction:

I'll use base stats as the comparison as it's easy to compare. We all know cb/pot is more important, but it also goes up as base stats do. For SS I'm only considering the common stuff too (mostly legendary) for simplicity.

WL gave you a certain level of gear (+ 97-117 base stats)
Solo instances gave you a few more pieces at the same level of quality as the top end of the WL gear. (+ 117 base stats)
Group instances added another 15 to base stats, and the contested added another + 4. (132-136 base stats)
The faction armour jumped up another 23 base stats from the contested.
Then raid stuff started from + 12 base stats more than faction.


Now let's look at CoE.

Solo timelines stuff is + 132 stats
Solo instances is + 160 with rares at + 179
Group instances give + 160-163 stats. Not seen a rare but I'd assume they'd be there too.
Group obol armour is + 175 stats.

Why anyone doesn't see an issue with this I don't know. It just doesn't fall in line with risk vs reward, but mostly in time and effort to coordinate a successful completion. Relying on yourself to complete an instance is much easier than relying on others as well to do it, and therefore rewards should match, like they did in skyshrine.

I don't have a problem with the solo instances providing the same ~160 stat items as heroics. You only get one of those items at the end of the solo instance whereas a run through a heroic will get you 5-8 of them depending on luck. What I have a problem with is obol item/easymode raid quality drops coming from the solo instances whereas you don't get that stuff in heroics at all. If you run in a full group you'll have to complete somewhere around 40-70 heroics before each person can buy their first piece, whereas if all of those 6 people had run the same number of solo instances instead they'd have 5-10 fabled items each already. That is clearly not right.

Yes, and keeping people like you (and in other situations that forces them to solo for one reason or another) happy is what keeps you playing/paying. Nerfing them may(at best) stop the groupers/raiders from whining about the loot but they'll just find something else to whine about and SOE will lose more customers cuz the best loot they can get is bought MC gear.

My personal suggestion if SOE wants to do something radical for once(hold onto your hats, this one is a biggie!!) buff the group/raid armor a bit(GASP! told ya it was radical - a balance fix that doesn't involve nerfing.. oh mai!). But really, that's the only way to make everyone happy, though it is pretty out there and unrealistic(historically).

Why buff the raid/group loot? For the level increase this gear is about right.

It's the solo instances loot that out of wack. Going from + 132 on the sig line to + 160 base stats.

If the solo instances gave around 145-150 base stats it would all align with this xpac and Skyshrine equipment.

Yes, the top gear being barely better than gear from over a year ago (plane of war) makes perfect sense. And only for a few slots.

Let's keep raid gear complaints to a separate thread

I don't want them to nerf or buff any gear. I just want all of that fabled stuff that drops (fairly often!) in solo instances to drop in heroics as well. The fact that breaking your heroic group up and running 6 solo zones in parallel is a more efficient path to gear is crazy.

I've been the odd man out in MMO's for years. I love to solo - I started in FF XI - a game that took 'forced grouping' to whole new heights - built my red mage like no one else's and found a way to make it work. Forming a group is not hard - at least not gameplay wise. It may be Human Relations hard, or Recruitment hard, or even Project Management hard, but that's not what the game should be about (IMHO).

I haven't gotten to do the new sig quests yet (been away a while, so need to level up and 'relearn' a bit) but I am looking forward to them. EQ2 is in a really good position if they can actually pull off having decent raid, group, and solo content. They've got decorating and housing for they players that love those (along with dungeon design 101 now), so you really can 'play your way' more than in most MMO's.

Personally, I think well designed (and that's the key) solo content can be just as hard if not harder than group or raid content. When you solo, you've got absolutely no backup (ok, you've got a merc now if the zone allows it), so if you screw up, even for a couple seconds, you can be toast. A group you've got someone who can jump in and cover for you. A raid, you've got a lot of someones.

I'd argue that for most players, raiding is the easiest of the three - main tank, main healer, a couple others excepted. If you're DPS #14 then you can show up on time (so you don't have to deal with any of the 'difficulty' of forming a raid) and you've got lots of people covering for you if you screw up or slack off for a second or three. Just stick to the script and don't stand in da' fire.

Well, they aren't... if you can kill raid mobs by yourself you get to keep everything. If you do it with 23 other people, your chances of getting something are small. Therefore soloing is naturally more rewarding than grouping.

Aside from that, teams allow people to win wars, conquer foreign countries, and build machinery and computers to explore the universe. More can be accomplished as a team, and the rewards are greater. I mean, I can't really believe I'm explaining this... did you skip kindergarten?

I think it's funny that Skyshrine and Chains of Eternity offered the first GROUP zones which are tailored for a SOLO or DUO setup and produce very nice gear which is a solid progression over the solo quest line gear, and people are already demanding more.

In Faydwer and Kunark, if you were a solo player who refused to group, then the solo quest lines were the end of the line as far as your gear upgrades. TSO and SF added daily solo shard missions. Velious had the same, plus Public Quests. Skyshrine and Chains of Eternity offer full blown group zones that can be done by 1 or 2 players. And still, people are getting greedy and wanting solo players to get the same gear 6 or 24 players working together get. Wow.

It seems like some people want a solo adventure game with a chatroom bolted on. Why? There are tons of fantastic single-player adventure games out there on Steam and other platforms. You can run Yahoo or Skype or Trillian in a window.

Coming soon to a marketplace near you.... I remember people complaining that masters should only drop from raid encounters because ad3 was fine for heroics, and ad1 was more than enough for any solo content at the time. Now you can just buy masters with station cash.

As far as I know, you can't get the tokens from solo instances that you need for simply buying the fabled gear-set. I believe that has been completely overlooked on this thread because if you really think about it, a steady group of players is going to get geared up in fabled a heck of a lot faster than relying on rare/random drops from solo instances(for instance how many fabled mage shoulders droped before ya got the SK boots ya wanted?)

And again why is this whole nonsense convo taking place, are people really that butt-hurt that other people can get gear easy, if you don't like it, don't run solo instances, seems simple enough. Personally I run in a lot of pugs, and since they've made it easier for soloists to gear up, the mental reject pugs of the past have thinned out dramatically. People that have daily groups with their guilds and regular friends have no right to even comment on this thread because they don't have to deal with what pugs are like when the people that can't play their toons are also undergeared. The better gear helps the community as a whole, your(the people crying "nerf solo instances") fussy whining and complaining does nothing for the game or the community.

The fact is that the same people whining and complaining about how "hard" it is to pull raids and groups together are probably the same ones that get hailed into raids/groups the second they come online, the people that put very little effort into it because it's already been set up months/years ago for them.

Also that other guy made a point as well, POW has better gear than a lot of what's out this xpac, the upper level gear COULD use a boost, the fact that stuff from last xpac is still selling for hundreds/thousands of plat should be a damned good indicator of that.

You really shouldn't comment on things you know nothing about. Screwing up or slacking off for a few seconds in a lot of the recent raids is a wipe. Solo zones are much, much more forgiving.

Obviously he's not dead on correct if you take everything he says literally, but he's basically right, raiding as a dps is pretty much easier than a solo instance(I know, I've done it) just stay on the tracks that the MT/raidleader lays out for ya and there's no issues. Only thing harder about a raid is that you don't(solely) control the outcome, the raid wipes, you jus gotta sit back and wait for them to tell ya to revive.

But I am going to add that difficulty is all relative, if you're a beefed SK running solo instances, they are the easiest thing since sliced bread, if you are a gi-mp templar, maybe not so much. If you are in Shoukin(on unrest) raiding is well, a job.. but I can hardly see anything posing much difficulty to them for more than the first couple days of the beta/expac release. If you are a new guild just starting raiding, it'd be more difficult.

End of the line is, buff heroic/raidgear, don't go nerfing the solo stuff to be worse than what ya can get off the broker or people won't run the solo instances, and for people who's only choice is to solo, they'll buy the broker stuff, play through the game a bit more, revisit antonica and lavastorm a few times, get bored of the game and cancel their sub.

I filled in some of the missing ranks in the quote above. Seems like a good progression to me. The only thing I would change is I would make the rare solo/group armor and Obol armor to be TWO yellow slot instead of R/Y or 1Y. That way it would keep it slightly below raid, but still an amazing item for the effort. Plus, people that choose to get gear exclusively from heroics (no raids) wouldn't really have access to red armor adorns (while people that DO raid, would get the raid versions soon enough).

I can't really agree with this since I have never had to do things like make a split second decision as to whether I'm going to cure myself or joust first, or activate an aoe blocker while fighting a solo mob. Also if I do wipe to a solo mob... not only would I uninstall the game and format my hard drive, but I would be able to revive and pull again much faster than the average raid.

Encouraging soloing is never a good idea for an MMORPG, especially one with such a low player population. If you play EQ2 for a solo experience, you make poor decisions as there are countless better one player games out there. People play MMO's to play with other people, stop being dumb.