CoE loot comparison - solo vs heroic

It has been that way since the beginning of the game, granted it used to be just a few points difference but it was there. And if you have ever played WOW you can see that EQ2 started following the stat inflation gravy-train that WOW has always had around TSO.

The only way they could make old zones really interesting is to revamp all of them, something the skeleton crew we have left doesn't have the time for. Just upping the combat / quest xp rate while mentored in them might help, but I'm not sure.

And yes your posts came across as "Its not fair that solo mouth-breathers are getting better gear than me in the new expansion."
You might not have meant it that way, but thats the way you presented it.

Since CoE came out I've played the most I have since DoV.

Skyshrine I did all the withered land quests in a day or two, did my raid zone access, got my heroic mount and title and then only logged in to raid and every once in a while to harvest to make some plat.

CoE has the signature quest (and I agree that people who have done it once should get a token for alts) and since I finished it I've been running overland mass slaughter for obols and trade-skill recipes while looking for shinies / solo zones for the chance at the tinkering recipes I'm missing and shinies, normal loot for muting and a chance for rare loot / heroic zones for loot, obols, rare faction drops and shinies / raiding on the weekend like always.

And I'm not the only one, I see a lot of people I only saw logged in to raid during skyshrine out and about doing basically the same thing as I am. In fact its nice to finally have friends on all the time to group with, so I say CoE and its loot system is good for the game, Short time? Long time? That all depends on how long the dev team makes us wait for something new to do.

When people start to talk about risk vs reward in a game like EQ2 i giggle. Risk where ? xp loss ? delevel ? corpse loss ? item loss ? item decay ? what is the risk cause i cant find it ? Few G's for repairs and your at it again, thise days you dont even have to leave a zone and suffer a lockout to repair broken gear and 99.9% of the players got enough plat to repair there gear for the next million deaths.

If a 5 - 10% item improvement isnt enough to get people to do heroic / raid zones, then maybe the problem isnt the items, if you need a 20% item improvement to actualy group up and do content then maybe the problem is the content itself not being fun or people just dont like grouping as they need to be lured in to it with massive item improvements. Maybe i have just been around too long and have grown old grumpy and dont fit in to mmo's thise days lol.

For me grouping will always be about fun, the social aspect and spanking mobs, a better item once in a while is a nice little bonus and as long as the heroic items i get is enough to beat heroics and access entry raids, i couldnt care less if mister solo number 35767 get a chance for a few best in slot items with a 0.01% drop chance, as long as they arent required for me to have to complete heroic / raid zones. When mister solo number 35767 finaly gets the drop it makes his day and his happy, gratz to him. I can grind for the item too if i wish, but can live and group perfectly well without it, so it dosnt bother me.

(% and numbers, randomly thrown around as examples not facts )

Thats me and my view on things, you can disagree all you want and try to shoot my play style down ( Not saying anyone did or are going to do this, but some do so now its covered ), but this is where i stand.

Kind regards, hugs, love, lollipops and space ponies.
Vriss

Thanks for linking the gloves Estred, I figured those were the ones you were talking about; in fact I had them drop for me and decided to use them for now since they are better that the EM skyshrine gloves that I had,

I'm only going to quote this part of your post though to ask you a question, you and your guild are bored of PoW too aren't you? I think it is a huge mistake that they decided to leave PoW as the end game-zone for so long,

They should have made a new play-ground for hard-core people like yourself to play in, and readjusted PoW down (including removing the mythical drops to the new zone) to make it accessible for casual raiding guilds to go test their mettle in at level 95.

As is, I think most casual guilds are going to pretend PoW doesn't exist and concentrate on CoE raid content.

I defenitly agree they even increased the levels of the bosses in Plane of War without upping the gear (and Avatar's accordingly). My guild is currently focusing on pushing out progression posts with new content and heading back to PoW when we have time. Believe it or not even Drunder Set Bonus is still very good.

I know myself and a number of Guk raiders from the top 2 guilds on that server are in agreement that we are tired of PoW and were hoping for new stuff considering Etherenere is another plane of existence (the afterlife of sorts), we had hoped for fresh new content. What we recieved was the usual packacge of "blow through it EM" which so far from my game experience only DoV has debunked as even Hardcore guilds had to farm DoV EM before moving to HM just like all guilds.

We have PoW and some Avatar stuff and we just ignore most EM scripts that don't dish out 500K+ damage. Turn-n-Burn seems to be the staple EM script which to me is almost insulting to entry level raiders it's like they don't throw enough to prep them for hard mode. As per your last part you are probably right, why bother doing excruciatingly frustrating scripts at times for gear that is 10% better when you can just "faceroll" through EM or at maybe as a mid-end guild give some effort to it and gain 180's on all your gear? Most raiders will be happy with that. High-enders like myself strive to be the best we can from adventuring and enjoy challenges within reason so we want that extra 10% for everything.

The Mythical drops should always come from the hardest bosses in the "current content" bracket. If Commanders Goreslaughter and Corpsemaul along with General Teku are still the hardest then the Mythical cloak should drop from him. Ethereals however should only drop from raid zones imo, or be like the DoV Ethereals that only rivaled HM gear not totally blew it away.

Estred, thank you for the insight.

I'm going to relate our experience last weekend. We decided to have a "fun raid night" due to knowing that a lot of people would be missing due to the holidays. So we formed up and noticed that not all of us were at 95 for the new content so we decided to do a quick UD run to see if we could get a mount to drop and a BP for someones alt or the rare cloth BP for one of our mages.

EM UD is pretty much a cake-walk at this point of time but you still have to follow the scripts or you get splatted. We killed Dokezar, and one group split off to go do SS contested to get our last person to 95 while the rest of us formed up in front of the new raid zone in the C-Thule temple to wait.

We didn't really have much time left but we steam-rolled first pulled the first two bosses in there, a giant stirge and a lizard-man. The stirge had some adds that I pulled off the MT group but it was really a straight turn and burn (with a ton of hit-points). The lizard-man was even easier.

We quit for the evening after those two kills, but I sure hope the rest of the zone isn't that easy, even us "twice a weekend" guilds like to be challenged. I guess we shall see this weekend.

• Echoes of Faydwer was an "overlay" for Kingdom of Sky and those KoS zones remained relevant all through the EoF lifecycle.
• The Shadow Odyssey was the same way. Kunark group zones remained relevant through a good chunk of TSO's lifecycle.
• Then Velious came out and totally invalidated Sentinel's Fate as the solo gear > past zone's raid gear. Drunder totally invalidated Velious, Skyshrine totally invalidated Drunder, and Sleeper's Tomb totally invalidated Skyshrine.

When an update's solo content replaces the raid gear of 6 months ago, gear inflation is going way too fast and players are getting funneled into smaller and smaller amounts of content. People ran KoS zones long after Faydwer came out. When Kunark and TSO were hot, there were over 20 combined dungeons for players that had some kind of useful gear.

Yet, when Drunder came out, there were exactly 3 dungeons worth running. It leapfrogged the previous gear so substantially that time spent in Velious zones was an obvious waste. And Skyshrine did the same. Players were funneled into 4 dungeons.

Gear inflation is part of every MMO. But keeping the numbers under a tighter control would mean that players always have an overlapping set of dungeons from more than one update that are worth running. Yes I'm aware that back in the day, the top raiders were only running 1 dungeon in TSO -- Guk. But there was decent stuff in every TSO zone for the average grouper, and more importantly, that one powerful rare item from each zone boss that people ran zones 100 times to get.

TSO and the multitude of blue stats that were added changed the game considerably. At the same time they added the first of the token armors to the game. I do however agree that DoV jumped the shark, I knew it was bad news when I logged into beta and was given a full set of SF raid gear to go adventuring with.

The difference between Skyshrine gear and CoE gear really isn't so much of a jump at all.

If you rage-quit a raid and format your hard drive because of one death, you really shouldnt be playing this game in the first place.
Also my reply was talking about dps'ers in a raid(not counting the fact that SOE botched up the entire role system in this game and now everyone has to dps including healers) dps rarely HAVE to cure themselves, often there's a healer that'll take care of it if they forgot to bring pots. And if the raid is that tough, it's likely endgame and gives much better gear than the solo instances anyways, and by endgame, I mean POW, which as best I can tell so far gives better gear than the expansion? Boost heroic/raidgear because it's not "in line" with anything.

Forgive me as my knowledge of expansions only really started with SF (I started during RoK/TSO), but my experience, having done all the solo stuff through the entire game and most of the heroic stuff is:

New xpac solo gear > old xpac solo gear
New heroic gear > old heroic gear
New raid gear > old raid gear

This got slightly changed in DoV1 where SOME solo gear was better than past heroic gear, then beaten with a big stick in GU xpac (skyshrine) as all solo gear was better than heroic gear and close to raid gear.

They seemed to slow down the inflation with the sig line rewards, them being the same quality as the basic heroic loot from skyshrine. But then they throw the instance loot in that's better than all skyshrine loot and equal to the new heroic loot. It just doesn't seem right. Like I said at the start, solo instances loot at 145-150 base stats would make it much more reasonable from a progression point of view.

jimminey christmas. It's not that hard a concept. We asked for stuff to do when not raiding. (What is a person "supposed" to do when not in raid????? farm plat so you can buy raid loot yes yes i know..?????? You guys are too dysfunctional to actually go out and make groups on your own so we end up with this. Yes i don't blame sony.. i blame you............. Progression is a "raiding" term leave it out of stinking solo and heroic play.. wow. If your seriously telling me there is a heroic progression path i'm going to lol.. It sure as heck looks all the same difficulty to me.. Just mobs are conned higher. You are way way wayyy overreacting. It is as simple as this. Here's something to do and you can get rewards you actually want. period... that's it.

All of you "eq2 historians" answer me this... How do you keep people signed in after raid ends?

See fabled heroic rewards in SF.

Najena's ring of readiness pops into mind.. boggle ! better then raid quality loot in a heroic instance!!!!

You sir have just blown my mind. Blown ... 100% .. no thought except pure rage(dear lord please realize this is sarcasm).. Speechless. People will try and run a zone to get a rare drop that actually is an upgrade??!?! and then help their guildies get that too as it will help the raid kill faster?!???? i'm confused? I thought heroic content was supposed to be alt loot. You know .. no real reason to run it.. You know just automatically declining everything because its all garbage and you don't want to take the time to clean your bags out later??

Again.. Heroic instances should have the same rare drops that you get in the solo instance. If I want to gear up I'm encouraged to leave my group and run solo instances because you get better loot faster and easier than in heroics. This is clearly not right.

Except Boroddas or Boroddas and Baelon ToTF is a fairly easy raid zone. The monkey will be some fun for you though he has an interesting mechanic. Harrow's End has some alright scripts if they bother to activate before it dies, but as a "twice a week" guild you probably will encounter more of any script than Kharma does on EM. Hope you can find some fun fights so far its been HM only for us that has been mildly interesting.

I killed Mrelgt the All-Tender in Wurmbone's End heroic with 5 firends last night and it was very disappointing.
He gave us a set of fabled gloves and one legendary gear.
He gave us no CoE currency, no spirits, no Master spell books.
The gloves have better stats basically compared to skyshrine EM x4 Gears,
but because of not having a Red Adorn Slot,ppl would not use the gloves.

So,basically we don't have very positive reasons to run heroic instances,
and almost no reason to work to kill HM heroic bosses like Mrelgt the All-Tender.

i believe heroic instances can give more rewards.

so as it stands we have....

Those who raid.

Wont care about solo or heroic loot as they get raid drops, the heroic or solo is farmed by them for adorns or Alt gear perhaps

Those who Group and dont raid

Will be able to get the rares for the faction gear in heroic indstances

Those who JUST solo

Will be able to gear alts with several 160 star items tho mostly jewelry from solo instances and Armor from Overland bosses

BOTH the non raiders may from time to time get lucky and get UD Raid quality Items and MAYBE that can use em or at least mute to make fabled white adorns

At the end of the day IF we all got a full set of Fabled in 3 to 4 weeks then we would be bored and wou;d now be complaing in a thread about how er have nothing to do nothing to aim for.

and as a side note if anyone does not Group the heroic instances then dont even bother farming 1000 obol as you wont ever get to spend it LOL

the rare drops are from Heroic instances only so unless you group you cant get any

That, is how gear progress should be done. Since DoV/Skyshrine were really the paired thing I was hoping CoE would be like KoS, RoK and SF were. An expansion that replaced the previous two and then gets built on by a new one later. DoV upset the whole balance of things. Even now in CoE with 9 new zones the DoV gear-scar is there because anyone who did any HM content in Skyshrine (Including Drunder/PoW) is entirely without a reason to group. I know raiders are the lower % now but it saddens me that there is so little if you aren't a solo player.

I guess to me I would rather even the normal heroic drops have a +5% stat increase and the fabled have a +10% (the same as EM raid gear) If they both were greater than Solo leg and fabled. From there HM Raid gear would be another +10% above EM raid gear and call it a day. The issue for me is Solo and Heroic (Obol aside) have the same loot tables. There should be some minor progression form content to content with Heroic zones having RARE (like the Ethreal drop rates) that is on par with HM Raid gear for 1 slot.

I just don't see that currently. Maybe I am blind as I fit into the top % of the games players.

This exactly. It's common sense. It amazes me that some people would argue otherwise. If we throw this rule out..raiders should get same gear drops as heroic instances