DBG..half your eq2 population are not ready for experts.

It doesn't matter to me. I no longer group anyway, for a number of reasons, & since I no longer group I don't need to worry about whether or not I've got BIS gear. So this whole "event" is a great big nothing-burger-meh for me, & that's fine.

But I will say that continuing to split up the the player base is a quite bad idea.

To all the people who keep complaining "Experts are too hard"; if experts are too hard to complete for you, why are you worried about getting the ethereal gear from completing them? If we are 8 months into the expac and you are still struggling to complete some of the heroic content, 1 piece of gear should be the last on your list of things to do.

EQ2 is a VERY EASY game, if you are struggling with it, I'd suggest being part of the community and learning how to better play your toon, better gear your toon, better complete your tasks. If you're completely fine with being totally casual and NOT learning to play your toon to its max potential, then stop whining about not being able to complete experts for one piece of BiS gear.

To give you an idea of how easy expert zones really are; I ran a zone with a PUG last night for my first trio of experts to get my coins. I was 75% of the DPS, I tanked, and I healed almost as much as the healer did. It took a little over an hour for us to clear 3 zones and we had zero wipes. Half the people in the group didn't even have 15k potency.

Sorry not sorry if any of that is too harsh for you, but so damn many of you sound like such entitled babies right now.

For anyone else, if you want help, tips, gearing suggestions, etc. etc. feel free to send me an in game message at Halls_of_fate.Wiegraf. I raid Sunday 8pm EST-12am Tues/Weds 8pm EST-11pm (So I am unavailable to help during those times, as I run raids). Any time you see me on outside of those times, feel free to shoot me a message. I'd love to help out.

Hello i am with you in a few points on this Event.

Only Exoert Zones will drop the coins is a very bad idea for a game / players who arent all playing in highend content.
Thier a numbers of players which are ready for playing a group but dont have the Stats for Expert or even Raid.

So DB first big mistake to drop the coins only in Expert zones, secound big fail why only 6 coins per char a day if member is a joke, why we cant farm the coins like last summer ETH with a Daily / Weekly quest for max our outcome of coins to use them.

For me i have like 6 Chars which are ready to do the Experts, i have much more options than a freetime gamer who is in the game for maybe 2 or 3h a day.

So next big mistake you did is to cancel the purple slots on the Gear which is made to add the orange addorns, its difficult enough to manage the Purple addorn slots befor the Summer ETH was thier and now we have the Cloak which should be an UPDATE and UPDATS should be better than the stuff before, but at the cloak the purple slot is away WHY and WTF you are doing thier???????
Ah before i lost that point why thier are no tank Cloaks again this time its a point for you the Cloaks having Doublecast thats ok but you always lost the deff Stats Mitigation and Block-Chance on the Cloaks, the Crafter Cloak hasnt if the Crafter is Tank and the New ETH cloaks havent it too so i ask you why ???

Tanks and Healers are useing the Deff gear and they NEEEEEEEEED it to survive in combat, so why you always miss them if new gear is comeing.
The same mistake you did with the belts in ToT last time thier you missed the Doublecast on the belts for the Mages.
Some realy famous man said if u dont get your essence from the past you cant invent or understand the future, ot seems you DB never heard it ???

We need the purple slots for the 3 Purple Run sets we just got a few month before with the new addon and the purple slots on weapons and CLOAK for the War Addorens which are in the game since addon ToV and they have use and needfull thing like immunitys and some other stats which are needed.

For example thier are mobs which have a Fear Script and most of us use the Blinding Glam Purple War Addorn against this because the Bottle from ToT has low stats and isnt realy a option in these days.

And how creativeless it is to do the Procs from the old Relic CloaKs we had in ToT to a Orange addorn and than for a price of 80 coins, the hammer is most of the old relic procs are dumb and uselesse and you are serving them again to us ????

So your TASKs DB

1 get the Purple addorn slot back on the Cloaks
2 give us a belt with stats like the Expert one + a usefull orange addorn and the purple slot and like 22/24 resolve
3 Make the ETH Coins dropp in normal Heroic inni and Higher the Outcome of Coins per day and in Expert Zones.
4 Give us a Daily / Weekly quest for the Event like it was last summer.
5 Stop breaking the game and reapeat or bring back old stuff back to us which was stupid and useless in the past and you KNOW IT!!!!!!, this makes us thinking about the point that you are to layzy to invent new ideas or content.

The best thing to get a game runing is to ask the players the consumers of it ist market sience or customer brainstorming
sure you cant get all in game which players are dreaming off but its a fact that thier wont be so much useless and stupid conten as we have now.

Sorry but but my line of patience nearly is on end with BDG , a link to DB in the kitchen thier is a saying never reheat a meal it must be fresh to serve it

Helfiren

itt: people incapable of critical thinking

Almost none on Maj'dul as well.

And since when was an "event" limited to a finite amount of coins per day?

I was pointing out the ridiculousness and just how condescending and insulting your post was by being ridiculous and insulting. And it still went over your head.

The only way to learn EQ2 to the level of playing well is to spend hours sifting through all the misleading spell and combat art descriptions, spend more hours testing things in ACT to see how the game REALLY works, crunch the numbers in Excel to see how stats affect your class with relation to your adornments, AA spec, find all the hidden gotchas and broken procs that do either 100x more damage than they say, or 1/100th as much.

The fact you are willing to do that is fine. The fact you think anyone who is not willing to do that, plus play 15-20 hours a week year round just to stay up to date in EQ2 is an "entitled baby" is not acceptable.

When I asked Kander if we can get more accurate tooltips and better information in-game so casual players can make logical choices so we can gear up, I was told that that is all optional and I should just ignore it as a casual player. In 2010, I understood my character. In 2013 I understood my character. Today? It's a total crapshoot. Basically, I shouldn't expect to be able to understand my character unless I am willing to put in tens of hours of homework. I suppose some people find that fun.

Feldon, the fact that you think that people who are upset that BiS items are not super easy for casual players to obtain isn't the exact definition of "entitled baby" then I don't know what else to say to you. Nothing went over my head, I don't care if my post was condescending. I literally said that in the post that I didn't care. What I do care about is the "everyone needs a trophy" mentality that everyone in the game has. If you aren't good enough to complete the experts to get the ethereal, then either become better or don't get the ethereal. That's pretty simple.

Also, the fact that you think you need to do all that inane work just to be good enough to run through experts is pretty crazy. This game is not that hard. You say it's hard, maybe it's hard for you, this game is very simplistic in it's approach; get as much potency as possible, get as much crit bonus as possible, use ascension combos, mobs die. EVERYONE should at least learn spell efficiency when playing their class, or they are just doing a disservice to themselves and any group they join. If you aren't willing to take even the most basic time to learn the most basic utility of the class that YOU chose to play, it is not up to DBG to make the game easier for you so you don't have to put in the work. Experts are not hard mode. If they made ethereals only drop in the hardest of hard zones in the game, which by the way they don't even really do challenge mode anymore, I could see the gripe. You are able to get the coins from completing ANY 3 expert zones of your choosing. (Pro-tip: pick the 3 easiest zones and you'll have an easier time doing it).

So yes, anyone that says "waaaaaaaah expert zones are too hard this far into the expac where I have had plenty of time to gear out my toon, but I still have 15k potency because I don't take the time to learn to gear my toon out properly, I don't ask questions, and I refuse to LEARN" is going to be called an entitled baby every time they ask DBG to lower the difficulty level of the game to suit their play style.

You also forgot the Spell and Combat Art rebalance from 2 weeks ago that you cannot see on tooltips. Every spell and combat art tooltip in EQ2 is now lying to you.
http://eq2wire.com/2017/07/02/everquest-iis-black-box-problem/

You didn't seem to have a problem with the 2 years Ethereals were luck-based. Run dungeons 150 times and odds are you'll get 1 ethereal, but not the right one for your class. To do that you have to run 600 dungeons.

Feldon- firstly, your selection of art is awesome as usual.
Secondly- your over the top post was over the top. You do much better with reasoning than with threats.

I agree with you that the broken stuff has got to go. I'm tired of hearing how so-and-so class can one shot stuff, now they can't, oh now they found another exploit. So I'll whine along with everyone else about how some people get ahead using exploits. It ticks me off.

But I don't see that as part-and-parcel of the overall balance. Honestly experts AREN'T HARD. They don't require tons of research. It's nice if you do. If you don't, you may get snubbed- but a group with a tank and two heals and a trio of DPS doing 200 mil each can slog through an expert. And maybe they'll end up wanting to get a little better for having suffered? Realize that maybe doing 600 mil EACH would be better, and 1.2 bil EACH would be pretty cool in the long run. That's not an unreasonable goal for any class at the moment, given how ascension spells can be timed with even a nerfed celestial gate.

So experts are going to be slow- but the resolve needed is easily reachable if you've been putting any effort in. And as to all the research- well there's a fine tool at EQ2U that lets you look at other people's AA builds. You can just copy one of those, and ask around for help getting a cast order put together.

Did not inherently change the way any classes were played. Was a non-factor in my casting rotation.

Are you saying this because you know me well enough to know how I reacted to the way things were done previously?

For the record, I like the "coin" system that they use these days for ethereals. I didn't like how they made the coins super easy to obtain last expac and how you saw the most casual of casuals wearing all of the ethereal pieces because the zones were super trivial. (I solo'd many of the daily zones to get coins last expac). Every time a BiS item is given out by completing trivial content, the game dies a little more. There should be pride in obtaining BiS items. The fact that they're super easy to obtain kills this. Inspecting a player and seeing that over 75% of a T4 raider's gear is the same as a mostly casual heroic non raider's gear is pretty disappointing.

I like the part where people are so into their own bubbles they feel that if you as a player are not on "their level" that you do not deserve good rewards. I mean, we remember this is a video game, right?

As far as complaining about one BiS item - that's not exactly true, is it. Last year's ethereal runes are STILL an issue for scouts, right? This is something that will potentially still be viable/important in the next expansion for some people.

Far as experts only - the character I am running these on is more than capable of running these zones. Finding a PUG group that is capable has been more challenging - a lot of people just aren't doing it at all because they don't feel the rewards justify the time investment.

(Hypothetical Made Up Numbers) So if you have 100 people, and only 50 are capable of experts, 40 so far are just not interested based on the reward, so you have 10 out of 100 who are even trying to do it... and probably 8 of those are in guilds that are running them as guild groups.

I get it in theory, since not wanting to hand stuff out for free or what's the point... I'm all for working for rewards. I don't see the harm in putting tokens in the regular heroics also, just not as many, as has been suggested many times over.

How fast someone else clears a heroic zone does not affect me.
How many opportunities there are to work toward a reward does.

My hope (assumption) is that this hidden balancing modifier is a flat change to the class. Basically just an unseen, additional "fervor-like" adjustment that affects all damaging abilities. I would be more ok with this, because our order of spell efficiency would be unchanged. I could still prioritize my casting effectively by looking at tooltips, even if I couldn't directly compare my spells to another class.

If each spell/ca is being adjusted separately, and hidden, this will be more than frustrating.

Your "hypothetical" is pretty much a non-factor in the conversation, considering I could make up a bunch of numbers on how people might group together to run these zones too (For the record, on Halls of Fate, LFG in channel has jumped "bigly" in the last 48 hours).

"As far as complaining about one BiS item - that's not exactly true, is it. Last year's ethereal runes are STILL an issue for scouts, right? This is something that will potentially still be viable/important in the next expansion for some people."

These runes from last expac are technically replaced by the Rune of the Celestial, so they are a non-factor.

I'm not saying anyone has to be an elite player to deserve to get these ethereals. The expert zones are trivial for the top 10-20% of people that play this game. Beyond that, they're NOT HARD to complete. If you're not good enough to even complete the zones, then no amount of gear is going to help you. Why can't the better players get the better rewards without people complaining about not being able to get them? Must everything be trivial to get? You are absolutely right that this is a video game, and lots of video games have a "nightmare" mode that most people who play the games casually DO NOT COMPLETE. This isn't even nightmare mode, this is just plain ol "normal" mode gameplay that the people stuck on "easy" can't complete, and they're complaining that they want the rewards set to easy.

I also agree that the rewards are a little lackluster, even if they are BiS. They're barely ahead of a, used to be BiS, cloak that you get for doing the crafting timeline. That's right, for the last 9 months the BiS cloak has been an item you get for doing a crafting timeline... (We won't get into that issue here). BUT, the rewards are still worth the effort. You run the expert zones, there's still lots of good gear for most people to get in there, like 1200+ potency jewelry pieces and 15 resolve armor pieces, and after all of your hard work you get a BiS cloak with a BiS rune for just about EVERY class. The effects might not be the greatest, but it isn't like you're losing something by wearing it.

I lose a pretty important purple rune... IMO at least.

You're wearing utter annihilation. That's the rune you want to replace. That rune is completely worthless. You'll love having the extra 5 fervor, since you don't have a cloak rune from last expac.