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

Honestly not intended as a troll- Wiz Den is a much harder zone than spire. If you don't have the DPS the second and third names can be interesting. Early on I did the expert version of this with a relatively low DPS group, and we ended up having to burn adds on the last name as well as clicking the vial about 8 times- fortunately the timer is designed so that you can.

And if dying 4 times upsets you, I don't know what to say. I die all the time when I try something difficult. Doesn't stop me from trying.

For example:

• Defeat Ongnissim the Unseen (Expert) within the Lost City of Torsis: The Spectral Market - 481
• Defeat the Algae Fiend (Expert) within the Lost City of Torsis: The Spectral Market - 481

One could say there are between 481 and 962 EQ2 players who have done these two zones. This assumes the first 481 players Did Not participate in the second zone. That is the numbers are mutually exclusive. When sufficiently geared, do EQ2 players only hit only one zone? No they don't. It's all mutually inclusive. It's likely the same 481 characters for both, give or take.


The harder the boss, the less people defeat it. Which shows up in this chart.


The low end count is only 3,233 characters (give or take) have successfully completed an Expert dungeon. And of these hardy characters, only 204 (give or take) made the cut for top tier boss. The upper boundary could be the sum of all the character counts, but that assumes none of these characters hit an Expert dungeon more than once. Which is unlikely.
Unless someone has checked each and every one of those above players, and found everyone of these players are unique.
As an aside, are there really only between "16,165 and 32,330 level 100 EQ2" characters in EverQuest II?
- 32,330 where 10% = 3,233
- 16,165 where 20% = 3,233
Representing (wild rounding) $200,000 to $500,000 monthly income to Daybreak games? That would barely pay the salaries of a skeleton crew, and Nothing Else.
Which would explain many things.

http://www.statisticshowto.com/mutually-inclusive/
"Mutually inclusive events have some overlap with each other. "
"mutually exclusive events can’t happen at the same time"

I love Feldon making all arguments better than I could ever do it.

/popcorn

If you don't have a grp you run experts with, you will be hard pressed to get into one. Just sit and look at LFG of people over and over asking for grps. Just another horrible idea that is horribly implemented - which is becoming the norm. Not to mention it is broke and and needs to be patched, like everything else they have been putting out lately.

Yeah I just took the most widely completed dungeon and said ok that's the pool. Just like if you want to know how many people are raiding Kunark Ascending, you can take the number of people who killed the first T1 mob and get the widest possible number.

There are 111,672 level 100 characters that logged in since KA launched, minus the 5-10% who opt out. Pretty sure decorators and solo questers are keeping the lights on.

The issue, IMHO, is not whether Experts are too hard, it is whether a LARGE percentage of the player-base are able to do them and/ or see them as enough of a draw to remain active or return to the game.

• Is a Summer Promotion focused on Expert Zones only going to entice folks to stay and/ or open their wallets??.

Players return due to seeing a promotion for EQ2.
What lies ahead: A metric crapton of work!!

• • Are they ready for Experts? Absolutely not.
  • Could we drag them through std. Heroics once we hand them gear, sure.
  • We have several new/ returning folks in the last few weeks/ month. We deluge them with gear and such. Ahead of them however: KA pre-reqs, KA itself, grinding Deity, grinding Ascension, starting and/ or finishing Epic 2.0...plus grinding PG.
    • In between ALL THAT, they might like to group, be part of the team.
  • Without new, up-n-coming, and returning players, how do we fill groups and raids when existing folks get new jobs, RL gets in way, etc?

No one wants anything handed to anyone. What we would like: A Summer Promotion that benefits a larger percentage of the player-base, makes folks want to group & keep Norrath alive.

This is exactly why I created this thread..you summed it up perfectly thank you.

Amen.

Those 2 years of summer ethereals were just horrid. Ran them nearly every day for those 2 summers and there were 0 scout drops for me and the group. Even if a scout item did drop, I would have had to /random against 1-2 other scouts in group. Healers and tanks had it easy, since you normally run with only 1 in a group. Mages and scouts were the ones getting the crappy odds stacked against them. Drops were rare, and then winning the /random made it even worse. If you ran a PUG, good luck winning the scout item you needed against someone who was playing a mage and wanted to give it to their scout alt or sell it on the broker for a profit.

At least last year, you could put in effort by doing the daily grind and taking advantage of the few "double coin" days to get what you wanted off the NPC. This year, making it "expert only" doesn't bother me personally, but I can see it being an issue for those who just can't seem to do expert-level zones.

The real issue at hand here is not that items are solely available in Experts. The issue is that the average player feels they are not able to do Experts. Which stems from the issue of the power curve in this expansion.

In your average MMO progression works like..:

1. Level Up
2. Normal Mode Dungeon Gear
3. (optional) Expert Dungeon Gear
4. Raid

There is no straight line of progression, which may or may not be a good thing. But, for anyone who hasn't been around a long time, it is EXTREMELY confusing.

Between Gearing, AA's, Adornments, Combat Rotations, Reforging, and absolute garbage loot, there is SO much room for player error that two people with the same Resolve (which people gravitate towards) can do exponentially different DPS.

Again this isn't their fault either. It's confusing as hell. There are next to no guides available these days, and for some reason people still SLR 400 potency expert gear. People just don't know better.

Some people are probably buying 400 pot gear because of Crit Mit 2 (ere Resolve)

Resolve is just poorly implemented that a piece with 11 or 16 is actually worse for your character because it has low potency, but without resolve you can't even get accepted into the groups.

It's like the Devs decided they 'wanted to try and trick players'. especially since there is NO MANUAL for this game. Online places are outdated, read that as 'wrong'.

I have 9 level 100 toons on my account, but 7 of them are "pure crafters", and just have crafting gear on. The are hidden from EQ2wire, because I log them in 2 minutes a day to hit their plants and get a useless KA rare that I have 100s of now in my harvesting box. When I get too many stockpiled, I just flip them for plat profit on the broker. The other level 100 toon I have is my PvP "evil swashbuckler" that I moved to HoF server and he's a middle finger to DBG for not making all classes neutral.

While I have 9 toons to 100, the census doesn't need to know about 8 of them. To me, they don't count and would bring 0 to an adventuring group. They are undergeared, apprentice level spells/combat arts, and I have no clue how to play those classes. I should have just made them all swashbucklers, TBH. If I'm going to play an less than desirable class like a swashy as my main, I might as well go all in and make all my toons swashbucklers. =P

The other toon is my main that I've played since launch. I'd gladly trade in my millions of plat, raid gear, and 80+ tithe points, and 8 level tradeskillers for a few coppers in my pocket and a pair of rusty daggers and start out in a new game and be done with EQ2 once and for all.

Agreed. But I'd bring up the point that if you're equipping a 400pot piece to get the resolve for an expert, you should be doing something else. I.e.

-PG gives you 20 hands/legs and a 22 ring
-Self Buff gives you 10
-Mount gives you 8
-Eth offhand gives you 20
-Mythical drops from key chests that give 20 resolve (2)
-Ascension rewards
-Crafter cloak that gives 20
-Grachinist earring that gives 16 resolve http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Shrunken_Goblin_Skull_Earring


or just getting the BiS Heroic gear

290 resolve is not a stretch by any means. There is no reason to go over that, at least for full-group Experts.

This is the big summer grouping event, and the majority of players are about to be excluded from the grouping. I really think they should expand this event to regular dungeons for a lesser coin reward. Some people are getting hung up on the whole BIS thing, but realistically the cloaks are not that much better than the crafting cloak, except for a handful of classes (where it is going to be pretty much mandatory).

It's not only an issue of if people are appropriately geared with enough resolve, but a lot of them don't even understand how stats work, how to build an AA spec, what spells have power drain, or basic things like how to change their particle effect settings so they can see things that they need to joust in the middle of all the flashy combat effects. Some of it can't be taught in the context of a random pug.

Some zones I just don't want to deal with the expert version in a random pug. It is bad enough when in regular mode ritual chamber I will put a green flame over my head and tell the new players to stay close to the green flame, and as soon as the mob is pulled they scatter in opposite directions, cleverly avoiding me and all the colored circles. I just don't want to deal with that in an expert zone. It is fine in a regular zone to just leave people dead and go find their bodies later because you don't really need a group anyway. I don't mind helping people out with updates and such, but experts can become such a painful slog with the wrong group.

I was told Experts are 340+, which again is NOTHING in this game is documented as it should be.

My main char is 342 Resolve.

But I won't do PGs, until people stop losing characters, loyalty tokens etc.

You might be right haha. I was under the impression in was 340 for the zone. I have no idea :/

Dont do PGs then, do the other stuff and do a few heroics until you have the resolve req. although I haven't heard of anyone losing anything

People haven't been losing loyalty tokens or characters in PGs for almost a month now.
The closest to 'lost' characters get, occasionally, is having to choose a character from the launcher instead of from character select.

Thats a pretty good idea actually, offer half the coins for normal heroics with a 3 coin max

Yea experts need 389, so the accepted requirement is 339 (340) and the group's buffs make up the rest.

290 is CM reavers. 240 is T2 heroics, 190 is T1 heroics. Just going off memory because yea, it's not documented anywhere, and the only way to find the value is to have a pred/rogue use some ability in the zone that spits out a ton of mostly unhelpful data. Would it really have killed them to give the mob a buff package that displays the required resolve? Like how crit chance requirements were displayed in Velious?

Also I can't believe Vessel of the Sorceress is being suggested as an easy zone. I mean yea, it's easy, but my god that last name with her knockbacks makes my blood boil. I avoid that zone like the plague

1. you can't know that, unless your a Dev
2. Someone was just asking this morning how to get help when that didn't work.