Disappointed

I'm pretty disappointed with this heroic nerf, Kander and Gninja. I understand that you have to take in player feedback, but this time you catered to the players that didn't want to put in any effort and still be rewarded. The casualization of this game is getting to be too much for me. What happened to the design in Drunder? 100% clearable with heroic gear, but it was actually a challenge. I miss Drunder and challenge heroics. Everyone shouldn't get a participation trophy.

Tonight, our beastlord (in full heroic gear) is going to successfully tank all of the heroics up to Tier 3 (likely including Sanguine Fountains). You let me down on this one.

I agree..the resists were not that hard to reach in the first place.. gear from lower level zones and resist adornments.. then learning the scripts for me, so far has been fun.. with this nerf, most likely, I'll be able to do what most of the high end guilds are now doing.. straight burning through scripts and will make the zone trivial... good news for all of us is we get to SLR I guess lol...

You can be well over 130k resists just running the first 2 zones alone and with adorns.. your viewpoints were not skewed on AOM heroics, people actually having to go out and do something, instead of being given something was the skewed point.. so I guess my 150k resists will work for anything without a problem../shrug fine by me.. easy mode it all is again I guess

Is it a reward, or is it gear to do the content?

The folks who dream of the "good old days" of EQ2 forget that heroic content from 2004-2008 was not heavily scripted. We started getting harder zones but now every single zone requires the coordination and script-following of a six person raid.

Drunder was ******* awful and caused many people to quit. I almost quit the game because of it. Sorry, but slamming someone's face into a wall repeatedly is not anything I want to play.

An exceptional player should not set the standard. And setting the bar that high should not ever destroy the possibility of pick-up groups and cross-server dungeon finder, but that is what will happen if you tune the game around people who should really be raiding because of their ability to tune stats, strategies, reforging, adorning, experimenting/refining, gems, ACT triggers, reading casting bars, perfect internet connection, fast PC, etc.

It's perfectly fine to have a FEW heroic zones that are hard. What's not fine is having everything in the game feel like a raid.

The gear to go the harder content comes from the first couple zones.. I ran them for at least 2 weeks straight and got my adorns on before I even stepped foot into the phantom seas zone.. its not about being hard.. its about following what is needed for each zone... people want to jump straight into the hard stuff because they feel like they should get to see it right away. That's not how it's meant to be. Get your resists up, learn how to engage an encounter and beat it.. now all you have to do is really go in and kill stuff, mindlessly. The only reason to do the zones now is really to SLR and to get Ferrin because of ridiculous amount needed for green armor, but I can probably just step into raid zones now and not have an issue and skip the phantom sea zones really. Its really not about exceptional players, its about people being able to listen. I've have taken pugs in and explained what to do on certain mobs and it dies, you go in with ones who don't like to listen and do what they think is right, well you die over and over. The zones aren't heavily scripted really either.. some of the harder ones sure.. but so far you have a dispel here, cure the right curse there, don't cure a curse, etc... the list goes on.. all is needed is some thought process and paying attention, but most people would rather kill stuff while watching their TV or doing something else at the same time lol..

Parses please, and links to the profiles of your group wearing appropriate-for-that-tier gear. We'll take your word for it that you were actually wearing it. No one cares that your group of top-tier geared raiders were able to easily beat the entry zones.

I started that zone in 3/3 green gemmed potent gear and all 6 pieces of mastercrafted jewelry with resist adorns on them.. wasn't hard.. and oh yea, so that's not top-tier raider.. just saying.. pay attention to what is needed.. not complicated.

The claim isn't whether it's hard or not. The claim is the names were killed in 30 sec using nothing but auto attacks. I'd like to see that. In any case I'm fairly certain the gear level for Zavith'loa is a full set of the sig line gear. Not 3 gem potent.

To be fair we started those zones in 3/3 gemmed potent and old ToV jewelery with only about 60 to 70k resists and killed a few named and got more jewelery and then eventually cleared those zones and now have moved on. However... not everyone came from 3/3 gemmed potent... Dom was a challenge to alot of people right to the end... and these are starter zones. You wanna make the end stuff hard sure... and I'm sure it is... but the beginning and middle could have been a little more forgiving and it appears Sony agrees.

Since we're all giving opinions, when I buy an expansion I want to play it. Let that sink in. If that expansion is not playable because I don't carry a minimum starting gear/aa level Then The design is broken. There is a reason why wow has millions of players and this game has a small fraction of that. If eq2 wants a larger player base from My point of view eq2 needs to radically evolve and eq2 designers need to stop listening to an old school hard mode minority And keep going with decisions that make the game playable and accessible to more players from all walks of life. Sure offer hard mode challenges yet make it the exception not the rule of playing an expansion. Again my opinion .

So your opinion is that 100% of the game should cater to you and 0% to me. You don't see a clear problem with that argument, but you act as if people in my camp are elitist because we expect a challenge. Ridiculous. Truly I don't care if you play here or not and I certainly don't care if the game has WoW quantities of subscribers.

I play because the game initially offered a challenge and has usually offered enough to keep my group here. CoE was a complete failure on that standpoint and we quit playing. I'm certain most of you saw CoE as the highlight of EQ2's history, but in my view that expansion was pointless for heroic content. We cleared 100% of the zones on day 2. We 1-grouped raid zones while they were current tier. If that's the design philosophy that you think gaming should follow, you're clearly not someone that is interested in gaming. You'd like enjoy something along the lines of Farmville or Candy Crush more. MMOs have never been about instant and easy gratification nor should they be.

As for you, Malleria, I don't run the parse, so I cannot give that to you. I can give you the profiles you're asking for though.

http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/463856877896
http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/463856827576
http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/463857384178
http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/463857382788
http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/463858445800

Best of luck to you on the mental gymnastics to claim we're all high end raiders dominating the content. We're dominating it with the tools given to heroic players. The same tools that everyone else is given and apparently cannot manage the content with.

Also, I disagree with you on this Feldon. Content should be designed with the best in mind. Drunder was easily the best designed content for heroics that has ever been in the game. It was made for players like us. It was three whole zones that didn't let in the participation trophy crowd and people threw a fit over them. There were many other zones in DoV that the casuals could mow through and yet they feel entitled to faceroll in every zone.

It's alright to have a few zones be easy, but it's not fine to make the majority of the heroic content trivial.

That's the thing, Serenaheq2. It's not hard. There are 14 zones and 2 of them are hard. That's not even remotely close to catering to my playstyle. The other zones were moderately challenging but nothing that required too much from players (like Thresinet's or High Hold) and yet people felt the need to have them made into handholding, failure-proof slogs. Two zones aren't going to keep me busy for a year. They're not even going to keep me busy for another month. Making it easier isn't going to alleviate that problem.

Every profile listed there is sporting a near-full set of top tier heroic armor, most of them full gemmed. The zones in which boss difficulty (and only certain bosses that were out of line with the rest of the dungeon) was reduced were all tier 1 and tier 2 heroics. If you are finding the tier 1s and 2s easy in top end armor and jewelry (your resists are all easily raid level), that's a sign that balance is about where it should be. Our intent is to provide a smooth and intuitive gear and zone difficulty progression. If you're looking for more challenge, you might focus your efforts on the tier 3 zones - they should remain difficult even in the higher end gear, and yield better rewards.

Fyreflyte made the point in the post above better than i could. You complain that others want the game to cater to their gamestyle and you want it to cater to yours. All I'm saying is there needs to be content for both camps... entry level zones need to be able to be completed by lesser geared/skilled players.

So I'm all for hating the entitled crowd. I'm a former college athlete with a successful career all because I busted hump and earned it. BUT...now for reality. That is real life and this is a game (that we pay for by the way). When I pay for entertainment I want the option for easy all the way to difficult. Sony has made it so that folks can actually play and enjoy the game (after a few weeks of tweaking). I'm sorry to the folks who want the ultra-super-challenge but if you want that then go work as a programmer, analyst, or actuary for a Fortune 50 company. A game that we pay for that provides fun and amusement should not be what challenges you most in life. If it does.......well......sorry about your life.

You missed the point, luckily Fyreflyte didn't. You're geared well beyond what the zone is balanced around, so of course it's easy. Still, I call bs that that group you linked is killing any Zavith'Loa heroic boss in 30sec with only auto attacks.

As to the original point - the top tier zones are being left alone. There's still challenge available, it just doesn't start as early as it was, that's all. Drunder was only 3 zones. According to Kander's posted tier breakdown there are 3 tier3 zones. That looks about right to me. I guess you could argue an equivalent to Elements of War is missing, but that zone was easier than the Drunder heroics anyway . Go work on Inner Sanctum or Choir and enjoy the challenge.

there was nothing really super ultra hard about it to begin with.. I haven't even done the temple zones.. because low and behold.. I don't have the gear or resists for them... common sense....100k resists isn't even hard to get now.. there was nothing at all wrong with needing 120k resists for beginning zones.. its not about being elite..I haven't even tried raiding this expac yet..the who reason resists were brought down, according to SOE is that they were to high to begin with for t1 and t2 zones, when infact, they were not.. it was just the people not willing to buy/craft jewelry for it, or take off their hard earned gear from last epxac, or their ethereal earrings with 10k resists on them that needs to be changed out.. people look at tags on gear and think that stuff is better for one reason or another.. the whole wow comment.. sure if you wan to cater to an 8 year old population go ahead.. /shrug.. <<not an elitist either.. like I said. haven't started raiding and haven't even dipped into temple yet cause I don't belong in there yet.. but with new change, it will be trivial, since my resists now sit at 145k self buffed lol.. so what the DEV said about t3 wont' even be true.. it won't be challenging at all

And that isn't the level of gear most of the people starting AoM had/have. 3/3 ToV potent is still better than 4/4 AoM yellow malice.

And most of us had/have a mix of quested AoM, blue gem ToV, yellow gem malice and ToV potent gear (and AoM Mastercrafted) when we went into AoM heroics. Only when we start getting the blue malice fully gemmed will we be seeing the same results you were seeing in 3/3 potent.

There is no reason.. other than if you start a new character out that with TOV being out for a year that you couldn't accomplish 3/3 potent. just saying.. and if that's the case you will never see 4/4 blue.. so why bother changing to conform /shrug

New players and/or new toons, perhaps?

Okay, I am going to be a little blunt here and it's going to sound really bad, and for that I apologize.

EQ2 is a pretty complex game, and a lot of people are bad at it. SOE can't cater too much to those of us who scour multiple forums, dissect ACT logs after every play session, memorize all the stat caps and formulas, because it really is sort of a ridiculous amount of investment into a hobby. I have been in my guild for over 6 years, and my guildmates are the reason I still play this game. I do my best to share my knowledge with them, but I have come to terms with the fact that some of them will simply never be on the same level as I am. They have neither the means nor the motivation to study EQ2's mechanics like they were preparing their PHD dissertation. I am an INTP, so I honestly enjoy examining the game in minute detail and learning how everything works, but that is not true of everyone, and I respect that. Lots of folks just want to come home from work, turn on their PC, and kill monsters to take their stuff. And that is perfectly within their rights.

I think Drunder is a perfect example of this disconnect. Masters of the game say it is some of the best content ever made because it was really challenging and made them feel like their time spent gaining said mastery was well-spent. However, the vast majority of people I have spoken to simply see it as "that zone nobody ever did because it was way too hard." Palace of Ferzhul, Guk4, Elements of War, Vulak'Aerr's Dominion, these are all zones that many players simply never got to see. It's fine to have one or two such zones in an expansion, but most of the raid content already caters to the hardcore masters, so it's only fair to leave the majority of the heroic content open to the rest of the game.

As I am an educator by trade, I'll use education as an example. In any class, there are a couple extremely bright kids, a lot of fairly average kids, and a few kids that have some real challenges. The challenged kids tend to be the ones who dictate the rate at which content can progress. Is that fair to the really smart kids, who are being stifled and getting bored? No, of course it isn't. But you can't just ignore the slower kids, because they deserve the education their parents pay taxes for, as well. I suppose if you have a large enough population, you can create special classes for the outliers, but that isn't really the case in EQ2. So basically, being the smart kid in class means you're just not going to be challenged most of the time. It sucks, but that's just how things have to be.