First off, I wanted to say I really appreciate this game and all the hard work that has gone in to giving my wife and I 100s of hours of enjoyment. Housing is awesome, beautiful dungeons and landscape. Immeasurable content all for free. Fantastic value, the best free to play game out there. That said, I have started to run into some issues. I have now played some classes to cap, played many BGs, raided, quested solo and done DMs and tried to use dungeon finder. Classes. I know I should be specific here but want to avoid the nerf talks and rage associated with the topic. MMO players can generally not talk objectively about the class they play. Classes are balanced poorly in my opinion, both PvP and PvE wise. T1 one DPS classes have dramatic difference in performance. In Solo one of the chrs I play duo SS contested with a merc another can’t at all never mind the merc I use. There is much much more. Classes need some balancing, buffs before nerfs please but I understand if a nerf is needed even if it is a class I play. Please do an entire class balance update, look at all forms of play. Raids are kind of trivial, some the encounters are sloppy and the new raids can be undermanned and done by brute force. In many cases you can ignore the script, heal through and rez anyone who dies. Too many combat rezzes IMO. Poor play should be punished, even if it is me. BG matchmaking is awful. I actually like all the BGs maps. They can be fun…can be. It is rare because of the matchmaking logic. Too often one team destroys the other. Mostly because one team has more healers. The other reason is premades. Premades should wait in queue for another premade of close to same number. I know that would discourage them but it would help restore the competitive balance. Close matches, that are back and forth and the outcome is in question until the very end are the most thrilling, that should be goal. I have been invited to a premade because of my play and the other team had no chance. A premade vs a premade would be a lot of fun. A few more maps would be nice. Remove taunting from PvP…When playing an unbalanced healer match, it is possible to win by playing smart and targeting healers, you can’t do this at all when your target changes non stop. Dungeon finder. It just doesn’t work. I have tried the random dungeon, It kept putting us in Rimex4 and we could never fill it. Steal WoWs, you must have someone who worked there. Once it you fix it, reward it so people do it. Tokens that drop off each boss that can be used to buy entry level raid quality gear. So new people can gear themselves with gear to participate and raids and be forced to learn the mechanics of grouping. This gear should be consistently adjusted to the previous level of raid progression. Fix DM PL and mentoring. Mentoring should make you close in power to the person you are mentoring, not invincible. My wife and I were new to the game we tried to do Sebeliss with a lvl appropriate group…It was a joke, people just pull the whole place and laugh at you if tell them you are questing…they are being paid, if they are rude enough you will leave and it will be better for them. I joined an SS group this weekend with a tank and healer with lvl 1-20 gear….a level 1 shield…C’mon man. If people could not afk level and instead were forced to participate in their own progression (not unreasonable) they would never show up geared like that. Don’t make us have to inspect people and be gear ****’s…fix your design.
I agree with the OP. 1. Fix Dungeon Finder and give out tokens as awards for completing them like the DM Dungeon Marks. It can't be that hard to have a script that invites no more than 2 fighters, no more than 2 healers plus 2- 4 other random classes. Fixing DF would be a big boon to EQ2. A simple gear check would be nice as well. No level 20 gear for a level 80 instance. 2. Get rid of mentoring. If it has to stay, limit it to 10 levels max. We have the chronomage for re-visiting old content. 3. Make "Achievements" worth something. If you could only buy something or access a certain dungeon if you had 3000 achievement points, people would work toward getting the points. A PL'd character would have zero points. A character that has months of questing and raiding under it's belt would easily have 3000 points. Make achievements visible to other players like a soldiers rank is on his uniform. You should be able to see how experienced a player is at playing a particular character. He may have been playing the game for 7 years, but this alt was collecting dust for the last 2 years.
Please, please no. I do not need another pointless grind to be added. Don't lock me out of dungeons because I don't chase achievements. Leave them as they are, fun things to chase IF YOU WANT, and sometimes reward something fun or useful. Making them requirements is stupid.
I don't see how this is true at all given that pretty much every mob in CoE has the "zerg-prevention" buff that makes it nearly unkillable after a certain number of peopld die. Being in a semi-casual guild, there are several fights in CoE that we would be easily killling every week if not for this. (i.e. HM Oligar, HM Monkey, etc.) There are also plenty encounters with harsh non-recoverable fail conditions that result in a wipe even if only a single person screwed up. Sure, new content is pretty easy, but it's not because of the ability to zerg it. If anything, that has been made more difficult than ever with CoE. Just how much raiding have you done to find it "trivial"? Have you cleared all of CoE and PoW?
I'd guess he's talking older raid content and given the HUGE increase in gear quality & player power it wouldn't surprise me you could easily ignore scripts.
I have not done a lot of raiding in EQ2, my criticism is not fair...I am in a casual guild. They invited me to join a couple HE raids not long after it was out. We were short 5 people, we didn't know what to do, we didn't move when we were supposed to(none of us)....we all took massive damage. Tanks died multiple times on same attempt, damage and mana drains to all. People died multiple times, me the most(was not geared but they needed bodies)...We just rezzed people, some a few times on same attempt and we still beat the encounter...felt kind of trivial.. Same "kinds" of things happened on other encounters. Made me decide I have done harder things that required much more effort and coordination...EQ2 raiding not for me. I know it is a small snapshot I have, but I will check again later. Mind you, I have led over 1000 raids across a few different games in progression guilds, my admittedly very small sample in EQ2 seemed trivial. I expect new raids to need a full raid force for bosses to be cleared with people performing reasonably well until most of the raid is geared from the new raids. EDIT Do not misunderstand...I like the game and support the devs, they have done MANY things right. No game is perfect.
Fair enough, thing is that raid difficulty variest a great deal. EQ2 has changed a bunch over its 8-year evolution. In the latest expansions, the developers have more and more increased the gap between "entry-level" and "challenge / hardcore" raid content. The reason for this is mainly to get more people into raiding in the first place. You'll notice that EQ2 (comparatively) has tons and tons of people raiding. (Last expac, at least 300+ different guilds had killed at least 1 current raid mob - and that's just guilds that bothered to report it, the real number is probably somewhere between 400 and 500 - guilds, not people). I really would not judge EQ2 raiding by killing some of it's easiest content. While the last (not CoE) expansion features tons of easy raiding, it was already the first expansion ever where no guild worldwide had cleared the content before level raise. Even after two level raises, only a select few guilds have cleared the toughest raid content that was introduced back at level 90. So yes, there is plenty of content that is easy. But there is also plenty of content that is challenging. And there is all kinds in-between the two, allowing for a large spectrum of skill levels and playstyles, which is what makes EQ2 great. I'm in a semi-casual guild that raids twice a week and while we cleared easy mode CoE (minus bugged Drinal) in our first two weekends of raids, we still have tons of raid challenges that we face every weekend. So for you to do one (easier) raid and call all eq2 raiding "trivial" is at best ignorant. I hope you take the opporunity to experience some more of the raid content before drawing conclusions. Pull one of the challenge encounters for example or even the first couple of named in Plane of War.
I have done the progression "thing" I will never raid enough to do the toughest content again. I will be in the less stressful raids. I would like those less stressful raids to require people to know what they are doing and perform reasonably well, not hard core but not faceroll either. I am not leaving or rage quitting. BTW I did not mean to lessen the accomplishments or efforts of those guild who are raiding the toughest content in the game. I know the time...time...time and effort it takes to achieve that. Specifically those of you who have to come up with the strats, post them an deal with drama that sometimes follows the high level player talent that you need to achieve your goals. these people can be.....challenging
As I mention, i'm neither one of those people, nor in one of those guilds. We're a casual guild that raids on the weekend. Yet we still find plenty of challenge. As a matter of fact, i think it's probably easier for the "casual" guilds to find challenge than it is for the top end guilds to find it. My point was that the challenge is out there - regardless of what kind of guild you're in. If you had such a "trivial" time, in HE, go try PoW. I'm not suggesting you put together call lists and compete for Top 10 WW. Just pick something that's challenging to the people in YOUR raid force. Of course if you go do something that is below your competency level, it will seem trivial.
