EQ2 - Now comes with WoW Easy Mode

The planned changes to the "The Drinal Signature Line" just shows what's wrong with today's mmo's. The lazy people do not want to work for anything and feel a sense of accomplishment once they get there. So instead, they cry for WoW easy type mode and now they get to only do the quest line once, and get the benefits on all characters.

This is a massive mistake. Leave the quest line and requirements the way they are. Make players have to put in the effort to enjoy the content instead of taking a page from the WoW dev hand book and making things easy. You want obol's, do the quest line. Also considering the items are heirloom i don't really see what the issue is anyway. Too many things already made easy.

EQ2 used to be about accomplishment, a shining example of a real mmo where you had to work to see the content and it felt great to acomplish things. Now it's starting to look like activision blizzard type of game...give everyone what they want as easy as we can make it, and let them sit around dalaran all day complaining how there is no content.

Completing a long, tedious signature quest multiple times is neither challenging nor an accomplishment.

This is hardly anything new to EQ2. In the quest To Speak as a Dragon, you can skip the entire tedious process of gathering tablets by purchasing an heirloom tablet to complete the quest. Currency has been heirloom for how long.

And honestly, if it bothers you that much, do the sig line over and over again. Nothing is preventing you from doing that.

This.

Soloing for 8+ hours on a toon, or completing heroic instances with 5 others. Wonder which is more challenging or accomplishments.

Very likely the solo.

Some people like to assume that all heroic content is harder then all solo content because it suits their purposes. Which is a crock. Heroic content is only guarenteed harder if you do it solo.

Can't say I"m surprised though.

Depends on how tough the solo content is and how overgeared you are for the heroic

EQ2 stopped being challenging a long, long time ago. They've been chasing WoW since release (remember they released the game to be on the shelves a couple of days before WoW's release?).

Let's see what's gone:

Soul Shards: check
Shared exp debt: check (you win as a group you lose as a group - what a horrible concept that had to go)
Heroic mobs - check
Access quests to anywhere you couldn't run to - check
Encounters that would kick your *** if your group was dysfunctional - check

Not that anything against a non-adaptive AI can be really challenging, anyway, but that ship sailed long, long ago.

This.

Completing something once shows that you have the necessary skill, friend and time resources to accomplish it. Normally I am all for worthwhile things costing effort.

However the signature quest does not gain in difficulty or entertainment or in the value of the reward upon subsequent completions. It simply gains in tedium.

Games this old have to be supremely concerned with replay value. Extra-long, involved static content with static rewards does not enhance replay value. It disincentivizes replay value, and makes people less likely to want to play through content more than once. This is the lesson of SWTOR and Skyrim for game designers.

Doing an 8-12 hr quest multiple times where most things die in one or two hits is not challenging.

I will probably do it on all my characters eventually, for the cloak reward. But in the meantime, I can offer a group a variety of characters to help them complete heroic content, and I do not get penalised. As it is currently, most people won't play a character that can't loot the essences, as they're so rare you need every opportunity to get one. So all it's doing is restricting groups from forming currently as DPSclass06 won't log on their tank to run the zone.

Pretty much what Regolas said ^^^. Let's say there are several people in my guild logged in and wanting to run some zones (small guild, with dedicated members). Guild leader has the sig completed on his monk, another member has it on his paladin, another on his mystic, one warden, and me on my inquis...we simply did the sig on the class we love to play solo, so we end up as a guild, with a poorly balanced group. Monk wants to tank, and the guy with a paladin wants to play his ranger, but with our raid alliance eating up 3 nights of playtime per week, and our real lives taking up the rest, he hasn't completed the quest on his ranger yet. He doesn't need any of the gear that drops from mobs, he simply wants obols/spirits so he can get some upgrades, but he doesn't even get a chance to win any rolls on obols. This is the situation for pretty much everyone in our guild, we each have several alts endgame, and very little time or patience to do the soulcrushingly tedious sig line on 4 or 5 alts just to make using them worthwhile.

Menelag,

Although I appreciate you agreeing with me, I'd run a zone with monk, pally, mystic, warden and inquisitor!

The real issue is when you can't get one tank or one healer!

Yeah this game use to have challenging access quest lines.

Like the dozen of signature quests you needed to unlock all the group TSO zones...oh wait.

Yeah, what am I missing here. That's looks like a kickin' group. Ok, a nuker would be nice but who's gonna take down those tanks with all that healing backup? Wardens and Inquisitors aren't exactly total slouches in the DPS department either...

This. personally i would have made it so you can see/loot the tokens before you complete the line and as you unlock the instances on one toon it unlocks them account wide (as well as the vendor activation), however what the devs plan to do is also an acceptable solution you can access all the heroics bar harrows end untill you run at least one toon
upto that point.

Actually....you didn't have to do any quests to access the group TSO zones, and the signature quests were bonuses if you wanted to do them for some awesome piece of equipment, much akin to doing the claymore, soulfire, peacock, prismatic, and class epic weapon timelines before it. Up through TSO, there werent access quests for hardly any zones, including the original release, the access quests were for the overland areas which came with inherent access to their dungeons, exceptions were DFC, Nektropos Castle <still requires the access quest for nektropos 2>, and various raid zones I don't recall off the top of my head.
Access quests have, for the major part of the life of this game, been bygone past element, largely removed to allow more people access to the features.

As for the sig line, I've done it 3 times already, and I'll do it 7+ more times, short of PoW/CoE raiding, its best in slot for your class <I could be mistaken, but I have yet to even hear of anything better dropping outside of current top end raids> and has +20 stats over any of the heroic content cloaks. Its great to run for the cloak, but restricting the ability to even roll on currency needed for the gear is ridiculous, and not a concept to introduce when the game is already lacking in its player base.

Erszebeth, based on the "oh wait" I assume he was being sarcastic.

meh...looking at it...ur probably right....point remains tho, introducing something so archaic and benign like they did with this access line at this point in the game....bad idea.

Shared exp: good riddance. Most of this stuff had it been left in the game would just cause more hatred for the common player as people would become more choosey then they already are. They'll just select from a small list of people to play with. Not that this isn't the case already, but it would just amplify it. Would I play with people new, or only have heroic gear doing zones while having to share their debt? Hell no.

Heroic Mobs: Heroic mobs are gone? Oh you're being vague, you mean useless heroic mobs in places like Nek Forest, Lavastorm, Commonlands, or Antonica. Even back during Launch, people went to hunt mobs where the meat and potatoes were. Most heroic mobs in sections of overland zones were completely barren 6 months in (after the population spread out) and had not a single group going through particular areas unless you begged someone to finish some heritage quest that require hunting down a specific mob in said area. How many level 30-40 groups went to hunt in the far corners of Enchanted Lands to fight generic mobs compared to going into Rivervale or Runnyeye for some actual chance of getting good loot?

Access Quest: I remember when the game came out, almost everything zone be it contested/overland/instance required an access quest. Most game content was hardly ever used as the more convenient access quests with the more convenient zones like RoV, Nek Castle, or DFC were chosen over the more useless ones. It was a gate mechanic for launch, it's not needed anymore in those zone. In order for access quests to properly work in content not targeted for high endgame, you need a healthy and sustainable population where finding someone at those levels is easy. After the first year, finding groups for specific access quests was near impossible unless you dragged a guildy or two to help you.

05:
Person 1: "Hey want to do The Overlord's Throne Room in Runnyeye?"
Person 2-5: "Don't have access"
Person 6: "I do!"
Person 2: "I'm willing to do access"
Person 3: "Ehh sorry I just want to level see ya guys"
Person 4: "Rather do Runnyeye or Rivervale"
Person 5: "Yeah I think ill head to Rivervale for a group on scarecrows"
Person 6: "I'm only on here a limited time so I can't do access"

Speaking of Access Quests for everything including the toilet. Reminded me of Gates Of Discord, you know, that one expansion that everyone hated in EQ1, access quests being one of the biggest ire's of the expanison. I don't remember EQ1 having access quests for every zone unless it was Veeshans Peak, The Hole. Seb ect.

Encounters would kick your ***: Hahahaha pre-RoK heroic mobs were wimpy unless you were doing Castle Mistmoore or pre-nerf Halls of Fate. Most names for both heroic and raid prior to EoF were simple tank n spank with the exceptional few (ex: Djinn Master) that had a somewhat more elaborate buffs, and some even had scripts worth a damn. Are you telling me that Drunder/EoW weren't kicking peoples ***** when they first came out for groupers or x2 geared ToFS people? During the days of KoS and RoK, it was very common for even zones like LoLV or VP to have pick up raids being called out in chat. You won't see that post-DoV, even for the easier zones. If it happens, it will end in disaster unless that person knows the script.

Edit: NM Ixiam said it for me. I was being sarcastic.

But I do agree with everything you said in your post nevertheless.

I think what SoE is trying to do with Launch CoE is to shorten the large bridge between heroic and raider geared players which pretty much started with DoV and brought to extreme levels with SS. I'm glad CoE group gear hasn't made my SS, ST (EM) and HM Drunder gear obsolete unlike when SS came out where many of my HM Kael/Rime gear was made obsolete by even simple contested SS gear.

That said, there is a lack of hard raid zones for the most skilled raiders, however I won't be surprised if we get more raid zones suited for them soon. Weren't we suppose to get 4 raid zones? Probably 4th one is coming out in a month.

Soul shards were an unnecessary hassle, I don't think it really hurt anything when they were removed.

Shared Exp Debt - And people think Pickup Groups can be rare now, or complain about groups having gear requirements, just picture how much harder it will be for the lesser geared players to get into groups if this was around. Having less overall dps is one thing, being penalized cause their gear isn't good enough for the zone and causes them to die several times because of it is even worse.

As to the quest line, they needed to remove the gating of the zones. it's not like the Claymore, Peacock, or TSO Ethernaut quest lines, this is one which was about 8-12 hours worth of simple solo quests. Can it be difficult? Sure, because some classes will probably have issues with some of the more difficult instances.

Still, the biggest problem with the questline is that in order to be able to even collect currency for the faction merchant, every character you want to play in instances has to do it, or else you get penalized for playing that character in an instance because they're unable to collect currency. If the essences in particular were guaranteed similar to how dozekar heads were, this wouldn't be an issue. But since they're rare, and only one drops at a time where you're then rolling against everyone in the group for it, it's a different story. I haven't had a chance to look into the currency, but I don't believe they touched on this with the update, so I still don't think they've gone far enough in fixing the situation.

The best part about this entire thing is that the OP felt a sense of accomplishment upon completing the questline. Sad man, just sad.