General Heroic Concern

After you wipe over and over and finally beat that zone, make sure you come back and let us know if you still feel that way knowing that was about the easiest zone in the expansion. It gets much worse!

If it would drop usable armor that would be helpful, but what i have seen is cloth with no potency, plate with no mitigation, etc. So for one upgrade you need to get enough to break down into shards to buy the right piece, so if you want a chest piece alone it will take 20 lucky wins on greed per person in the group for everyone to get the proper chest piece. Maybe some will get lucky and a good piece drops and win on need, but in general it will be 6 people x 10- 20 pieces to or more to get shard for one upgrade. It is an unfathomably high and possibly game quittable amount of runs to get a full set of just mediocre for the expac armor. This preciousness of gear is killing the game as people don't like to be forced to do 100+ runs to gear up one toon. Why not allow people get gear in a timely manner?

For post #62:

When TOV started last year I think people had to actually wait for the 'right' piece to drop. There wasn't conversion to buy what you needed initially nor double etyma's for being subbed. The system they have in place now puts me at ~ 3 days of 2-5 zones a day to 'gear out' per slot on one 100.

Sometimes the quest reward gives you the 'right' piece and you can get ahead but most of the time it's matched so All Access + Quest Rewards Broken Down = The piece you need Blue at 4 or Green at 1 happens naturally. If you have 10 100's, yeah it needs to be faster but for a person with only 1 major character the pace feels 'about' right.

AoM feels like the "Rise of the Main Character" and the ease of which players can have 10 100's equally decked out in Heroic gear (or TSing levels) has been reduced.

My entire group is wearing exclusively heroic gear and we've managed to clear every zone but Ssra and haven't really tried Sanguine Fountains yet. The content is challenging, but it's certainly nowhere near impossible. We've only come across a rare few situations where a mob needed retuning (Quorox or whatever the spider's name is in Thresinet's Den).

Every single time they've put in challenging content people have complained because they couldn't waltz in and kill each named on first pull in a tank-and-spank manner. I recall people throwing a fit over The Vigilant zones and Drunder specifically. Both sets of zones were clearable in heroic gear (though Drunder required a few tweaks to specific named).

Devs need to start ignoring the "complain about difficulty" crowd. The instant this game goes the route of every other MMO (casualizes every aspect of the game) is the day the population here dies. People play EQ2 because it's still unique in the MMO world. It's not EQ1 hardcore, but it's in the middle. There are very few MMOs like this.

I think the heart of the issue is low populated servers and not enough grouping. I cant judge other servers but i have checked out AB server and compared it to mine just to see. They have enough people that therye already auctioning off raid peices whereas my server is still auctioning off blue zone gear/jewelery etc.. Its not just people being lazy or not paying attention because obviously there are people that are lazy and dont pay attention, however majority of the problem is theres just not enough people grouping or filling in raid forces. Its the lack of gear, the lack of knowledge and the lack of skill. It takes practice to learn your toon and prioritizing how often you group and play your character to its full potential. You cant buy auctioned gear if its not being auctioned and you can't earn the gear if your group is failing or just not enough people grouping to get the gear or ferrin.

You have to learn the zone,thus the only way to do that is to group more often. To group more often well you got to have friends or people to group with. Theres too many crafters and not enough skilled players. Its a challenge but i dont have issues with getting into a group because i spend my time learning one character at a time and dont waste time leveling up alts or crafting all day every day , which i dont see any problem with people that do that however, when they complain about not getting into a group because of thier gear well its called Priorities. People in general waste time leveling up alts and crafting and dont focus on one toon at a time. Especially now with this expansion they made it more of a challenge to put gear on alts.. It isnt easy peasy anymore and people just need to realize that if they want to group and not have a fail group or fail themselves or if they want to be invited and earn a good rep well its according to what you are willing to do with your time. If you have life and dont have time to play; this is a game afterall, However (not you) dont complain if people dont want to invite you into thier groups because you lack the gear. Your skill, Knowledge and well hate to say it.... gear is what makes a character impressionable for groups.

Don't get me wrong because i do have a tradeskill and i do craft but its to help guild and myself. However, i split up my time and dont waste time on other things if im wanting to get better well i have set my goals. Only problem Im personally experiencing is the lack of people.

The solution is obvious. SOE needs to do a server merge. That way you can cut out the bad apples and not have failing groups. No offense to anyone on the bad apple comment but just making a point. If people actually got together and petitioned for soe for a server merge that would be awesome! lol

I hope those options are mergers....and soon.....or at least offer your gold members a 1 time account transfer "free" of charge.... let's be realistic...not everyone can afford the cost to move their toons to AB.....it's frustrating to be on a low pop server where you can't get enough to fill raid forces, groups, and heck...even the economy is majorly borked because of lack of supply/demand.

Agree....cross server dungeons does nothing to help fill raid forces and build/stimulate failing economies on dead servers.

I look forward to your solution of having more people in guild to raid with regardless of what server they are on.

So what is the plan: A BG type hub for all instanced group/raid zones - form a raid/grp and then Que into the instance from said hub? This type of solution would kill the once great open world of Norrath.

Cross-server dungeons and grouping was asked for last year. I'm hoping the framework is at least 50% of the way done.

I don't think we need any across the board nerfs, just some of the supposedly easy zones early in progression. Particularly look at the trauma (physical) ae's on someone wearing the intended gear for that zone.

Nobody wants to go in the pirate zones because they're longer and harder than some of the green zones, but I like them and I want to hit them for the weekly mission tokens (to actually upgrade the green armor).

Keeping in mind they have to constantly develop new content for the GUs (and now weekly/monthly updates), content for expansions, while losing team members to lay offs, other projects, etc, and working with a very old system that wasn't designed for cross-server anything...

If they do something along the lines of Rift it would mean business as usual. In Rift you can shard hop to your hearts content.

Please tell me the cross-server group finder will be tons better than the dungeon group finder and BG matchmaker! And if it will, then fix those other two as well! And if not....please don't bother.

That would be a terrific idea to implement for Nagafen as well-- people being able to move their mains onto and then off of it again at will.

But I don't see character shard hopping even from blue server to blue server working for EQ2: there would likely be too much potential for cross-server item exploits, compared to just sticking with a cross-server group finder (which had better be a lot more functional than the dungeon group finder and BG matchmaker or SOE should not bother!!!).

I think it would be great for Naggie. I'm not sure if you played Rift at all, but you can flag Y/N for PvP on all shards. And yes players did use it, and often, for open world PvP.

You could only shard hop with an invite from a player on the shard you were zoning to, and although I guess there would be players that would exploit it, I'm sure there'd be more that did not.

If they were to give free server transfers, it would be best if they did what they did in EQ1. They should limit transfers to one specific low population server. Alternatively, they could limit it to 2 servers, one low population blue server and Nagafen. This would allow players to get involved in PvP more freely without fully committing to it.

I still don't understand why we are stuck to a specific server in 2015 and that's not only for EQ2. One big massive server and community with zone copies if needed and we can choose which copy we want to be in (same as what we have today in EQ2 and since EQ2 is already so heavily-instanced it shouldn't be as difficult as with a massive open world type of game).
Language shouldn't be a problem either since you should be able to select the game install language and then have specific language channels.

Anyway, if I wasn't a guild leader with totally awesome guild members I would have moved to AB long ago since I absolutely love decorating; however being on the only EU server is like being in a barren desert, as you need to switch game settings to US and create lvl 1 alts on other servers to visit their homes, and vice-versa. Dungeon/Raid grouping is a nightmare as well.

Therefore, I really hope there are solutions for this in 2015 and I am definitely eager to see the outcome. Currently it's a rather sad situation. I am happy this is being looked into and acknowledged as an issue by SOE.

tbh cross server dungeons will only work if you fix your formula for filling out groups, or else it will be another DM/BG fail where you end up with 5 healers in the group with a mage. that's supposed to run something.
or 5 tanks and a chanter.

it would be better if there was a center place like the BG arena where everyone can hang out and you can set groups up there and go into whatever group you want.

Seems to me this could be easy to fix by adding a check box for dps/tank/heals in the queue ui. There really is no need for the game to determine the role.