A group can zone into Cazel's and literally pull the entire zone, and kill it all in one aoe fight. A group consisting of 3 60's, one healer, 2 58's and one level 54 (the healer). A level 60 wizard rotates thru the heroic instances and solo's all the names each day. Is this the challenge level appropriate for the game? In other examples, raid mobs don't auto attack at all, or raid mobs auto attack for less than level 50 heroic mobs from last expansion.
My dream would be like above, server opens at EoF, give four month timer to level all the way there plus clear the content. Then move onto RoK and beyond. Unfortunately these TLE's are designed at this point to be as hands off as possible from the developers. I'd love for a server that just does EoF-DoV, as that's when they can add avatars, you have AA's, interesting gear, fun raid encounters, etc. Not just turn/burn.
Yeah bad luck on the raid mobs, that's my fault and the fault of a few others on Nagafen. They tuned everything up really high for us, didn't give us blue stats, and then we feedbacked for it to be lowered. They did nothing for us but lowered it significantly for your server, where you have insane gear. I think Fallen Gate up to EoF got the balance right. Unfortunately one of the problems with normalising gear is that it makes everything boring until we get things like decent armour sets and transmuting. At least there was SOME variety on Fallen Gate and in limited situations choices had to be made between certain pieces. Now it's just plain, and I have no idea why they reitemised - they should have just buffed some of the gear in entry level Shattered Lands and DoF raids for balance and left it alone.
I'd love EoF thru Plane of War. I'd even take the 4 month expansions with the first 4 months being launch to EoF. Easily the best years of EQ2 for me, that's where the Nostalgia is for me, and that's why these TLE's have been disappointing for me.
If they could release a server, as it was at the end of RoK, before all the re-itemizations, AA changes, spell revamps, etc., and open it at EoF for a couple months, I'd be all over it. Hell, bugs and all. It truly baffles me that they don't have code going back this far. I'd like to take whomever was in charge of their source control back then, and ask them wth they were thinking. I mean, I have code in old repositories going back to 2001 that I could spend 10 minutes restoring and get functional again, and those were just hobby projects I'll probably never look at again in my life, and yet here we have what was (at the time) a major developer with one of their primary IPs, that apparently can't even restore Freeport to what it was before the revamp, which wasn't even that long ago, in the grand scheme. A part of me thinks they do have the code, they just know the amount of work it would take to get running is beyond what they can spare right now. Or maybe they really don't have the code, and the idea of a true classic server is truly just pie in the sky. Either option isn't exactly great. Blizzard have managed to do it, but they have archives going back to 2006. Kudos to them. I'm sad, because I genuinely love EQ2 and have a lot of great memories in this game, and would happily create a few more if given the chance. But, with what I've read in this forum so far, I just can't see that happening any time soon. Hell I'd happily volunteer my spare time (with almost two decades' dev experience - hint hint DBG) if it were even remotely possible to realize a server closer to back-in-the-day, with challenging content (at least more so than now), and without all the hand-holding the modern client does for you. Sigh.
I tell anyone who will listen that I would literally pay a double monthly to play on a legit TLE, pre-stat revamp server.
My favorite part about TLE itemization at the moment is how it's actually worse than fallen gate's itemization, and the only reason content was so under-tuned for the most part was because of one buff, confront fear, which is nerfed. Just looking at KoS itemization it appears that there is no reason at all to raid! All the raid gear has similar stats to mastercrafted gear much like DoF, and in a lot of cases, it's worse than DoF gear because no KoS gear seems to have more than three stats for some reason ( sans tank gear !). Very fun. Oh also claymore rewards are level 60, and pretty bad, bad to the point of no one will use them in EoF =/.
At this point my guild is done until KoS, we will probably clear the content within a week or two and just move onto other games because of the lackluster rewards for playing. Call me impossible to please or whatever, but when I find zero upgrades after clearing the heroics to level to 70, to killing venekor in halls of seeing, I find a major issue in the game, and find close to zero point to play~. It's nearly impossible to create an actual gear path without spending hours days weeks trying to fix all of the itemization by hand but it's honestly the only way raiding with have a healthy population on kaladim. I'm unsure of how many are raiding, but looking at the progression list I know at least 1/2 aren't raiding anymore, or are having issues even fielding a x3 at the moment because no one wants to raid for gear worse than heroic loot off DMP.
Bekkr the problem with getting anything like when EQ2 came out is all the data is corrupted by changes and can't be restored. People asked for exactly that when we had the first TLE servers come out . We were informed that what it takes to get back the old EQ2 is to basically remake the game after the old patterns.
If you truly want nostalgia, then you need to go back to day 1. You had 4 classes. You did a quest line from one of those 4 classes to specialize. You had no AAs, no stats on gear other than str, wis, int, sta, you had encumbrance, you had corpse runs, you had to have food and drink to live. In tradeskills you had sub-combines and every profession needed every other profession to complete an item. Missing or hitting the wrong counter could kill you, especially at the forge of death. If we are going to revert, lets truly revert. Lets go back to day 1. That would be my vote. Come on Kander, Holly, Gninja, Caith, Kaitheel, lets go really OLD SCHOOL and NOSTALGIC, lets go LAUNCH DAY!!!!
Yeah that's never gonna happen. But bold. With the current set xp rates you would probably blow through the class quests and instantly be your desired class anyway. Also sub combines aren't fun, I did enough of them for hours on SWG EMU to say no thank you at this point, either way; not like the massive bots crafting 1/2 of the server's combines would care.
If you want a challenge play on Nagafen. It is TLE hardmode. Kaladim is a training server for new players to learn to play the game and have lots of low level players to experience content with. Think of it as an extended tutorial server. TLE = Tutorial Learning Experience
Does TLE hardmode = people killing each other at 16 with scouts with m2 choice? If so not very hard to me. If anything, nagafen has felt like a pure pve server with the number of quests i've done to level to 70, because everyone feels like t2 pvp > t8, but idk mane. I'd rather play at 70 when pvp is actually more than 10 buttons and just killing ppl with a large spike + poisons/autos.
You are right it is pretty much a PvE server after level 22 or so. It is the PvE side of things that makes it seem hardmode since the mobs got buffed on Nagafen. From Caith: x Not sure if will extend to endgame raids but some some of these low level dungeons are a lot harder than I remember.
I haven't really done dungeons past fallen gate because there is no one to group with in the 40's/50's at the moment. But it seemed pretty face roll for the group I was in. Either way it's kinda ridiculous I have to quest for 50 hours just to hit max level. Good thing the bauble is coming, I can't imagine anyone is going to be willing to grind/quest up to max level before it comes in at this point. I killed the one guildie in my range and we got less than a % for killing each other. Pretty great to see a heroic mob give more xp than killing someone in pvp. Really brings the pvp experience out! I also can't imagine anyone bothering with raids with how terrible itemization is right now, you can actually do the solo cloud questline and get better gear than the relic gear/raid gear at the moment because of the set bonus on the solo cloud gear. Bolded for clarity honestly because it also extends to kaladim at this point, itemization up to EoF is "done" for tle's but it's actually the worst itemization I have ever seen in this game. Boring, pointless, and without a progression system.
I haven't had enough of the right people with the patience to farm the data out. But combat mitigation and some other mysterious tuning is causing yellow mobs to be much harder, and orange / red mobs impossible. If you roll into FG with it being blue, you run over it, you hit yellow con, and its a snail. I think the curve put in is hitting a little too aggressive at these lowbie areas with very little combat mit debuff available.
To get decent exp you have to kill yellow and orange cons. That is why I said this is TLE hardmode for PvE content. No mysterious tuning on Kaladim makes it easymode.
