This has been the WORST XPack EVER! It is so grindy. Gear updates are hard to come by, especially jewelry. This latest update broke crusaders in a way that causes groups to fail. Zones that we once were able to do we can't do anymore. I have played EQ2 since the beginning and this XPack has made it not fun anymore. I don't think I'm alone in this thought.
This expansion is extremely grindy, gear-wise, if you're trying to get any meaningful gear, I agree. The 'rare' stuff was made far too rare. There should be some level of less powerful, more common chase items (EG, CBOC with lower resolve) or meaningful buyable items with the Renewal Talents. That said, if you could only run zones because of the OP crusader wards and now you 'cant' run them, that is a you issue. The wards were broken before, not now - they should probably be a bit stronger than they are, but they were undeniably overly strong before, and the fact that you clearly relied on them to clear content shows that - your healers should provide the majority of the healing, not yourself.
TBF, I can show you heal parses of healers doing 3-4 times the HPS of the crusader ward pre-nerf. It was great for healing stuff that really didn't do damage though, and a lot of healers relied heavily on it to do their job for them as folks progressed, took less damage, and killed faster. That said, take it. Make the healers earn their keep. Sitting there, doing flip all for damage, not healing, not debuffing, bringing nothing but curse cures to a group.
Oh, I don't disagree. That's why I said it should be a bit stronger - but absolutely not where it was. While I do think strong players should be able to 'carry' a group a bit, I don't think a fighter should be able to carry multiple roles (DPS, Heals, Tanking, Curing) like a bunch of the complaints seem to want - and I'm with you on making the others actually manage their own weight. (Edit - And yeah, I know there were also good healers blowing the ward out of the water.. which is how it should be. Maybe if they had just made the crusader ward lowest priority for wards so other healers wouldnt complain..)
To me (and this only my opinion) - this expac was the worst expac in years for the following reasons: 1. Resolves for everything was set too high 2. Zones were over-scripted (and the lack of immunity rune drops didn't help) 3. Tanks got 100 to 300 increase in hate transfer and a 2/3 cut in DPS (I didn't have problems holding aggro before and don't now, but I rather have the DPS to be honest.) 1 and 2 - are why PUGs rarely happen and about 10-15 less guilds raiding this expac. I mean it seems like every guild that raids is trying to recruit 3 to 5 players.
That was but one example. Our healer was a warden who was solo healing an H2. My understanding is that wardens are the hardest to solo heal a group. Other combos may be more successful. For example, groups that have a defiler/mystic tend to do better. Regardless of the nerf bat on crusaders, I hate this xpack and almost sat it out.
The scripts and fights in h1/h2/H3 and now C1/C2/C3 are all good and interesting and much better than what came before. However EQ2 no longer has the player base who can deal with these scripts. I would say H1 should be just tank and spank. H2 just 1 script relegate all the script intensives fights to H3 etc.
The scripts themselves are great and fun, they are challenging, work realy fine and I think they're ok. However, the necessary group setups and gear requirements, especially with regard to CB and CB Overcap, and absolut nessesary high dps classes, are far too much of what can be done at most. And it is also the case that a lot of things can only be obtained with a lot of luck. Which makes it difficult to get people with little luck or less time up to the gear level they need. It's not enough that only one or 2 players in the group have the right values, no, everyone has to be on the right level. Due to the links like the painlinks and their necessity, with the current mechanics, undernumbered groups are no longer possible, because otherwise a lot of the necessary CB is missing again. If groups are far above the actual gear, which would be necessary, this can be compensated for a little. Furthermore, this stupid short time adornment craze is completely out of control. The required resources blow up every reasonable framework and those that drop cannot be used sensibly, only litter the entire inventory and massively reduce the chances of looting meaningful gear. Masses of runes / adornments that no one needs because they have the wrong color or always occupy the wrong or same slots make the whole thing even more useless. The massively high stat requirements and the time required to achieve them are beyond the scope of normal players who are not unemployed and can play 24/7. Let alone having a whole group of these players with the right classes to progress well.
I gave up on trying to find groups very shortly after the contested zone came out. I'm burned out on tanking, and the drop in DPS and the hate scrolls are part of that reason why. I know tanks aren't supposed to do high DPS in most situations compared to scouts and mages, but they overcorrected.
What Ingerimm said... and Many of the issues are related to the time commitment required and that time commitment comes from the Grindy nature of the content and gear progression. I don't know what the player mix is and I don't know where the game makes most of its money now but the devs need to understand that most of the people (at least as I see it) want to log on, advance their toon and log off. If I can get in game, be productive and log out then I feel good about the game. There are far too many other games and things to take up time to stand around for hours to get a group going only to die over and over, get almost no rewards and not be preparing for the next level..h1...h2...etc. 1. Gear progression to advance through the zones is broken. This relates to stats and resolve. The rewards don't progress in a way that you can advance without grinding away and grinding simply isn't something that the player base will really tolerate. Solo and Sig line should lead to basic H1 success and so on. Grinding for weeks and weeks for meh gear in H1, dying over and over just to be able to succeed in H1 is not ok. 2. Related to 1. Whoever decided the CB/CBOC implementation should be sat down and scolded. It's dumb. And the fact that you have to give up so much of one to get the other (along with other stats) is dumb. 3. At this point many people have thrown in the towel on this Xpac. I'm still excited to see whats next but myself and a lot of Guildies don't feel like fighting to drudgery to climb the shear mountain of content just to have basic success in the xpac.
I agree. I've been a lifelong player of the Everquest franchise from 1/1/2000. That is my character create date on EQ1. This xpac has been a nightmare. I second what Sedient said. I want to log on, get a group, have fun and log off. I don't want to spend hours trying to find a group. I'm too old for that now. The days of spending 36 hours camping Stormfeather have worn me down. Been there, done that. I want to have fun and this xpac has NOT been that.
As a raid healer, I pay attention to all these things. My observation is that, if you're doing your job (healer) no one should outperform you on the heal parse--period. That's a mechanic issue if they are. That said, if you've got people who are, to quote you, " Sitting there, doing flip all for damage, not healing, not debuffing, bringing nothing but curse cures to a group," then their sorry azzes shouldn't be in your group and shame on you if you're tolerating it. And I'd say that's true of any other class--just add the appropriate class mechanic to the description--haha. That said, to the OP comments--I would concur. I can't recall an xpac so ill thought out and implemented since the game launched. Progression is nonsensical, itemization is a joke, temp adorns that are as useless as teats on a boar hog, Mage or healer gear with block on it is idiotic. So little gear had reuse or casting speed on it that we're using adorns from 5 expacs ago to augment it. Honestly, the list goes on and on. If we could still reforge out of some of this stuff and put it into stats a specific class could actually use, would have been helpful. And when 6 people can run a zone and get better gear than 24 get in a raid, well Bubba, you might want to ponder that for a bit. Grind, grind, grind, doing mindless tasks over and over again doesn't make a game fun which is why it's a desert out there right now--no pun intended. But this has been pointed out ad nauseum.
Just went to live because of this cloaks event. And left immediately . Fly, you fools. Don't expect better in a few months . At some point you have to take the plunge, leave your precious pixel behind. Whose fault is it? You know it
This and... Resolve has almost killed the live servers. To add insult to injury the mindnumbing, tedious, chore of a stat grind is nothing but the carrot being dangled in its fullest sense. Hopeless development of itemisation, no sense of how to balance the content requirements with the lack of players available to engage with it. No communication between the developer who is making the zones and the one doing the itemisation. Class balance is at its worst with every wretched class is going after the same stats - i mean you once took pride in having over 20+ classes for crying out loud. No player feedback taken into account. No courage to take constructive criticism. Just churning out expansion after expansion like a mindless drone knowing that suckers like us would still splash money.
I feel that they made two big mistakes with itemization this expansion: Crit Bonus Overcap became chase/rare items Stat scaling from gearing up is very small. The crit bonus overcap issue is huge in that it's both not intuitive and that the only real progress is made by mixing and matching with rare drops. Combined with needing to make resolve for content, this makes content extremely grindy in that you need to get the exact right combination of drops in order to meaningfully progress. Low end content is particularly bad about the lack of crit bonus overcap options. The poor stat scaling is the other issue. If your character has bad stats because you lack the laundry list of non-worn-extras required to fix that, your character will not improve with gear. It'd take something like 2500 resolve to even out the effects of Hizite Painlinks, like another 3.3k resolve to match a mercenary's crit bonus, and so on. Gear upgrades are so modest as to be essentially invisible. The only reason combat mitigation was acceptable was because it allowed for players to see rapid increases in their performance with gear upgrades. With this new system, that isn't possible, so it no longer has a reason to exist. They need to either greatly increase stat upgrades with gear tiers or do the same to crit bonus/fervor what they did to potency in the combat mit calculations - lower the floor value so far that it's not really much of a factor anymore: like 200 fervor and 10k crit bonus, for example.
So, they can't ever make us happy in terms of gear progression. Folks want big jumps or small jumps. Folks, in general, are never happy. They complain theres no progression (tiny stat differences) or that the jumps are too big (large jumps) from tier to tier. Its a no win. They cant balance it because a lower tier geared player will often outperform a higher tier geared player of the same class if the lower tier geared player has the best P2W items/buffs. This game can't have good itemization because the variables are just too numerous
