I love the expansion! I hate that its not accessible to most! (reqs & zones too hard)

Is there something wrong in an MMO with seeking out others to either exchange, purchase or obtain free by way of friendship their services? Not everyone needs to have the recipes they want right away. I've gotten 0 horse recipes you've had a glut of that I would've liked. So? I'm still looking for someone to make a saddle, for example, that I don't feel like paying alot for. So? These are not problems. This is good MMO gameplay - you want to be constantly in need of something you dont have or the hamster wheel breaks down

I've been doing the planar level on weapons thing already, but I don't really know how you are able to go over the caps on infusers. How do you go around the caps?

Haven't seen the heroic mount for this expansion yet either - I do have Thanatorse from last expansion, but I'd assumed a new mount was just a rare drop in T2 zones since they aren't doing the whole last named recipe component thing this go around.

While your attitude of "if we get it done great, if not we'll come back and try again later" is awesome and breath of fresh air wish more "it's tooooo hard" crowd would adopt, above statement about raidguilds couldn't be further from the truth and some sort of housewife tale passed around that new players are in danger to fall for.

There is a dozen of guilds that do casual raiding that welcome anyone with a pulse, and some even without a pulse or hands. Majority of them are also super helpful I'm sure or they won't survive since their target audience is seeking help. They will never be efficient at said raiding due to pulse and hands lacking individuals, and if your fun is linked to efficiency you won't have fun in them, but you're sure welcome to join and learn in them.

What you stated is certainly true of more efficient raiding guilds - they are less likely to take someone without any experience, because that would impact their efficiency, and FUN-having. I dont see anything offensive about this, unless logic is offensive.

Not at all. However, I've not gotten a ton of recipes for saddles, I've gotten the patterns and that ain't the same thing. With 16 toons, one would hope something other than the same things would drop on occasion. That's not good MMO gameplay, that's poor design. And why shouldn't people be able to get recipes they need or want? I can recall when we finished a TS timeline in the past, we had the access to the recipe books. Now it's all RNG and trust me, we all know how well that works in EQ2. You still don't have the saddle and you don't want to pay a lot for it? Why do you think plat inflation has completely taken over the game. When people are selling recipe books for millions of plat because they're that rare, that's not good MMO gameplay in my book, but we'll agree to disagree.

old-fashioned

Plat infusion was always going to be necessary because it's so cheap and provides such a huge benefit. There's no underlying reason for it "taking over the game" as opposed that it just simply being a small feature that is extremely beneficial for each new piece of gear. Now using infusers, on the other hand, that gets expensive quick if you're upgrading junk!

This system would have worked on the old eq2 population. It won't work with the new one.

You can't give out gear from a prior xpac and runes, then they still cross over into a new xpac and call it equal ground.

You can't sit there and charge for all the combat arts and spells, then people who were not even around feel like they are on equal ground.

You can't put tiers in heroic zones when servers only play with familiar names and the offset of everything I said above comes into play as to who gets into what.

I've watched it countless times, your name is your talent. If people do not know your name, you won't be getting into a group no matter how flattering your heals,dps, or tanking skills are. Resolve is the easy part, getting by with expert spells, apprentice ascension spells, and some solo gear won't take you far. You need last xpacs chest and shoulders, you need more than just the free adorns they gave you, or you can just use the broken MC potency gear. Then again that's not going to give you 150 fervor either.

Just because I got the gear doesn't mean I'm not paying attention to how people are being towards others. The original point remains, until server populations realize they need to help people or they'll be more people quitting, nothing will improve, and until the drop ratios allow people to catch up, people will not enjoy it either. Last xpac gear should have been shot completely out the window, that includes ethereals.

Main point from this community, help people out so they'll actually stay around. Otherwise like every year, more people will leave.

They're getting everybody on an equal footing at the very start of the xpac. That's the starting point. No one is way far behind because they didn't run heroics in PoP. That's all the equality we need. From there, it's up to each player to sally forth into solo overland and instances to get recipes, harvest, get rares, etc. I think this is as egalitarian as it gets.

I see plenty of PUGs on Maj'Dul. Yes, they are going to require you to have at least the minimum resolve for the tier, and they are going to ask you to have at least 60K potency, because without those things you are useless and they'd have to carry you. You can ask your friends or guildmates to drag you through content you aren't geared for, but it's unfair to a PUG to do so.

If you're not getting PUGs because of your Resolve and/or Potency, well, get shakin' and work on that. MC armor, collection rewards, and armor from Doctor Arcana's key quests can all help you do this. You will probably need to get POT adorns on everything, so go to Tishan's Lockbox in the Myrist Lobby, buy seven helms, and strip off the white POT adorns and use those.

Need more stats? Did you do the quests for Yun Zi at the spires in Sundered Frontier for the Greater white adorns? Still need more stats? Infuse your armor, either deity infusing (aka plat infusing) or craft infusers and beef up your potency that way. Still need a bit more POT? Get the tinkered 8-hour temp adorns and slap them on your armor, primary and secondary.

None of this is a severe barrier. Once you get to 1060 Resolve and 60K Potency, THEN you can get into PUGs and get heroic armor, which hopefully will have still more Resolve and better stats.

If you aren't getting PUGs, have you been horrible in General chat enough that most of the server has you on /ignore? Are you in a guild with active members? You have the choice to seek out new friends and a more active guild.

I have been in a few guild groups lately and at T1 heroic we haven't required a second healer.
We could do more dps sure, but getting over the Reolve threshold only required MC gear. I refined and experimented to make the potency equivilent to T1 heroic potency. It isn't all MC though,

You can see my character here. I have a little more to go before I hit the 60k pot threshold, but it isn't far now and it should only be a few more heroic runs or Public Quests I guess.
https://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/450972114911

If you look at the wrists you will see how much potency you get with refined, experimented, plat infused, mastercrafted gear. I haven't added any other infusions cos I want to wait until I get some better gear before doing that kind of stuff.

When you compare it with the fabled heroic T1 ear, it has higher Potency.

heroic Fabled Ear:
Resolve: 65
Pot: 3578

MC Refined,Experimented, Plat Infused Wrist
Resolve: 60
Pot: 3687

One, I am not sure if you are referring to me in general or not, but even if the case was my own problem, I still say look broader at the community problem. I get groups and I offend people, but that's only because my name is old and I can play my class. That's not the case for ALOT of people. You want the game to work, then work with people who need help. Not everything population wise is Daybreaks fault

Second, allowing people early access through t1 zones so they don't run t2 zones half as much cuts out a lot of the population. That is because of last xpac gear such as Ethereals and orange runes you can't get right off the bat. Master spells, Master ascensions, catching up on all of those, require doing the same crap from last xpac. People are using last xpac raid gear in these new zones. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

Third, resolve is east to get, I'm starting to think you didn't read what I said. You can do the entire quest line with solos zones, and get the prestige items and you still won't have enough resolve or potency. You can go get the mc set with a few million plat or sit and grind it out, when the solo gear should have placed you in t1 heroics but it won't? Make sense of that. The Mc gear only works because people exploit it.

Fourth, No..60k potency does not get people in zones because 60k potency doesn't do much of crap. Experts combat arts and spells don't do much of crap, and apprentice ascension are not that useful either. People want easy and fast as possible. You have no idea how many times some of us step down to get someone else in group that needs things, then have to hear it in tells from people complaining cause the person we sat in for doesn't have uber numbers.

I agree with you Kari because that's where the problem lies. It's money. We can't all buy our way into the heroics content. We like to grind it out and work for it.

They give us starter gear for the new content- Great- then we should do solos that should get us into the heroics. Heroics gear should get us into raids. Plain and simple. MC gear great! Stuff to make you better and your alts! I love it but now its drop only for the recipe !? I'm not saying making the gear all uber out but just a slight upgrade to where its "enough" to group into the next tier, to get better gear. The gear should always help you level up. Isn't that RPG 101? I think somewhere along the lines, that memo was missed. Infusing the gear to make it better? Okay cool concept, that works but it shouldn't be our only way to Level up. It should be just a bonus. Not to mention, more money involved.

The Sig didn't even last long and was so short I was mind blown. I can't believe I got it done in two days, could've been one but I was trying to take my time. Its still November and people are already done with this expac..hmm.. somethings not right here.

I can't believe the recipes are drop only too?? That's insane. Make it harder for people to enjoy a game are they?
Whats the point of TS timeline then??

I'm really tired of putting hundreds of dollars into a game when the next expac, it's for nothing. Its infuse, infuse and infuse. Buy kronos to buy MC and then yay Im done with game. I used to never care because I enjoy this game over the 14 years I've played but now Its just seems too much.

There is no way anyone is done with the expac.... only a handful have finished all the t2 heroics and less than a dozen guilds are killing the first raid mobs.

"Toooo much"... "Toooo hard"... "Tooooo rare". Sigh. Let's save complaining miles for something xpac actually fails at, instead of some things it gets spot on for a change. Too used to having everything on a platter right away; day1 heroics in welfare gear, vendor recipes, "the good ol' days" eh. It's only been 2 weeks and change. If you're a non-raid type of player, I think you're perfectly on schedule to just start having fire-side chats about how to approach heroics. Frankly what's the rush? Once you're done with them, you've cleared the xpac... If you already started doing something to prepare for them, you're a go-getter by all measurements.

The t1 heroics are perfectly doable in proper, non-infused solo-gear only. I didn't want to go here because it'll hit some feels, but if you insist. Select proper sequence of heroics, avoid the overtuned ones at first. ("Omg how do i know which is which?!" Try and fail...) It'll be slow and take a group of above-average skilled players, with above adept skills to accomplish it under these limitations. Yes, then THAT would've been unproductive game design because it would exclude many from enjoying the content. Good news: there is a laundry list of things that can make your experience easier than this "hardcore" case. Unsurprisingly it takes plat in most cases, because well u know that's the currency in the game. Short memory of when we were screaming that this game needs plat sinks like asap or economy will be rendered meaningless? I by no means want to talk up DBG's record of getting things right because they have a long way to go to even break even in my eyes, but praise must be equally awarded when deserved.

I wish I could like this about 100 times.

Reading this with interest even tho I'm not yet able to do this content... I'm a slow eater... Most of it doesn't bother me but zone requirements do. IMHO, there should always be a pervasive quality of immersion and role-playing. I think we've gone so far down the road of parsing and analysis that the great beauty of these games is being lost! How does it contribute to the depth of the experience to have so many pieces of the puzzle revealed before you even enter the dungeon gates? I find these kind of naked mechanics depressing. I'd much rather the play be centered on the ability, strategy and cunning of a group of players than a list of stats for generic and meaningless avatars. Don't tell us we need 1 "tank", 1 "healer", etc with gear at such and such a number. Let us discover it for ourselves and figure out the puzzles in ways the devs never intended. Just my $.02

Step in one of the new heroic dungeons by yourself or with you and a merc and greet one of the trash mobs near the door.
There is no doubt in my mind what you will discover.

You'd be in a minority of people who want that. Not judging, just fyi. I'm in it, tho I don't really put much emphasis on it in my mind; it's sort of natural to just try things since there are no consequences for failing. Luckily this minority is easily served by existing mechanics. Don't read up threads like these, find 5 other like minded individuals, go into a heroic and analyze results. The are no zone requirements, just what logic dictates. You want what's already available.

I see all these awesome people here saying that if you cant do t2 its bascially your own fault
Get real , a pickup grp or casual grp wont have a chance in there and many of these dont run ACT or understand scripts like we who raid do, they wont have the plat to plat infuse everything or their spells at gm and ascensions / ancient
They could just have given us challenge zones and left the normal heroics to the casual people who would eventually would get geared up to do those - i mean they did this to raids
People without epic clearing t2 heroics to try and get their rune? i mean they bascially said you dont have to go back

Are we reading the same thread? Can you quote out where someone said this, please? This thread discusses "entering" heroics - t1s. I agree T2s are overtuned currently as you alluded, but let's not unnecessarily cause more hyperventilation for now? There's plenty of time for them still to get nerfed before the majority of the non-raid crowd gathers up enough t1 gear to dip their toes into t2s.

Theres your quote from the OP