It's not yet too late to save the live servers ......

My take was that she was referring to the franchise in general, not specifically EQ or EQ2.

My take is she's promoting EQ. She's had other recent public comments where she is specifically promoting EQ.

EQ2? Nothing.

It's also not EQ2's 20th anniversary. EQ is the feather in the cap. EQ2 is the "what could have been, but never quite was." If she's promoting their legacy, then EQ is rightly the focus.

Yep. EQ is rightly the focus of the EQ2 producer's letter.....

If EQ2 has a "bright future", she would have said that. She didn't.

It is my ***Opinion*** that Longdale is trying to cleverly engineer a soft landing for EQ2. Nantg owns the EQ ip and is developing the mobile.

EQ is likely where she sees her bread being buttered for all kinds if reasons, not the least of which is that it has a healthier population and is cheaper to produce.

But, only time will tell, so we'll see.

I strongly suggest you re-read the producer's letter. When things get confusing, apply your context clues.

https://www.everquest2.com/news/eq2-20-years-producers-letter-january-2019

Being arrogant and condescending doesn't make you right. It just makes you arrogant and condescending.

My (repeating this again) ****opinion****, which incorporates signaling behavior from a number of different sources led me to this ****opininion****, which is reasonable and plausible.

All that being said, and as with most observations with people in general, I attach little credibility to what they say, and attach a great deal of credibility to what they do; their actions, and the facts on the ground.

It's ok if you disagree with my assessment, I'm not claiming to know what DBG plans to do. Only they know for sure.

As I said, we shall see.

I read the whole thread and throwing my 2 cents.

I think the main problem is that people at end game min max to much. To keep them satisfied all other sorts of stuff was thrown in.

This game is not only raid and end game, yet the lots of the complainers think it is.

I see it here and in other games as well, min max ruins totally fine games.

Elitism

No, I don't think that's it. The biggest challenge the devs have is to create enough content that will keep people playing until next November. Raiders DO tend to min/max, but that doesn't generally affect everyone.

The thing this time that was thrown up as a roadblock was the really high step up to get to where you can run Heroics, because these Heroics on their own don't have enough variety in content or loot to keep people busy for months on end. I think the team miscalculated how high that step-up really was. It turns out that Resolve (i.e., Crit Mit under a new name) isn't the huge hurdle, because you can get plenty of Resolve just from a full set of Academic mastercrafted gear: no, the problem is Potency.

There is a bug with reforging mastercrafted armor whereby you can get way too much Potency (reforging into POT normally gives you single-digit returns). This bug has been thoroughly documented and reported for months, yet they're not fixing it. I suspect that the reason it isn't being fixed is because it's really, really hard to get enough Potency, Fervor, and Crit Bonus to be effective in Heroics. To get that Potency, Fervor, and Crit Bonus, people have been exploiting the reforging bug, using plat infusion, making crafted infusers, trying to compensate with adorns, i.e. forced to do a bunch of things that normally only raiders must.

I personally would prefer that DBG staff up enough that they can get a very full slate of quests that would satisfy the soloers, and more than 9-12 Heroic zones. I'd like to see some scripted fights in the heroics mixed with some tank-and-spank. I'd like to see maybe a dozen very desirable items dropping very rarely in heroics such that people will willingly keep running heroics to get that specific item (one nice cloak isn't enough).

Raiders have been slowed deliberately as well. Instead of coming up with more challenging scripts, they severely limited the adorns that block control effects. A raider needs to have several orange adorns and swap them out for various fights (stopping mez, fear, stun, stifle) but the mob(s) may use more than one of these effects in that same fight. In Ye Olde Dayes, we had a T1 raid dungeon, then a T2 raid dungeon etc. In each, the mobs were progressively a little more difficult, but when you had finished that dungeon, you moved to the next and started working your way through that dungeon's incrementally harder monsters. Now, you have to hop around various raid zones to pick off the T1 mobs. Then when your raid is able to do T2, you have to clear the darn T1s out of the way so you can do the T2s. etc. The running around and clearing old content over and over is just a time-waster... it doesn't make more challenging content, it just artificially slows progress. Oh, and scripted fights? They're re-using old raid scripts: we have a Pawbuster look-alike fight, for example.

So, this isn't some leet raider plot. It's the whole approach to try to keep us busy for a year. I'm pretty sure DBG currently doesn't have enough dev staff to appropriately develop lore and challenging questlines and interesting scripted fights. And as long as the management is content to sit on their laurels and refuse to advertise, refuse to build a bigger player base, then we'll be seeing a dedicated but small dev team doing their best with limited resources to fill up a whole year of play time.

What is time at them goes also for experiments? For some reason everything cannot be made at once rightly and for all times. What the reason(-s) is? Because they are not independent (the management, players, and?). It's expected of them that they play a more independent role? Yet this is something that they are not accustomed to..

The only real road block for new and returning players to become viable in group and raid content is the Proving Grounds adornment grind.

Panda quests can be knocked out in 2 hours.
All of plane of magic solo leveling to 110 take about a day and half.
The entire CD signature quest line for epic 2.0 can be done in a day.
Ascension levels fast. You can get to level 15 ascension instantly with panda potion.
Tradeskill from 100 to 110 for experimentation unlock can be done in 3 hours with exp pot running.

Then comes the real grind: Adornments. It is like a brick wall. YES I know about the free adorns in Tistan's chest but that is not enough. To get all the max health and potency adorns from proving grounds will take weeks if not months of grinding out the most boring solo zone imaginable. Daybreak needs to get rid of that and just put ALL the adorns in the Tishan's chest.

There are better adorns than the [IV] runes from PGs.

This is a great example of why live servers are dead to me. I don't want a list of chores to do. I want fun, interesting content. Sadly there's been precious little of that in years.

No better runes exist for returning players. I've asked around, looked around, and have not found a better adorn than the Proving Grounds adorns.

Well, a number of those runes have upgrades up to Celestial version [VII], so which ones do you mean exactly?

Are you aware that you can go to the Myrist foyer, and raid Tishan's Lockbox and mine the armor for adorns? Helms, for example, usually have POT adorns. Just pull out one of everything, see what adorns they have, and grab duplicates as needed.

Did you not read my earlier post? I already know about Tishan's box and the adorns in it. There are 9 adorns on the Proving grounds merchant that cannot be acquired via the Tishan box. I am talking about the Max health adorn (Rune of Nerve IV) that goes on Head, Chest, Bracers, Legs, Feet, Gloves, Cloak, Primary, Secondary, and Ranged. That is the best in slot adorn for new and returning players. Only way to get it is waste weeks grinding in the Proving grounds instance.

I would adjust your Class Prestige AA to have 8 points in Enhanced Vigor to get the Max Health, and go for Crit Bonus adorns, And max health isn't the best thing for every class. Fervor > Crit Bonus > Potency > ABMod.

Personally I am going to cancel my sub at the end of the month. Mainly because of how they have grossly reduced exp on killing MOB's and exploration and trying to push quests as the ONLY way to get significant exp to level. I already do tons of quests but some days I like to relax and explore and kill MOB's.

The only adornments I would bother with from the Proving Grounds are the extra attack adornments that go on neck hands and I think shoulders, for the doublecast, but really, there are celestial upgrades for those too.... https://u.eq2wire.com/item/index/2650060211. There really is no reason at all to do Proving Grounds at all right now, unless you want a reset item. As for the health adornments you're questioning, there are Celestial adornments with the exact same health percentages, that can be crafted, but have slightly different slots attached to it. https://u.eq2wire.com/item/index/2576500718

That adorn appears to be bugged in it's current form. Note the Blue stat is missing. The recipe book appears to be either very rare or non-existent.

you can have them commissioned. I can't say much about the blue stat missing...that's a game issue that would have to be corrected dev-side if the stat is indeed MIA.