Kingdom of Sky Itemization Review

Also, as a side note, is there any possible way you guys can re-enable the access quest for Deathtoll, to put a small barrier on it at least, so it will take 2+ weeks for people to get in there killing things after it releases, add a little barrier to entry at least.

Ok... so I just looked at the Templar gear and it looks like much of is has INT on it... which is totally useless for Templars. If this gear is going to be Templar friendly at all, the status need to be updated.

How convenient that the vote didn't pass!

I dunno, maybe just take a few hours, go through all of it, and figure out how it should be itemized? The legendary set from the Cloud questline gives you +40 primary/sta for each piece. That's the current level of fabled stats for T6, sure that makes sense, I guess. So are we just going to inflate absolutely everything even further? Relic needs to be nearly +50 of each stat OR higher, just to be considered "an upgrade". Also needs to have better blue stats than level 30-50 treasured items...

Know what has +50 of stats? THE MYTHICAL WEAPONS FROM KUNARK THAT ARE LEVEL 80! Seriously! Get with it guys!

Know what would be even better? Reduce the blue stats of everything so that players on the TLE don't have >200% attack speed and have flurry before level 51. Or we can just continue down the bloated stat path and end up even more borked and screwed up by the time we get to RoK/TSO and beyond. If you guys don't go back and REDUCE the quality of items that we have now, you're going to be up to live numbers by the time we're past TSO.

At this point if you guys keep inflating the stats and keep going up and up and up, Mythicals will have to have almost twice as much stats as they do now.

Fabled in T6 = ~+40
Legendary level 70 - should be ~45
Fabled T7 KOS - ~50
Fabled T7 EoF - ~55 (Otherwise what? An upgrade of blue stats? More inflation of those? Leave the stats exactly the same because the levels are the same, therefore creating no upgrade?)
Treasured RoK - ~55 (Let's keep things classic! /snicker)
Legendary RoK (75-80) - ~60-65
Fabled RoK generic - ~70
Fabled RoK Sets - ~75
Mythical Weapons - ~80 AT LEAST

So Mythical weapons are at +50 primary/sta right now, we're looking at an inflation of a minimum of 60% in stats, from where they are "on live".

Does that add up to you? Or should we maybe not all be sitting at 60% bonus damage for attacks without even trying, at cap without blinking an eye in a raid?

Why not, I dunno, fire Intern Jimmy, and actually go back and redo this stuff. Why not actually rebalance the stats and reign things in. Do players on live enjoy seeing 8234573 90384593940 73457893 348957934 3458935 983534 2354037 fly by on their screen and in their chat windows? Seems ludicrous to me. Almost as ludicrous as the stats are going to be by the time we hit RoK.

We keep giving you guys feedback and no one wants to listen to it. So either you guys are here to fix EQ2 and bring subscribers back to the game, and revitalize it; or you're just here to make a buck and push the rickety cart on down the line until the wheels finally fall off. Most people still play EQ2 because their friends still play and they enjoy that time; a lot of us came back for the TLE because we, at one point and for a time, loved this game. It's in shambles now, because of stat inflation, because no one cares, because it's been pushed down the line. The wheels are starting to fall off, duct tape patch jobs aren't going to cut it anymore.

You guys may have a new expansion that just came out, but we are not second rate subscribers, we expect a quality product, not a rush job with little to no oversight and response to player feedback.

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Here's some fun numbers, even with gear alone at a baseline of +60 primary/sta and a conservative estimate at 8.0 * stat for a bonus, we'll have around +1300 Primary and +1300 Stamina, just from gear alone, at level 80.

That comes out to a minimum +10,000 of health and power. So mages and scouts on a conservative estimate will be sitting around 15-17,000 hp at level 80, Tanks will probably have upwards of 25,000 when raid buffed. Why do we need numbers this high? It's easily counter-balanced with the mobs doing more damage, and our increased damage is countered the same way; with mobs having more HP. But why do we need numbers that high?

Suck it up, do a Cataclysm style patch. Reign the numbers in. Fix the game.

^THIS! The ability to step into some of these zones Day 1 you needed access to is ridiculous. I'm glad that PoS and DMP for DoF still needed access. Please, don't **** the access quests. While it is a bottleneck, it gives the guilds that care about raiding something to work towards.

Please do all our work for us. Thanks

Seconded, do we really need to say, "All and any items from Kingdom of Sky, not limited to and including treasured items", at this point?

Honestly if we get gear with cast speed on it that is when I unsub and chalk this nostalgic journey down as a failure. Cast speed wasnt introduced on gear till some set bonuses in RoK and didnt go full ham till TSO.... the early stat inflation in TLE from the damage to the hp to the healing has really killed the excitement and variety of this endeavor. Before this server launched I loaded into Nagafen on an old character and the TSO Void raid sets had 30's to base stats on it plus various bonuses and blue stats and now people are reaching those statistical numbers before DoF even launched. So now going forward gear will never be good enough and to combat that the content will ever be hard enough till the game levels out whenever the game hit that stat revamp (SF?). Probably would have been better off disabling the gear that was improved and enhanced in the original sweep and leaving broken gear and statlines as they were but instead a massive influx of changes will be required to make players more powerful and then figure out how to not make mobs so trivial when people are doing the damage of RoK raiders in DoF.

They don't need to remove casting speed from items completely, reducing the value of cast speed on most items would be a great thing to do, same with Multiattack, and quite frankly most other blue stats. But oh no, that would affect live until the players realized they're doing proportionally the exact same damage as before! Nowai!!!

As far as i remember the first time i went over 10K with my raiding mystic was probably during ROK when we were doing VP.
I also remember that we requited 6K hp for Protector (my 60 warden is already over 8k).

Haste (from items) was capped at Flowing black silk waist item and i don't remember any dps mod item.

These are stats at level 80 with full TSO gear.

You guys are putting in more work than them by far. Appreciate all the help people are giving but it's sad to see you guys spending all this time and them doing 0 about it. They'll come here take a little batch of things and be like "WE WILL GET ON IT" fix those and act like heroes like they always do. And the whole "we're busy with TLE, the new xpac and server merges" bs. That was your fault on planning them all at once not ours.

sorry that was with full tso/avatar gear back in the day.

Also, here is nostalgia for you if you REALLY want this server to be as it was back then:
http://eq2.xanadu-community.com/items.php?page=browse&id=218
Some of these items are still bad though and could use updates. But updates on the scale as the other old items. If you want to make a item special, add a special to it, not more stats. Best in slot shouldn't be dictated by what item has the most stats, it should be dictated on how the item fits into the class. I can almost guarentee that every coercer would drop 20 int from an item for a damage proc on spell cast, in fact there's a nice spell proc piece from courts right now that should probably be BiS but it isn't because there's some other random helmet with +1xx ability modifier so why would they want a 200 damage proc when they can just add 100+ damage to EVERY spell they cast...
RIGHT NOW pvpers are sacrificing entire items for just CC procs. My warden is using cloth gloves with int and leather bracers with str because of the procs on them for pvp.
STATS ALONE SHOULD NOT MAKE AN ITEM BIS
http://eq2.xanadu-community.com/items.php?page=viewItem&id=1110 would be BiS, not because it has slightly higher wisdom, sure it helps, but the proc. It could have the same stats are some 1h from labs with wisdom, but that proc.
Blue stats should be rare and hard to obtain, that is what made those items BiS
http://eq2.xanadu-community.com/items.php?page=viewItem&id=1378
That's one of the only items during KoS/EoF that helped increase auto attack damage. Now I can grab the shiny shards collection and get that same effect.
Even if you can't give back the specials, if an item from a freakin' avatar gave 7 dps mod, sure you can even make it a blue stat, I shouldn't be able to grab 7+ dps mod from some random drop in labs.
Same goes for ability mod and crit chance/damage (I honestly can't even remember crit damage in KoS or EoF)
http://eq2.xanadu-community.com/items.php?page=viewItem&id=1379 by far BiS item for all mages in EoF gave 100 ability mod. I can currently an item with close to 200 and I believe it's treasured or legendary and easily farmable by yourself.

As far as the current way stats have consolidated. I like some of them even though it makes gearing frustrating. 1. Crit chance no longer being separated to physical, heal, and spell crit chance. Although this is annoying now since every item can be shared between 2 archetypes meaning healers and mages fight over the same item because it gives crit chance whereas it used to only be heal crit chance maybe.
2. Bonus heal amount and bonus spell damage now being ability modifier was a nice change. But scouts never had that option in EoF, in fact, they usually had some sort of proc chance on CA cast (maestro's flame sword thing from the mistmoore maestro is the first thing to my head). This kind of goes back to chain healers wearing treasured scout gear because 150 abilitymod>25 wisdom.
3. Just look back on these extremely hard to get, extremely contested, extremely sought after items and realize that what they offered can now be found on any random treasured drop.




For the sake of making a point we're going to go extreme here. The Mutagenic Outcast - Probably the hardest, most fought over, contested in KoS. Right next to princes and hurricanus. Right now they look like they still drop some of the best gear in the xpac, which is wonderful. That gear has +50 stats.
Let's examine MO from 2007:
http://eq2.xanadu-community.com/items.php?page=browse&id=252
Highest I see is a +35 and that's cause it's 2 handed.
This is what we are concerned about. Idk when it happened but suddenly these items got another 15-30 stats tacked onto them.
Actually, tbh, it started in RoK when the Sarnak starting zone was introduced. Treasured gear from there has +7-10 main stat for a level 14 item whereas most level 14 gear at the time had +6 at max. I remember this because when RoK dropped my locked 14 warden was outgeared by random people leveling. This started a dangerous path.

Unfortunately, without the removal of blue stats we can't go back to these +25-30 values. Having 7k ish hp in KoS with dps mod or ability mod remaining in the game would be ludicrous as a ranger, quite literally, 1 shots you. Sad fact is we will need this inflated amount of stamina to keep up with the offensive capabilities of the blue stats in pvp. Sorry if this seems very pvp focused. As someone has mentioned before, pve can be fixed with just hp/damage values from the mob...
Before anyone complains about making a fight boring because it's 10 minutes long - Fights used to be 10min long, they used to actually test healers on power conservation, they used to test scouts on aggro control (kind of a joke now has the assassin pumps out WAY more dps than ever heard of on live and transfers that hate over), they tested mages on target swapping because you couldn't just mass aoe the adds and just not worry about them.

Would removing blue stats entirely and going back to the old system (where an item has some special effect on it that gave you 50 spell power or relic gear directly increasing the damage of one spell, etc...no blanket blue stat)? That would be extremely hard to answer. Spells and CAs, and even weapon damage, have all been balanced around these blue stats that shouldn't be in the game (yet).
How could we answer this? After KoS is voted in (lol jk, do it now. DT is pretty dead so we might as well get this right by starting the process now), grab some people, hell, you have 2 guilds on Deathtoll who would gladly come test some crap out for you (Their names are The Kraken and Darkhand, and funnily enough they semi-hate each other in game so you can even test some pvp balance while we fight over stuff...), and shove them into a small little beta. Just copy the characters over as they are but make them 70 and watch them go (because let's be honest, DH in particular is going to grind to 70 asap and replace only 2-3 pieces of gear by the time we're 70). If this had been done earlier, you would have had pages upon pages of real, live, feedback about every random nook and cranny of KoS because the majority of the players played it when it came out.
Now we have 3 (ish?) weeks before next vote so GL getting any testing done.

It would be nice if these were treated like new releases, because compared to how they played out in 2007, they are new releases. Stuff hasn't been tested to the extreme like it was then because people now just breeze by while leveling and just don't care about the items. I'm not saying have a huge beta for 1-2, but you should have something to allow for player feedback before it drops so you don't get stuck with a release and then a week of HEAVY feedback where you try to changes things but it's already live so you just kind of have to hope it'll work out. You should let that chaos happen in a controlled environment.

In regards to Dreww's screenshot of TSO stats. IIRC, fully geared (with RoK avatar gear) mages barely hit 10k hp. This means that TSO, without increasing the level cap, increased his hp by 40ish percent. Seems a bit steep to me.

I ran out of time to edit my above post. EoF avatar gear was probably the most well made items in this game. Very unique procs, allowing classes to branch into areas of use they couldn't before, increasing their character a bit beyond just their main stats but not making it where those extra stats didn't completely shadow their main stats. They were extremely well made items that allowed for some serious min/maxing scenarios.
Learn a little from it but then remember to tone it down so labs isn't dropping BiS gear...

Random stuff I want back in KoS:
1. DT access quest (and put it back where it was because nothing says KoS nostalgia like trying to land on that piece of crap island for quest updating)
1a. Flamethrower in DT back where you need the flame shield (forgot name) to get through it to turn it off. This was the most clever way to do access quests imo. Allowing players in (I think?), but can't progress without finishing the access quest.
2. Flying clouds.
3. Just killed Mutagenic Outcast on live and he dropped tradeable raid gear so uh, fix that.
4. The old travel system to KoS including:
4a. 5min spire timers.
4b. CL/Ant go to Tenebrous Tangle
4c. TS/Nek go to Barren Sky
4d. EL/Zek go to Bonemire
4e. Only way to travel from one overrealm zone to another was to either go back to the shattered lands and go to the proper spire, or find the portal in your current zone. None of this every portal allows porting to any zone thing.

It is crazy to see just how much stats have changed since the original days. Sure we all knew, but knowing it in your mind vs seeing the actual original stats is a big difference.

Yes.

Thanks for your diligent work guys! Lets make KoS and the expansions to come great again!

Bumping to keep this on front page.

It's tougher to go through and make ALL gear that shares the same database as the other servers to have the old stats it used to have. It's better to normalize all gear to make it all better and then have a buff placed on instanced heroic and epic content, and contested dungeons and contested epics that make them harder in line with the better stats.

Also, picking a choosing each item to be tailor for your class isn't a great idea, it prolly won't get looked at. The best thing is do what Judge and I have done and look for items that just generally didn't ever get his by upgrades over the years.

Hardly. 90% of the items that were touched by "upgrades" are still unusable compared to current T5/T6 gear that has blue stats. Having slightly higher green stats doesn't even come close to making up for the lack of blues. Even if this wasn't the case, in most cases the green stats from these "upgraded" T7 items are lower or the same as T6 items.

A large portion of those items will show that they have stats that will be unlocked with KoS. Not all but a lot.