We went there I see... Consumables being needed during everything.. oh look.. helps TSers in game. What else are they doing atm?? Nothing, unless a provie lol.. so pretty sure I care about the game. I didn't say anything about a perfect set up.. I said a T1 dps should be required, because as I've been told and many others as of late, the tiering system has went away... so any conjy, necro, ranger, assasin, wizzie, warlock (yes I've done zones with them and completed them), brigand, swash should be in the group (just one of any). Heroic content was never meant to be done without a tank (thus the stupid mechanic of bulwark was placed in game, so tanks could feel useful, somewhat), nor having 0 dps. Quite literally you should not be able to roll into a zone with 6 healers and kill it (a little extreme concept, but using your last sentence, I'll play into those words.) It's literally been that way since day one, through the good ole times (TSO), all the way through now. Last expansion no one wanted mages, and they had to sit on their thumbs, why, because well content was broken. What healer do you take? I bet a fury or mystic all the time, even though any of them can solo heal the content. The crit mit concept started way back when and evolved to resolve. People are mad at the following, which rojjr started out his post with... needing 2 expansion ago aa's via ethereal trackers. Needing to do old content for a monolithic green adornment (which could obtained by adding a side quest to at least say they did something for it, vice having to go back to old content. People are mad at resolve being quite higher than it should've started out at. Broken classes, period. Pet classes dominating. Necro pets tanking raid mobs and bypassing mechanics, because see above (we only want 2 heal classes). I simply made statements about the why's. I've been playing this game since day one as well, well this is my second account since one got a temporary ban, but that's another story. As far as most time played world wide.. I mean leaving your toon logged in overnight acquires time played, so 7 years is masterful for sure, but could also just be you standing in qeynos harbor showing off your gear
I agree with being able to see mobs and too have said the same thing. I'm speaking in a general sense when I hear people discuss things like that. I for one enjoy beta raid testing. If they give me something for it so be it, but if they don't then as you said, I've seen that mob now already.
From a quest/art standpoint, the expac was fine. From an overall progression and PUG standpoint it has been the worst expac. Back in PoP/CD/BoL - I used to tank PUGs all the time. Since RoS/VoV/RoR - I rarely tank PUGs anymore. You can thank the ever-widening gap between players and overuse of scripts for that.
I disagree about the quests. Every expac we get less and less quests. For a player like myself that loves the lore and story the last few expacs have been terrible. It's giant zones with very little quest content in them. The expac could really just be one zone at this point. So much wasted space. We don't even get dungeons anymore. It's mostly just the overland zones sectioned off. I miss the older expac that had long quest lines and many quests to do. I agree the zone art and art in general is good but that has never been an issue. It's the lack of content for me.
Yup too much stream lined sig lines now with very few side quests. Everquest stopped being Ever"quest" after DoV which is mostly due to lack of staff and resources.
Well said. I want to help the devs understand the mindset of a returning player and the barriers faced. Please take this post in the spirit it's intended to hopefully give a use case of a problem to be solved. I did return in January after an 8 year break. My wife and I started playing our old raid mains SK and Troub with the intention of more casual play and duo until we had leveled and relearned our characters enjoying some of the content we had missed. I may have forgotten or missed some things at this point but here is our journey. It was recommended we do the panda quests by an old friend which was OK. Didn't really understand the ascension stuff that filled up my hot bars, yes some spells seemed very high damage but they took so long to cast and didn't understand how to upgrade them, I largely ignored them figuring if they were needed for something eventually I'd hit it. We reached cap and did the sig line. Along the way learned the be all and end all was resolve which seemed so artificial a gate it kind of spoiled things a bit but ok. We enjoyed figuring out the solo zone scripts and graceless mode without a healer. That was fun but after a few times through it was boring. We were well under resolve for H1's though so we grinded, and eventually met resolve. At that point we hit a brick wall on getting groups, there was none to be had. In guild all the raiders were grouping together to meet different raid requirements which is understandable. In general chat there was no interest. Not having fun and since it looked like the few groups that did form took hours to set up decided we had to do something different. We thought we would see what the TLE servers were. Had fun starting characters from scratch and first time we tried grouping at 20 immediately filled up with guildies. Apart from the social aspect the play style experience was much better, felt much more organic and offered multiple ways of defeating mobs. Power drains take time giving options, out DPS the drain, get a power feeder etc. People under equipped could still fill a valuable role. A lot of people on TLE are returning players who gave the latest a try, didn't like it and found a home at TLE. Played quite awhile at cap but it is hard to give up on characters on the live servers after spending thousands of hours on them. Kind of reached a crossroads where the decision was try and join a raiding guild on TLE or give live one last chance. Had not completely left live, still kept up on overseer's there and did the weekly solo, kept tabs on the guild discord server. About this time one of the live guilds raid forces reached out to me after I'd found out yet another thing my character was missing and I was commenting on a thread there. Things had changed a lot in 2 or 3 months we were on TLE and both me and my wife was accepted to app and everyone on the raid force has helped gear us up fast so we could at least live to contribute. Raid leader arranged things so we would get the flawless buff which I didn't know about and a huge help. For our part we have gone after everything we know we are missing and had been working on other stuff previously. We recently upgraded from the standard edition to the prestige collectors which when we left simply just didn't matter unless you wanted a cool appearance mount of prestige home. I'm still finding out about other old things that are vital but no one talks or thinks about because they had done them years ago. There are some things that would just take so long to do and involve others doing multiple runs through old content for months we won't do it or ask others to help. This thread is the first I've heard about a pre-order pet buff which is apparently impossible for us to do anything about. That seems ridiculous, there should be some mechanism to close that gap. In total this is all the old stuff we have had to grind through since coming back: Panda Bonus Prestige Ethereal trackers: only recently found out about them so luckily gained some from the weeklies we had done but still need to accumulate more. Getting new versions of and leveling mercs/mounts/familiars - familiar were new to us, merc and mount levels and gear were new to us. Epic 2.0 spells from like level 100, only found out about that one last week! Very powerful, absolutely required and to be leveled to ancient. Leveling support crafters to get spells to expert level, make some money to pay for recipes and other essentials. It's not just the grind, it's a bewildering amount of "stuff" you just don't know about, have to learn about and research often from spotty sources from years ago. The barrier to returning and being relevant is crazy high, that is a problem. I feel in the end we were lucky and possibly a rare example of making it past all the barriers. It wouldn't have been possible at all without the help of a raid force taking us under their wing so to speak. That has to be rare. We are enjoying the game again though in large part because of the people we are playing it with but the zones as well. I will say that H3's do not look fun at all, I've watched groups in there streaming and it looks like I'll only do them once for the buff if I can help it.
Sitting 90% AFK in the World and doing nothing, isnt the Same as Playing the game for this amount of time.
I can confirm that H3 is not fun. Too much complication for too little fun. And, to top it off, a 435 stuff that nobody wants anymore.
Despite the idea that this xpac has lost a lot of players due to many reasons and groups are now hard to get I wanted to point out a few positive things the developers have done. 1) The artwork is awesome 2) The story line is great 3) Trade skill was a refreshing upgrade from last xpac as we got to harvest useful nodes and got decent rewards with the currency 4) attempting to balance back the assassin was a good move 5) Making control runes available even though a little late was a help especially to tanks that are not crusaders 6) The contested zone gear drop almost makes up for the lack of gear previously available. That's the most I can think of.
This summary almost exactly matches my own experience, returning to the game at level 90 last ~January after a break since ~2012. It is eerily identical to my own experience.
Well said, thank you for conveying these points. I thought it was just me, but not. I posted in other threads that the "Game" whomever that is, or whomever came up with the brilliant idea about CRIT changes over potency has lost their way.
All I have to say is I agree with the gate comments. Number one reason why the game is in such a population decline is because of the fact that the developers lock people out of content because of all the bull resolve and such stats. Remember the days when a priest needed wisdom and that was the primary focus for them? I don’t even know how they bother to keep that little note in the character creation. It should say resolve and all that first and then everything else. What is even the point of gating? It’s like Daybreak literally wants to kill the game off.
The key part of that sentence is "attempting". They didn't actually fix the assassin, it's still useless, just the complaints are in muted voices because everyone either quit or betrayed to ranger.
Next expac can you give the base buffs easier? I mean let people build on that through out the expac l am talking about all buffs the flawless ones included all be it as base tier from either solo or heroic but it definitely should not start from a raid or heavily scripted h3 zones. An example is log a character in you haven’t played for a while it’s the same level as your main but has less than half of things like ferv ect because it doesn’t have all the needed buffs the base buff can not be achieved by doing this expacs sig line or h1/2 zones only raiding or h3. A lot of casual guilds don’t raid and the h3 zones require higher resolve dps and are heavily scripted. Now imagine your a returning player with those stats it’s a big off putting barrier you can’t just /lfg and they then log taking there money with them … l have had I think four or five players from the past log in wanting to play but then realise what a load of BS the catch up is and they logged out again. While having the base tier that allows them to group and not be a total passenger would have bought them back playing again.
Resolve is slaugtering and killing any enjoyment of the game. Its gating people out of content it shouldn't. Ridicilous temporary buffs is also keeping people from logging in and playing the game. Who would waste a 200frvOC buff doing some easy H1/H2/H3 instance. Resolve needs to die and until it dies, resolve requirements for contested stuff needs to be lowered.
Assassin is pretty strong now. They dont have much utility, but they probably shouldn't as the top dps, imo.
Whoa, let's stay on topic. There's no sense in getting upset. He has more /played time so your comment is less relevant than his anyway. Also, I'm a pretty good example of players that have just stopped playing live because of the barrier to come back. I've played this game since launch but am done paying a couple hundred bucks to come back and play time-gated catch-up where my character is useless until I've pledged the proper amount and waited the appropriate amount of time while doing my chores. It's just not worth it any more and I know quite a lot of players that quit for the exact same reasons as me. The monetization and time gating mechanics have murdered this game. I'd love to see a developer go on a quest to start a character and get it to a point where it could meaningfully contribute to a top end raid guild and not get 100% carried. How long do you guys think that would take? Maybe 6 months while having to get people to help you the entire time by dragging you through stuff you don't have the stats to solo?
I always just end up disappointed with my life choices when i use /played. Like I could have done so many other truly valuable things with that time. But I guess being logged into a video game for 7 of the last 17.5 years on a single character is some sort of an achievement. Not sure which column to put it in, though
