Please clarify this particular patch note

They say they want feedback. You've made this game harder, which is fine. Travel and getting around the new zone is tedious. There's no contested dungeon to give us some place to get experience in the new expansion, forcing us to go to old content for tithe and ascension experience, fine I'll deal with it.

Now you've made it so I don't want to put in the effort to get the cookies you've dangled in front of us for fear that you'll nerf them as soon as I've accomplished the goal. This game is rapidly becoming unfun. It's like you've put this treasure chest out there for us to reach for on the top of this pile of crap, and we slog our way through the crap to get the treasure. We get the treasure and it's shiny and beautiful and we are so happy. Then it rains, and it turns the shiny and beautiful treasure into a dull and ugly thing that nobody wants.

But you know this has been MMO's for years, always chasing the next new shiny thing. The problem with this is they put them in and were so stubborn or had ego's to big to admit they were wrong and way to over powered, then they suckered everyone in to run simple heroics all summer to get the runes. Then realized they just trivialized a whole new expansions content because all the top end guilds had them all. and just plowed through the content.

I like chasing the next shiny thing, its what makes mmo's fun for me, and each expansion has been almost a reset to go get that stuff. I truly would like to know who is running the show now with eq2? They really need someone in charge that believes in class balance, challenging content and fun game play aka cooperative game play, not running key quest till my eyes bleed to get that top end key to get the best gear. thats my feedback to you RadarX.

Since you're finally willing to admit that these reset effects are game breaking.. remove them from the game. This is the first of many steps that is required to make eq2 great again.

Yea make the gap between the top and the middle that much larger. Sounds pretty legit to me. They should take back all of the kills too then right? Kill it how it was supposed to be killed? lmao! They need to hold the next expac til june/july 2018 and make sure its right because repeating this a 3rd time won't end well.

*Nerfed Focus Casting
*Nerfed reset rune
*Nerfed My Hammer
*Cant even get the fix for the 18 hour faction quest right.
Just cant understand why reset rune is not on OF merchant to cater for all the whiny *** kids who didnt get it last summer!! ..everyone happy.
Hammer yes its OP but hey gave me a reason to do that zone week after week after they bought the stupid resolve in and thats all we could do after we hit a roadblock..and i got lucky...and i loved it while it lasted.

Its the knock on effect that bothers me as a member of a casual guild that raids...we are just a bunch of friends that have a laugh and everything we kill is a bonus..well guess what DB you just ruined our fun.
Great expac devs but i doubt i will see another one..love and light from a soon to be retired warlock

Reset effects didn't break raid content you peanut. It broke class balance.

Fun fact: half of my guild has to afk during raid encounters to kill them. I'm just a resolve buff for t3 fights.

Ascension abilities broke raid content.

It takes timing to learn how to balance cast orders with the reset rune and the hammer. It took me a long time to learn how to rotate my spells around them to maximize DPS. With the changes I cannot build increments as fast and my dps took a significant hit. I wont go into specific warlock changes (you can read the mage post for that), but it hurts my dps in a bad way.

Here is the thing. I firmly believe that I spent my time getting first the AoM version of the mage reset, then the rune in the ToT summer event. I EARNED that item. I raided for a whole year and got a hammer. I EARNED that one. Wether you think it is OP or not, it is an achievement. New toon 007 should not be able to join this game, which is 12 years old, and keep up. The fervor on the hammer is the only thing keeping me on the parse, but I can see the argument that this might be a bit OP, but if you think that the runes are game changing and toons without them are at a serious disadvantage, then instead of nerf them...WHY NOT MAKE THEM CRAFTABLE??? KA has 4 new sets of purples and could easily have fixed all of the eth rune problems with these sets. The playing field would have been leveled easy.

We could have had them on a KA timeline for crafters so that these effects can be obtained by everyone. I have never understood nerfing items or classes because they were seriously OP as a way to "level the playing field" when instead they could make them obtainable by everyone with a bit more work. In ToT the AoM ethereal weapon effects were made into super rare runes that dropped in KP contested. People complained and they added the runes to a rare drop in blood iron chests in the Zek content. Still rare and people complained. So they had a summer event for FOUR months where everyone could get them by using coins. People are still complaining.

So here we are. Instead of making these effects more available, they are effectively phasing them out. I am sure that the reasoning behind them is Epic 2.0 is way better, and it likely is, but how long do we go before people complain about that quest?
Devs, please consider class balance by bringing everyone up to the same level and not bringing the top down. It makes earning great gear and effects feel disappointing.

First time I have ever been called a peanut lol. You telling me that hammer didn't break raid content would be like me saying heroic players having the runes didn't break content. And guess what it was broken long before KA. Thus the addition of mob mit. Why did they add that do you think? You sound rather jelly that people are contesting why these items even made it into the expac, only to be reduced substantially after a madness of grinding that the top assured everyone was the "professional" way to get them after the event. You can do me a favor. Go back to the progression page and see when the first kills happened for the top 20ish guilds. See if you don't notice a difference between when people had ascension level 5 and prior.

They should just make all the new gear have a different adorn slot and make all the purples obsolete then. See how well that goes over.

+1 to all of these that will probably never happen

And there you have it folks. This attitude and the level whining simply astounds me.

That was not attitude. Play any game for along time, get lots of gear, and then see if a new guy can join and keep up. It takes work to get gear. Nerfing players with gear so new people can be on the same level is thew wrong approach.

If you read the rest of the post, my solution was to have these runes obtainable by other players, including new players, instead of nerfing the rest of us.

I did not whine nor do I have an attitude. Please read the whole post next time.

This is exactly what they should have done at KA launch. Those who played during Ethereal event, would have had the entire fall to enjoy them, just like it used to be before a new expansion. Old gear get replaced by new gear and a new journey to get them. A fresh xpac is where returning players and new players have a chance to join in on the auction

They could have made the runes more realistically obtainable, but that would just be the same outcome for u wouldnt it? U would still have complained that u worked for them and those who return for new xpac did not. Right? This way is better, i can only imagine how much harder it would be to balance classes when Cooldown literally have no meaning anymore other then on temps. Full fatal followup chain on same cooldown as daggerstorm? I can totally understand that u feel crippled now on your warlock, Increment management is a pain in the ***, i know, ive played sorc and i stopped doing so because of it. Too much of a headache. Then add up the rest of the issues on warlock, warlock cant be anything but torture to play now, but this is a seperate issue tho and needs to be balanced without the runes in mind.

In the long run this can only be good, but i can certainly understand that u guys feel cheated. I would too in all honesty. However i do also understand that its good in the long run, if they would nerf Ravaging, my dps would suffer massively but id still be happy that the Ethereal effect circus is over.
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new toon 007 should be able to catch up and play after starting and playing enough to catch up. these runes made it so you could not catch up ever. Same with Tithe points. Unless you go out and grind last expansion contested zones over and over and over. Which no new players want to do. This is a good step to try and bring some new players in

The complaints about that quest already has at least one multi-page thread. People are complaining profusely with the occasional "I quit" thrown in for good measure.

I bet if 007 new guy was the trouby that your guild has been needing for the last couple months you would have a completely different outlook on that lol. Eventually casual and hardcore are going to have to be mutual before we can expect anything to change.

Devs want feedback that's good, here is mine.
I raided since KoS for almost 9 years. Now I'm hardcore slacker but still want access to some good stuff. You know.. And I have dozens of my old raid mates who think the same way (some of them raided since 2004).
I skipped all ethereal giveaway event due to RL obstacles but purchased them later (at "ludicrous" price I must say). Now they are nerfed (or soon will be) and I don't care (well no one will repay me mlns of plat I've spend on them, whatever). Now I'm poor again with next to useless items and I don't care really because this happened to me before. And I don't feel "cheated". I feel cheated many times before when horrific changes come and go in EQ2 and removing some items is not one of them. Now I only care about one thing. Bring CLASS BALANCE back. Yeah I know "there hasn't been class balance since 2004" (c), but what else could go wrong? I think it's worth trying. Or die trying.
Reuse time is essential part of this game and it is part of class balance. Items that remove this should never appeared in the game or should've been ultra-rare items from hardcore contested x4 mobs (if so - I'm totally fine with idea of "game-breaking" items for few top-players. Not for all, not for random-winners or plat-farmers like me).
and
I want my auto-attack back. Without it my classes are boring "illy on crack" with tons of useless procs and abilities spam. Take them all and bring my auto-attack back.
I have tons of ideas how to do this and how to do that, but who cares.. Just look at T7 or T8 balance as it was and do the same. I can donate my original KoS and EoF discs if needed=)

PS. Orginall EQ2 never was "vanilla", it is now vanilla. Stinky-sweet vanilla when original EQ2 was hard cider and stout. Bring it back.

PPS. I saw here on forums very disturbing remark that players don't know what they want. Well.. let me tell you what players want: when we entering the game we want CLEAR SET of RULES. And rules should not change too often. That's it.

Players are good at taking existing game rules and finding synergy that the devs didn't know was there. This has been noted for years and even planned for in EQ at least once (players killed an virtual unkillable boss using masses of npc enemies and then attacked him once it was low enough... dropped a crummy shield since he wasn't supposed to be killed!). In theory, players should be rewarded by keeping those synergistic combinations or clever tactics and just make sure they aren't TOO game breaking and note them for the future. Obvious game glitches that are repeatable or minor effects that have been in game but suddenly a problem can be worked around (CoS use in EQ caused levitating player to slowly float upwards, for example, stopped by keeping wandering mobs in the area that see invis, and respawn fast, making it harder for a raid to sneak up over a wall that bypassing much of the trash encounters to the boss). More than once in WoW I have had raid leaders slap their heads in frustration when I start using a playermade item in just the right spot that helped the raid, but if all engineers had carried them, that fight would be much easier (trash OR boss).

Rather than players get nerfed, perhaps a group of players using that tactic are put into a discussion to help balance the problem before heavy-handed nerfing is done. If the runes/hammer were around for months, taking another 2 weeks to finetune the adjustments with some discussions with those players who used them the most might have helped this complaints from being this large. Just my thoughts.

Sorry but I call BS on this. The game was dead for weeks in the fall when everybody was pretty maxed out and doing grey (!) quest lines in preparation for the new expac. There simply was "no time to enjoy" the eth runes. Everybody were exhausted by the daily grind (most often for two measly Eth coins per day) on several toons, day in and day out. It was the Devs decision to make the Ethereal Event the main focus of the game for many months to keep players motivated and have something to aim for. What is the point in such a daily grind for months on end if the price is snatched away just when it is time to enjoy it? Talk about demotivating.

The problem for new toons to catch up and join in with the group fun is real and tangible, but it is not related to the Eth Event over the summer. The problem is that new toons have too much content to do to catch up and no access to Eth runes apart from farming or buying - yet they are STILL available - and what is more, they are available to a similar cost of what it took to get them in the first place (time grinding or buying with plat, both equal time and effort invested), maybe cheaper if you buy them having sold metal keys for plenty of plat. I still see Eth runes on auction on a daily basis. Just today a Ravaging rune went for for 600k plat, which I would guess is roughly worth a months daily grinding.

Yes, I feel sorry for the warlocks in my guild who I love to compete with.

I came back to the game on July 2nd this summer on my assassin. I quickly realized that my auto-attack had been nerfed beyond usefulness and that the Devs had just introduced Potency Stat Inflation. There were fundamental changes in game mechanics and to keep competitive with mages I needed the Reset rune (I chose this one as my first Eth rune) and the Fervor rune. And so I joined the daily grind for them. I had plenty of help from my awesome guildies to get back in the swing of things even if my toon was severely gimped at the start. This points to another severe issue with the curent expac.

The difference between last summer and now is that I could still jump into a heroic group after the ToT sig line, now new toons need more than just the KA sig line to join heroic groups. We currently have quite a few guildies that are starting fresh again and trying to catch up, but the road ahead for them is a long and arduous one, and without the Eth runes how are they to catch up?

I have many other points to make related to this but to keep it short I will stop here and state the basic problem; the Devs are not fully in control of their development lines and ideas. New toons and players need a realistic 'bridge' to join the current content but old players can't be pushed back because they were sold, believed in and invested precious time and effort into previous content. Why bother playing over the summer at all if the Eth runes were nothing but a time sink?

Maybe make Eth runes more readily available for new toons again, or cap the hammer dps output rather than nerf it. Explore other options rather than this nerf, which feels like a panic reaction to fix several interconnecting issues that have built up over time, but which only annoys large parts of the player base yet fixes little for the new players. The problem with cutting edge players being OP is completely a result of poor design by the developers.

The game was dead because ToT killed it. ToT was the most trivial gaming experience ive ever had, hence why that xpac only lasted a few months for me before i had to leave. The majority of the heroic zones was actually advance solo zones with 6 ppl in them. One zone took between 5-10min. Many ppl got burned out and i can only assume that this was the reason why they needed such a massive carrot as the runes. ON TOP of the ethereal Jewelry.

"Why bother playing over the summer at all if the Eth runes were nothing but a time sink?"

Why bother returning to a new xpac if BIS is going to be for the ppl playing during summer in the last xpac? What they did to break balance wich they now need to adjust is by using these godmode runes as a carrot to keep ppl playing ToT, now they are standard loadout for all but a few. How can they balance content and classes after that? These items are toxic and they need to go. Maximum of 30sec CD for all classes? Too much!