=( Returning Player, New Xpak...pain and suffering.

Its like new or returning players are coming in with boosted 100's and the basic gear & spells that come with it and are under the impression that they should be able to just jump into advanced content with no problem. It just doesn't work that way.

Did you just assume my subscription level??!?

I'mmmm just kidding. I thought that the last two GU's were only available to subscribers... ? I could be wrong.. /shrug. The new mastercrafted gear looks really great and I recommend those who are using older gear (read: 3 or lower resolve) that you upgrade some select pieces to get you ready to lay some smackdown. Ask in /general for a crafter who's totally not trying to monetize / capitalize by selling the items for 600 - 2500p each... I've picked up some nice stuff for 45 to 50 - which I think is fair (ish).

My DPS toons had little problems conquering those pesky mobs in the very first hallway / cave area - but my tanks? Sheesh.. it was like....fighting the hero's fest puppets with no buffs. How my zerker went from pulling 200m plus dps in CT Fabled / etc - to barely chugging out 5m DPS was beyond me. So he's on the shelf until I get more gear farmed / etc.

And Kander - "should be inexpensive" is no longer a viable term in this game's economy, really. Krono's are now pushing 400k plat, crafted purple war runes are now 10k plus - someone's trying to sell the new purples now for 100k plus.. so wherever these individuals are getting that amount of plat, I'd certainly like to know - and get in on it.. Guess I could start crafting adorns...

In most progression style games, there are going to be areas for which you are not ready. The fun is in getting yourself ready for that content and then being able to complete it. The last expansion, if you wanted to boost your character up, it got you to level 95. This means you had to do some prior content in order to get ready to do the new content if you just jumped right into the game and wanted to start as quickly as possible. Here, they provided a level 100 boost. However, you are still pretty much required to do some previous content in order to get ready for the newest stuff.

In ToT, people had a tough time at first killing the overland monsters if they were not in solid gear. Grabbing handcrafted gear was one way to make the content more fluid right off the bat if you were in a hurry. Heck, if I didn't get the merc feature and some friends, a LOT of the content in eq2 would have felt way too tedious for me even at lower levels. The only thing that has changed right now is that you are not actually locked out of the newest content based on level. So you can reach level 100 with very low gear, stats, adorns, AA, etc, but still be fairly far away from what the content requires. And what the content requires can be easily obtained as a solo player as long as all content is available to you.

Also, there is a high probability, based on what some people have noticed and tested, that there is some kind of bug going on that is causing this difficulty curve to be ultra-severe. Also, the very first mobs people face are being adjusted as of a patch today.

Negative posts are not helpful to building the community back up, nor are they helpful for people who may be struggling.

They aren't jumping into advanced content. They're jumping into the beginning content of the new expansion. The point of the 100 level boost was so that they would be able to have one character at the level and equipment needed to play the expansion content.

I was gone when Thalumbra launched, so I have to ask... Did everybody complain that you couldn't demolish Thalumbra with AoM gear? Because you can't.

20 to 60 holy ****, this a job or a game heheh

Nope ToT was a nice smooth launch, this is something new EQ has tried, or perhaps not depending on who you talk to

The OP was citing the very first questline mobs - those critters in the cave that ya fight after you get locked up. I certainly hope that can't be considered "advanced content", can it?

I wonder if the boosted 100 gear is based on GU100 / 101 stats.. I haven't bothered to check it out yet. It would be kinda silly for a brand new player to:
1. Buy KA
2. Buy a Krono to sell in game
3. Buy handcrafted gear
4. Start the KA sig line.
or have to level up 9 different crafter first to make the gear needed to start along the sig line?
or go backwards to GU100 / 101 for a few days, then TOT.. then KA?
/shrug

Hopefully, returning players dusting off a year old toon would understand that they'd need to AT LEAST have the current expacs crafted gear to run solo stuff... idk. I don't know much these days anymore. Oooh look, a shiny!

That was more of general comment, in any case. But, the boosted classes only come with adept level spells.

At the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to include a boosted character with new expansion that isn't ready to tackle the expansion. If that is the case then it would sure be nice to have some type of breadcrumb in the game to let us know what we need to do to get ready for the content.

The boosted character was good enough to do anything that would be required to prepare for the expansion. That's why it was given out prior to the expansion. With that boosted toon, you could do ToT timeline, scourge wastes timeline, and also nizara pretty easily, especially depending on class. If you did each of those things and geared up appropriately along with advancing your spells to expert level, along with getting the correct adorns and runes, and along with epic repercussions, and along with actually learning your class well through some practice and reading (all things anyone starting eq2 character should do to get ready to play), then you are ready to start new content that is designed to be more difficult than previous content and designed to assume that you have prepared your character.

More to this current point, however, let's see how people feel after today. Perhaps there was a legit reason, non gear related, that is causing these issues for people. Only reason I'm posting so much about it is to try to help people understand what to work towards and how to do it.

Look at it this way. For someone who already has good gear and AA and spells and everything, what would the rewards look like to them if everything was already one-shot? Where would their progression be? I'm a solo/heroic player, and I found the content to be super easy, but the upgrades were mostly pretty darn awesome, which means I will be able to do the easy stuff even easier and definitely get myself ready for heroics eventually. I would have been pretty annoyed if everything was even easier, and the quest/solo dungeon drops were total garbage and not at all an upgrade. To me that would have been a HUGE fail for the expansion, and I would have moved on to another game.

So as a developer, what do you do? Make the people who put a lot of time and effort (and money) into the game unhappy? Or make the people who still have a lot they can do to get ready unhappy for a brief time--since bug fixes and gearing up are totally still possible? I would definitely go towards the latter.

Just saying based off of this

"If you are having difficulty with overland or normal solo dungeons, I recommend you upgrade your gear with new handcrafted items. I've fought through every solo dungeon, and defeated almost all of the overland names on both a dirge and an illusionist, with no merc all apprentice spells, and no casting order with nothing but handcrafted on and no fight lasted more then 30 seconds unless it was a named, and no fight with a named lasted more then two minutes."

Based off of this posted by Caith a level 100 boosted character should be close to ready to go with the new content. With that being said I sold a Krono and spent 200k plat upgrading the items I was given to Nizara gear and buying upgraded spells. I still was not able to make any headway in the new expansion with the 10th anniversary SK merc. I want challenging and I understand I'm playing catch up over people are in heroic/raid gear from previous expansion but as a returning player i'm not okay with spending 10 minutes killing a solo mob and no clear path on what I need to do to improve my character.

I was able to start the Thalumbra quests using only solo AoM gear and did just fine. Obviously, I didn't keep the AoM equipment the entire time but upgraded it during the course of the signature questline. That's the reasonable expectation that players starting the KA quests have. There is no other expansion I've started where beginning trash mobs took 5 to 10 minutes to kill even for the most poorly equipped players.

Yes, I agree that the 10 minutes thing seems to be a broken mechanic of the game in some way. My comments are meant to demonstrate how this game has never been one that takes very little effort to do well, and it is also never easy to do current content in old content gear unless your old content gear is substantially above the 'type' for the current content (heroic in solo for example). Also, I have been defending the fact that brand new content as being difficult for solo players has been the case in both of the other new expansions I have been a part of. Each time, my previous gear was wiped clean by new gear right away. There is nothing different here in theory or in game design (other than what is hopefully a bug or overscaled mobs). So for those who are saying DB totally messed up and are pushing people away with their decisions in this expansion, that is just not true.

Hopefully today will be much smoother for people who are starting out in KA. I still recommend gearing up appropriately before attempting it, and that doesn't necessarily take 200k plat to do unless you are in a hurry. For example, I have never had 200k plat in my bags at any one time in this game that I can think of. For most of the suggestions I have in terms of getting ready for kunark, the most important money you would want to spend is on a subscription (perhaps unfortunately for some, but definitely true).

I understand that the game is challenging. I was a day one player who played up through Sentinel's Fate. I agree that hopefully today will be much smoother. While your opinion may be that DB did not mess up I can only tell you from my point of view that I got so frustrated after an hour and a half last night that I logged off. I met another friendly player who was struggling with the first quest in SQ so we grouped up. We both had mercs so we had 2 level 100's and 2 mercs. In 1.5 hours of working together we only managed to complete our updates on the lava elementals. Then you check forums and see the developers say it is not bugged and it is working as intended. If I log back on tonight and have the same experience I will likely chock the money I spent for buying the expansion up to a poor decision and move on because it flat out is not fun. I want to believe it is bugged because it is unlike any experience I've never had in the game(including soloing Heroic mobs during original EQ2) but the developers swear it is not.

@captainbeatty Oh I agree that there is always going to be some effort involved. For instance, I'm pretty die-hard about supporting the idea of needing to do the 1.0 epic as part of the 2.0 epic progression, but something seems to be a lot different in this particular case that makes it not just tougher until you get better equipment, but ridiculously more tedious as well. Since I know my equipment is going to be replaced during KA, I just chose to tough it out and have a book with me or spent more time chatting on homeshow while the trash fights were going on. I was rarely in danger of actually dying because the mobs usually couldn't do much damage to me as long as I was paying some amount of attention to whenever I needed to press heal or cure, but the fact that it took soooooooooooooo long to kill anything was beyond silly!

So yes, while I am typically supportive of some reasonable time and effort, something was just not normal for many players who either have put in reasonable effort or were using the boosted character with the expectation that it was ready to start the expansion as advertised.

Obviously, you can choose to do a whole lot more, but I don't think it should be mandatory just to *start* an expansion, or that starting an entire expansion should be barred from f2p players who couldn't play Zek or Nizara and yet don't have tons of platinum to drop on KA crafted equipment. I certainly don't have anything near 200K platinum myself. Maybe more like 2K.

I'm hoping today smooths things over myself because it's really nice seeing so many more people excited about the game!

No, they are under the impression they should be able to jump into the basic content. Starting the KA sig line isn't advanced content, it's basic content. No one is suggesting that they jump right into heroic instances with that gear.

The boosted character is sold as part of the KA expansion. It isn't unreasonable for people to expect to be able to use the character in the expansion it was bundled with.

Thank you for this info. I know the 5+ minutes per basic quest mob can't be intended and will remember this for when I get Kunark if it ain't fixed by then.

Again, you have to compare it to the past. In the past, if you boosted a character you had a chance to get to 90 when AoM was the current content. This meant you had to do ToV or other stuff to get to 95 before you could do the current content. Then in ToT the boost eventually became 95, after quite a long while if I remember correctly. So now, you had to do AoM or other stuff just to reach 100 to be able to get into ToT, and even then, you needed to get stuff in order for it to be smooth. A boosted character meant grinding and at least one full sig line to feel good about entering ToT.

So now, there is no level cap to use as a gate for the boost--which became available more than a month ago, when I used it to create the character that I now main, and who because of that month of preparation, is now awesome in solo content. The gate now is that you should put some time into your boosted character to get it ready for the current content. Rather than level requirement, the gate is gear and skills. So in this regard, nothing has changed. At all. There is still a period of getting ready.

Point is, at least since AoM there has never before been a time when you could jump into the game and immediately access current end game content. So if you have to do some gearing up prior to KA, it is not a new concept.

For the sake of the game, I hope the curve is lessened from what it apparently has been this week.

Update: As of today I have completed the OF sig line. I'm not at 6500 Pot and 2500 Crit bonus. Mobs are sropping like flys. To get me started, a friend bought me 5 pieces of handmade Twark armor pieces. This made a huge difference. Go buy some handmade Twark armor and make your life easier! Good luck all and enjoy the game.