SummaryThis paper contains a set of recommendations brainstormed with feedback from the exile guild “Secret Service”. These recommendations are designed to improve the overall health and longevity of the server and are not necessarily aimed at improving the individual results of any one guild, class, or player. The overall impression from most I have talked with is positive and many feel this is the closest we have gotten to the original Nagafen (KoS thru TSO) experience many wish to return to. New Systems – Slayer’s Quests and PvP GearDesign Intent 1. To encourage player versus player interaction, quests should only have objectives located outside of instance zones. 2. Quests should be repeatable with steep diminishing returns to discourage a daily checklist (I did my Slayer quest and can log back off) mentality. This design would provide an incentive to players to frequently interact in the overworld without generating a massive gap in players that no-life and those which only complete one or two per day. An example reward structure could be as follows: the first quest every 24h awards X tokens, the second awards X/2, and the remaining should award X/5 or even X/10. 3. Quests should have a small internal cooldown (30 minutes) to prevent players from avoiding prime hours to quickly chain quests. 4. Alternatively, quests could be designed in a manner that completion requires player kills, but this has been exploited in past TLEs through the farming of alts. 5. Rewards from the quests should be a two-tier system. A set of lower rewards should be offered for relatively inexpensive costs (2-3 days of play time per piece for the average quester) and a set of “chase” items at a much higher cost (7-10 days of play time per piece for the average quester). Slayer’s Rewards (PvP Gear) – “No-Trade” Entry tier Slayer’s equipment should compete with PvE pieces dropped by heroic instances or early boss drops from entry level raids. For the KoS expansion, this is 1.8 potency / 1.3 crit “4-stat” equipment. This gear is aimed at players and guilds who may not be able to form a raid force to complete end-game PvE content and provides an alternative character advancement path to close the “gear gap”. This gear should not provide any tanking stats (HP, Mitigation, or Block) to help balance PvE raiding progression rates. Below is an excel sheet with recommended items sets for armor and accessories. Charms, cloaks, and weapons are left out on purpose to encourage the completion of end game PvE content and contested mobs. The second tier of Slayer’s equipment should include “chase” items which compete in slots with end-game PvE content. For the KoS expansion, this would be 2 potency / 1.5 “4-stat” equipment. Aside from the stat bonuses, these pieces should provide interesting procs and abilities that players will want to equip for PvP. These items should have a limited number equipped per character, like the Hunter’s equipment. Some examples of interesting procs from old Nagafen are below: Procs found on these “chase” pieces of gear could include: · Heals/Wards/Health Siphon · Power Drain/Power Regen/Power Siphon · CC (Slows, Stuns, Fear, Root) · Cast Speed/Reuse Speed for next CA/Spell · Taunt/Evade · Damage · Range Extension · Modifications/Buffs to class specific skills (ala RoK and TSO PvP gear sets on Nagafen) System OverhaulsLevel Locking – Lower tiers (T2 and T3) seem to be teeming with a large amount of twinks. I fondly remember playing my level locked alts back on original Nagafen. However, this game is no longer in its prime and could struggle to retain its player base if new players are chased off. Increasing the experience awarded from PvP kills could help as it would force those level locking to progress beyond the entry tiers or force them to re-roll which is costly both in time investment (AAs) and gear. Pay to Win – Items from the marketplace/LON/packs are providing a significant advantage for those willing to pony up real life cash. Ideally these items would be completely removed on PvP servers. If this is infeasible, limiting their bonuses to match items already available to players willing to invest time (see DoF mount Kelrok) or only to minor advantages (10% or less speed from Flock of Seagulls). These should not stack with other marketplace items (i.e. Flock of Seagulls stacks with the Journeyman boots from the new $35 packs) to limit their impact on the competitive nature of a PvP server. Float Cloaks/Mounts – Float/slowfall is a permanent buff. On original Nagafen, these buffs were temporarily cancelled/disabled when engaged in PvP combat limiting the escape of players and making cliff-diving once engaged a non-issue. Currently players can leap from great heights or off the edge of KoS islands to completely avoid PvP consequences. Ward Bleedthrough – Mystic and Defiler ward bleedthrough needs to be re-tuned. As it stands now, Defilers and Mystics are horrible solo PvP healers. Retuning the overall ward amount (overall decrease) and removing/limiting the bleedthrough would put them in a much more workable spot. Damage Cap – The current 40% damage cap has limited PvP to classes which strike quickly and often. As such, the population of Wizards and Assassins on the server is almost non-existent. A 50% or 60% damage cap would help bring Assassin and Wizards into a more workable spot. Unintended consequences could be a buff to classes like SK whose Harm Touch is now on a much shorter cooldown than on the vanilla server. Defensive Stats – Defensive stats are currently in an un-tenable spot as implemented on Tarinax. Spells almost never resist and CAs have a near 100% hit chance. I am unsure what is causing this issue directly, but when inspecting our character stats, it may stem two things. Player “weapon skills” are incredibly high for the tier. My character currently has 622 weapon stats at level 70. Historically this would be a base of 350 modified only by skills/AAs/select gear. This results in certain buffs/AA choices having no real impact on character performance. In addition, avoidance seems to be only calculated from “uncontested avoidance” which makes a lot of AA choices and buffs have no impact on combat performance. This also limits the choice of shield vs dual wield of symbol. Poisons – As stated in many prior feedback threads, poisons on rogues and predators have little to no impact on PvP performance. Itemization – Itemization feels very lackluster overall. Every item is cut from the sample template with no variation. This could be a difficult task to solve depending on how the templates were performed. Some recommended changes would be to add variance from the existing template. For example, a piece of equipment with Haste and DPS at 2 potency will always have 3.2 haste and 6.8 DPS. Allowing for variation would mean that the DPS and haste could vary up and down. As an example, the same item could potentially vary by 30% on the stat balance. This would mean the item might have 2.5 haste and 8.8 DPS or 4.1 haste and 5.2 DPS. Additionally, including single-stat and tri-stat gear (with 0.8x and 1.2x stat balance respectfully) could add additional interesting gearing choices. Skill Damage Spread – Damage spread on skills in PvP is very tight limiting the effectiveness of critical hits in PvP. As it stands now, critical chance in PvP is simply a % chance to increase the potency on next ability cast by 30% which is quite boring for some classes. Individual Class Balance (Daarkstar Inputs)· Brawler – Overall brawler damage tuning seems high and damage needs to be reduced. In addition, remove or greatly reduce the damage of Devastation Fist in PvP combat (as was standard on Nagafen) · Warlock – Reduce damage of Curse of Darkness in PvP. 30% is a good starting point. Skill becomes a simple check of “does the enemy group have a AE avoid to counter this or not. · Enchanter – Reduce duration of stifle from 14 seconds to 6 seconds. o Coercer – Charm only allows the caster to have the target follow. Caster unable to break charm or have target engage in combat. · Summoner – Damage in PvP still feels overturned, especially coming from the pet. · Druid – Greatly reduce Infusive Wrath damage in PvP · Templar – Unswerving Hammer is too strong. Reduce damage to be in line with other dumbfire pets · Defiler – Spiritual Circle does not upgrade with spells ranks · Scouts – Duration of mitigation from snare debuff matches the reduced snare duration. Increase the duration of the mitigation debuff. · Troubadour – Revert nerf to Perfect Shrills · Brigand – Reduce damage of CAs impacted by Double Up by 30% Link to Word document with embedded attachments and images: https://1drv.ms/w/s!ApOWrv9n82rLi2WFa6B7oVsQLZy-?e=6jK0EI
Avoidance and Defense versus combat arts and auto attack is not working properly in PVP as stated above. This should be top priority to fix . Fixing Avoidance will correct a lot of issues and bring better balance back in the game. Right now scouts can just dump their arts and CC on any other class in the game for insta kill and hit at almost 100%. The necro temp pet is still too powerful. Not sure what they did in the last patch helped much. Brawlers hit hard now because of the avoidance issue as discussed. This will be somewhat corrected if avoidance is fixed. Dev Fist hits hard because it is supposed to. It has a 5 min recast timer and should be subject to the 40% damage cap, if not then that needs to change. Wizards and Assassins do need adjustments but I am not sure raising the damage cap higher is the answer. Getting two shotted by two assassins or two wizards could become an issue. Let's start slow at 45% damage cap and perhaps consider some other adjustments for these two classes.
Just read this one and I think it's good, however i think it's too much work for the devs. i think the simple thing is just add: PvP token drops, buy raid gear. done. Maybe you can even get claymore from mega amount of tokens (like 3 months of pvp). Group PvP is fine balance wise imo - you can win with a mage, melee, or mixed group, and without a templar. I don't think perfect shrill should have the same dmg as previously (as it was on test) - just make stifle 5 seconds instead of 2. They are already pretty powerful in group. on test - perfect shrill was like harm touch. Overall i think to prevent things screwing up - only dirges need a boost (i don't have one). I made a thread here before reading this one > https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...arinix-needs-incentive-for-pvp-tokens.599960/
All I'd add to this is that rewards for hunters quests should cost plat as well as tokens (I think for KoS 2p for tier 1 and 5p from tier 2). 0 broker fee chests and people not buying mounts means there's no way for plat to escape the economy and we're already getting significant inflation. Botting is also causing havoc for inflation but since they won't be banned I assume, something needs to be done to help the economy.
They have already stated "No Pvp Gear". I highly doubt they have the manpower for that kind of effort right now...if ever. I'm okay with it actually...I like having to scrounge by crafting, grouping & eventually...raiding...for the best gear possible. Makes for a more dynamic server, imo.
Agreed on the following:Get rid of the pay to win stuff namely runspeed and mount(or reduce it to existing freely obtainable levels). Fix cliffdiving aka get rid of gliding floating in any form!! Adjust class imbalances in small increments (as you have done) with every patch. . Some pvp gear with slightly below raid gear stats would be nice. Fix contested mob drops.
Careful what you say. I told kander to remove the p2w mounts on discord and got banned. Don't want to interfere with their money!
I agree with everything in the OP with the exception of requiring player kills for the completion of quests/PvP kills dropping tokens to be turned in for loot. I think that makes PvP a lot less organic. Organic PvP breaking out while competing PvE objectives is one of my favorite things about EQ2 PvP and I don't want to see that changed.
isn't that how it is now? You can also just carry on playing the game as it is now and don't worry about "adding tokens". It feels more organic that I am going out looking for people of the enemy faction to kill and getting a bonus of tokens, and reporting back to my faction leader to get some reward. Sounds perfectly normal both game and lore wise. PvP servers die if there is no PvP.
if the developers paid attention to this forum. it would be a long time since the game progressed. whatever you may say here, it will still be a bar counter talk. Their objective is mercantile, the video game industry is like that now. The opinions of the players, their ideas for improving their game are not taken into account.The only way to be listened to is to add an idea that involves the expenditure of money from players. There, yes, you will be applauded and pinned to the player of the month wall.
P2W on a pvp server is not nearly so bad if everything you can buy from the cash shop you can somehow also get (albeit slower) in game. If I refuse to pay real money, or can't, I can still earn it in game and eventually be on par with someone who shelled out a lot of RL cash. Otherwise, it's never going to be fair to play and that erodes server population over time.
Not 100% p2w imo. They say that but Ive been farming my gear for over 2 weeks STRAIGHT... and just finally got all my masters but one, all my jewelry/ranged wpn/primary wpn/cloak and a few leather pieces. Im still not finished farming my gear. I dont need the mount to melt 3 lvls up that have the mount but I bought it anyway for the spd and hover convenience. Nothing on broker for me, everyone's waiting for farmers to sell it to them lol
You need to make it so we can gain fame from anybody on the server, if you're going to allow bots... FINE, let me get fame from killing them untitled f*ers. Also make it so I can get fame from a dreadnaught as a slayer, why not?XD Make it so people fall if u hit them while they are floating while running away from pvp, and jumping off KOS Make evac 1 hour cooldown, please
Good post - a lot of good ideas. Unrealistic to expect all these changes for Devs to make. Seems a bit much however i'm on board. Revert Pumice Stones back to dispels instead of cures - Too many CC breaks in this game. When this is done, i'd be happy for CC changes on illus/coercers but as it stands, anyone with half a brain can cure most CC.
Fame works as good as it can. it cannot work any other way (it has been tried) - otherwise it will be farmed - and people with titles will just run from any fight. When you are a Champion+ it is it's own metagame - you must fight someone who is also hardcore. Getting more fame is much more difficult. Note: i am a Slayer... If you don't like fame just ignore it. go off "number of kills" or "kvd" simple
