The next expansion needs changes to group content over all

Truth be told, CD have some pretty decent raids. But outside of raiding, EQ2 currently have very little actual PvE content to offer, that is relevant and current content. Currently, what people (raiders) do daily is pickup the TS quest in Library and pick up the 4 quests in Anchorage. They click their house plant and sell the rare. These can all be done in less than 10 minutes.

What they do next is wait for the monthly quest to reset. Every single raider have been waiting for the summer event to start for several months already.

My argument is that all content outside of the monthly for celestial quests and raiding was rendered irrelevant just one to two months after the expansion launched. In my opinion that is in no way how you should build a MMORPG in 2019. Yes raiders might do the weeklies more than once per month if there is a new raid recruit that you have to drag through them to level a spiritstone or two, but outside of that, there is very little to no reason to actually run the content at all.

My biggest hope and wish is that they will make content outside of raiding more relevant come next expansion right from the get go so servers once again can flourish and have PUGs and just some life in general.

Also, some server merges would be welcome.

The question is: what can be changed to draw folks into running content other than the raids? Most folks want something new and shiny to wear...and not some house item / infuser / etc.

If they put a near BiS item on the loot table for a weekly mission reward / daily reward will the other raiders cry foul saying "casuals shouldn't get a free piece of raid level gear" ?

Now, I could get on board with some Greater Planar Frags dropping from heroics...or Essence of Chaos.. weapon essences... in fact, they might even be on the loot tables with a .00000never chance of dropping.

Don't get me wrong - I fully support what you're saying, I just think its a real slippery slope trying to balance out the rewards for running solo / heroic encounters versus how they think progression should be.

I really miss the days of examining the reward box to see what carrots were in there to chase.... now its all "you think there might be something inside..."

At least back then (prior to the change) we didn't have to rely on a 3rd party application and crowd sourced data to figure out if the zone was even worth the time and effort to run.

Cannot agree with you about CD raids.

Most CD raid fights have very basic mechanics.

Castle Mischief , while some of the fights were fun , the rewards meant it was a zone you would just complete once and never go back again.

All CD raid content ( including shorthanded / flawless kills ) was completed about two months ago.

The mount and meta collection from PoP did a good job keeping people running heroics.
There were useful (or semi-useful) items to buy with the tokens. Extra gems could be turned into useful (or semi-useful) items.
These things kept the heroics at least semi-viable for most of the expac.

This expac there is nothing to spend coins on this expac and the gems have no other uses.
Many of the rewards from missions are no value, no salvage, no transmute and some exchange heirloom for no-trade.
All these things detract from the viability of the heroic zones. There is very little reason to run the zones.

100% agree .. CD Collections and gems are useless

Never had trouble with group content back in the day. It wasn't hard, I don't know how they seem to have forgotten how to do it. Take a look at TSO for reference. Tiered equipment, straight currency purchase of gear, decent rare drops from heroics, multiple difficulty tiers of heroic content with entry level heroic content having low to zero barrier of entry and working your way up, adequate spell drops. Not rocket science.

....needs to eliminate mechanics that force group makeup (raid is not an issue). Let people play what they want to play.
....needs to eliminate the requirement for the game to become a job. If people have to log in at specific times to do specific task that is no different then a job. It is not supposed to be a job.
....needs to redo all old dungeon mobs and loot and make them "current". That way you have a greater variety to choose from when doing the daily "job" task. I would rather see the next "expansion" use old zones and make them current to end game - something like they did with Zek.
....needs to make everything heirloom and flags account wide. Once again it is a game not a job.
....needs to just accept the fact you can't please everyone but you have to keep everyone engaged. Give everyone the means to keep advancing their character. Who cares if population X gets upset because you can work towards BiS doing Y - a healthy game needs people doing all aspects of the game and moving forward.
....needs to stop linking character advancement to how much you want to spend on real $. I have real money to spend but I refuse to spend it on advancing my character. I would spend it on some of the more mundane or cosmetic items. Give me an ugly mount with great stats and I will purchase the skin I want to cover it. Don't put the great stats on something tied to spending money - I won't do that.
....needs have one per character items in the CE box instead of just 1.
....needs to give us back our alts without making it a job.

There are many ways that could lure us to do heroics more
The meta reward could have had 5adc added to it and 10 more resolve
Could have useful stuff to spend the currency we earn on , both heroic and raid currency dont see much use
Familiar training potions - Elysian patterens - bonus infusers - mount barding unlocks - ancient ascensions scrolls etc

Well it depends, EQ2 is based around the "trinity + support" idea so a group MUST have tank, healer, dps and support. If you remove this requirement then the whole game changes completely and everything breaks down. What they shouldn't do is, force a particular tank class or healer class on you but you MUST have one of each archetypes.

Recently when people say "Let people play what they want to play", they really mean lets do heroic zone with 6 DPS classes and thats bad for the game.... If you want to know how bad and stale the game can get then take a look at how heroics runs were in early GW2 (they pretty much have "trinity" now days)

What I would like most in a new Xpac? Is to provide a path to grouping for new & returning players. I can't tell you how many people we have brought to the game and have had them quit again when they realized what it was going to take for them to be able to run a T1 end game dungeon with a group.

The sig line should give you decent enough gear for a beginning T1 dungeon where the loot can start you on the path to the next Tier. T2 & T3 can maintain the same difficulty. But a beginning Tier dungeon that helps the game lure & retain new / returning players would be awesome.

Problem is balance. They gave raider the need to do heroics last xpac for gems. Then people complained about having to do heroics. This xpac they gave the gems in raid and people complained there is nothing to do.

I'd like a bunch of lore-rich questlines other than the signature questline. And not just one off "find an item, get a kill 10 rats quest".

Get rid of gems then.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You want questing in the game? That's just crazy talk.

The biggest problem with heroic content is the gap between solo and group content. When Chaos Descending first came out there was a way to get 5,000+ potency on Mastercrafted gear so it was pretty easy to make the jump from solo to heroic. In the current meta this MC gear no longer exists due to a bug fix or nerf change whatever. I see a lot of people LFG for these zones but they don't have the gear to really run it.

There really should be some T0 heroic content to bridge the gap between solo and T1 heroic because MC just isn't good enough with the current meta.

How about adding some unique appearance items to all chests?

Stat creep and mechanic creep have built over time to help create this situation. If you removed resolve and fervor entirely and nerfed the everliving hell out of potency, how would the game change in terms of content balance and accessibility?

It would make live fear like a TLE server only we would be level 110 instead of level 50. New and returning players will be viable for group content on day one instead of having to go around begging for gear for months.

Great ideas

I haven't read these posts here yet, but I've already written something I think developers should do somewhere in the forum.

First of all, they should give the status more worthwhile to spend time on. Only improving Fervor/CB/Pot with items in addition to bonus infusers makes the game play worse for us. I mean, make other status great again.

Next, balance. They Developers have tried to fix the balance among the classes so far, but it seems to have failed, not to say it's a fiasco. Sometimes they changed the balance at the release of the next expac, but I think that's a bad idea.
It just is that we'd like to feedback until the next pack goes into live. Why haven't bruisers got any improvements in this CD, while monks got another bump on their buff, whose spell is the counterparts of bruisers?

I think those two points are the highest priorities in making the game alive again.
Although concerning the balancing the status, there is a big problem in Itemization.