This expansion and its difficulty is not fun anymore

Would have to agree that is the core of the issue when it comes to players performing poorly, is they just don't understand any of the finer details of the combat. Having a deeper understanding of how all the buffs and gear and AA available to your character works can have a very profound difference in results for how strong a given character is. Due to the massive amount of secrecy of combat formulas currently, the number of players that have a through grasp of this is very very small, even among many of the "hardcore" raiders out there.

It is so bad, you have many a bad pug doing stuff like taking 20+ minutes to kill one h1 boss, or a super strong h3 group killing h3 named in under 1 minute, the difference is too extreme. For those who do want to actually kill stuff, group makeup is more important than anything, even if you have used the same toon for 15 years, if it is currently a weak class, you will do more on a fresh toon of the right class, after you get it viable for groups, even if it is missing stuff.

@Gninja Could you please look at heroics as well, at least H1 and H2, I think a lot of us would like to be able to get through these in a timely manner and maybe even play alts again. A lot of pug groups or even groups of friends won't have the perfect set up, it varies wildly some groups might not have a "super" dps or can't get a healer that is flavor of the month to solo heal, we need to be able to do these with what we have, this is an aging game and the pool of players is shallow, just want to enjoy our time again like past expansions. Thank you.

This expansion is not made for players who don't group several hours a day, and that is hurting the game a lot.

Previously, players who only completed solo could get interesting things like masters, red rune trios, recipes, desecration, etc.
In this expansion, basically nothing. So those players are getting tired and leaving.

Players who ran H1 and H2 weeklies with PUG groups now have a hard time. They often run out of time before completing all the H1 zones. Difficult for them to get a single H2 kill. Also, many of those players participated in PUG raids. Impossible now with the required resolve. So they are also stopping playing.

Almost all non-hardcore players I know are stopping playing. All of those players were paying for expansion and membership.

As someone said above, the devs should stop listening to the top players, who only want a big gap between them and the rest of the players. Those players, who I see asking for lockout time reduction on Discords to help others, are the same ones I see boxing with 6 accounts regularly.

Solo healer is a chimera in this expansion. I can understand two healers in h3, but in h1/h2? Come on

The content really is not at different from what it was in VoV or RoS or even before that in terms of difficulty.

The main new thing they tried in RoR was to add a steep resolve and stat check from the word go and this has led to many folks thinking the content is hard. I can relate to the frustrations of the casual players feeling now when I jumped into h1 zone with 60 short on resolve within the first 2 weeks of expansion going live last year. It was a chore and a half and then went into h2 with low resolve and it was a bigger chore with time to kill painfully slow and fair bit of incoming damage to deal with but once I put in the time to gear up and go over the stat check and resolve it is mind-numbingly tedious to do these zones because the scripts can be blown past when you have the right numbers - just like every expansion before it.

H3 is supposed to be challenging but to be honest it is more of a stat check again with some mechanics requiring people being awake and coordinated but in the thick of it all, you again start to see the same notion of fairly rinse and repeat scripts with stat checks.

The stat check was deliberately made like this to stem the flow of players running out of things to do because the content is again very very thin underneath. Crit bonus overcap requirement did not make things easier either with a forced grind through solo/heroic collections, combination of experimented mastercrafted gear if you could meet the resolve and the need to actually get some resolve pieces from h1 zones to be able to meet their resolve check -- all of this for someone going into the expansion thinking that solo gear should be enough for them to progress through h1 at least with relative ease probably ended up on this thread talking about how hard it is.

Lastly, I don't think that Devs really get the point about having too much mitigation/stat checks makes fight somehow challenging. It does not. I equate this to the looter shooter culture we have seen in the likes of Destiny and The Division where you have damage sponges in the form of mobs that once you figure what to do with just requires patience and time to bring down - a far cry from what challenge actually means. It is plain boring. Wait until you start killing t3 raid mobs for this to make sense but I digress.

If you really want to press on a point then focus on the absurd itemisation, resolve mechanic and underwhelming content that continues to be put behind ever increasing price.

This is my play time now. I used to play daily and help groups and run zones for fun. They have become so time consuming for zero reward at this point I prefer not to log in other for the sake of pack ponies and overseer's. I have been trying to build an H3 group for over a month and lfg for H3's for longer but to no avail. I still have H3's I haven't seen and I am more than geared and capable. It's getting others in on it who say it's a waste of time and the carrot isn't there to blow or invest that much time. While I want to run the zones, I agree with them "Where is the Carrot?" It's hard for me to convince people it will be worth the effort when we run an H3 and 1 person gets one upgrade in two zones. Kind of pitiful.

And just how much do you think it takes to make a new toon viable? I only ask because I main swapped to a Swash this xpack. I have been playing since the beginning and I like to think I know how to play a lot of classes well. I can tell you it was quite of bit of work to get my swashy up to par. And as not a returning player but existing one it was easier. I still had to go back and farm runes, get the flawless from VoV, Level a merc, familiar, and mount from scratch, all the tack gear and bardings, all the merc gear, Upgrade all my spells, go back and get the epic's, go back and get all the gear clicky's, level my ascension spells and run the PQ's for the celestial upgrade on the ascension fervor buff, find all the right white adorns. This is just what I can think of off the cuff, not too mention language quests, signature quest and trade skill timelines, tinkering, transmuting and harvesting skills needed to be viable for that stuff.

It is absurd to say it's easy to swap classes or make it appear to be a simple thing. C'mon Man! And if I had been a new or a returning player, it would have been much worse...

Oh and in Outlaws on Halls of Fate, we ALL share class info to make each other better except for one Swashbuckler... footnote to that "It's not me."

Just sayin...

G' doesn't work on heroics, he handles raids.

This right here, is the real biggest issue. I would also add that with all classes outside of T1 dps not being able to contribute in the form of DPS, is a super turn off to that player base and more and more of them are the ones leaving the game. At least most NonT1 DPS classes. There are a couple of exceptions.

Here is a casual-player data point to add to the conversation, since it seems relevant.

I played the game back in the day, and quit about 2012, with a level 90 ranger and 90 illusionist. Recently my brother and I decided to return, and we have been slowly working our way thru the expacs (we did all the sig lines, in order). The ranger just recently completed the ROR sig line, the music box quests, and have put mastercrafted items in all other slots. So most equipment is at 410 resolve, a few pieces here and there with >410.

The question the became - now what? I'm in a good guild with many members. I spent a week or so LFG for my first heroic mission, and finally got a pity-spot on a group cycling the H1 weeklies. It took several hours, and did result in several slot updates for me, so that was good. But that has been my lone example of progress since completing music boxes. Looking at the parses of those heroic missions in ACT, it was just laughable, there is just NO WAY we would have been successful without one or two key members doing 95% of the DPS, and we still died a lot, it was absolutely NOT trivial. Had that group been made up of just casuals, like I was/am, we would have had NO CHANCE at success.

Leaving me to ask myself - now what? Options I can see:

1. Continue farming the daily/weekly solos. But it's just an exercise in deleting trash loot, I gain nothing from it. There are no upgrades to be found there, its all 395/400 resolve gear that I won't use. Even if those missions would just give a shot-on-goal for training reducers, I'd happily do them, but in the 20-30 solos I've run, all I've gotten is junk armor and weapons. Clicking on the Tier4 reward crates, it seems like they drop all kinds of desirable loots, but the evidence clearly shows those items are either super rare, or outright bugged.
2. Keep hoping for another Heroic 1 pity spot, to get more updates. From the ACT parses, it is clear that just putting together a random PUG to run heroics will NOT be successful. I do seem to recall doing exactly that, back in 2012, for what that's worth.
3. ....play an alt.

I have to say, it is hugely disappointing to grind thru all that old content to "catch up" so I could once again play with the big boys, only to run into this apparent brick wall stopping further progress.

You do gain some of the Mira Miracula coins. Eventually you can get better gear from the NPC in Sandstone Delta with those.

My advice, if you want to continue playing, is start forming groups. Find folks that don't mind doing the content they can do and moving to the next zone. If you can only kill 2 mobs in a heroic zone, kill those 2 mobs and go elsewhere.

If you want to be viable for RoR h1/2/3 heroics. especially as a dps class, you have to get the pre-req buffs/items. ill list some below

VoV batallion merc - level 20
Celestial or Fabled mount - level20, all current bardings and mount gear
Celestial or Fabled Familiar - Level10
Mount infusion
Merc Infusion
Familiar infusion

Peacock buff
Guild Buff
Diety pet buff (pet of the gods)
Shadowed Ethereal trackers to boost AA buffs from vendor in Savage Weald

French slobberer buff from collections
Ascension buff
VoV flawless buff from completing VoV h1, and h2's
RoR Flawless buff - if you have resolve to raid RoR content

Optional but if you want to parse, you need
Paid in their own coin buff from Den2 challenge
Monolith buff - level10

In addition to this, you should have nothing less than all expert spells/CA's, master/gm/ or ancient/celestial preferred

Also you need to play a viable class. Some classes are simply not viable for tier1 (top) dps.

Lastly resolve/gear. You need to meet the resolve requirements for the mob you are trying to kill. Dont be shocked when you cant dps a 9250 mob because your resolve is 9150. Every point of resolve is 1% less damage you will do, and 1% more damage youll take.

Good or bad, this is how it is currently.

As someone said in a previous message, previously the solo zones gave interesting runes (like destruction) or masters. Now there is no point in doing them. They removed it just after some top raider complained that it was very boring to run solo zones.

Another problem is that the imbalance between classes is brutal. Every expansion the imbalance increases instead of being corrected. I don't know what's fun or motivating about watching one player do 75% of the group's dps while dragging the others through the zone. Well, I answer myself, nothing. That's why so many people are leaving the game.

Unfortunately, all this is difficult to solve. Hope the developers will find a way.

Thank you, this seems to be very solid advice.

I have almost none of those things.

I hope you are listing things that are NICE to have, as opposed to things that are MUST have. That list seems like an unclimbable hill, at least for a casual player like myself. That list, if it truly is things that must be acquired to seriously play at the heroic level, is actually pretty vivid support of the original topic of this thread, which is "the game has become too much grind."

You also need some cb oc pieces to give you the ability to raise your cb which is the new must have dps stat this expac if you are missing a lot of the things listed in Schwetties post it doesn’t matter what you do your stats will be so low that you won’t do much dps . As you can see the effort and amount of time to be viable is brutal and detrimental.

People asking Gninja for changes on this thread are barking up the wrong tree as he’s the face of raid/script devs .

• VoV batallion merc - level 20
  All the mercenaries currently available in RoR have the Visions of Vetrovia Mercenary Battalion buff. Having one, unlocked, and leveled to level 20, is a good goal. When you are running heroics or raids, you don't have your mercenary summoned, but you do get the Battalion Buff, so you want the best buff you can get.
  
  To level the mercenary, you can use time, you can run Overseer missions and hope for Mercenary Training Potions, or you can spend real money to level them.

• Celestial or Fabled mount - level20, all current bardings and mount gear
  In RoR, you can get the Fabled Titian Carpet of the Plundering Horde in solo, H1 & H2 content. It has 15 less Resolve than the upgraded Glaura, Savior of Renewal that we got from pre-order. ideally, you'd always pre-order to get the biggest and bestest. But really, there are alternatives.
  
  To level the mount, as with mercs, you can use time, you can run Overseer missions and hope for Mount Training Potions, or you can spend real money to level them. These also will get you Barding Slot Unlockers. I have so many that I have one full box in the bank with nothing else but stacks of unlockers.
  
  The bardings and other mount tack are player-crafted. The basic tack recipes don't require patterns, and come from Plateaus Crafter's Primer Volumes I, II, & II (available from the GH recipe sales NPC or at your local crafting society). Advanced Hizite Crafter's Volumes I, II, III - drop from names in Solos and H1s, patterns for use with these can come from solo collections and solo names. Bigger and better recipe books and components come from H3s or raids.

• Celestial or Fabled Familiar - Level10
  Tishan's Lockbox in Hopewell Harbor, Raj'Dur Plateaus, will have a starter familiar if you need one. There's a Treasured and a Legendary familiar that drop in Solos, and better Familiars in heroic content. Take a look at EQ2U for several of them.
  
  Same deal as with the mount. Preorder gets you the biggest and shiniest, but there are other familiars to be had. To level the familiar, you can use time, you can run Overseer missions and hope for Familar Training Potions. Or you can feed other familiars to your summoned familiar to help level it. It's a small amount usually, but doing Familiars Wild daily can help level your familiar.

• Mount infusion - Available in Tishan's Lockbox.
• Merc Infusion - Available in Tishan's Lockbox.
• Familiar infusion - Available in Tishan's Lockbox.

• Peacock buff - You can see it at EQ2U. only available from the RoR pre-order. It's nice, but if this is the only thing holding you back from greatness, that greatness is all in your head.

• Guild Buff - Available in your guildhall, assuming you belong to a guild.
• Deity pet buff (pet of the gods) - Do the deity quests for the god of your choice, get your god pet. You can boost the god pet via your AA choices.

• Shadowed Ethereal trackers to boost AA buffs from vendor in Savage Weald
  This is a PITA. You have to go back to Reign of Shadows and do various weekly quests until you have enough of these Trackers to buy the buffs from Kelaci Vol'Luissa in Savage Weald (/way 16, 110, -719)

• French slobberer buff from collections
  The French Slobberer is a nice Potency buff with an animation of a French bulldog. It's from completing all the RoR Solo Instance collections.

• Ascension buff
  Each of the Ascensions has a "form", and the highest level of the form gives you a little Fervor and Ability Doublecast buff (Elemental Amalgamation, Etherlord, Union of Stone, Sanguine Embrace). Go do the Panda quests in Sundered Frontier,and then you can "buy" for 0c the Ascension level boosters. Once you have the level 10 form, you will want to level that Ascension spell as high as you can. A sage can help you by crafting the spell upgrades. Some levels will require an Illegible Scroll Page, and you have to scribe each level in order.

• VoV flawless buff from completing VoV h1, and h2's
  Happily, I've noticed many groups in LFG pulling together to run these last-expansion heroic zones. This is a big help.

• RoR Flawless buff - if you have resolve to raid RoR content.
  It's a nice upgrade to the VoV Flawless Buff.

• Paid in their own coin buff from Den2 challenge
  I have also seen groups forming to run The Merchant's Den Challenge Mode. It takes a bunch of runs to get the final coins.
  
  
• Monolith buff - level10
  The Monolith adorn is in the "nice if ya got it" category. The Hua Collector's Star Shard is just about as good.

If you'd like swash tips, look me up.

Lilim / Isle of Refuge. Formerly from Halls of Fate. PM for discord if you are interested.

Thank you an excellent, detailed post! Much appreciated. That is a perfect detailed roadmap to "how to catch up."

I still look at that list and see man-months of playtime. But at least it's a little less opaque than before.

A couple of thoughts in response, for discussion:

That's certainly my goal. It's just easier said than done. I used up the 4x10 day potions I had managed to collect to get the BOL inquisitor Zel'Kriaz to 10. I've got 3 or 4 more that are 15 day potions, and that's it, so I don't have enough to just potion my way to 20, it is going to take time.

The thought of abandoning that project midway through and starting over on a different VOV healer is ... daunting.

My cynical self says "hey, at some point Daybreak is going to release a new generation of healer mercs anyway, so if you're going to start over anyway, wait for the newest." I'm tired of the yoyo game of starting the levelling process then abandoning that merc and starting again on another.

The real problem here, in my opinion = those damn time reduction potions are WAY too rare.

Good tip! Wasn't aware.

Super interesting. So I actually tried to track this down a bit, and although I am not 100% sure, I don't think those Tracker coins drop any more from the ROS weeklies. Certainly when I go and get those quests, and examine the quest rewards in the quest journal, Shadowed Ethereal Trackers are not shown.

However, they ARE shown in the VOV and ROR weeklies, to the tune of 50x coins per solo weekly. So I think the barriers to that one are actually a bit friendlier than you are describing.

But even with that fact, it's still a PITA ton of grind. At 200x coins/week (member bonus, if one does VOV and ROR), that's about 14 weeks to earn 2800 to buy the crit bonus booster.

Again thank you for such a detailed playbook. It's still a lot of grind to catch up, but at least it's a bit clearer.

Let me ask you this - if you can't possibly do that entire list, what would you prioritize? Is there a pareto curve of band for buck? i.e. which 1-3 things yield the most benefit, and which are diminishing returns?

Thanks again.

You should be aware, the Mer season REALLY matters for the buff. The BoL merc buff is WAY inferior to the VoV one. I'm sure when they release the RoR season, those will be much better. DAunting? Yes. But you are far better off starting with the highest quality VoV merc you can find (fabled or celestial). The first 10 levels go fairly quickly. After level 10 is where you really need the potions. It's been awhile since I looked but a level 10 VoV is probably as good or better than a level 20 BoL.

Once you get the good quests as OS rewards (Fabled/Celestial) If you do the 20 OS quests per day or so that you can do, I get between 10-15 reduction baulbles a week. (spread between OS/Familiar/Mount, I get around 3-4 merc ones). So if you take a month to level to 10 just using the calendar, you should have enough reducers to get the merc to 20 by then.