TSO Stinks

kcirrot wrote:

It is all becaue of the poor design of TSO that we are about to undergo a round of NERFS. Again TSO was a poorly designed Expansion. BRING BACK GALLENITE -- i.e Scott Hartsman.

Its hard to disagree that game is missing Scott..a sad day when he jumped ship he turned around a game so firmly set in the past and brought it kicking screaming into the modern age..but alas the truely terrible TSO has tried to go back from those dark depths,i fear under the present direction where the game will be in a year or two

Oddly enough, TSO's praised up and down on EQ2Flames (for the most part.) Not linking here because it's NSFW but I found that strange. TSO's pretty cool for the most part but another expansion like EOF or KOS' content amounts would be awesome.
That being said I'm really interested in trying out the new solo shard things and collecting the new armor models.

dawy wrote:

Isn't Gallenite the idiot who smurf-ified Kunark, taking it from the frightening, primal landscape of EQ1 to what we have today? I'm just glad he left before he had the chance to neuter Velious as well.

Meaghan@Lucan DLere wrote:

Far from being an idiot Scott i fear wouldnt have let a half baked xpac like TSO out the door,of that im sure

ROK was full of its own problems,but in the long term its been and will continue to be a much better xpac than TSO could ever hope to be,unless of course mindlessly running the same instance times 1000 is regarded as great game design

faith wrote:

I still don't understand this. There is so many new instances in TSO, many more than in ROK. I'm still really enjoying TSO.
What I don't enjoy [even though it's the wrong thread] is the fighter changes. If good tanks keep leaving the game and the server TSO instances will be a thing of the past and we'll all be wishing for more damn solo content.
Stop messing with fighter classes SoE!!!!!!!!!!!! You are destroying the game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

faith wrote:

Um, what exactly do you think Kunark was? Except in Kunark you got a whopping 4.5 instances compared to the 20 or so in TSO, but only you had to solo quest through happy Smurfland,er.. I mean Kunark, to get to them.
Fact remains, Gallenite took a once dangerous landscape that many had many fond memories of and neutered the hell out of it.
Example: Many players spent many an hour in EQ1 happily slaughtering and being slaughtered by the angry Bathezid Sarnak. In EQ2 we get to spend a few hours being their errand b****es instead.
By the time you hit 80 you should get a new suffix title: Errand Boy of Kunark. Because by the time you've hit 80, you've run errands for Teren's Grasp, various Iksar towns, various Sarnak factions, a pair of crazy dwarves, and the goddam bloody skorpikis. You hit 80 not by adventuring, being the hero, or being the villain, but by being the b****.

Meaghan@Lucan DLere wrote:

Couldnt agree more..ROK had its own problems thats for sure,as you say the endless and very poor quests,but ultimetly its still a better xpac than TSO mainly becuase we'll still be using it to level up in the post TSO era,because those 20 instances will become utter ghosttowns the moment the next xpac goes live,whereas even today Kunark is still busy with players,i would add also that Chelsith is one of the best dungoens in the game IMO,its a shame its just inderused.

And please lets be honest the days of camping for hours on end for a mob are well over and rightfully so,i do feel the loss of sitting at a camp and talking for hours on end of course i do,but in most modern MMO's that feature is a thing of the past,is it right or wrong?? well thats not for me to decide,but its fact and its something older MMO players like us have to live with.

Where Kunark fell down,for me at least was not the utter banality of the quests though,it was becuase they used Kunark,i would have loved to have seen something utterly new added to the game with that expansion,not rehashes of old zones,rose tinted specs are nice to wear for awhile but you have to take them sooner or later.

As for TSO,well that fails on many levels mainly,as Faith wrote doing the same instances day after day,week after week isnt fun,i'm sorry i dont find it fun at all,dont get me wrong i loved SOS,POA,HOF etc and still go there today but the last xpac added nothing really in terms of making the game feel bigger (other than the moors) and for a once a year xpac thats not good enough,i said at the time it felt like a big adventure pack and i stick by that.

I just hope they come up with something better next time round tbh.

Maroger wrote:

Umm, the fighter update coming up is something that has been building since DoF. TSO content had absolutly nothing to do with it (neither did content from any other expansion, as it is a mechanics issue, not content).
faith wrote:

if given the choice between spending 12 months running the same 20 heroic zones over and over, or 12 months running the same 7 heroic zones over and over, which one do you think the majority of players would want.
Just in case you missed it, the 7 heroic zones for a year was RoK, the 20 heroic zones for a year was TSO. Neither expansion has anything else worth doing other than raiding.

Horses for courses i suppose the end of the day in my opinion TSO is dull,even duller than ROK at leasarietyt there was something other to do than those same mind numbing instances in ROK over and again,for me that fact gives it the edge over TSO,becuase there is a bit more varity in it,but its a close run thing between them..both very poor expansions,once again in my opinion.

And yes you where boned if like me you dont raid with the last 2 expansions but hey ho.

dawy wrote:

What else was there to do in RoK?
The solo-quest-line/level-80-toon-factory grind? the shared dungeons? looking at the scenery? killing the same solo names over and over again? the worthless faction grinds?
As to the variety in between instances in RoK vs TSO, TSO has a far greater variety.
Scion of Ice is your basic tank and spank. The only mobs in the entire zone that has anything else to it are the mob at the end of the left hand area, which needs nothing more than a root to deal with it (is similar to VoES endmob in that respect), and the last mob in the zone, which requires the puching of the "forward" button every so often, in addition to doing what you normally do (yeah, I know, having to do two things is hard!).
Going slightly harder, you have zones like Veksar Nu'Roga and Hollow Tower. All of these are able to be cleared with a group if 4 non raid geared players that know the encounters, so gear for a full group is a non issue assuming its current (read: TSO legendary+).
The encounters in these zones include constructing a golem and then sending it to kill a mob well above what you would be able to kill, in order to distract it while you pull the named. Killing coffins followed by body parts in ordder to be able to do damage to the named mob. A ring event where AE DPS is margiannly useful, though not at all needed (AE DPS being useful was totally absent in RoK until RE2). Draging a drakota around. Communicating the dispelling of an almost insta death effect. Dispelling a damage shield/hoT, or using a series of very fast attacks to dispel it. A Djinn that has a periodic 100% reflect/riposte effect, a drakota that ports you into lava and another ring event in which AE DPS is almost needed (ie, its possible but hard to do it as a non raid group without specific AE DPS).
Going a little harder, you have AoB and Kor-Sha. In here you get encounters that imprision random group members, you get to take over the body of void beasts in order to kill a named, the periodic placement of void portals to prevent multitudes of adds, a mob that knocks you back at the same time as he burdens you and a mob that the entire group can kill from range, eventually.
That there is a summary of some of the encounters from less than half of the zones in TSO. Each of these zones can be done in T1 or T2 shard armor, which is rediculously easy to obtain. The above encounters contain more variety than every encounter in RoK outside of raid mobs.
Saying you need to raid in order to run TSO groups is simply an excuse, something to say to try and get SoE to make the enxt expansion easier. Thing is, this expansion has a fairly large pile of easy content, with raid geared players able to trio half of the instances (if raiders are trioing it, that means it is doable by T1 srad geared groups).

In my honest opinion, if this years expac is anything like rok or tso I'm probably going to give up eq2.

Rok was a horrible solo fest through boring areas for horrible xp.

Tso is just a 1.5-2 week solo fest through the moors and then run the same set of instances every day till your nose bleeds and you /wrists out of boredom.

The last great xpac for me was EoF as it was such a broad expac. Yes things could have been done better but it still kicks the booty of the last 2 expacs.

ShinGoku wrote:

EoF was only any good if you are the type of person that likes to create an alt, and enjoys the thoughtless, spoonfed leveling environment that EoF gave us.
If you were at the level cap and had no intention of playing an alt, you had 3 group instances and 4 raids. If you didn't raid, you had 3 group instances, if you did raid, you had 4 raids (the group instances provided nothing for a raider at all).
Since the next expansion is likely to have a level cap increase, another EoF is unlikely (thank god tbh).
Another RoK wouldn't be that bad, assuming they learnt their mistakes from the actual RoK, and provide a heroic leveling path.
The other two level cap increasing expansions are not particulaly good as examples as to what can and can not be done. DoF was a mess in almost every way, but KoS was much better (and if it wern't for SoS, I would consider it one of the better expansions).

Noaani wrote:

Sorry but its hard to take your views on EoF seriously..EoF was possibly the best MMO expansion i've ever played,and i've been through a few games over the last 8 years or so,becuase there wasnt a level increase is for me at least made it so good,you could have a mooch round your toon and check things out as when you needed to,even now,when i dust off my wizard i go for a roll round LP and LF and still find the odd thing to do,its not all about the endgame for quite a few people me thinks.

TSO is rubbish,unless as i say you think great game design means running the same instances time and again day after day,i dont i like a bit of variety in my gameplay,i do however agree with you about KoS,that was an utter mess and really best left forgotton(a fate i fear that will happen to TSO in future years),the KoS/EoF era of EQ2 was the games golden age,something for pretty much everyone in those 2 expansions (even sos wasnt that bad if you went with the right people ).

The last 2 expansions have a massive meh factor with both of them and like ShinGoku if this years fare is anything like them then my time playing EQ2 will come to an end,i hope they have learnt thier lessons of the last 2 expansions..i.e. dont hack either side of the playerbase off,but i fear it wont be the case.

dawy wrote:

The part that pains me the most is wondering if its just me thats changed in gaming tastes etc or if the direction of the game is really swinging that vastly in another direction. I love bringing up alts, I really do but once you hit 70 it all turns to poop imo. My poor wifeys fury is stuck at 73 atm as she mistakenly thought most of RoK would be group based with the odd solo quest branch ala KoS but she hates RoK even more than I do lol! Honestly, in the last 2 expacs worth of content, why do 7 out of 8 people I know prefer to revisit the older zones rather than face the new ones for leveling?

dawy wrote:

Obviously, the above is my response to you liking EoF.
If EoF had a more open leveling plan, had multiple possible paths to take at each level, and provided heroic content to level on, as well as providing another 2 heroic and 2 epic instances (all of which needed to be harder than what was in EoF), then it would have been a good expansion.
It didn't.
Fact is, after 3 years of the game, the majority of players had a character at the level cap. EoF did not provide enough for those characters to do. For an advertising tool to get new players in to the game it was reasonably successful, problem is, it was just as successful as a tool to drive existing players from the game due to lack of content
From the content additions we have had since then, I think it is safe to say that SoE are aware that adding a consistant supply of new content for players at the level cap is essential to the health of an MMO. While additions to lower levels can be made, these are best left as game update type additions (as per Neriak), or alterations to existing zones.
Using up a large portion of the resources that go in to making an expansion (which are finite) means little more than not enough resources are able to be put towards end game content, which when disecting player populations is where the vast majority of players spend their time online. Not only are there more characters at the level cap, but those characters spend longer online than characters below the level cap.

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I've avoided posting in this thread until I gave the expansion a fair shakeout. It being almost 4 months along as of this post here's my succinct observation of the TSO experience.

Good: Varied, detailed, high quality interwoven heroic stories;scripts;progression.
Content grade... A+ Give everyone raises..

Bad: True unsoloable (and unboxable in many cases) heroic lines create access barriers that force grouping for completion that assumes any guilded player who wants to complete heroic content can arrange a group.

Bad: Access to content has a pretty high barrier to entry for a single person with no RL friends on the same server to leverage grouping experiences that sincerely wants to complete heroic quest lines that don't overlap in shard barring zones.
Complete Access to Content to a player w/o 3+ RL friends in game or true raiding guild networking circle... C-

Producers need to consider this when thinking about future game direction to not "count on" their "managed" army into creating opportunities for players that just doesn't work out as often as it should... I would have quit a long time ago if I hadn't had the in-game $ to buy my way to access content that I wouldn't have had a chance to see otherwise.
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Edited: For Brevity.