I logged back on my 100 illusionist in Plane of Magic and in the barrage of damage I did to a level 106 scorpion, I hit it for 36 million damage... Lol? I feel like I would've remembered doing that much when I last played...
I haven't even tried the "end game" for the last few expacs; always felt I needed a degree in math to figure it out. :-/ Mind, I do up to 110-level stuff here and there (don't have RoS yet), but I tend not to pay attention any more. If this keeps me out of raid PUGs, I'll survive. ;-> Uwk
Yes, the numbers and results get stupidly bloated from level 100 onwards. Check the difference between the stats on a level 99 character and your level 100. Unbelievable.
Okay, that's scary... What's discouraging is that once past 99, you might as well just give up being a crafter. At least an Armorer, a Tailor, or a Weaponsmith, and the only reason to be a Woodworker any more is for totems and ammo and such, because the provided gear crates give you SOOOO much better stuff than any mere peon of a player could make. :-/ People who make expendables like the Scholars and the Provies are about the only ones still in demand, and Carpies will either always have a home or not, depending on whether you have all the Sales Crates you want and do or do not care about house decorating. :-/ Uwk
Don't worry, at level 120 you will be hitting for HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS (billions+) of damage, and your stats will be in the THOUSANDS of percentage.
This looks like a raid geared toon, but look at the stats circled in red. Even heroic toons probably have these kind of absurd numbers. I feel like stats and such really lose meaning at these crazy levels. Why is crit chance over thousands of %? The whole crit-mit thing, crazy. Then there is fevor and resolve too. Talk about pointless stat bloat. I honestly challenge you to find a western MMO with worse stat inflation.
The stat bloat to me, makes it impossible to tell "Am i where i should be ?" "Is this an upgrade, sidegrade or trash ?" and as a new or returning player.. not being able to see where you are item wise, and or even start a hunt for "upgrades" is a bad thing. I can only really play a channeler now a days.. and my pet having 3 to 6 billion HP, makes no sense to me, and my AoE's hitting for 1m+ with 6 to 8 procs of similiar damage.. WHY!? , and the thousands of percentages, makes no sense to me ether, it means the BASE values are only 10-50 points, maybe 100, then they are horrificly multiplied to silly.. and trying to see whats "a good ability to use" just by looking at the numbers on it.. my brain just stops and resets, past 6 zero's i cant quantify
And the monsters will take trillions of points to kill? I've wrestled about with them at "100 (but not really! /giggle )" and "110 (ditto! /giggle )" and just finally got into the habit of Auto-Mentoring when I know I'm gonna be dealing with scale-to-your-level critters. :-/ Uwk
The last time I paid attention to stats was when they'd come out with the excuse as to why they were nerfing all our gear below, basically, 100. The idea was, I guess, to look at "Legendary" or "Mythic" or "Fabled" or whatever tag was the "bestest of allses! " at 100, then degrade everything down from there, which is why you have to be at like Tier 5 before anything we can dare to scrape together at Mastercrafted actually starts getting into the double digits for ability etc. stats. A cheesy little Crackerjack-Box of a collection reward (think it was the Moth Wing Ring or so) hadn't had its stats changed, but went from being a Level 4 item to a Level 20, iirc. X-P I'm seriously beginning to wonder about those that were kvetching about the free-to-players "destroying the game"; I just thought they were NIMBY jerks, but after reading reviews of games that are subscription by default with free-to-play as an option (but still available, thank goodness), versus the perhaps unfortunate choice that was made here to do the opposite of that (if it happened when DBG was still SOE, I'd chalk it up to a Betamax sort of decision). :-/ Games that don't do what we did can take more time with each new expac to get it at least a tad more polished, rather than having to fret about cranking out new product every year; they don't have to cater to just the end-game raiders (which could be the main reason behind all the Bloat); they don't have to feel like they've got a loaded Rocket Launcher of Damocles hanging over their heads constantly, etc. I don't know if it's too late to change back to where we were, subscription default with an F2P option, but I don't think it could be any worse. How is what we have now working for the F2P folks; if it's better now than it was at the beginning, why can't we just keep that good model for F2P (and maybe bring Silver back), but go back to the original paradigm? :-/ Uwk
I would like a stat squish, as for "Were the game has gone" would take too much time to go back through, all the expansions and content, to straighten it out and get it coherent again, the augment system needs to be trimmed down significantly, the base stats , and general mob HP in "Solo dungeons" . The game to me has run on too long of "listening to the end gamers that have never left" rather then taking a step back to see "how is our game approachable to new players or returning players" , also they seem to NOT advertise at all, they have no content purchasable on steam, to help keep it on any kind of activity pages. As for fully "going back to how it was" I sadly do not believe thats possible, because gamers themselves, have changed, "Most" gamers i've found, are now 100% self serving "dont waste my time" types, they dont care about you being a person, only as a body to fill a slot so they have the numbers to get what THEY want.
Ow, point. "Never advertising" has been like the hallmark of this game and/or SOE/DBG in general; even in gaming-specific magazines, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've seen ads for either EQ1 or 2, and I've seen ONE cover, when we got mounts finally. Can't recall if it was for 1 or 2. :-/ There was the big "whoop-de-woo, hoo-dee-hoo! " ad campaign SONY begrudgingly allowed SOE to do when EQ2 came out in 2004; it was a glorious bit o' CGI that was way better than the in-game graphics (which, iirc of EQ1, was infinitely better than theirs, but I'm probably remembering 16-bit), but only showed in theaters where SONY movies were being shown, as part of the specific ads and previews. :-/ I can understand SONY wanting SOE to be tucked away and not known about (though SONY hasn't always made the best decisions for marketing; see Betamax above), since they were toying with their PS1 line about the same time as they incorporated SOE into the fold (so why did they bother with online gaming...?), but I can't understand a company whose only business modality now is online computer games not advertising more. Granted, you could argue that's what SOE was, but at least we had a sugar daddy to lean on back then. WoW got tons of players pretty quickly precisely because they did saturation advertising. I guess The Powers have always looked on the Everquest universe as Mac/Apple ("We were there first!") and WoW as Microsoft/Windows, the upstarts, the late-comers, and heaven forfend we clutter up the servers with millions of players; why, that WoW rabble will let just anyone play! And they even have RL merchandise as well (my hubby and I still have our "Murlaco's Tacos" his 'n' her t-shirts ;->)! Good heavens! Friend of mine who did haunted houses for charity for years started figuring his budget for the next one (opening the last week of September, running through the last week of October/first week of November, depending on the weekends) a month or two into that next year, March at the latest, and one-third of his budget went towards advertising. Granted, it was a temporary event, but I can't imagine that a business that wants customers would do much less. :-/ If they're afraid the servers couldn't handle a huge, sudden influx (of apparently even just returning players, as well as newbies), due to actual advertising, maybe they could at least update their servers. If they need to take 24 hours to do so per, I think we could forgive them, IF WE KNEW IN ADVANCE. Like, tell us on Discord, Twitter, HERE, the Message of the Day, everywhere: "We're going to be bringing down the Antonia Bayle server for 24 hours, starting xx/yy at 7:00 am Pacific time. Once it comes back up again, you should see a marked improvement in server function." or whatever. Then the next time, Halls of Fate. Then Maj'Dul. Then Skyfire. Then Thurgadin (start, of course, with Public Test, to see if it'll work). Then the TLE servers; shouldn't take too long with them, since they're new, right? Or are all the US "realms" on one server now, physically, with Public Test on another, the TLEs all on a third? We know Thurgadin is... Uwk
I agree, especially to your "listening to the end gamers that have never left" rather then taking a step back to see "how is our game approachable to new players or returning players" comment. I LOVE this game and do not want to see it end. I want to quest forever which to me = EverQuest. I have a few alts I want to mentor down and take back to go through all the old content the proper way. You know like a "brand new" player, which would certainly encourage new players knowing others are also playing at their level.
