EQ2 Endgame Status

[Mr Element]

So new WoW content is blasted through in a matter of weeks after its released. I was wondering whats the common status on EQ2 endgame. Has everything been beaten and people are just waiting for more, or are some guilds fighting for the top possition? Maybe easier to answer more specifically: I started playing on the Unrest server. If anyone happens to be on that server and could give me an idea of whats going on up top, that'd be great.

[Suineg]

http://www.fohguild.org/eq2/index.php

I know that could be considered rude but most likely they are close enough to the cutting edge to know what is going on.

[Mr Element]

Only problem is that hasn't been updated since October and it doesn't have that much info.

[Zhakrin]

Challenging, there are lots of things to do and get done for expansion raids.

We have beat everything but Poet's Palice: The Return and have only done our first attempt at the Temple of Life the other day. Its fun, and the loot is slowly improving, a lot of the initial loot when DOF went live really sucked, but they have been revamping the raid zones one at a time.

Some of the top guilds around off the top of my head:
Ne Plus Ultra on Guk: http://www.npuguild.com/
Chaotic Legion: http://guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?Gu...0&TabID=389489
Vagabonds: http://mellco.net/vagabonds/

to name a few.

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by Zhakrin

Challenging, there are lots of things to do and get done for expansion raids.

We have beat everything but Poet's Palice: The Return and have only done our first attempt at the Temple of Life the other day. Its fun, and the loot is slowly improving, a lot of the initial loot when DOF went live really sucked, but they have been revamping the raid zones one at a time.


Ne Plus Ultra on Guk: http://www.npuguild.com/ is probilly the top eq2 guild across all servers atm.

I would like to ask a question on the raid fights themselves. What makes them challenging? Is there more to it than just having the proper resist gear? Are there specific strategies that the developers want you to figure out so you can overcome the encounter? I have never played the EQ2 end game so I am curious to know if they made advancements on that front.

[Iannis]

Yeah, I saw Ne Plus Ultra people when I began going to DoF zones consistently. Their guild level must be high as fuck.

But i imagine that's easy with the endgame mentality and people actually getting off their asses to grind the guild's xp bar *grr*.

[Zhakrin]

Iannis, guild level cap is 40, with the amount of faction given by killing some raid mobs (lots of stuff is 10k + status, per person, per kill especially T5 contested) lvl 40 itsn't THAT hard to get.

Utnayan , a few different things off the top of my head

-Mobs that self ‘mem blur’ preventing tanks from simply locking agro, if you are not carefully they rampage through your healers
-Mobs with massive knock back, so healers and DPS need to keep on their tows to avoid AE attacks when the tank is being thrown around.
- Scripted events where extra mobs spawn and attach based on different factors
- time (if you don’t kill before X mins, so much shit spawns that you’ll get erased)
- health of primary mob
- location of raid force (get too close to X while fighting and you get raped by Y)
- timed encounters (kill in X minutes or you lose)
- general scripted traps (once you do it once though, you send an ungroup person through to suicide spring them)

In EQ2 resists help mitigate the damage from raid mobs, but they aren’t going to let you avoid attacks completely.

Personally I am enjoying it, its fun and challenging to figure out the tactics to beat this stuff. With the current difficulty of the high end raid content i am sure that it'll be gimped soon, just like the T5 prismatic stuff was.

[Lyrical]

To the op:

My guild has pretty much wiped out most of the mobs in the old and new world. While I like the raids, the itemizations sucks ass. So I haven't logged in to Eq2 for a month, now that I have a level 60 and itemization is weak. I did hear they were talking about revamping the drops, but last time I raided, the loot was not much better than what you could buy in the bazaar.

We were raiding six nights a week, five hours a night, and I just didn't see the carrot. Imo, the tradeskillers seemed to be making better gear than what the mobs were dropping. That is a problem. You only need to make a few instance runs in Splitpaw, and now you can afford the tradeskillled loot. All in all, it was better to devote your time to running solo instances than to go on a raid. The gear needed better stats, and more effects imho. And who is the asstard designer that made only druid gear drop?

I hear there have been changes to loot tables in the last month, but after the smack in the face of Swg, I doubt I will ever reactivate my billing. So now I am playing Cov and WoW.

Here is a link titled, "Dof has killed the Uber guild" that is from the official boards. It has Foh members talking about the itemization in the Eq2 endgame:

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/e...ssage.id=26295

To me, this is the biggest flaw of Eq2. There is definitely enough raid content to keep you busy for 30 to 40 hours a week, but the itemization blows. Also, the mobs seem to be too easy. There isn't anywhere near the progression that was required in Eq1.

Maybe someone that has played in the last month can talk more about the new itemization. I hear the prismatic 2.0 quests are in-game right now (kind of like the epic 2.0 from Eq1).

This needs to be fixed pronto, but I am still not sure I would ever come back. I just have this feeling that Smed could wake up one day and turn this into a race car driving game, an online poker game, or any other type of game the marketing data shows would sell better. Gallenite is only one man and he isn't running SOE.

[Iannis]

Splitpaw blows now. But, crafting = uber is the Camelot problem. They went too far to cater to crafters. Except it's even worse than DAoC: at least only the crafters got fucked time-wise back then. Now I have to spend a dozen hours just to get the rare (i've been pitied for my incredible bad luck before) and have the bonus fun of having to compete with chink IGE farmer accounts in t6. Now that I comprehend the rarity I realized I can make money to simply buy from the harvest bots off broker faster than getting the rare myself. Meh.

Gimmie an old EQ mob camp any day of the week. Well, if armor means anything. I wouldn't of camped jack shit for armor until 60 in a game like WoW.

I hope Brad doesn't make the same mistake with his investment into a variety of crafter profession VG will have. Fuck crafting. In the ear. Balance the stuff out instead of just making crafted better than all drops, or all drops better than crafted. Maybe i'll wear half and half, huh?

[Jubee]

Originally Posted by Iannis

Fuck crafting. In the ear. Balance the stuff out instead of just making crafted better than all drops, or all drops better than crafted. Maybe i'll wear half and half, huh?

Now don't take this wrong way, WoW itemization does suck for the most part.

But technically, 75% of the FR gear is crafted. Sulfuras is crafted. Thunderfury requires atleast a little crafting.

There are some decent crafting recipe's in game. It just happens they all require raiding mats.

[Marauder]

Not really Jubee... everyone would have a thunderfury if it weren't for the rare items that require a raid to aquire. Same with sulfuras. Getting arcanite and all of that is trivial... its the super rare drops that are the mitigating issue. I like the way crafting works in WoW... it augments the game, rather than drive it... further there are awesome crafted items - but they will never compare to a raid item. As it should be.

[Goofy]

Originally Posted by Zhakrin

Iannis, guild level cap is 40, with the amount of faction given by killing some raid mobs (lots of stuff is 10k + status, per person, per kill especially T5 contested) lvl 40 itsn't THAT hard to get.

Utnayan , a few different things off the top of my head

-Mobs that self ‘mem blur’ preventing tanks from simply locking agro, if you are not carefully they rampage through your healers
-Mobs with massive knock back, so healers and DPS need to keep on their tows to avoid AE attacks when the tank is being thrown around.
- Scripted events where extra mobs spawn and attach based on different factors
- time (if you don’t kill before X mins, so much shit spawns that you’ll get erased)
- health of primary mob
- location of raid force (get too close to X while fighting and you get raped by Y)
- timed encounters (kill in X minutes or you lose)
- general scripted traps (once you do it once though, you send an ungroup person through to suicide spring them)

In EQ2 resists help mitigate the damage from raid mobs, but they aren’t going to let you avoid attacks completely.

Personally I am enjoying it, its fun and challenging to figure out the tactics to beat this stuff. With the current difficulty of the high end raid content i am sure that it'll be gimped soon, just like the T5 prismatic stuff was.

I don't see how that distinguishes EQ2 since most of the features mentioned are already present in WoW mobs (not turning this into a eq2 vs WoW thingy, but taking WoW as comparison since it is something almost everyone on this board plays)

[Mkopec1]

Originally Posted by Goofy

I don't see how that distinguishes EQ2 since most of the features mentioned are already present in WoW mobs (not turning this into a eq2 vs WoW thingy, but taking WoW as comparison since it is something almost everyone on this board plays)

And its the same shit that EQ had since like forever.

Welcome to typical RAID bullshit.

[Noah EQ2]

1st- The eq2 foh site was off line for most of the late summer. Provided I have time, some more shit will be posted soon (w/in a week).

2nd- The raid game challenge is definately there now at the upper T6 area. You dont just have one mob AEing and doing some DPS on 1 tank. Most instance raid mobs are "events" where multiple things are going on at one time. Exploding Kamakazi mobs, Memwipes, Triggers at % healths, objects that have to be interacted with, special abilities when you are at % health/ power.... all is just to name a few. I would say the largest downfall is the serious dependancy on De-buffs. Mobs are normally hitting for 80-90% of the tanks (plural sometimes) max hps and debuffs have to be applied in seconds or basically the raid will wipe. It does lend to another lvl of strat where you need to have debuffers in sync but the damage is still way to spikey.

The biggest pit fall that has hit EQ2 are the mistakes and time it takes to revamp stuff. Pre DoF loot really sucked till about 2 months before DoF hit (got revamped). DoF loot really sucked up until the past month or so. Hell, I quit for a few weeks due to not having a reason to waste 30 peoples time farming shit for drops. Even now there are remains of shit loot from epic mobs/encounters that still need a revamp. Additionally, itemization seems pretty fucked up for class distribution - very small amount of Scout items... and a shit ton of Plate. Stats have improved but creativity in Effects/Image are definately lacking. Im sure it is the clock that is the biggest enemy not apathy.

The "staff in place" now seems definately different than the people that created EQ2 pre dof and EQ DOF Release. These poor guys have to go back and fix all the mistakes that some retards did and create the next expansion/live events. Im not sure if DoF can be salvaged enough but the "new people" in place are doing much better than the release team.

I would say if you enjoy raiding 4-5hrs a night, 4/5 nights a week, you would enjoy DoF endgame. If you are looking for 8hrs a day raiding... 7 days a week... you wont find it here.

[Lyrical]

Originally Posted by Iannis

Splitpaw blows now. But, crafting = uber is the Camelot problem. They went too far to cater to crafters. Except it's even worse than DAoC: at least only the crafters got fucked time-wise back then. Now I have to spend a dozen hours just to get the rare (i've been pitied for my incredible bad luck before) and have the bonus fun of having to compete with chink IGE farmer accounts in t6. Now that I comprehend the rarity I realized I can make money to simply buy from the harvest bots off broker faster than getting the rare myself. Meh.

Gimmie an old EQ mob camp any day of the week. Well, if armor means anything. I wouldn't of camped jack shit for armor until 60 in a game like WoW.

I hope Brad doesn't make the same mistake with his investment into a variety of crafter profession VG will have. Fuck crafting. In the ear. Balance the stuff out instead of just making crafted better than all drops, or all drops better than crafted. Maybe i'll wear half and half, huh?

Sometimes I think that a buff to the raiding game is a loss for the crafting game (and vica-versa). Make raid items too good, and you decrease the demand for crafters. Make crafted items better, and you disincent the raiders from doing anything else but farming for gold (or sellables). It seems like it is a zero sum game.