Everquest II: What the Shit edition

[Qhue]

I pretty much duo all the time when playing and am having an absolutely great time doing so. It is a bit frustrating that as a duo the content we can tackle tends to be itemized a bit lower than our current level as content is 'geared' towards a full group, yet adventuring as a full group seems very overcrowded with 6 people all in one small area spamming fireworks-like displays all over the place from spells and combat-spells.

Too much of the combat system is reliant on people playing whack-a-mole with every button on their hotbar and that really detracts from the experience of actually being immersed in the game.

[kegkilla]

i picked up eq2 the other day partly because i wanted to check it out and party because i wanted to see what my new laptop is made of. its a lil soon for me to draw any conclusions about this game but i will say that graphically it blows wow out of the water (from what ive seen anyway), really it is a great looking game. if anyone here plays on nagafen and wants to hook up shoot me a PM or /tell me in game the name is Funkenstein on the evil side.

[daishinzo]

It's because of AA's Qhue. Once you start filling out lines at all and are remotely competent you can start rocking most old content because it lacks the HP to deal w/ all the increased utility/dmg people can do. A lot of old world is trivialized because of it.

And what lag from mashing buttons? Only time I lag is from leaving spell effects on which is retarded from the get go cause it just looks like a blur of sparkly vomit on the screen during raids.

[Pinski]

Originally Posted by daishinzo

It's because of AA's Qhue. Once you start filling out lines at all and are remotely competent you can start rocking most old content because it lacks the HP to deal w/ all the increased utility/dmg people can do. A lot of old world is trivialized because of it.

And what lag from mashing buttons? Only time I lag is from leaving spell effects on which is retarded from the get go cause it just looks like a blur of sparkly vomit on the screen during raids.

At the high-end with all the procs that modify casting time, recast time, recovery time, etc. It just gets laggy as hell. But that seems to be fixed, soo no more lag for once.

[Digits]

Just cleared a good amount of Sol's Eye and Permafrost, albeit I was solo for the latter, and these zones are zones done right. Gigantic, well designed with named (seemingly) in all the right places. Their common drops are actually good, and their rare drops are fantastic. They don't drop masters as much as they need to, the only ones I got in 5 hours in both zones were from trash (great idea, btw), but considering people actually needed loot that dropped I was content. Tack on masters like this zone is Varsoons and you may even see people starting to go into the zone that aren't stubborn jerks like me who refuse to blaze past classic content. It doesn't hurt the zones put to rest any qualms I had about the games art direction. Fighting fire giants over glass walkways spanning wildly across molten lava rape the shit out of arid desert area with orcs for capturing peoples imagination.

Of course, the entire zone was far too easy with an at level group and only giants and gnomes were interesting to fight. Fucking gnomes and mana drain. It would be really a phenomenal zone if it didn't have any encounters and mobs had natural power levels. Right now you have a swarm of 4 normal mobs, 3 ^ mobs, 2 ^^ mobs, or 1 ^^^ mob. Every single time, if you know how to body pull. Maybe this one puts a HoT on the group for +30 hp every 6 seconds, or this one chain mezzes the main tank then immediately breaks it but it's all the same. Pretty boring shit. Then again, this is true for every dungeon until at least 50. Probably after, too.

It's perplexing. Even if they kept the hard linked encounter system there are thousands of ways to make mobs interesting. Give efreetis charm, giants rampage, LCDs their dot back, golems with a pushback. Stop making priest mobs giant pussies and let them heal instead of spamming heals over time. Even if a mob has a unique ability, like how lizards in CT lifetap, they are so fucking weak it doesn't even matter. Oh shit, the mob who loses hp at 10 percent a second regens 1 percent every 12! Monsters are easy enough now for groups that you can give them ludicrous abilities. I still can't believe I fought tae ew justicars and they didn't heal a fucking thing.

[Moontayle]

They're upping the drop rate of LoN booster packs this weekend. I think right now it's like a 1 in 200 chance of getting one in a chest.

[Dahlrek]

The only group zone I've seen in that had interesting trash and named was Nizara. A couple of the EoF zones have one or two specific encounters that are mildly interesting, but generally mobs are pretty bland.

[Shutup]

Originally Posted by Digits

Fighting fire giants over glass walkways spanning wildly across molten lava rape the shit out of arid desert area with orcs for capturing peoples imagination.

I've ran through Sol Eye more times than I can remember and yet to this day running on those glass paths 100's of feet above that lava still gets me a little nervous. Definitely on of the better zones I've experienced in an Mmorpg. Unfortunately, like you said most of the mobs are pretty dull and lackluster.

[Kreugen]

Any FoH without Furor is not 'real' FoH. Furor is FoH, period.

[Miele]

Originally Posted by Digits

Of course, the entire zone was far too easy with an at level group and only giants and gnomes were interesting to fight. Fucking gnomes and mana drain. It would be really a phenomenal zone if it didn't have any encounters and mobs had natural power levels. Right now you have a swarm of 4 normal mobs, 3 ^ mobs, 2 ^^ mobs, or 1 ^^^ mob. Every single time, if you know how to body pull. Maybe this one puts a HoT on the group for +30 hp every 6 seconds, or this one chain mezzes the main tank then immediately breaks it but it's all the same. Pretty boring shit. Then again, this is true for every dungeon until at least 50. Probably after, too.

It's perplexing. Even if they kept the hard linked encounter system there are thousands of ways to make mobs interesting. Give efreetis charm, giants rampage, LCDs their dot back, golems with a pushback. Stop making priest mobs giant pussies and let them heal instead of spamming heals over time. Even if a mob has a unique ability, like how lizards in CT lifetap, they are so fucking weak it doesn't even matter. Oh shit, the mob who loses hp at 10 percent a second regens 1 percent every 12! Monsters are easy enough now for groups that you can give them ludicrous abilities. I still can't believe I fought tae ew justicars and they didn't heal a fucking thing.

The problem is that basically everything mobs throw at you is curable, even root, snare, charm or mez.
It takes a decent healer 1 click per effect to cure you, without even caring what actually hit you. I play a healer and 99% of the times I click the cure appropriate for the icon (click to cure mod rocks) without even knowing what I removed, with the exception of arcane debuffs that I can pretty much figure out what they are according to the mobs' classes we're fighting.

Every now and then you'll run into uncurable stuff, especially in T7 which makes things a lot more interesting.
The AI for mobs is also quite lacking, up to T5 for sure, but it doesn't get much better later on. With some ranged attacking mobs actually trying to stay at range and keeping their assist agro always centered on the mob and not on you (body pulling), eq2 would pose significantly more challenging scenarios.

[Kobalt]

You know, the more I play expansion content the more I get confused. I ran sanctum of scale 2 days in a row for hours and killed 4 named in the 2 days combined. And each time was a wooden chest with shit no one wanted no less.

This is confusing to me because old zones like runnyeye and permafrost had named all over the place dropping loot people actually wanted. Why the fuck is the old world better itemized then all the expansions? Am I missing something here?

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

Any FoH without Furor is not 'real' FoH. Furor is FoH, period.

Funny, this reminds me of my adventures in early Sullon Zek (so much fun first few months, magic weapons ftw). There was a ranger named Furor, and my friends and I being native Veeshanians, knew it was not the real Furor. So, to teach him a lesson about naming yourself things that you should not be naming yourself, we corpse camped him in between Kithicor and High Keep for about 2 hours before GMs finally came. Some how he convinced GM's to intervene even though the rules of SZ say that you are allowed to corpse camp. He probably called tech support crying. I must add he kept claiming to be Furor, that is why we actually corpse camped him.

[Denonia2]

Just cleared a good amount of Sol's Eye and Permafrost, albeit I was solo for the latter, and these zones are zones done right. Gigantic, well designed with named (seemingly) in all the right places. Their common drops are actually good, and their rare drops are fantastic. They don't drop masters as much as they need to, the only ones I got in 5 hours in both zones were from trash (great idea, btw), but considering people actually needed loot that dropped I was content.

I spent tons of hours in all the lower tiered zones. Fallen gate, ROV, Cazic Thule Runnyeye etc. and mass harwested masters (read played a bruiser). To sum up Permafrost. The amount of name farms there are extremely limited so farming is kill, kill. wait endlessly, repeat. I did some rotations and got a couple of masters. Sol was simply so anoying to prgress that i didnt bother for more than 30 minutes.

When you move up 1 tier to the first xpansion you will get much more limited drop rate, but with persistance you can get ALOT out of zones like poets palace.

[kythik]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

The network lag on raids makes a supercomputer into a slideshow and completely ruined any remaining enjoyment I had left after putting up with the button mash combat.

There are lots of good things about the game, but few of them involve actually playing it.

so very true!

[Noah EQ2]

Originally Posted by kythik

so very true!

Last Hotfix cleared up a large portion of the lag issues. The improvement was amazing. Raiding is actually fun.