Everquest II: What the Shit edition

[kasey]

Originally Posted by Kuriin

I take it you only got to level 35, right? Because then you would know that loot gets remarkably better and cooler looking at the end game. Look at the Pumpkin Horserider's staff if you don't believe me.

Nope, endgame. And sir, the items suck(opinion!). Items sucked(opinion!) in every single game i played almost the last decade. Devs are afraid to put in real tiers seperating each other. In eq i had real funky stuff like jboots (clicky self buff instant, makes you run faster), that mana supershawl with a mana regen buff which stacked with like everything ect.(Yaaaaaa Tsalarian i beat you on a 10minutes bid marathon which i ended with "ok i bid what tsalarian has+1" You could hear his scream to trough europe. First drop ever meeeeeee).

I guess WoW has a few rare items which stand out like that thundersomething sword thing, the legendary rare sword from molten with slow proc. But i am not talking off one in a million (literally ..) items.

I will put it this way, are there any items (new players who lost their online virginity dont count) you would sell your grandpa for? :P

May be i am jaded and giving eq too much credit trough my rose coloured glasses but imo the items should be more cool. Its about depth too, eq had items which only dropped a short period, or plain toys like illusions (sleeper gnome mask anyone?) or items for a specific purpose or overpowered items and you could feel the countdown to nerf on them or or or ... fungi to twink! Sometimes just owning exactly that novelty item yielded a ton respect rofl. Very interesting market to barter.

Or my enchanter epic was so cool when i got it, the class now played differently. I could speed buff the whole raid without a dent in my mana.. click click click or how about the cleric epic 2.0/ the AA to do the same at a worse efficience or or or or or or or or

P.S. I dont know the last development cycle of eq2. May be they have now suddenly cool items but generally speaking everything ive seen was MEHHH. I remember when i won that thing with tons wisdom out of the ultra rare chest and half the top players congratulated me while the other half wanted it. Well i guess i was the only one who was totally underwhelmed. No clicky no graphic no big upgrades in stats nothing new yawn.

Originally Posted by Aamina

I love the title of this thread as well, but suggesting a class combine is the height of stupidity.

Changing and altering a class is a steep step so my suggestion would be to do something where nobody can loose. Next expansion you raise the level cap by 1 or 2 or something. AT the finish line there will be a smaller number of classes lets say 12. So you now suddenly share your skill tree with another class and the developers have half the worries. The rendundant skills come in handy. They are our placeholder abilities to turn into something fun to do.

I bet you could do this without loosing one class defining perk. Its not like all classes are super unique, we just overshadow one classs with another and try to keep both playstyles both classes offer in the new reincarnation. This would be really hard with lets say WOW classes since they are so totally different but in eq2 it would be easier. Isnt there like a good/bad offensive/ def alteration of the same anyways going on in the class trees? Inquistors/temple paladin/shadowknight berzerker/tank ectect

[Kobalt]

Originally Posted by kasey

Changing and altering a class is a steep step so my suggestion would be to do something where nobody can loose. Next expansion you raise the level cap by 1 or 2 or something. AT the finish line there will be a smaller number of classes lets say 12.

I bet you could do this without loosing one class defining perk.

I really don't see this as a solution, it's no different from just combining the class and you are still left with a little problem. When you gain this lvl does a paladin become a shadowknight or vice versa? They are quite different so you will basiclly piss off an entire class, especially since if they wanted to you could just betray to the other class already.

Alot of the subclasses are like talent specs in wow. But can you really imagine there not being a huge uproar if suddenly one day blizzard did away with talent specs and every resto shaman that made a shaman to heal all of a sudden had to go enhancement spec?

The eq2 classes aren't as similar as people like to say they are.

[Denonia2]

Honestly, i think some of you no sayers to class combination should try what it actually is like to manage an eq2 raid guild for a while to understand the insanity of having 24 classes and 24 raid spots. Basically the ONLY challenge in regards of having moderate success in the game is the ability of managing those 24 raid spots. Fuck raid strategies, fuck having skilled players, as long as you can manage the correct combination of 24 you have succes. Basically it is so bad that you can have a retarded monkey lead your raids, as long as you have the correct class combination you will win.

[daishinzo]

I don't know what you expect from a game that is almost entirely different from how it was released. They still have so much misc and backed up crap they need to fix and scrap but instead they are focusing on progressing and cleaning it up even more in the expansions as can be seen in EoF (sans reused art which drives me nuts too). Certain spells and abilities do need to be combined. I never understood the point of having a spell that adds HP and resistance and a spell that has HP and mitigation instead of just having one that does both cause even with both of them taking concentration slots (annoying) they don't adversely affect anything other than taking extra time to buff when you die. I'm glad my raiding main is an assassin since the bulk of my stuff is macro'ed and I don't need to have 50 hotbars lined with different shit. And ya there are very few pieces of gear that make me say "I must have that" but then again I've never been a loot whore. I liked raiding for the simple fact of seeing new shit and after doing it once or twice I could care less if I ever went back. Though in EQ1 yes I loved running around in fungi, sod and MQ'ed giant/dragon/dwarf armor pieces at level 10 back in the day and it sucks you can't really do that in any new MMO these days.

As far as leveling. You typically don't even need to use much of the old world if you don't wish to do so. Hell my first character was almost 40 before leaving butcher block straight out of gfay. Half of you complain it's too hard and the other half too easy but in game I hear everyone whine the same that it's taking too long or this level gap sucks blahblah almost none of us are as hardcore as we were eight years ago and shit is easy but w/ most of us being grown ups now and not having 40-50+ hours to dedicate to a game if it was too hard you'd quit just as fast if not faster and trying to find the happy medium is a bitch. It takes less than a month for even a casual complete new player to hit 70 w/ a big grasp on how everything works. Any "hell" levels where you are stuck in a gap as dps/tank where you are too low for the next tier or too high to get good exp from the previous can be skipped simply by heading to the broker and picking up some collections if you're too lazy to quest or grind. I skipped easily 10-15 levels on my first char by simply spending plat and doing a turn in. Now on alts I use them to breeze through levels I know are going to be shit cause I hate questing. And if you have a semblence of how to play you can get 1-30 in a day w/ ease and get a grasp on how your character is going to play for the most part. There are plenty of quests, named, disco etc content to mess around with non stop for months unless you are on 24/7. I skipped probably 90% of the game my first go around and now w/ three alts I've been making sure to hit everything and while it's not omg amazing it's still fun and new.

With WoW you can breeze through everything so fast only thing keeping you from trying certain content is rep grinds but even those can be overcome quickly. I did love the game and managed to grind up 8 60's and 3 70's on both horde and alliance over two years and change of play (and if anyone wants to complain about easy getting to 60 in 5 days /played was a joke if you knew where to go/what to do and 60-70 in 3-4 days /played) but every few months just ended with me ebaying one or two of them off and quitting till friends bugged me to roll another char w/ them cause they were on their 43 alt reroll cause there was jack shit to do at level cap other than rep grind and afk in arenas/bg if you weren't a 2k+ team in a good battle group. If I didn't end up with a bunch of fun players from release onward (Serenity Now funeral wankers) I would have quit and never touched it again till TBC. Sure I miss PVP a ton and sure the PVE in EQ2 isn't omg spectacular but scripted encounters even in WoW were not hard even during cutting edge. All that meant was you needed to farm consumables harder than everyone else and have more tanks and make sure your monkeys all press buttons when they need to do so and run over here when they need to. Hardest thing in WoW (and EQ2) is making sure people attend the raid not the content itself with the appropriate make up ;[

Back to EQ2. At this point combining classes would be the nail in the coffin and as much as I dislike having 24 almost everyone that isn't raiding for their means of entertainment in game loves it. People w/ alt-itis have 24 different albeit similar options to mess around with and I don't see them alienating the majority of their player base for the few "hardcore" vocals.

Here's hoping all the things I keep hearing about RoK are promised and even if it's more of the same I'll still play it cause of the people I've met and the content I've not seen till warhammer or aoc or the "next big thing" that isn't complete ass comes out cause there isn't shit else to play.

Yes some of this is probably redundant and rehashed but it's spelled correctly! ;]

[Kobalt]

I don't think many would disagree that 24 classes is retarded, just people question if the shitstorm that would follow be worth making the change.

[Jovec]

Originally Posted by Arbitrary

I truely am stunned that 2.2 isn't out yet. It's been four months and the patch doesn't really even contain anything special.

Doesn't 2.2 contain voice chat? I imagine that unlike Vent and TS, the WoW voice server will mix the voice streams before sending them to the listeners/clients, so their is a fair bit of work and testing to be done there.

[Miele]

Originally Posted by Pinski

I completely disagree about not needing classes combined. I'm pretty sure there are LOTS of people who think that classes need to be combined. And it's more than just people on the FoH board. There's been posts in the past on the official boards about it, there's also been posts on eq2flames about combining classes. The amount of classes in this game is a problem, a huge problem. If you actually played EQ2, you'd understand the problem exists and somehow needs to be addressed, although now it is probably too late. There are probably 50% of people wanting the spell consolidation, and 50% who don't. And I bet it'd be the same with class combinations. But hey, if they're willing to do 1 thing for the "better" of the game, why not take another step as well?

You should really look at how some people think on EQ2-specific boards about class combining, and you'd be surprised that a lot of people think it'd be a good thing.

24 classes create a problem just by their mere existance. Aside from going in a dungeon not blessed by the smart loot system (the vast majority in the game) you keep getting shit that no one uses.
I can count on 2 hands the number of times I got loot I needed from mobs, rest of the stuff sold to buy me upgrades, very funny I tell you. I don't even start talking about master spells.

Combining is possible, but not feasable for the NGE effect it would have, even if I'm confident that done right it could make the game a lot better. The problem is: would it be done right? Knowing SoE I'd say "hell, no!", but the EQ2 team did some things right in the last year or so.

Right now some classes complain that they are borked or whatever other word you can use to define "broken". Troubadours, mystics, both brawlers, etc. browse the class forums and make yourself an idea.
Doing a crop to 14-15 classes would also allow the devs to abandon forever the "archetype system" that never worked since day 1 and make each class as unique as possible, allowing them to add a new class or two in the future.

[Denonia2]

There allready is only arround 19-20 of the existing 24 that are being tolerated in raids. If you try look on various guild roosters you will see that they have 2 of certain classes, dirges, illusionists etc. Everytime it is desided to get 2 of one class you need to completely uncheck another class so 4-5 classes simply wont be used ever, paladin, monk etc. So the game mechanics have allready made a natural adjustment for lowering the amount of classes that way. To make a Margin where you can have 2 of each class in the raid but realistically would do a pos/ neg 1 calculation simply would make the game much more healthy.

[Kuriin]

Well, we just went through Emerald Halls and it's obviously Plane of Growth 2.0. Why did they do this? The original was bad enough, but adding trials in order to remove some mobs is irritating because if you don't make it in 3 minutes, you have to spend over an hour clearing goddamn brownies.

Just glad the Wuoshi trial isn't as bad. lol

[GrobbeeTrull2.0]

So don't suck and clear the trials!

[Kuriin]

Well, you only have three minutes to initiate the trial and finish it (at least second floor). So, gotta move move move.

[Shutup]

Originally Posted by Miele

I don't even start talking about master spells.

I've been playing since 2 days after launch with probably around 120 days played and have NEVER seen my class's master drop on either a main or alt. Don't really know if things have gotten better because as of late I've pretty much lost hope for my server and the game.

[Deris]

Originally Posted by kasey

May be i am jaded and giving eq too much credit trough my rose coloured glasses but imo the items should be more cool. Its about depth too, eq had items which only dropped a short period, or plain toys like illusions (sleeper gnome mask anyone?) or items for a specific purpose or overpowered items and you could feel the countdown to nerf on them or or or ... fungi to twink! Sometimes just owning exactly that novelty item yielded a ton respect rofl. Very interesting market to barter.

So its ok that a player is completely fucked out of applying to any raid guild because they don't have the flowers from PoM, Fungi, Circlet of Shadows, or any other large number of items that come from old content? I can remember denying people just based on what items they had. It doesn't matter how good you are - if you didn't have a manastone you were SHIT. It doesn't matter how well you pull - without a Fungi Tunic as a Monk you were a liability, thus utter shit. Worthless player, go get the flowers next time before you come to a resist fight. Snap this Shaman has the Hammer from VP? sign him up. Who cares if a 3 year old with mild retardation is the player - he can click his hammer and thats all that matters.

You sir are a moron if you think mechanics anything LIKE EQ are "good for the game". Unless those items are completely and utterly useless upon expansion release - you will have people going back to 5 year old content to attempt to get something that should have stopped being useful eons ago.

[Grizzlebeard]

No idea which guilds you were in or what era you left EQ in but I've never seen a person turned down for not having rare loot in the five years I played EQ. Maybe the odd SK was expected to have a pre-nerf CoS but it never stood in the way of a skilled applicant getting an invite.

[MrGraham]

Same. Never saw any of those loots required, although SKs with the prenerf CoS got to do some random things that wouldn't be able to otherwise.

Personally I spent a ton of money on shit like AoN, Holgresh beads, and even more time on PoM stuff, and that was just for fun (well the Holgresh beads were occasionally useful).