GSS bottleneck

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[Pubis]

This is a thread I've been meaning to post for a couple of days, but I wanted to give feedback about the flow of progression in and around T10 as it stands right now and the clear issue with GSS. I realize a similar thread has been posted about GSOA being a problem right now, but I want to differentiate that from this in that both GSOA and GSS are for upgrading character equipment, GSS actually hard-locks you out of progression right now.

I've progressed to this point organically in that I've never traded or interacted with the community simply because at the top resources tend to pool and people are friendly and they will happily trivialize a tier or 4 for you by trading you the excess they have for basically nothing. The result for me has been a really really satisfying experience working through the tiers and learning about the server, I would recommend it to anyone. However, I am just at the point where I am finishing up my third faction in T10. I have never looked to speed through tiers, for instance in both orcs and gnolls I have added to my crew and thus stuck around doing extra... I haven't just tried to rush through the factions. In the process of finishing these three factions, I have killed 800 of the 1000 PB I need, I have found 120 essence pretty much exactly as many as I need (enough to mana neck my 3 necro and now have 100 essence ready to go when my warrior hits 79), however I have only ever seen 3 GSS. How many do I need? Well just to bring my whole group into the next half tier I need 45. Maybe I could just bring one group for now? For that I would need 15. Eventually I would want no less than 75.

My only point is that most resources in this tier are paced pretty well where right as I'm finishing up the factions, I'm also finishing up the other resources but I am basically nowhere near able to move to the next zone. I would be 1000% down to be able to move to the next tier but find I am not well enough geared and as such must farm, what sucks is the idea that I need to farm extremely rare drops from a tier I "finished" in order to get equipment that isn't even necessary to do the tier but rather just as a hard "to zone in you need this" check. I would strongly suggest putting something in place to make this progression more natural.

[Ginge]

As far as I'm aware, the drop rate of gss was a way to bottleneck because after t10 there wasn't any content so people didn't really have anything to do apart from farm t10 for gss...

I'm all for a bump in drop rate, always have been, always been told no chance..

Tank

[Ogru]

Yeah, I agree.  Because of the GSS hard stop for progression, I have barely played for months. I don’t particularly like T10 (that’s for another thread) and the thought of spending literally months farming it for enough GSS to move on is not appealing at all.

Why is UA the requirement to move on to Sleeper and VP? I can understand why it is such a low drop rate since UA was supposed to be super hard to get because it was/is the final armor (until T11?) and because there wasn’t anything else to do after it. But in my opinion UA shouldn’t be used as a progression check, it should only be some awesome armor you have to work you ass of to get. 

I am not sure what should be used to progress, probably some other quest that allows you to progress all characters at the same rate, rather than one at a time. I think that’s what bothers me the most is that for all other tiers, you are basically progressing everyone at a similar rate, then once you complete t10, it’s a hard stop to 1 character at a time.

In all honesty, until/unless something changes, I probably won’t play much if at all anymore.

[Ginge]

In all honesty, until/unless something changes, I probably won’t play much if at all anymore.

And that's the worst part about it, not the fact I don't get the loot I want(I've been on EZ a long time, I'm used to it), The fact that it is literally making decent people quit, and people that are coming back two years later are seeing it's still the same and they now need even more GSS if they want to see VP are just noping straight out again, we got told that the drop rate in VP would be better than SR, Why?! So we can all just trade away everything we have to those that are able to farm them in VP?... Just an absolute kick in the dick again for those in SR or those that have quit because it's so bad they just don't feel like wasting months to get nowhere.

Tank

[Sarthin]

I agree that the GSS drop rate should be improved in T10 now that we have more content. I feel it's an unnecessary time sink and will harm the future of the server more than it will do any good. I've seen people stop playing more than once due to this and also friends that decide to not continue on EZ/T10 due to GSS rarity.

[Otto]

I quit twice during the T10 farm, after finally completing it I dread making more characters just due to the faction farming required - It's numbingly boring

[Pubis]

I agree that the GSS drop rate should be improved in T10 now that we have more content. I feel it's an unnecessary time sink and will harm the future of the server more than it will do any good. I've seen people stop playing more than once due to this and also friends that decide to not continue on EZ/T10 due to GSS rarity.

I'm fast approaching this. In the next day or two I will be done with my third faction and all I'll have left blocking my progression is GSS. I need somewhere between 18 GSS (one of my three groups in ST) up to maybe 30 (one of my groups in VP... if I decide not to key my other two groups for ST). So far I've seen 3 in the time I've completed three factions, my slowest factioner gets 86 faction per turn in (750 kills, which is roughly 8 pulls of all the mobs of a faction) which means 20 turn ins to get to ally or 160ish factionwide pulls. I guess pulling all of one faction is slightly less kills than 1/3 of a zone pull and thus I am something like 300 zone pulls from being able to zone a group into sleepers or so? Let's not even consider that I think one of my GSS didn't even come from T10 but rather from halloween (is this possible? I don't know memory is faint).

My point is that I don't think this is a "let's bump up gss drops a little" problem. If progression will be gated behind them, the drop rate is like 10 fold off. I'm guessing many would not be happy with that level of change, so my thought is that the best thing would be to just remove UA requirements from progression. Let UA continue to be a really rare status symbol with stat benefits without slamming your newer and more casual players into a weird artificial wall. One of the things that has always kept me playing this server is that when I first enter a tier I often feel honestly overmatched and need to develop understanding and strats, forcing me to gear in order to overcome this is my favorite thing. Forcing me to check a box in order to slaughter stuff I suspect I can already handle is deflating.

[Miriya]

I can understand why a minimum requirement in UA is required.  I think it's to save you from embarrassment in the next level/tier lol.  Say the requirement was removed and you only have T10 gear/armor, you will not progress very far in the next zone Sleepers or VP due to lack of gear and/or DPS (especially VP)

I have 9 decently equipped toons (war, pally, cleric, bard, enchanter, zerker, ranger, monk, necro) and I think I will need to make an additional 3 toons minimum (thinking 2 rogues and an extra pally) just to, possibly, have enough DPS to progress further.  Damn, Enslaved dragon soul with random unresistable/uncurable debuffs.  Once it procs, i'll be lucky if I still survive the encounter.  What more as I progress thru VP where mobs are getting considerably tougher, when I'm not even halfway thru the zone (/cough Draca).

You can see it as a bottleneck, sure, but even if it were removed, you won't get very far.  I mean, at least you get to see a new zone 

[Raygan]

I can understand why a minimum requirement in UA is required.  I think it's to save you from embarrassment in the next level/tier lol.  Say the requirement was removed and you only have T10 gear/armor, you will not progress very far in the next zone Sleepers or VP due to lack of gear and/or DPS (especially VP)

I have 9 decently equipped toons (war, pally, cleric, bard, enchanter, zerker, ranger, monk, necro) and I think I will need to make an additional 3 toons minimum (thinking 2 rogues and an extra pally) just to, possibly, have enough DPS to progress further.  Damn, Enslaved dragon soul with random unresistable/uncurable debuffs.  Once it procs, i'll be lucky if I still survive the encounter.  What more as I progress thru VP where mobs are getting considerably tougher, when I'm not even halfway thru the zone (/cough Draca).

You can see it as a bottleneck, sure, but even if it were removed, you won't get very far.  I mean, at least you get to see a new zone  

Exactly! If you worked UCv4 on only dps...and have UCv3 on healers...you are going to have to go back and farm the UCv4's for the healers....at this point weapon dps means nothing because you are hitting for 60-90 but taking 500k+ and the mobs arer quadding on you...so you are talking HUGE hp swings...you will be spamming your clerics heal...of course I still watch tv and just turn my head and spam click "4" key to heal.....

[Raygan]

Just an idea but what about the possibility of adding a vendor in VP that you can trade GSS into for a GSoA...a 1=1 trade....just a thought.

[Draca]

I have made the decision to remove the UA requirement from Veeshan's Peak, Sleeper's Tomb will remain as it is.

There will be no adjustments in difficulty in VP, nor will any of the quests from Sleeper be made available anywhere but Sleeper.

I implemented a UA requirement for VP because I had to pick a gear level for which to tune too, and the difference between faction level gear and UA is substantial enough that tuning to faction sets would make it pretty trivial with UA. Without an Ultimate Armor requirement, someone coming in with faction gear may find it quite impossible and in turn, frustrating. Unfortunately, gear on EZ only makes a huge difference to the tank, so at a minimum a well geared tank should get you going.

As for other concerns about VP, it was initially quite a bit more difficult, and would require more attention than single button mashing every so often, unfortunately it means that random wipes are considerably more common, which can be frustrating, and more dynamic fights weren't that popular, especially when players didn't have the right class mix to make it work.  Everquest isn't a super dynamic game anyway, but with some lessons from VP, going to continue to work out more exciting ideas for T11.

[Dokplayer2]

i think that’s a good call. thanks!

[Otto]

I'm not so sure the issue is accessing VP, it's just poor drop rates as a whole for the "Key" items top-end players are seeking.

There is a combination of frustrations right now among the veteran playerbase (And likely some of the more advanced newer players)

• Tier10 takes absolutely FOREVER to complete, even with triple loot and zone pulls, and feels like an artificially gnarly triple-faction grind intended to be EZ's final zone - This is a soul-crush for folks without these perks, and very frustrating for those of us realizing we need more rogues to clear VP in a timely fashion.
• UCv4 farming sucks, it's not even fun at all, and the drop rates are so random that some folks have seen half dozen, while others have seen zero
• Halloween no longer allows zone pulls, which means those of us that missed that don't have the 20million+ surplus AA's that the guys who were able to ZP currently have, on many characters (Maybe all). This also affected the ability to refresh stock of ZP spears, triples, doubles, augs, and the awesome gear from the event
• New players can't easily find EZ, which means upcoming folks aren't gathering GSoA drops and selling to the end-game players for essences, etc.
• GSoA have now become the prime currency, as we need 52 for the earring (Required or you do no damage), and another 50 for the Legendary Ring of the Ages (Completely game changing, folks will view this as a tank requirement). They also drop less frequently than GSS, at least in my experience.

I'm probably missing more of this, but as a whole, the top-end of EZ is extremely stagnant. For what it's worth, I don't think removing the UA requirements from VP is necessarily a good idea, either. People will enter with faction armor, as you stated, and get completely wrecked - plus realize they don't have the DPS or survival to really perform well in the zone.

Most of the grumbling is due to lack of key drops that we need to have "FUN" here, which is the main point of playing the game. While a good RPG grind is rewarding, I feel things may be reaching a breaking point for many players here.

Hopefully this doesn't come off as too much of a bitch-fest, but it's a compilation of thoughts that are absolutely not exclusively my own, but a general feeling among everyone I talk with "Except maybe Sarthin".

So finally, I shouldn't just complain without also proposing an imperfect solution, right?

Well, we need more options / paths to obtain items that players don't want to sell (GSoA, AA crystals, GSS) - I outlined this in another thread but didn't really see many responses http://ezserver.online/forums/index.php?topic=6198.msg74201;topicseen#new

Hopefully these much-needed adjustments don't arrive too late!

[Raygan]

I think the player base, as a whole, appears to have chjanged...most of the "old guard" those players who have been on EZ for WELL over a decade...who have been building toons up for YEARS...now you have some newer-ish players who are playing a major game  of catch up....most people are not going to stick to a game for a decade...so maybe instead of poo-pooing it off (as I know I have done in the past) we bend an ear....but I don't think we need to make it easy on folks either...it took me YEARS to complete the RoA to 1k...heck I remember when it was only RoA 100!

[Otto]

...heck I remember when it was only RoA 100!

Same, but it was RoA50 max =)

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