EZ Server

---

T10 Thoughts/Musings

Hello ladies/gents/trolls,

It's Hate again. Just dropping in a new thread to encourage some dialogue and to prove that I've not expired. I am looking for general conversation, dialogue, discussion, etc about what YOU want to see in tier 10. I'm not looking so much at "I want trolls! SO MANY TROLLS!", but more of what you liked/hated about previous tiers or things that you would like to see.

Quick Ground Rules:

• DO NOT ATTACK OR START A PISSING MATCH. (You are free to disagree with another, but flaming/pissing/bickering for the sake of being argumentative will get your posts deleted)
• Do not ask for teasers as Love and I will be tight-lipped.

Outside of that, please let the posts fly!


-Hate

I would like to see armor that doesn't have so many combinations to make ie- t9. I would prefer a mold of some sort ie chest mold, arm mold, leg mold etc. Then maybe 2 or 3 other things to add to the combine. If multiple mini bosses maybe an orb or component from them with a random zone drop for that piece.

More of a tiered system of bosses (Like T6) where they get harder as you go up the chain.

If a tiered system is in place maybe kill boss 1 to get boss 2 to get boss 3. No skipping right to the end. I really like chain events.

Random zone drops of SLS (have to try).

Naked wood elves.

I am a big fan of chain bosses as well, however T7, running for 10mins to get bosses at different corners of the map is a pain in the royal asses of all.

I am also a big fan of the mechanics of T5, however, I am not a fan of spending 2 weeks to try to get the last 4 bosses to spawn

I like the idea of having to turn in an item to get a boss to spawn, ie: T1-4, what I am not a fan of is farming a zone that has no value to get these turn in items. A tier lvl zone for the turn in items is desirable though.

Xp greater than all the other tiers, as well as a greater chance for the aa crystals, gsoa's, SLS's and plat. If you are in the top tier you should be rewarded for such.

Big fan of a last boss, or last few bosses that require more than 1 person to complete, at least at the first.

Big fan of not being able to sell the tier, ie: Twhatever armor for sell pst. Needs to be a farming type armor so that you cant just come in and loot your armor and leave.

UWXII item that is bound to T10, needed to complete the quest for that UW. a quest item within the zone that cant be just come in and loot the item. an item that needs to be "built".

just a few thoughts, basically T10, imo, should be earned, not sold on the market.

I really like this --- a Quarm or Kerafyrm type...

Though thinking about it - I can't think of a way to do this without it having a huge amount of drawbacks... i.e. flagging the OTHER 15 members of your crew. Also the boss would either be:
a) too hard in the first place
b) trivialized once you get geared people

I like the idea in principle though, plus I remember Hate saying a bit about his vision for EZ a while back in posts of "OH S&#^, A DRAGON!!" instead of a grind of watching their health go down with zero risk. I can't remember the context of when he said it.

---

^ On that note - my favorite memories on EZ were NOT being able to kill Dragon Slave in PoTime... and NOT being able to kill Kronos (back when there was only one REAL Kronos, and 2 fake ones )... I haven't not been able to kill a boss upon breaking in since then... White was easy, MCP was easy, OMM was easy, Loping Plains is easy except Pride... which just Drakes himself, Vulak is easy, Hill Giant is a joke (although Black Priest is hard)

Things I liked about previous tiers :

1.  Outdoors vs dungeons so I don't have toons sticking on corners.
2.  Zones that allow summon vs ToFS (I get why) can't summon.
3.  Linear progression vs random drops.  I actually liked the multiple items required to get upgrades so I didn't have to deal with 30 Ranger/Mage/Bst items per day.
  --  I don't know if it's wise or feasible, but would like to see equal combine requirements for all classes.  In T8 my mage was the first complete set, but was the last in T9. due to short drops on Silk...  or more Obilteration mobs vs Spiders.
4.  Surprise spawns.  Superior wisp in T9 was peachy.


Things I didn't like :

1.  Water.  More specifically, rooted mobs in water.
2.  Not knowing ahead of time (or very early) what combines were required for Epics and armor.  i.e... if faction is required, a zone specific vendor/NPC with the information that actually tells you what the goals and requirements are.
3.  Risk out of balance with reward.  Trash mobs so hard that first timers couldn't survive the encounter.
4.  Narrow-specific-scripts requirements in order to spawn bosses.
5.  Water.
6.  This probably should have been my number one... Tasks in another zone required to complete the new tier.  Specifically, HoH tokens required for T3/T4 and resist stones from ToFS required to compete in Tiered zone.

One last thing... if could suggest it... please don't include T10 essence in the Epic (or UC 4) requirements.  If you do, please increase the drop rate beyond 2 - 3 per clearing.

As I've stated before, I'd like to see use made of later zones. Unsure whether or not you already have the zone picked. I'm hoping for places, if its doable, like:

Sepulcher of Order (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=815)
Chapterhouse of the Fallen (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=874) (Befallen revisited)
Breeding Grounds (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=871) (Dragon Necropolis 2.0)
Chelsith Reborn (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=914) (THe Grey on Crack)

Just some ideas. I think I'd prefer an indoor zone to an outdoor, overall, but any would do. And agreed, I like the idea of dungeon crawls....but dont make it too rigid. Just set it up so that down the road you cant pull the whole zone and instagib with a group of 1 war, 1 druid and 4 zerkers :P

If the above zones dont work, maybe:

Frostcrypt, Throne of the Shade King (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=443)
Valdeholm (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=439)
Meldrath's Majestic Mansion (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=535) (nice sized zone)
Crystallos, Lair of the Awakened (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=540)

As for the idea of armor being just a mold dropped....I dont like that idea. As much of a pain in the ass as it can be, the way armor is done in T9 is excellent. Its perfect. Its a pain in the ass, and takes time and effort....as it should. And, as Rent stated, you cant just hand someone an SLS and loot a rotting armor piece. You need to FARM.

Wanna make something easy? Fine. Make spells easier to get....perhaps something like a rune drop and use it to buy the spell from a merch (kind of a modified OOW method) or something similar. Also perhaps add clickies for the melee, as we had in T4. With the new client clickies are definitely viable again for any and all. But something for the melee minded would be cool!

Please, PLEASE do not make armor or epics easy. But....please DO add an alternative to a UC upgrade....just as difficult as what you might find in the T10 main zone, if you decide to add UC4, but a second place that allows you some variety. The thing that made T6 and 8 so gawd awful monotonous was the fact that you HAD to stay in and clear scores if not hundreds of times to UC even 1 group. If its doable eventually adding a second option, even if its HARDER, would help a ton.

I like the amount of mobs that cast, and having to work up resists to mitigate that. Maybe jump up the resist check for T10. As it stands most T9 tanks are 4K or better on resists, and the boxes all 3Kish. Maybe its time to force people to start making resist XXs.

Moar UW augs!! And something other than the dailies to get them....unless we KNOW all the issues with those are behind us.


^This!! As much as I hate to say it, maybe T10 essences need to be no drop.

Just some ideas that have popped into what passes for a brain for me. I'll post more as my caffeine levels approach normal.

I would totally disagree with the resist checks. It's bad enough im getting feared in t9 gear and frankly there is not enough time in the day to rank up to XX unless those also are dropped in the zone. Then i could understand. But enough is enough w/the resist checks. If you get up to 4k I would say that should be good enough for the resists.

Oh, I love Rents comment about not selling the zone.  T9 has that mechanic, but I still see it happening.  The only way around it that I can conceive of is to continue with faction requirements and eliminate the faction items and positive faction hits for the toons flopped at zone in.

There needs to be another "gut check". We have them all the way through progression, and its time for another. Every few tiers there's something about a zone that weeds out the guy who farmed 200 SLS and is using them to buy his way to the top tier. We havent really had one since T5, and T10 is a great spot for another, IMO....and resists are a great way to do that.

IMO if you want to play in "the big boy zone" you need to do your work.....more than just getting through collecting armor drops and doing an epic, sometimes. The increased resist checks will force people to prioritize aug slots, perhaps force them to replace some of the LP hp augs with resists.....perhaps force them to get UC upgraded to 3, or UW to 10 before they tackle the zone.

My bottom line: we need to slow shit down on EZ....not install 20 item or less lanes. People are hitting max gear too fast, too easily, and it breeds ennui. Making new zones too easy is a great way to make a game boring quickly.

ESPECIALLY at the top ranks. I'd like to see T10 take even the most die hard player months of hard work to conquer, rather than the days or weeks we're seeing now.

I am on the verge of finishing T8, so I still have T9 to go before I even think of T10.  

But here's my thoughts on the previous tiers.  

T6 is by far the way I like the gear/weapons/UC/everything else.  The more you do it, the better your group gets.  It used to take me 2.5+ hours to clear it but now I can mow through that place in 35-40 minutes.  The money is good.  

I loath T8's class specific armor drops.  I am on my 35th to 40th clear and I still have 3 toons that need 3 or more pieces and I am only about 1/3rd through my first UC3.  I almost want to throw my keyboard every time I kill a named and it drops Wizzy or Necro gear, which happens ALOT.   I don't mind the UC collection aspect of this zone, it is going to take some time but will definitely be worth it.  The randomness of the scales is a little lop sided.  I usually get 3x green scales to 2x red scales and I am lucky to get a single silver scale per run.  

T5 and T7 all the running around to gather mobs suck.  In T7 I have to have a toon parked on one side of the zone with the coth clicky, to try an eliminate some of the running around while I farm the other side of the zone.  In T5, the corals are the bane of my existence.  It wouldn't be so bad, if they were able to be mobile.  Even when you are beginning in that zone, if you were able to pull 2 or 3 up out of the water, it would make a world of difference.  The fact that the game doesn't allow the under water movement to work properly, if anyone other than your tank is even a pixel closer it will cause the toon to get aggro and loosing a toon or two when breaking in the zone can cause wipes.  

Tier 3 and 4 sharing the same HOH tokens is kind of a pain.  I would rather not see anything like that again.  LoL

Agree

I would also like to see the leaf series extended in T10, make the leafXX available for combines, basically just continue the line to extend to 20 instead of 10

I would like to see the SoT extended in T10 as well, a quest type thing that would net a considerable upgraded SoT, not so much one that starts only if you have SoTX, but one that starts off in T10

Essences no drop in T10 should be a go, farm them yourself, no selling, no nothing, get in there and grind it out for your own. I think this is an excellent idea for T10

MULTIPLE skins for each class, so many so that everyone doesn't end up looking like a cookie cut of each other's crew. and really cool looking ones. Tired of seeing everyone with the same damn weapons for each class.

I would also like to see T10 be a 3 or 4 zone tier, not just one zone done, boom. a variety of scenery. a dungeon component, an outdoor component. Something to please both crowds here. What has been bad about all the other tiers is you go to one zone and stay there grinding until your eyes bleed and you cant take it no more. What would be really cool is a T10 zone for epics, a T10 zone for armor and a T10 zone for your off slot items. What are you doing? T10! Which T10? gonna do armor today for my crew, so T10b (whatever). Next day or so do epics, mix it up.

Here's a crazy thought - how to make the final boss REALLY hard... but eliminate the problem of having to get a REALLY hard and time consuming epic 16 times...

Make it some kind of semi-required item to get for, say, your warrior - (so that yout you only have to get it one time)

I.e. the boss is near unkillable without this item on your warrior... and the item is hard to get (old-school epic 1.0 kind of quest) but makes your warrior much more able to kill the super-mega boss... tho he would still be hard.

I don't know if that would be in the form of bane damage, bane mitigation, flat out damage/mitigation... idk

These are extremely flawed thoughts, just throwing them out there. I just like the idea of an extremely hard T10 final boss... but that comes with a lot of baggage

+++ I like

Agree +2

The thing I hate most is zones that repop.  When breaking into T5/T7 I pretty much had to block out a 4 hour chunk of time so i could complete it.  Those are by far my least favorite zones.   Yes there is plenty of time to clear them, even for a new gear appropriate person breaking in.... but you have to do it all at once.  Some of us multitask (play at work /cough), have kids, family obligations, etc that make it hard to block out large chunks of time to complete zones like those.

I know that some people like that mechanic as a "dps check" or see it as a challenge, however I'd rather see hard dps checks on the bossess... ie you kill it 30 seconds after engaging, or it WTFsplodes you with a 20m hp AoE for example.  I want the zone to be long and hard (yes... yes it is what she said), but I want to be able to work on it over multiple play sessions if needed also.  

The way the zone progression works obviously makes a big difference too, ie T9 has fast repops but it doesn't matter because your basically farming drops from trash and spawning named with body counts.  

I like outdoor zones in general due to easier boxing and not having to deal with tight corners, steps, etc...  unless you want to make a Call of the Whole Frigg'n Raid clicky :P

I agree with others that the plat and other drops should be adjusted for difficulty.  It is way faster to faceroll lower tiers for xp/unicorn poop/GSoA/etc.  I will say T9 is good plat return rate though.

I like this idea as well, that one item, say an Aug for each class, you go up for your boss without those its gonna be near impossible if not impossible. But, with the Aug for each class you chip away at the armor of the boss. A spell for the enchanter that does xyz, an aug for the warrior that makes him able to negate the harsh beating, a weapon for your rogue that allows him to bypass the defenses, a tap aug for your SK that allows you to drain his mana, go along these lines.

and those items come from combines in the zone(s). so its not just kill x and get x aug/weapon/spell and done.

lets be clear, T10 needs to take months to complete. No joke, needs to take some serious effort to overcome. however, not so much as you cant kill jack when you walk into the zone, but to progress through to T11 it will take some serious, dirty grinding. Not trickery, no gimmicky spawning tactics like T9 used to be or how T5 is, but good combines that build on other combines that lead to xyz item needed to get your gear.

No fricking water, seriously, no water.

No running 5 mins to grab a boss and run back another 5mins like T7

No I have killed this T8 named 39 times with no fricking pally arms dropping

No well, I have 79 green scales but only 15 red scales after 2 weeks of farming

+1

And +10 to what Rent said.

I would like to see this as well, and maybe even make them sub tiers of t10... say something along the lines of you cant get into the next part of T10 with out a certain faction? or maybe even a certain item turn in like LDoNs where at first you have to get the stone to move down to the next level?

I agree with you to a degree. I believe you can achieve this goal w/out the resists though. There are multiple ways to make gut checks; slow down drop rate, rare drops, harder bosses, bane dmg, faction checks etc. Resists shouldn't be the end all be all. And since Im quoting you, no zone should be based around an UW.


I love that.

Building on "old school epic 1.0" thought... what are the players' thoughts on incorporating drops in other zones into quests for T10? ... would essentially be a new "CG/FG/EoN" type requirement... Think that might be cool... a necessary tour through other Norrathian zones... thoughts?

Catching up on the reading here. To expand on Rent's idea, you could incorporate the mini dungeons into the corresponding zone.  Instances that you can choose once a day in that zone for a mini side dungeon that has a higher drop rate of what you choose. IE: What focus would you like to choose for your task [armor], [weapons], [SLS], [Essences], [Epics] or [Mixed]. Then you could make the main zone or zones harder to get drops randomly.

Oh ya.. More use of the TASK system.

Only if that quest would unlock greater benefits where you could receive discounted items such as the ores, weapon skins, clickys etc. I would be game. Could even make it so you have to get that quest done and revamp the weapon strikes to help w/the ROF2 client not letting you double dip your augs.

If not you would have a hard time selling because it sorta reminds me of t3/t4 tokens which we all know sucks.

FWIW - I would dislike any "daily" anything incorporated into T10, not a fan of lockouts in general (though they serve a purpose in mid/lower tiers for fasttracking tiers... this is certainly not necessary in the higher tiers)

Was only throwing some ideas out there to make the zone longer. Would be optional but help to catch up boxes who might be missing certain items you would want that aren't dropping.

that is cool that you would have sub T10 zones to complete before you tackle the main T10 zone(s)

(Expletus' Idea)
I don't like lockouts, but I like the idea of an LDoN from what you're saying (circa oldschool EQ Live, not current) mission type expedition without lockout.

As per my survey, I know many of you are not familiar with Shards of Dalaya...but what they do to limit overuse of these dungeons is they make "Maps" which are extremely rare items (look like glass bottles) that are one charge expendable, with the effect of "spawning" an expedition. They range in difficulty from "Very Easy Map" to "Very Difficult Map" (which would, of course, spawn an expedition scaled to the difficulty level). They can be fished... and not sure how else they could be found, but other ways (rare boss drops I think???). Maybe roughly the rarity of rainbow crystals (in terms of EZ rarities)

If the expeditions were "spawned" based on something like this rather than daily, I would be down. Just my thoughts.

Backflagging some alts lately i have found.
1. T7 is my fav zone minus the bosses spawning all over. Bosses don't really get much harder through the chain.
2. T6 is nice for the armor drops and is relatively tough when breaking in.
3. T5 is a real cool zone minus the water and rooted mobs.

What would I like to see?

1. Some are going to flame me for this, but the WoW armor system was cool for the different grades of armor that could drop(when super rare stuff wasn't common). Common, rare and super rare. Was always cool to find a super rare item. Was a bit of progression inside the progression. And the guys that put in the time will end up with the good stuff. Make it a token that needs faction and you remove the money progression.
2. A main boss that requires some tactics. Make him easily spawnable but real hard.
3. As a casual player something I can work on, spend 45 here 45 there hour here hour there. Not asking to make it any easier, but like someone else said lots cant dedicate 4 hours to do a certain task.  Like T9 i like the zone but its real hard to dedicate enough time to get to any bosses. If the counters for T9 would stay active for like 3-4 days then awesome!
4. Tasks/Quests. Gives purpose to mindnumbing farming at times. This could be used in conjunction with #1 for common armor drops to smooth zone break in.

First problem I see with some of these ideas..

How do you balance a zone for a 6boxer AND a 18boxer?

it eliminates DPS as a check...

Someone said Ultra rare item drops with flashy skins ....like that idea... (T8 caster main hand..t7 ranged items)

Quests across many zones sounds awesome... does t10 even have to be a zone? how about a collection quest..spawning rare bosses with turn-ins from rare bosses.... not the zerg the zone for loot...but have people do old school quests and then after 3 or 4 quests combine the rewards for a token that spawns a ubber boss in a tier 10 turn in zone...almost like POair.   

You could have crafting...questing...rare mobs..trigger mobs...all kinds of stuff...across dozens of zones...

some...maybe most..of you will hate this.... would be better IMHO to ever quest then ever grind....

This thread is exploding. I'm really glad to see it. :-)


-Hate

What I would love to see from T10 is some actual real competition between players and guilds.

You want T10 to be longer and more difficult to farm? No instances for the first 6 months. Real competition for boss spawns. Personally I'm tired of sitting in my own instances every single tier; the content all blends together without any real interaction.

I really have to disagree here, because this would pretty much assure that the lower time to play crowd isn't going anywhere, maybe ever.


I like the idea of armor and then rare armor, and then super rare items, but I don't think this would be good for our visable armor, but it would be a great idea for our off slot items as well as the weapons/range items/power source/ammo slots

lastly I have to say im not a fan of expeditions, at all. Hate, Akka, and many others have spent well over 300+ hours this month trying to just get the 2 mini things to work. Can we just go back to real zones. Lock out periods are just dumb imo. Real zones, real instances, no tom foolery with this please.

These are in place to SPECIFICALLY address those without hours to dump each week. They will not hand them the progression, but allow incremental gains until he/she can dump time into the zone. The time spent by Akkadius has been rewriting the expedition system has been to make it absurdly efficient and to fix a lot of the stability issues too. The system he wrote and pretty much re-wrote allows Love and I to VERY quickly assemble an instance. The T5 mini was done in 1 afternoon. These things are neat and useful, but not intended as the content "main course" but more of a content "snack" or "appetizer". :-)


-Hate

I loved t8!  I hate wide open zones like t5 and t9.....I think something in a zone like Kael would be cool...or something in a new zone from UF that IS NOT WIDE OPEN....having to travel all over the map 12 dozen times is a pita.

oh, one other thing, a LOT of testing done before release :)

possibly off server testing, like akka's server

just to get everything really smooth before a big release party!

A real quick thought regarding T10, since Hunter removed rampage and AE's were made resistable, the ONLY thing that has really mattered in terms of progression has been focusing all gear upgrades into a single character...the main tank.  You used to have to keep your alts geared ALONG with your tank if you had any hope of reasonably getting through relevant content, relevant content meaning content you were currently geared for.  Now all people have to do is farm sls, buy credits or w/e currency is en vogue and they buy gear upgrades 3 tiers ahead of their alts, since all that matters is keeping the tank alive long enough to kill the mobs.  I think T10 needs to bring back the disparity between the people that gear appropriately and people that skip tiered content. 

There have been a lot of suggestions already that I both agree with and disagree with, and I really hope to be able to devote enough time to offer more fleshed out thoughts regarding the actual content.  But first and foremost I think T10 needs to be T10, not T9+1...make it a challenge that requires T10 worthy gear to be able to do it.  I also think it's about time to give up tuning shit around people not wielding UW's, honestly they aren't necessary until at least T8 for even casuals to do and I don't know of anyone past T7 that doesn't already have a UW.  Balance T10 early parts around having at least a UW on the warrior and balance T10 harder parts on having multiple UW wielders.

Not sure my opinion counts here yet since t9 isnt farm status, but heres my two cents.  The not t7ish omgwtfbbq huge zone with random boss spawns is a good idea.  T6 was much better overall, just starts to suck a bit with uc2 grinding but it covers your necessities.  Having a hard t10 will be amazing...not just mindless slaughter of easy mobs for your drops then rinse/wash/repeat.  Dont know if scripted fights are even an option or how that would be handled since everyone is boxing anyways.   The token system for hoh/poa wasnt horrible...atleast back when it was end game...sure it could get repetitive but you had the choice of farming tokens and uc1s or trying for armor/4.0 books.  Maybe this system could be revised to multiple steps to spawn certain bosses and have acc slot stuff easier to attain, perhaps with the varied rarity that ends up being time put in is relative to reward...maybe have accessories drop a base version, and then have tasks using zone common items that are also used for other things to upgrade them to a better version.  Then it would be a choice as to what you work on.

Like the idea for mini events/dungeons for some of the content...wont let you easy mode it, but maybe make an alternate route for obtaining more items/components you need a crap ton of.

My only concern is going to be ever getting to sde t10 myself as the difficulty will probably be scaled to be hard for the people sitting around for god knows how long farming 6+ uwxi's  rank whatever earrings and max soa/roa etc.  If youre not already in t9 sounds like youre looking at a year or more to complete t10.  However long to get to t9...put it on farm status, finish up uc3's and a butt load of uwxi's/earrings/etc before you can even peek inside t10 without being instagibbed.  But i suppose we'll see what happens.

That was another one of those things that Blizzard <ahem> "borrowed" from another game...but yes, this can be a lot of fun. We saw a smidge of that in the tiers with the new weapons and the rares....but more would be cool.

Not sure what you mean Rent. Limiting instancing doesn't really have anything to do with lower play time. Someone with limited time to play can still beat you to a boss spawn during their play time.

Don't you ever feel like, even as the content changes from tier to tier, that's it's becoming the same grind every time? Everybody heads to their private instance. Someone figures out how to get all the loot, the information disperses, everybody waits for the next tier.

I kinda like the idea of having mini events/key items ( 2-4 items or armor to progress to next hop.

Think back to the original POSky zone where you had to hop islands.

This way its gona take a while to get to the epic 10 boss as you have to drag your crew each stage.

Or just turn VT into T10 lol

This is a really cool idea!  I am reading some really good thoughts here!

As someone who has played P99 long enough to get to the raid scene, I STRONGLY disagree with removing instances... 90% of why p99 is a bad game is because of lack of instances, IMO... instances good... fighting over rare spawns bad

One word... "poopsock"

---

HOWEVER, some sort of incentive to encourage cooperation across members of EZ would be neat... not sure how that would look, but forcing boss fights to be public is not the solution, IMO

I was thinking about ways to incentivise cooperation from other players, and i thought about T5... I remember some fun times when we had 70 players (4-5 actual people) in one instance of T5 killing crap... it was good because EVERYONE was getting credit for the kills, and would shout rots if they didn't need them.

Some sort of "flag" system that could flag EVERYONE in a zone/raid at once (in place of a "collect this and that" T9ish quest) would encourage cooperation

[/b]

I strongly disagree with this statement. You are going to pigeon hole people into getting multiple UW. In my opinion, UW needs to stop at some point. Probably wrong thread, actually I know it is, but there is no reason to balance content on UW's... unless you make T10 have 2 versions, hardmode with greater drops and regular with normal drop rate.

Tell me how many people you see doing relevant content without UW please, and I'll concede that UW shouldn't be a required item for what's supposed to be the end game.  You'd have a leg to stand on if people were doing T7+ content without a UW, but even the people who had T7 completed before UW were even implemented have UW's.  T10 is supposed to be END GAME, as in culmination of enough time put in and resources burned through to be able to expect to consume the content.  I see no reason why it shouldn't be balanced around UW, SoA, RoA etc since everyone has the ability to farm that stuff as they go...it's not like you're asking someone to go back and refarm something they haven't already been working on.

Again, this tier should require more than pooling resources into a single character and letting the support characters gimp by.

t10 is end game. T9 is end game. T8 is end game. Guess what, next year T11 is going to be end game and 12 after that. So it will never end which is why I think the UW chain needs to stop at some point. The more powerful it gets the more people are going to argue that content is not hard enough which then pigeon holes everyone on the server to get an UW because they can't do content without it. That is what we need to avoid. I got no issues with SoA, etc

I have to agree with Dim on this one. T10 should be a put up or shut up tier. Separate the "players" from the "buyers"

and hey, there is nothing wrong with being a "buyer". I have done it, ive rode coat tails too. But on the other hand I have put in the farming/grinding time. If players like me can do this, then everyone else can too.

Balance the content around all available content questing/gear/items/grinds/farms


Blarr, I know what you are saying here brother. I really do. However, I really do not feel that the low play time people are going to be able to reap the rewards from a system like this. NOW, with that said, maybe one of the sub T10 zones could be a contested zone. A contested, public only zone for rare/nice/uber off slot items as a contrast to the private off slot zone (I am still clinging to that separate zone thing) so that there is some friendly/not friendly competition. And label the damn zone "enter at your own risk", anything goes, no bitching about it.

I like the idea of ppl having to work together to accomplish a goal rather than cut each other's throats

There is an endless amount of content that exists on the server for people who don't want to farm UW's to consume, T10 should be tuned around requiring a massive amount of resources to survive.  And when T11 comes out, that can easily be carried forward.  The only way that T10 should be balanced around not having UW is if they are either outlawed from the zone(s) similar to the PVP zone coding or completely removing UW from the game...if UW is here to stay then it should either be allowed in T10 and T10 appropriately tuned around them or they should just be disallowed from being used in that content.

Just because the zone exists and the content is being consumed by others doesn't mean that everyone should be able to do it without jumping over the same hurdles that everyone else had to.

Im not trying to start a pissing match but this game should be enjoyed by all players regardless of how much time is invested. UW is OPTIONAL and YES if a zone exists it should be enjoyed regardless that you jumped a 50 story building for the other guy took a cab around it.

Edit: There are other ways to keep people from buying equipment and I think those options need to be explored. I don't think content needs a full blown UW adjustment, but if a happy medium was found where someone who doesn't have the max UW on multiple toons can do it, I'd be fine. A full zone requiring UW is just wrong. Sorry just my opinion and I do understand what you are saying.

For instance. You could make the armor in a section of a zone that is unlocked by killing boss A. That will give you access to that zone requiring a key flag. Hell even making an entry quest sort of like Rent was saying about a FG/CG which would require you to kill something from previous zones, hit a combine and bang got your entry key. Then your in, Kill boss A opens section A. Can't goto section Z w/out having flags for previous sections which would making the multiple zones come into play. So no buying armor, have to put the time into the zone.

kinda like the journey to Plane of Time.....my favorite zone/quest/progression, truly it was a blast, and I do miss that kind of stepping stone type of play within a tier

This isn't a pissing match, it's a discussion of differing viewpoints.  I'm not trying to thump my chest and demand that you fall in line with my way of thinking, but I'm consistent in my logic and I'm trying to make the suggestions I've made completely clear.  To that end, I'll respond this this quote.

This game CAN be enjoyed by all players REGARDLESS of how much time is invested.  There are 9 custom tiers of content, none of which are tuned around ANY toons having a UW.  9 tiers to toil away in getting flags, getting epic upgrades, working on strikes, working on aa's and their related gear pieces, accruing plat for crafting, killing trash mobs for drops and bosses for gear...I'd say that regardless of how casual or hardcore you are, it's very easy to log on and find something to do.  

UW is OPTIONAL, I completely agree.  You know what else is OPTIONAL?  Strikes are OPTIONAL, RoA is OPTIONAL, UC and the subsequent variants of UC are OPTIONAL, SoA is OPTIONAL, spells and song upgrades are OPTIONAL...all of the OPTIONAL upgrades become somewhat required upgrades at some point.  Why would UW be an exception?  And yet it would be difficult to argue that any of the OPTIONAL upgrades outside of the UW trivialize content as much as UW itself does.  UW is supposed to be a pain in the ass to attain, it's supposed to be something you work on when you have finished everything else...much in the same way the next tier of custom content is supposed to be what you do after you've nothing else to attain in your current tier.  

You are suggesting that the end game, highest custom tier of content should be accessible by everyone and I simply don't agree.  Call it elitist or whatever you want, but end game zones are supposed to be END GAME and as such need to be tuned around max gear at some point.  The level of end game gear required is debatable to some extent, but arbitrarily saying that someone is entitled to enjoy the end game zone simply because they choose to log on and play is a bit of a stretch.

Personally I say phase the darn things out.

I agree with Expletus to a point...

Possibly T10 should operate under the assumption that a crew has *ONE* high level UW... but forcing multiple UW's is (IMO) crazy...

Plus that forces the timesink into GRINDING Ultimate weapons, instead of "grinding" T10.

The thought of multiple UW's makes me shudder... Even for high end, that seems unnecessary

This post is dedicated to Rymo

I see where you're coming from Dim, but T10 should be not only accessible, but ultimately winnable for anyone who logs on, pays their dues in the grind of flagging through T9 for T10.  Not just the multiple UW11 crowd.  Everyone who completes T9 should have that opportunity.

I see what you're saying however at what point do you deserve to be there? When you are maxed everything? What happens when T11 comes out? Should T10 be tuned down? I don't think you should be able to log in and just pick a tier to go into. I think since this is T10, we need a roadblock of sorts, similar to what T5 is. Months to beat and the question is how? How do you achieve that w/out making mobs hit for 1 million with 100 kajillion billion HP's ? I don't think tuning the mobs to a group of UW's is the answer. I think you could get away with tuning for 1 UW warrior and adjust the steps needed to win that zone. It makes sense, every 5 tiers you get essentially a Hell level. Gut check if you will.

Completely agree with all Expletus just said

I'm super down with T10 being a "gutcheck"... just think the gutcheck should come from some place other than SOLELY dps check or damage check

Which isn't to say the bosses shouldn't hit hard - because they should

I keep coming back to epic 1.0s in original EQ... MEGA hard quests (granted they were very flawed)... but didn't rely solely on killing things with lots of hps or lots of damage... only a few steps were mega super bosses.

^ But at the same time avoiding repetitive mario style "collect the coins" to make everything... (UWs, UC1, 2, 3, T9  :o)

/ramble off

And what dues would be sufficient?  I agree everyone should be required to pay their dues to be able to progress there, I also am realistic enough to know that anyone who's in T7+ already has a UW in their arsenal.  Perhaps I was misleading when I said multiple UW characters should be required to do the content in T10, I didn't mean they all had to be the same person's toons they are playing...it's quite easy to raid up with other people who have a UW toon or 2.  I simply don't think a single group of characters with a single UW on their warrior should be making much headway in T10, since that's basically every person T7+ has at least one UW in their arsenal and you aren't raising the bar of requirements and you are raising the rewards considerably.

Thought this might be useful to reference... full thread here (http://ezserver.online/forums/index.php?topic=4549.0)

(http://ezserverwiki.com/images/2/26/Epic.png)

(http://ezserverwiki.com/images/c/c7/UW.png)

I'll run queries against DB tonight and post the numbers of UWs and their ranks (full breakdown).


-Hate

Chunka and Blarr hit this on point

The current trend is purchasing your way to end game (and it being easy enough that any can do)

T10
Needs to be in a sense a return to the gut checks and randomness that is EZ.

It needs to be similar to T5 (no water though), and by similar I mean task driven present for the kills and awarded the gear through the task system (this ends all the players gearing 1 toon 3-5 tiers above everything else in their party or their guild.

All future Tier Essences = no drop

It has to be re-re hard, hard doesn't have to mean long winded but has to be challenging some examples (will edit later)
- Massive debuffs
- NPCs that cast some form of Muting spell
- Places where all buffs are stripped
- NPC casting some sorta zone teleportations to the players or raids
- Zone repop (from Boss)
- Some type of "Help me mode" (Boss calls every mob within XXXX distance)
- Factions where if you choose to kill this, IT will take a long time to repair and you will have to repair it cause you need something that they give too.
- Task driven for any Boss Kills and Loot awards (gotta participate to get geared)
- Make it so 1 player cannot solo(self group or self raid) there i.e. events happening that that player cannot manage his/her toons to be successful.
- Make it so the free waypoint click does not work for T10 for the 1st 6 months ( there is instances but will cost ya like the millions I spent on T6 instancing)
- Triggers and massive wave fights
- Aggro triggers on boss fights ( some form of meh, F your DPS.. or F your healers..) if Im a mob and sitting there fighting a raid force and this warrior isn't going down.. cause I see this dumpy ass dwarf cleric healing him.. I'm going to put 2 and 2 together and smash that dwarf.
- HP/Resists/DPS/AC/Healing gut checks or some variety of them from Boss to Boss.
- No Double Loot in this zone 1st 6 months
- No safe area ( zone out if you want to afk, this will prevent a lot of the leeching )



I a lot of players will be like "I don't have the time to do all that" ... or "what about the guys that don't have much time to play (low game time).

Shrug no love here.  Hunter's words mean a lot still to me... not everyone will be end game but possibly can get there through time and help.

Not everyone should instantly be maxed gear overnight just cause that said tier was released yesterday. If you can't invest a lot of time, the enjoy all the stuff leading up to it and slowly get through it. This instant reward stuff has gotta stop sooner or later.


Then as always tweak it 6-8 months later to make it a little more accessible to others (just like Hunter did).


Again, Blarr and Chunka hit all high points. There has been Plenty of time to grind your goon squad out and get UC/SoA/and name your trinket here. It needs to aligned with needing XX to kill XX.. rather that be HPs/Resists/DPS/Healing ...

I don't really see this as an issue... there's a limit to how much you can "purchase" your way to end game, and there are stops on this. IMO this isn't an issue, even though I see several players reference it. Yeah it happens... a little... but I don't see the problem.


All the humility of the past posts went out the door with this one... Seeing a lack of "IMO"s in this post.

It doesn't NEED to be like T5 (though I do like T5 and that's one way to do it), but that's one of many ways that would work

Agree :)

Some great ideas... Love it

Sure there should be a difference between a guy with 6 UW11's and a person with UW8... but we shouldn't just say "F&#* YOU" to the guy with UW8... since he only put in 60 played days into his character instead of 120...

As a person that has UC3, UW10 (closeish to 11), SoA max, UC2x5 (sure that's not impressive by many standards, but it's all relative... that stuff takes FOREVER to grind... I'd like for T10 to be hard by its own merit, not that you have to spend another 10 play days grinding various items and THEN you can get to T10... it's a balance... which isn't to say that you should be able to minimally poke through T9 then conquer T10 in a day... i think it should be hard as Hell... but I think you're overdoing it

XOXO
- Darpey

I really like some of the ideas bouncing around.  When we have these discussions it really boils down to play time.  EZ has always been x time = x rewards.  What we always see is that people who can only play 4 to 6 hours a day versus those playing 16 or more a day.

In 2013 when I returned, I did at first feel sort of overwhelmed at the projected hours needed to be fully equipped. However, 10 months later I had 17 toons t10 flagged with all the goodies to go with it.  Now, as some read that statement they will say no way in hell, others will say yea it can be done.  I played 6 days a week and 14+ hours a day.  So keep that in mind guys because we all don't have the same play hours per day. Also, no mmo that I know of has ever said, lets make this easier for those that cant play a lot of hours.  Anyway, just wanted you all to remember that its all time versus rewards.

With that said I do agree with Blurr, Chunka and Fugitive.  Cant wait for t10 thou  ;D
Off to finish my last 4 uw's in my main group  ;D

I like a lot of fugitives ideas but the casual player needs some love too. Like I said not looking for easy, just looking for the opportunity to do what the end gamers can do in a longer time period. Making T10 and expecting someone to commit to 4+ hours to do anything beyond gain xp is only catering to a small group.

I disagree with making it so one person and their box squad can't do it. Some of us may work with others but seems most guilds are one person and this doesn't seem to be a server where we work with each other on zones. I get annoyed with most of you in chat, can't imagine how annoyed I'd get working by your side...j/k kind of. UC seems to be spaced out between tiers, I don't see the rush for UC4 in T10. I like the Halloween boss set up. You kill one you might get another and you might get another after that but nothing is promised. T9 was better with taking effort to getting gear but still easy. Boss 1 wrists, boss 2 arms/hands and so on with 2nd to last being bp and last being epic book. No matter how much people piss and moan about it's too hard to get a bp or epic keep it challenging and drawn out. I got all that quickly and T9 and have been bored for awhile. Gearing a group in a day, shit, be happy to gear a toon in a week. Another idea is like the old school Naggy/Vox raids but not sure how you'd bring the same feeling of then to what we have now. While were at it Sleeper's Tomb seems to be locked with no use atm. Maybe we wake that bitch up from it's slumber.

A lot of good ideas posted but I just ask that it not be retardedly hard to break in but at the same time don't give into all the piss and moans to gimp it up because we can't gear up over the weekend.

If someone wants to sell a buttload of SLS to pay the toons way up let them. Can't say it's an easy way to the top as farming that many SLS makes most of us suicidal. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of us who are needing a SLS mule and the EZ economy could use them.

It boils down to this:
Should EZ T10 cater exclusively to this crowd

-or-

should it accomodate the "moderate" players (2-3 hours per day hardly seems moderate to me, but relative to some players it seems to be that way) while also (of course) benefitting the truly hardcore.

I am in the latter camp... T10 should be HARDCORE, hard as Hell... but should not require numerous megagrinds (e.g. 6 UW 11's, 6 UC3s, etc...)

T10 should be hard. weeks of a hardcore player is what it should prob take to get the 1st toon done and after that it will get easier.

Progression server:
Hard up front= easier on the back end

So how to negate the UW why not do something in the script that says if toonx is attacking boss x with uw(x-y) Then boss gets 10-50% mid buff? this way there will still be a boost but can scale.

This has pretty much been a solo server. I know people do play together but that is pretty rare. I think it should keep up on that scale.

I see a lot of "I dont have the time for that!". Fine. Then dont. This is the same ....stuff I hear from people in other MMO's...and what drove one company to make it so that you can now pretty much recite your name correctly and just skip 90 levels.

Fuck that.

Look, getting to the World Series requires time, effort, sacrifice. You dont hear guys in an after work neighborhood softball league bitching about how "unfair" it is that they cant play those 7 games, too.

Because that would be ridiculous.

And dont get me wrong.....I am anymore an EXTREMELY casual player. It took me forever to get where I am....and this will mean I will probably either never get past T10 here or it will take a very long time.

I'm fine with that. Just as I was fine with not being able to run end game raid content live when I didnt have the time to dedicate to doing what it took to be end game ready. But if we arent making these cutting edge end game zones specifically with the dedicated end game player in mind, then whats the point? If we're just adding more content for people to semi afk their way through, then fine, lets call that "added casual bullshit 207" and NOT call it T10.

End game should be end game. It should be cutting edge. It should be hard, and it should take time. While I'm not sure about a lot of what Fugi posted, I have to say I think he's on the right track, here. MAKE THIS SHIT HARD! Make it something that requires a while zerging to figure shit out....same as it was when most of us raided live. Thats the only was it will have longevity. Its the only way to keep people coming back to play EZ.

As for the UW issue....

If you dont see that the REAL epic on EZ is the UW then you're deluding yourself. Its not mandatory, no.....but epics werent really mandatory live, either. They just made your odds of success one hell of a lot higher. To ignore that fact and NOT tune T10 content with heavy UW in mind is silly.

It has to be re-re hard, hard doesn't have to mean long winded but has to be challenging some examples (will edit later)
- Massive debuffs
- NPCs that cast some form of Muting spell
- Places where all buffs are stripped
- NPC casting some sorta zone teleportations to the players or raids
- Zone repop (from Boss)
- Some type of "Help me mode" (Boss calls every mob within XXXX distance)
- Factions where if you choose to kill this, IT will take a long time to repair and you will have to repair it cause you need something that they give too.
- Task driven for any Boss Kills and Loot awards (gotta participate to get geared)
- Make it so 1 player cannot solo(self group or self raid) there i.e. events happening that that player cannot manage his/her toons to be successful.
- Make it so the free waypoint click does not work for T10 for the 1st 6 months ( there is instances but will cost ya like the millions I spent on T6 instancing)
- Triggers and massive wave fights
- Aggro triggers on boss fights ( some form of meh, F your DPS.. or F your healers..) if Im a mob and sitting there fighting a raid force and this warrior isn't going down.. cause I see this dumpy ass dwarf cleric healing him.. I'm going to put 2 and 2 together and smash that dwarf.
- HP/Resists/DPS/AC/Healing gut checks or some variety of them from Boss to Boss.
- No Double Loot in this zone 1st 6 months
- No safe area ( zone out if you want to afk)

I think everyone is more on the same page than Fugi and Chunka think... I think...

Everyone is saying it should be hard... Most people would probably say that if you don't have a UW10+, it should be practically impossible (at least in terms of efficiency)

What I am saying, that I HOPE nobody is saying, is that we shouldn't have some sort of DPS check that requires you to have MORE than one UW11... that's where I draw the line

I think having three UW11's should benefit you, as it of course would. To have some DPS check that requires it? that's impractical and asking too much with the way that the UW is currently set up.

Assuming that nobody is saying that you should NEED to have multiple UW11's to complete T10, then I think most people are on the same page.

You can make T10 hellishly hard without making it hard because of having to have a certain amount of DPS, that's a weak way to make a zone "hard"...

There are a thousand other ways to make T10 hard that don't include making sure that you have 4 UW11's to kill the supermegaboss.

See Fugi's list for a lot of good ideas a few posts up from here... I also think a quest similar to CG/FG/EoN would be cool to incorporate, like the actual Epic Quest...

maybe this will help some.

A lot of players here seem to think that just because I do some wiki work and took the time to write up a guide that I'm somehow a beastly end game player.

Hardly! Ask my guildmates in Ctrl Alt Elite and now in Focus Hope: I afk a LOT, I am pretty gimp and I take forever to do shit. People I helped introduce to the server.....people I helped get through T3 and T5 (many even in the last 6 months to a year).....they're farther along than I am now.

I usually log in. I answer the dozen or 3 tells I get....I listen to a handful of players who are pretty advanced and who talk shit with me (often tactics, game mechanics, issues, etc) bitch piss and moan about player X or current game issue Y. I then, if at work, minimize my screen for an hour or 3 and get some work done, while popping back in now and again to say hello....or to kill for another 15, 20 minutes. If I am at home, I kill some, then go afk for a while to help the wife with project X, or fix house issue Y, or help my mother, who is living with us atm and fighting with leukemia. On a normal day I am in game and AFK 2 or 3 times as much as I am active. Not an exaggeration.

But....when I AM here I get shit done, even if in 20 minute blocks. I advance, even if slowly. I'm NOT an elitist who's seeking to get more content for my playground; my main concern is the health and continued life of the game I love. Its why I spend so much time on the wiki....its why I help so many new players start here.

We need to see harder, more challenging content. We need it at the top tiers. We need to get back to having content that you genuinely have to struggle to even ENTER, let alone overcome. Thats been somewhat erased from EZ over the last year or two, and we've suffered for it. I'm hoping Hate and Akk will listen to this, agree, and adjust.

And I hope all of you will take a step back, take a hard, long look at the server and see why a lot of us feel this way.

I had an idea.

Again, going back to limiting higher end UW in lower zones.....making for less purchasing your progression. Perhaps the 100 essence quest from say T5 on should only be available from an NPC IN those zones.

T10 final zone (only accessible after the infinite grind of zone 1 and 2) takes place in Innothule Swamp, pub only zone for the first 6 months, and Jojoojojgogogogunaoguna http://wiki.project1999.com/Jojoojojgogogoguna (http://wiki.project1999.com/Jojoojojgogogoguna) is the ultimate boss.

Jojoojojgogogoguna requires multiple UW10+ to kill, and has a staggering amount of HP along with insane regen/heals. Basically requires more than 4 fully decked groups to kill. He spawns once per day, max, when someone shouts "KOBOLD!" in zone. Throws players around, debuffs etc.

However, upside is he drops 5 or more BPs / ultimate epic books (new thing to end epic augs?) or whatever when killed - allowing raids/guilds to split up the phat lewtz. Obviously DL would not apply here.

In addition to "takes forever," hard can also mean "uber raids required."  ;D

Likes: Anything that encourages cooperation or is server-wide. Really hard bosses. Old zones in end game. Elite dps / hp checks and big raid encounters. Ancient Dragon. T1+T2. T6+. Outdoor zones. Mini dungeons. Multi-zone requirements. FG/CG, Siinge (if sceptre didn't suck), and EON type quests. PoT. Hushed Banquet. Halloween 2014.

Dislikes: .5 pages. Boss flags. Corals. Too much repetition or endless zone wandering. Shadow. T5. Small indoor dungeons. T3/4 tokens. Useless required epic augs. Poor loot for effort.

I think before the discussion can really flesh itself out, we need to know what it is you are targeting T10 towards being.  Is this just another bump up and mob hp and dmg like previous tiers are currently set up or is this going to be a holy shit, you'd better be incredibly geared to zone in and have a hope to progress type zone?  If it's just a T9+1 upgrade then the ideas on content are going to differ substantially from if it's intended to be a true T10, end game or go home type of tier.

Chunka,
I liked a lot of what you said but this rang off to me. Not sure why, probably because you are using "we" and "us" which is a broad generality. But I think it's possible you could be right, maybe the server lost its way.

I'd like to see harder too, maybe go the way EQ went with group zones dropping group gear (boxing) and the better stuff actually required a raid of more than one person with game mechanics that require simultaneous input at different locations etc... Make it fun, challenging and rewarding. make it a grind to a certain degree but not the only thing.

In retrospect, I liked T5 but hate the water. T6 was ok just boring specially doing UC2. T7 with all the running around was just silly. I could clear all the mobs in about 90 minutes then would spend another 90 minutes chasing named back and forth. I just broke into T8 and am half way done with my 1st UC3 so still loving T8 plus I just love the zone, reminds me of my monk days pulling :). Back tracking some, dislike the tokens and really disliked the .5 page gathering.

I'm sort of a middle of the road "end game" player. I don't have max ring, earring, UW (it is UWX, so that is at least close). I was still able to burn through T9 at a rate of one toon per day. So at two weeks in, my whole crew had their full set of armor/accessories and 9.0 epic. I was also able to max out shield and my NS augs. I don't use any FS augs; so, other than farming 100 essences for UW, I was done. Now I just can't bring myself to go back there.

T10, as Dimur, Fugitive, Chunka and Blarr have said, NEEDS to be HARD. Period.

Fugi had some awesome suggestions on how to do that.

I love the idea of a task driven gear system, but it has to be a very long task. I don't want to be able to complete the task in a day or two and get my whole crew a piece of gear.

I'd love to just play my rogue, cleric or druid once in a while, so I also love the idea of events that are physically impossible to box your way through. Think Vishimtar, where every so often a random person, not at the top of the hate list (tank having to run away to get cured is the suck) gets a debuff that they have to talk to an NPC to get cured. If they don't, they die and so many adds spawn that it wipes the raid. These events could flag your character to request a group task to backflag the rest of your crew (another long task). The backflag shouldn't flag you to request the backflag task, only the next set of tasks. One to three of this type of event would be optimal. Make it the first one(s) in the tier, and until you complete it/them, or the group backflag task, you can't request any tasks that reward you with gear. If three tasks, one could flag you for epic, one for armor, one for accessories. Or just one task flags you to speak with an NPC who has tasks for all three.

Free waypoint not working and no double loot - excellent ideas. Though if all gear is obtained through tasks, I'm not sure if double loot would affect that.

It's late and I'm tired. I'll post more later.

I think since this is a box server trying to have raids is going to be a tough sell.  I like having my crew and working on them...not having to depend on others is both a blessing and a curse it seems.

people complained about the random armor drop from dragons in t8...but that was certainly a way to curtail people gearing up in a few hours  ;)

Lot of good ideas in here. I don't have a ton of do's, just a couple don'ts.

--Don't involve the task system at all, fer chrissakes. We can only ostrich our heads into the sand for so long. As an unstable crutch for casual gamers it's done what it intended to do. It certainly hasn't been reliable enough to be part of any progression content.

--Don't bring large mobs and uneven ground into the fray. I can shred any zone on this server and still only have a single UCv3 because of the goddamn guardian wurms disappearing under the world making taking out WW pulls a nightmare in t8. Hell, if t10 was an open zone like t5/t6/t7/t9 I'd suggest putting an alternate form of UC3 in there. Just somewhere with level land where we can tackle big pulls legitly. Even Housegarden would suffice for that. I clear t9 strictly to acquire essences to trade down for ToV essences. That's just.. well, WRONG. But necessary.

-- Don't worry too much about scripts. Scripts are just something we delight in breaking and shortcutting and hardly ever do anything other than annoy people new to the zone. This isn't a server where people control 2-4 toons and can handle delegating parts of an encounter to 6-7 living breathing people in the same guild. I've seen some amazing stuff on other Servers (Trevious and Kayen are maniacal geniuses at it) but on a true boxing server a lot of it doesnt translate, especially with the high math 5million HP toons are routinely bogged down by.

-- Don't splatter our processors with 1,000 mobs on a 2 min repop in a wide open zone we need to log 12+ toons in for. I really dug the idea of multiple side tiers for epics/augs/armor/etc. Just something closer to a few zones of really angry tacvi as opposed to a super populated t7/t9.

-- Do whatever the heck you want. Just do it. Give us another couple months and Rymo won't be the only one closing in on a 6box of UWs. :)

Im warming up to the idea of working with others to complete a portion of your armor/gearing tasks

much like the idea of having to talk to an npc or wipe the raid

however, I think if we should go this way it should be in a group setting, not a raid setting. That way we would all have a chance to do it in times of low server population. IE: you play your cleric, ill play my rogue, grab a warrior, someone bring their enchanter, etc. since we all have a ton of classes to choose from I think this could be easily accomplished at any given time.

basically make it like an individual flag type requirement to progress, but done in a group setting, not a raid. have a zone set aside that is ISP limited to 1 per ISP, pretty sure that can be done, I think.

How about making 2 new zones.   1st zone- t10-  to keep the progression server progressing for the whole server.   2nd zone with super super hard stuff for those couple guilds with 50 UW's.     They can do both zones then as the rest of the server gears in the servers normal progression, maybe one day they can pop over to the 2nd zone and try it.

What's going to be hard for the few hardcore with mass amounts of boxes with UW's vrs Everyone else is going to be crazy different.

I think a lot you guys forgot that everything is only easy because this.  

My groups could only pretty much kill 1 or 2 things at a time our 1st time in t9.   Rezzing over and over.  The undead event at the zone in was and still is insanely hard.  Having to rez over and over and over...running back to kill a couple more before death again.     ....Vrs... Now that I have the tanks UW up to 9, he is able to stand there and handle much much much more.  

Just caught up... holy shit. First of all there needs to be a decision made. Is EZ server a boxing server where you can log in and do what you need to do OR is EZ server a raiding server where you have set times and need others.

If it's a boxing server, multiple tasks, off tanking on the other side of the zone shit like that won't work except for a select few that do team up.

Think about the negatives. Raid times, ppl not showing up, canceling raid b/c lil billy didn't show up with his cleric. Fighting over loot, loot dkp, oye!

You can't flip the switch at T10 and say Oh hey btw you now require 3 tanks, 2 of which are off tanking on opposite sides of the zones and while you are doing that you need 50 ppl to beat on the main guy while singing mary poppins.

Ppl keep referencing "Live", "Like Live" well shit go play live then.

Good points :) Its fun to work with your guild members, best thing I ever did was leave my solo guild. I was not really implying needing full live raid like situations but to make it a little more difficult to where in the beginning you would need help from another boxer or something.

have a boss that shouts a class, and only that class can land the killing blow, or boss DT's all players in zone =D

We're not talking about the expedition system, we're talking about the task (quest) system that's been working properly for years. Think T5 100 bosses tasks.


I wasn't really clear on that in my first post, I totally agree that a single group is the way to go there. Trying to get many more people than that at one time would be like pulling teeth. And for the second part, it should also flag you for a backflag task, so you only have to do it once. So if you play your rogue for the group task to start the teir, he can then backflag the rest of your crew and they could all progress.


Now that is a great idea!

Having a boss shout a class works until you get to "MAGE"... and think, dayhem... I need to level one.

I like the one group challenge idea, but not for progression.  Maybe a side quest that you can choose to do or not.

Expletus said it better.  You don't suddenly flip the switch at T10 and say we are no longer a boxing server.  The real gut check for EZ Server is MQ2/ISABoxer.  Those who can are here and those who cannot are on other servers.  Let's not suddenly decide to change the format because someone had a wild idea.  And.. be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

I'm not going to suddenly change what EZ has always been. There is no fear of that. :-)


-Hate

If this is going to be the case, then the XP mask buff needs a shorter recast time.

I always thought tier 10 should be similar to tier 5, minus the water.

Some sort of huge task.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that every single character in the instance needs to have a UW, simply that UW needs to be a balance point to start with and the content should require more than the previous content has.  As you gear up in the relevant content, you attain gear and items that increase both your survivability and your dps and at that point the required numbers of survivability and dps have been surpassed to the point where you can do it with smaller forces.  But if you're just going to say anyone in full T9 gear wielding a single UW on their warrior that is geared far more than any of their support characters should be able to walk into T10 and start advancing right away then you're simply asking for a T9+1 zone.

I ask again, Hate, what is YOUR idea of what T10 is going to be?  What type of gear requirements are you visualizing for the content you want to put forth?  Because until we know that, we can talk about encounter mechanics, zone dynamics and everything else under the sun but none of it matters until we know what kind balance point this zone is going to target.

I think you can get what you are asking for with task system gear rewards and unlocking zone points to advance gear. Maybe utilize 2 sets of gear rewards which you can obtain right away with a heavier DPS / gear requirements and the starter set that will assist those who struggle in the zone. Building block sort of style. I do strongly agree the zone needs to be lengthy like t5. Every 5 tiers

I would like to see a velius like tier 3 factions with a central war zone have like the dwarfs to the hidden parts giants do armor and dragons do the weps. Then have the war zone be a anything goes kill giant boss get armor.... kill more giants get more giant bosses but spawn more dwarfs and dragons. When one facton controls the zone get a reward from the head of the facton.

Then you could combine the 3 to summon an overlord for the epic. After the kill the zone waits 3 minutes and repops all corpes gone.... ie not alot of selling.

you are all so funny...

All I want out of t10 is a challenge for my boxed army of 6-8 toons...

from what I see posted here they want to have DPS be a check..but how can that be when we have people with 6UW maxed out toons and 26 full t9 toons and then people like me with 1 group+ a couple of support toons....
You know that you cant balance a zone based on DPS on this server right? it wont work..

So what do you do?  everyone seems to have a fairly high UW now on at least the main tank...hell its been many months now with nothing else to do because t9 is such a cake walk... because people bitched because it was to hard...the same people I might add who are now complaining about being bored because it was to easy....but whatever...

MY suggestion is stop the UW at 11... its done..leave it.....no more....
stop the ROA at 1000....its done ..leave it....
now look at what people who have those items can do.....this is your base point... assume that they have ROA 1000 on all toons...assume they have UW11 on at least the main tank...
assume they run 12 toons...
assume they all have UC3...
assume they have chanter/bard/druid/shammy buffs...

This should be what you are looking at for the trash mobs in the new zones...

now you are forcing people to farm/backflag up to this general point to play in the new sandbox...some people are already at that point...most (t9)are close...

As far as what you want to do for content in the zone...

no lock out timers...please...no instance zones...please....

Normal formula has been kill a bunch of trash ...kill a small boss.....kill a bunch of trash...kill a small boss....kill a bunch of trash....kill a big boss? ....

t9 saw some variant of that and that was fine..and good...but it got reduced to nothing because of the dps nerf...

I really dont think you can make everyone happy...

whatever you decide please let it be a real challenge...like...holy shit I beat that %&&^ on my 50th attempt and it felt freaking great.... hell it should be broadcast across the server what a bad-ass (insert player name) is because he just beat the badbossman challenge in t10!

So what does a bad ass boss look like?

I think because of how we play... knockback would be a huge factor... maybe a zone with fast repop as well.... so you have to clear most of the zone...cause this R%&%&^ boss will knock you clear across it and you will agrro a mad train on your toon running back....so maybe a mage has to have his COH skills up...
having low aggro threshold on the boss would be good so he is switching targets constantly...
Striping buffs would really piss of people so that would be great.
Random Enrage is good...
Porting back to a bind and summoning help is fun.... more of this would always be good..
Lots of tricks in the mobs of EQ that can be made to make it a challenge...but doable on this server and make it fun!

No mater what you do ( unless you are truly a mad genius ) people are going to figure it out...and beat it into the dust.. its just how we are... sorry... I would not worry to much about making it unbeatable but lets try to make it fun!

I was really really sad when I spawned my first Hill Giant and it was a tank and forget it mobs...made the entire zone seem pointless to me...

its just ideas and feedback ...

I know I haven't been around much at all the past 6? months or so.  Gnomi and myself got burnt out on all the farming.  Yea, my warrior got hooked up, thats it.  I had a good tank to help with all the farming.  It took months between 2 people to farm enough essences for UW for 1 person, since gnomi was more of the farmer, we decided he could have them.  We got him to about UW4?  Since everyone has between 3-30 boxes, seems like a scaling zone would be amazing?  LDON scaled based on levels and hard/normal right?  would it be too hard to use that system for the zone?

First of all I want to say i have enjoyed reading everyone's ideas. This community has a lot to offer. That being said I want to put in my 2CP about someone who is only flagged for T5. I have been playing EQ since it first came out and I have played it off and on throughout the years. I have seen the game go through many phases some good and some bad. I have also played alot of other MMO's that had better graphics,quest systems, crafting and raid experience. Out of all those games I have always come back to EQ and the reason why is this. EQ is the only game I felt that I actually had to work at it to earn something. It was never intended to be an instant gratification game. What I mean is I should not expect to log on and be max level and raiding within a couple months.

I remember when I first started playing it took me almost 2 years to make max level. I remember being in a group for 5 hours doing SolB and only making 20% xp. You were lucky if you got more than 1 name to spawn. Spending 20 hours camping one name for a quest update (Anyone remember Stormfeather in IC Ocean?). That was the way the game was. I spent maybe 20-30 hours a week on the game and I loved it. Sure there was frustating times and I always saw high tier characters running around and I used to OOH and AWW over the gear they would link in world chat. But at the end of the day they could do that becuase they put in the time to get there. I wasnt jealous or thought it should be easier for me to get there, it just encouraged me to keep plugging away. The problems with all the new MMO's that come out is that they are catering to the masses and making the games so much easier that they cant keep up with thier players. Look at SWTOR great quest and story line but it was so damn easy that after 1 month, I was raiding, and within 2 months I beat all the game content. Then I stood there wondering what am I going to do now.

That what I love about EZ, its the old EQ. You have to work really hard to get to the max tiers. Not everyone is going to be equal and get their at the same time. I am T5 flagged with 12 toons. I only have 2 UC's, and every toon's ROA is at 100 except my tank at 250. Everyone else in my guild is T8 - T9. They help me out every now and then but I dont expect them to. They worked hard to get to where they are and played alot longer on thier toons and they should be rewarded. I am all for T10 being a gut check. I will tell you that T5 is a gut check to me when I got in it. I had 1 group and realized very quickly that I needed 2 groups. I needed to work on my resists, UC's and augs. Now that I am back in there I can tell the difference. Let make T10 the same way and not appeal to the masses (minus the water and damn stationary mobs).

-Sapish

Boss chains are Very fun.  Would love to see that a thing.  T9 had way too many mats to farm up to gear.  Killed some of the fun.  Unique boss abilities that existed on some bosses would be welcome as long as it's box friendly.

In my opinion some of these posts requesting bosses that take multiple people are a bit out there.  The majority of people box and the ability of said boxes varies considerably person to person.  Please keep them in line of what your average player can do.

NO WATER ZONES PLEASE.

Pro's of previous tiers:

T1/T2 having trash pop mini bosses and chests were fun, the random aug mats were not.

T3/T4 Shadow was a neat mechanic, the shadow step was not.  Sky bosses spawner was efficient but def ensures people won't be using the public instance (do they ever now I suppose?)

T5, spawning random bosses was pretty fun but requiring them to progress makes this zone extremely tedious IF the rarity isn't altered.  CORALS NO.

T6, Loved this place.  Spot on.

T7, Again, loved it, spot on.  Chains were quite fun and this zone allowed a better geared player to do more in less time.

T8, DRAGONS!?  That was the highlight.  

T9, event ending up becoming tedious and farming mats to combine for every toon is a nightmare.  Things changing during night and day and having bosses spawn was cool.

While the above is true, that is what occurs at this point on EZ.  Your idea would result in a handful of people running content since there is no tagging.  This would, if anything, cause an uproar and many people to leave.  Are we trying to lower EZ population? 

Seems like a great idea but ...

content is based around stonewall. a nice one at that I'm at 69% and I'm an sk... and wars are what 73%? That is a lot of extra damage when numbers tend to be put to the max here in the first place.


How about this do a script like the one in OT for uw and if you dont have uw12 you can't use any UW in that zone or it kicks you... this would mean you would have to actually finish this zone to use the UW there but you could in all other zones....



I.m.o I would like to see content set up for a 6 man group. Yes with more toons it does become faster.
It takes a lot of work to get 12-18-24- whatever you want to say fully flagged for T10 ... but because you put that hard work in to make things easier for you now you have to make everything harder for everyone else?

Knockback + Snare = good combo gives you a chance to get back to the mob to proc heals etc again. Pref a lower range like 200 or so.

More than anything, the things I loved about previous tiers was zoning in and knowing nothing about what I was supposed to expect and having my ass handed to me handily.

 I liked when I first went through LDoN and actually had to worry about wiping because I hadn't finished my key and respawn was fast enough that you had to keep your ass moving, the mobs were hard enough that you could easily wipe on a bad pull and there were a handful of times I had to start all over due to wipes until I got to level 6.  

I liked Qvic and initially being overwhelmed by the named mobs' adds and wiping until I figured the spawn mechanic out, I liked that Qvic kicked your ass when you first got there but as you geared up it became trivial.  

I liked zoning into PoDragons and burning disciplines to take out trash dragons because until you got enough gear, you had to do it to survive.  I liked being able to collect the augs you could make from there, even though aside from the Nerds augs everything was outdated by the time you made them.  I didn't mind having to farm crystals from minis so you could spawn armor bosses, but I fucking hated the totems random respawn timer.  I liked the T2 bosses being challenging enough to make you sweat when you were getting ready to spawn them, hoping that if Kronos spawned you'd be able to find the real one before you wiped.

I liked HoH with the roaming pathers and static clusters of mobs, didn't much care for chasing Shadow around more due to his HP and my lack of dps at the time than the shadowstep.  Airplane was fun when you finally got the dps to turn the 10 minute snoozefest fights into something under 3 minutes, but only if you had a stack of coins to burn on boss spawns...going up there with 20 always seemed a waste of time.  

T5 was a gut check, actually having to UC my paladin tank because I hadn't rolled a warrior yet, and really needing to flesh out some strike augs.  And the task itself was fun for me, because even if I was limited on playtime I could go in there and target specific mob types and hope to get a named or two to spawn, not to mention the elation you got when you finally finished the quest and realized you didn't have to do it a second time for your dual wielding alts.  

T6 was great the way the front end mobs were easy enough to do on first break in, but the further you got into the zone the harder shit became...it really gave you a gauge for the increases you made dps wise in relation to clear times and I liked that yardstick because it magnified the hard work you put in after initially getting there in bringing up the rest of your crew.  

T7 was a real pain in the ass initially, not so much for the mob difficulty but for the vastness of the zone and the 2 hour respawn at release, thankfully that was increased to 4 hours soon after.  T7 had a great mechanic too as far as the epic fight went, needing to farm enough bane weapons to take out the Skull and hoping your group heals could keep up with his rampage since paladin epic proc and cleric epic procs didn't work on him.

T8 was incredibly rape initially, with the unresistable 1mil DD, the damaging AE spells, and the massive dps output from mobs as well as the rampage they'd fire off at a very fast rate.  It was so bad, the first few times I managed to kill Dozekar was killing the 2 roamers that pathed through his room and positioning my toons out of AE rampage range and chain healing my warrior with my cleric and sending toons in to attack knowing they were going to die but hoping I'd get him low enough that I'd eventually outdamage attrition.  T8 is also where I decided to go easymode and roll a druid for Drake to make it more manageable, and since then I still keep my cleric active more out of habit than necessity.

T9 was a broken zone on release, but if you managed to get the teleport ring so you could port to the tunnels you could wait out the skeletons at night and chip away during the daylight hours.  The mobs absolutely smoked anyone but the tank if they either drew agro or ate a riposte, there was no lore at all to tell you what to do and the armor patterns cost 1mil plat each and were surrounded by Obliteration mobs.  If you didn't realize this and were actively killing obliteration mobs along with other trash mobs, you fucked your faction with them and had to do a full camp clear to be able to spend your 1mil per pattern buying them from neutral vendor mobs in the camps, I hated that because people that didn't kill oblits could just walk in and have no issues with the patterns.  Spawning the Hill Giant was retarded more so because unless you were directly told by Hunter how to do it, you had no idea that you had to kill 20 each of 5 different mob types, some of them associated with each other...more than anything I hated T9 for the lack of direction given to you upon breaking into it.  I love the T9 armor system, it gives you a reason to grind other than trying to spawn bosses and I am glad as hell that the armor patterns had the ridiculous cost on them removed.

I was fortunate enough to hit T8 and T9 when they were balanced around end game gear, Hunter cited using Fugi as a template when he used his damage scales for the npc mobs.  It felt epic going to these zones, I didn't make my first UW until I was already full T7, and T8 and T9 still kicked my ass until I put in enough time figuring out zone mechanics, mob tendencies, etc and then backfarming UC's, UCv2 and upgrading strikes until I could manage the zones.  I understand the shitstorm that arose when UW's were being reigned in and tuned, and I understand that at that time UW's were still a rarity for the overall playerbase, but I don't think that's the case anymore.  I realize that not everyone is going to be at the same level of time invested, I realize that some people are going to stockpile resources more quickly than others.  But Hunter always had a way of dangling that carrot, making you grind towards being able to do something and not just getting flagged and expecting to waltz in and get to work clearing a zone you just got access to.  There used to be a learning curve, and that curve was harsh and steep and had a way of pissing you off to the point the you'd relegate yourself to going back in tiers just to farm enough to catch up to progress in tiers.  T8 and T9 were gutted to make them accessible to the non-UW crowd because at the time, the UW was an item that not many people had access to.  Times have changed, things have been streamlined and people's focus has shifted toward getting that UW for their warrior before they even bother progressing.  

T10 is the next tier, and after being fortunate enough to be one of the early adopters in previous end game tiers, my perspective on what it should be is going to vary greatly from those who've only come up after T8 and T9 were gutted to casual status zones, mob damage values being 1/10th of what they were and the heals that Hate adjusted against the original values having remained the same...essentially being 10x more effective than they probably should be.  The game in the last year or so has taken a HUGE swing toward catering to the casuals, with daily missions that you can farm for exp, plat, essences and alternate currency with a normal crew to the 2 highest tiered zones being tuned toward characters without UW.  My hope first and foremost for T10 is that T10 specifically swings back to the hard core, bleeding edge zone we haven't had here since.

That would be fine except the UW's that were in existence had 3-4 Million HP's on them. Since the adjustment in HP's the mobs had to be scaled down which it seems you are asking for. Whatever is coming im sure will be fun and be adjusted several times before the final version settles.

At some point I believe the UW has to end and it should allow regular gear to catch up. It would then be very easy to make a zone based off RoA/SoA etc and not so much the UW's dmg raping the mobs. Is that T10 or T15? Who knows but the only thing I do know is that as long as the UW remains the same the discussion of basing a zone off the UW will remain.

Sorry, Ex, but saying you shouldnt balance the zone around UW, if its end game, is like saying you shouldnt balance new expansions Live around top tier raid drops/quests in the previous expansion. Its in the game, people are gonna get it, and a lot of them are going to gear more in their raid force (guilds there, boxes here) than just the main tank.

Two possible solutions here: remove UW completely (which we all know isnt going to happen) or make cutting edge content with UW in mind. Anything else is a waste of the "Borne Supremacy's" time. And a waste of ours.

I'm confused as to where I've asked for mobs to be scaled down anywhere in this post, please clarify.

My apologies for the formatting issue in the previous post, quoting and posting from the phone is painful.

I'll be honest here....when I got T8 flagged was late in the game. It was already nerfed. I got to T9 way after it was fixed. I was UW7 when I got to T8, UW9 in T9. Max strike augs on my team by T8....no box without UC, and only 2 without a UC2. And it was surprising to me how easily I conquered the content. More of a shock how easy T9 was.

Depressingly so. There was no excitement. No "butt clench" moments I'd had in earlier tiers. And whether some of you realize it or not, we need those. Without them the game becomes stale, boring.....WoW. Or Prophecy of Ro era EQ.

BEGGING management to look at this through Hunter's eyes. Yeah, some of what he did made me scratch my head and say "WTF was he thinking??" and fixing some of the bizarre things he did with development has given Akk and Hate hair pulling fits at times....but the man KNEW the value of having your ass handed to you, even if you're used to steamrolling top end content. Hell, ESPECIALLY if you've been doing so. Paradise here for me would be the team we have now managing coding, hardware and content combined with Hunter's sadistic streak.

We need to bring back a bit of sadism.

And with this in mind.....man, I cant believe I am saying this, and I know I am gonna get attacked for it....but we really need to revisit Drake, or at least find ways to have mobs get around it in cutting edge content. Its still too powerful.

Ok, ok.....got mauled when I logged in, so I will try and explain a bit.

Drake is arguably the most powerful spell in the game. No, not arguably it is HANDS DOWN the most game changing spell on EZ. While its up you are damned near invincible. Yes, there's a recast....kind of. Yes, its short duration. But that still means while its up you're very, very hard to kill.....even if your gear is substandard.

Example: when I first got to T9 I started like most do....killing bugs and cats and wisps just outside the cave, one or two at a time. That lasted 5 or 6 kills. Then I was pulling 4 or 5 at a time. Within an hour or 2 I was pulling a dozen at a time, then 20 at a time....all without getting my first armor upgrade (just 1 epic 9.0 added, on my warrior). Erase drake....no way I could have done that. In fact the few times I did die was because drake didnt land in time once it fell. Did boxes die? You betcha! But seldom to the point that I wiped, as long as the box dead wasnt my pally and my druid.

Yeah, people definitely kill in end zones without drake, and some pull multiples without drake. But if you who DO use it look at it honestly, you'll know that its a keystone for mass pulls when you enter a new tier....and its a valuable tool even after you're geared for the tier.

Maybe I worded this wrong in my first post. I think what I should say is that in T10, if nowhere else then on boss fights or just on key encounters, things should be set up in such a way that drake is taken out of the equation. No, dont remove it from the game....and obviously people would fly to my home town, find me and lynch me if management were to nerf it completely....but I seriously think that it needs to be not so invincible....in places.

That help?

OMG ... no you didn't!!!!!  ;D

Wtf Chunka  :D

striping all buffs from the main tank would handle this nicely during boss fights don't you think?

Only if it also prevented drake from being recast for X time.

I think there are plenty of ways to make T10 a challenge without messing with Drake, and many are already included in this thread.  Besides, no one wants Chunka lynched.

Yeah, but I have to stand by it, Kwai....drake makes some content way too easy.

When I came back I was told to make a druid, why? We all know why... Drake. Servers been easy mode cause of that. People say almost invincible? I've never died while drake was on and I've pulled some pretty big trains. Haven't seem T9 yet but if its like all the other tiers it'll be easy mode thanks to my druid.

What I'd really like to see in T10 besides not being able to steamroll with drake is a max number of toons aloud. I've never had a problem doing anything with 6. Anything at all. If I played 12/18/34 toons content would be so easy and boring I'd just quit. I mean one warrior dies, its got another. A group wipes, its OK got a few more. If you want hard take out drake and make people work on a core group instead of having 24 toons and saying whatever I got more if a few die. And before the flames shoot out, just save your time, you got 24 toons to T10 and I'm jealous... Ya that's it. This server is way to anti social anymore. The only reason for guilds is chat. Maybe try to move back into needing guildies for the game, not another form of social media.

A lot of people in the guild I am in help each other out constantly, and more than just "Who wants a rotting 9.0 book?" You'll often see 2 or more Focus Hope members working a zone together, either en mass or killing in different areas and sharing drops. The guild I was leader of, Ctrl Alt Elites, was the same. I know for a fact other guilds here do so as well.

That being said....yeah, you arent forced by necessity to socialize here....and I sincerely doubt you'll ever see that happen. Its one of the strengths of the server (and yes, one of its weaknesses as well). Regardless, we'll never see a server pop high enough to make such mass social grouping/raiding viable.

You didn't forget I know all about focus hope right? I mean I created it years ago.... I spent 3 months in it when I came back. If by clearing you mean sky and wood together cause woodees sky's bitch (love ya wood) then ya its a guild of who needs a rotting (insert item here). And as far as saying we don't have the population, the last server I played on had a population of maybe 35 RL people and we raided and had guild wars over spawns. I'm pretty sure we have more of a population then 35. What you mean is we don't have a population of people who aren't anti social, which is true.

All I'm saying is it'd be nice to be forced to clear a zone with other people. With free way points and repopping instances there would always be time which is peoples main complaint I've seen. Someone always has a comment about how they play here when they want to. Well if you wanta play a game yourself I hear ps4s are cheap right?

Dim I never said you want mobs scaled down. I'm saying they were based on the UW HP revamp.

This is the part I was referencing and it still confuses me.  And while the mobs needed to be scaled down, their damage was completely gutted down to 10-20% of what it was originally.

He said "it seems you wanted" so reposting a quote makes no sense

I like a lot of the ideas posted regrading making content hard, but to me there is a difference between "hard" and "PITA."

Examples:  

Hard:  Mobs that hit like a truck, bosses that have scripts that need to be followed, Big AoE dots that need cured or you die, dps checks like I mentioned before, ie you don't burn boss down fast enough.... BOOM.

PITA:  No safe spots to pull to, buffs getting stripped (yah, it would make it hard, but also be so annoying to have to rebuff after the 100th time... and /cry about xp mask buff lol), time constraints (ie clear all mobs before they repop to get spawn), FU Deathtouch type mechanics that are gonna kill a toon every time, no matter what, etc.

I'd like to see the new content be as hard as hell, but on the merits of the mob difficulty, not annoying gimmicks.  I want T10 to take a long time to complete.... otherwise I'm going to have nothing to work for after a few more months.

I'm not a "low time" player... I play a lot... but often have to do it in shorter bursts... ie I don't always have a 4 hour block of time to work a zone.... but I might have a 10 hour time in which i can actually play 5 hours for example...  I do need to AFK, I have kids, work, etc.  I'm fine putting in however much time I need to in order to advance... but like I said before, I like to be able to do it in chunks smaller than 4 hour blocks.  As perspective, I have 15 at T10, working on 3rd UC3, UWVIII on tank (and closing in on the last three... where are you LP mini? :P), RoA over 800, max SoA, etc.  I started around 17 months ago.

Anyway.... my 2cp

He said "it seems you are asking for", and I've never asked for or inferred that I wanted scaled down mobs so I'm asking for clarity on what he meant.  What makes no sense is posting a post that says a misquoted quote makes no sense.

Just an FYI Napo, I rarely group up with Skyye. I am more likely to group up with Ugazel, Dim Krink or one of the others.
And most time I run my 6-8 toons alone in an instance, because if I get around you ppl running 24 toons, it lags me out hardcore.

You aren't alone. I've been working through some things for casters, both as part of the DPS changes and to address other issues (not working or, in Drake's case, always working too well).

It won't be a sudden "Drake got nerfed lol" post on forums, but it will be VERY clearly stated how/why it was changed. It is extremely powerful with 80-90% up time. I am likely going to slightly lower healing on lowest rank and fairly lower healing on highest rank, as well as extend cooldown significantly. Regardless though, that's outside the scope of this thread and won't be addressed for another week or so. :-)


-Hate

done

Dim I honestly can't remember what I was trying to say or the point I was trying to make. Short nights long days bad posts. I apologize

Just like to point out that not too many have called for a Drake nerf, and the only ones that have are conveniently already at the end of the game..or extremely close to it.  Bet there wasn't hardly a peep out of anyone when they were in t6/7...just sayin.  Roll em all back to that point after drake "adjustments" and see how quiet everything stays = 3

Lowering the healing amount will still make the druid useful, but if the recast delay is increased that class will be far better filled by another slot.  Drake is quite strong right now.  This is a UW style discussion to be had.  If it is going to be tweaked, perhaps some other useful mechanic can take it's place.  I would certainly be ok with the healing amounts being reduced, instead of gutting the main use of that class.

Seems.it would serve better to reduce the 100 percent proc rate down to like 85% instead if the massive overhaul to spell that everyone will QQ about later because the druid will be useless again.

I dont really use drake but there are a fair amount of newer players who only run dru as a healer. switching to a longer cool down could put them at a hold. Adding a lower % to proc and/or a limit counter seems more efficient without severely damaging the spell.

Drastic changes like what you suggest really deter people from playing on this server and we want to increase not decrease.

Darinow, don't kid yourself...the content is doable without Drake, it's just not going to be an automatic-as-long-as-it-lands-I-can't-die situation.  And yes, a lot of people weren't bitching about Drake back when they were in T6/T7 because it didn't exist at that time.  Drake originally had a hit counter attatched to it, so after X number of hits it would fade while it had the 30 second lockout timer.  Now it's a 30 second recast, 30 second duration nearly permaheal, no hit limit so it's great for pulling massive trains.  I don't care if Drake is altered or not, either way it isn't going to change the ability to play in current content but if we're talking about keeping T10 difficult, Drake in it's current state would pretty much trivialize melee dmg as it does in every other tier.

Oh, and as far as rolling people back to T6/7...go ahead, it's still going to end up being the same people in the end game regardless.

Never said it isn't doable...I did content before druids became more than PL puppets, and will do it after.  Just saying this feels a lot like kids in class getting hold of a cheat sheet, then the first one to finish the test using it tells the teacher that everyone else is using it before they finish.

yep

Thanks Rent. No disrespect or irritation intended, just making note.

I guess it's only fair that I throw in my perspectives as a player when warriors were the only tanks, clerics were the only healers, and Anger Augs were the only DPS.

I started with my single wizard, Hateborne. My brother played his classic dwarf warrior named Majuen. We immediately grabbed our epics, had our nostalgia "woaaaaaah" moment, and started our shenanigans. We finally got to LDON and had a hell of a time with a solo warrior and solo wizard. We got to QVIC, brother quit and I continued. I was having a hell of a time using a 5 second cast and dealing pitiful damage. I ended up caving in and starting a shadowknight because I wanted something different than the warrior train. In addition, I knew I would need heals so I started a druid with it. The regeneration plus the direct healing was OK at that point. Fast forward a bit, I finished QVIC and entered Plane of Dragons. It was HARD, the poison was MEAN, and I could not heal and cleanse enough while tanking and nuking (I had not adopted MQ2 yet). I got lazy and added in a bard and rogue at this point. With my WIZ, SK, DRU, CLR, BRD, ROG group...I did fairly well considering it was still all manual. Got to T2 without much difficulty. Kronos was horrifying though. It was basically me juggling disciplines and hoping I didn't get one rounded. I never was able to kill Kronos without being 1 rounded until I had T3 and T4 gear on my Shadow Knight.

Enter HoH, I was competent enough to hold my own but I was limited to 1-3 per pull due to no AoE and no Stonewall. My DPS was stupid low and I was landing 1 in 5 spells due to the massive amount of resists (which can be found in some of my SUPER early posts). I decided to back to get my UC at this point as I figured I would need it for Airplane from what I kept hearing the high ends (Gnomi, "He who is not worthy of a name", Fugitive, Xiggie, and a few others that have quit or been banned). I got about 2/3 of the way through on my SK in addition to getting RoA 100 on my Wizard (mainly to piss off "He who is not worthy of a name" and to prove it could be done) when I found a huge exploit that allowed pet owners to keep their pets when deleveling. I was, surprisingly, given a UC for the report and details on how to fix it. I gave it to my SK, despite being 2/3 of the way done, and found that I could pull up to 6 giants in HoH safely now and my DPS went up a lil bit. I gathered tokens as I could, chased Shadow, and continued farming up cash in HoH. As I got to fighting in Airplane, I realized that I NEEDED other people to make it faster. At this point, I had purchased rights to loot Yamakagi's for my wizard and it still wasn't enough. I ended up busting my ass to get Hate's UC and ended up doing well enough.

Enter T5, shit hit the fan. I was dying left and round to bosses. Extra pulls that I could root and run away from ended in wipes. Bosses were like Kronos in the 'hold-my-breath-waiting-for-one-round-death' sense. It was fun, but frustrating a shit to die, get my goobers back into public, find my mob being murdered by another with "lol public zone" being shouted. At this point, I got involved heavily into looking at spells, effects, and database. I approached Hunter about creating some spells and what-not. He was kind of "uh yeah sure" in the belief I might give him some half-ass bits. Two or three weeks later, the first ~140 spells were handed to him and made live a month later. With the minor stonewall for SKs and the variety of new spells/buffs, I was able to slowly work through T5 and get all of my bosses except four. It was hard, it was scary, but it was felt GREAT when I finally finished T5 with my crew.

Approaching T6, I was much less amused. It wasn't really harder as I got in, it was just VERY monotonous and tedious. It pretty much required a large chunk of time to clear it in one or two sittings relatively close to each other. I never really finished T6 as I had changed up my lineup in T5, was back gearing them, and became too involved with adding/correcting things than I did actually playing. My main group all had their 6.0s (but I couldn't kill OMM without help due to lack of a REAL stonewall).

---

My fondest memories were carefully working through EZ's LDON dungeons, risking life and limb to pull the tunnel bosses in QVIC in two pulls, the general look/feel of Plane of Dragons, fighting Kronos and expecting death at any moment, chasing Shadow around in HoH (public zone), and the sheer expansiveness of Abyss and the tasks associated.

T7 was never truly played by me as a player. T8 was only something I heard and read about. T9 was obviously readjusted as he left it in pure beta-test mode with "lolf**kyou" damage/regen in place.

---

As mentioned in this thread before, the UW has effectively fractured the server and made content balancing impossible. Even with the scaled down HP, it's still a VERY significant difference from those without. As Love and I get closer to the testing phase, we'll become more vocal and revealing about the way the content is scaled...but for now we're still going to be VERY tight-lipped about it.


PLEASE keep this thread going. It's great!


-Hate

Yep

I agree that drake is O.P. and honestly would like to see it go back to a hit limit. Its IMHO a tool for pulls to help keep agro off the cleric but since the change its benched my cleric. Yes with or without drake content will be conquered. Harder to mass pull and that would up the hardness factor. I would just hope that druids would be given something else to keep them relevant.

Expletus, same as I told Rent, move on. This is for T10.


-Hate

Last request to get back on topic before I lock the thread. Please stay on topic.


-Hate

Sorry Hate, posted soon after you posted the first one. I removed the post.

Harthek and Leis had a really interesting idea, one that tackles UW AND Drake. Har's idea was a boss event where during the fight the boss spawns mini versions of the bosses target...so 4 or 5 little Fugi's would spawn (giving Hate his wish....kind of). This would make it almost impossible to automatically target the tank for drake (as anyone with a Halloween familiar knows). I thought making them genuine clones would be a great idea....to which Leis replied that it'd force everyone to have dummy weapons ready on their tank, so they didnt get 1 shot by a UWXI wielding clone.

Anyway, just a thought....and a fun one!

Sorry HB however now that you spilled the beams about a revisit to drake I felt it was relevant to shaping t10. Anyway let's discuss zones !!! Valdholm for the win. I think anything old school like velious and kunark need to be ruled out. There are many zones that are more aesthetically pleasing and built for a cool zone.

 ${Me.ID}
learn it ....love it....

After reading your post Hate, and having a similar experience (albeit not being the weirdo refusing to jump on the warrior train), it sounds like you understand the good and the bad of what made each tier.  It's in good hands.  NO WATER.

After browsing the posts it looks like Most people prefer boss chains.  No one likes water.  Mini boss pops are fun.  T5 boss spawns were interesting but some far too rare to be required for progression.  T6 getting harder as you go was a neat challenge increase.  

You certainly have many new tools including expeditions to make this into something outside of what has already been done.

Never worked for me.

Well, correction. Never worked reliably. Works sometimes, sometimes doesnt. Unsure why.

I enjoyed the boss chains in t5 accept for the stupid rare ones.  T6 i think has had the best setup minus the spiral staircases. No tokens no crystals , Just unleash us as the killing machines we are.  I would like to see items/item that's rare and unique to the zone that is actually usable.  Im not talking like the t10 weapon drops etc. I mean a significant item that actually doesnt need to be built.  Put the fun back into grinding for the random chance to get something awesome.

Xeky

 PS All the water on the EZ server was evaporating so much it had to be drained into T5 to keep that tier going.  So water isn't available for t10

Now that its pretty obvious Hate will be making T10 in the Plane of Water....

How about an upgraded version of Tserina's whip.. maybe a quest, rare drop item, something hard to do, but a new skin that allows an extra strike aug and has some kind of a neat proc with updated white damage.  Maybe even one for FS/IS users too who have nothing better to spend their SLS on.  There was a ranger only whip in plane of Earth that proc'd swarm pets for example, was kinda fun.

No, but I can flag zones as underwater and make ANY zone into Kedge.


(http://worldnewscurator.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/evil-plotting-raccoon.jpg)





-Hate

/crys

Evil.

You should do that to the Nexus or stonehive one day, just for SNG. 

lol or have it flag nexus for 5 minute randomly when someone hails the buffbot. I'm sure Hunter would approve, and giggle a bit.

lol he would too

I like the mechanics of t5 to a degree. The water part not so much. And the rarity of some of the bosses not so much. Could have a similar thing for t10, and even keep the rare spawns, but make those have a chance of dropping a rare weapon skin or caster ranged etc but not require them for progression.  I love t6 for its straight forwardness, progressivly harder bosses and the zone (outside of those damn stairs) is great for the bot army stuff. I like t8 a lot but the class specific drops suck a bag of dicks. I could have flagged 20 sk's but still need some things for shammy and cleric.
So long as we stay away from water i think you can use elements of the other tiers to make this both fun, and challenging.  I am looking forward to breaking into it.

Thought of a way to address Drake in t10.

Have the mobs proc a healing reducing debuff that cannot be cleansed in 1 shot.  Maybe it takes off one stack, pulling trains would result in too many stacked debuffs to live through.

Add in an item on future t11 vendor or from t11 that cleanses it.

Still gain benefit of Drake for farming purposes but might allow not trivializing t10.

you could totally accomplish what youre saying with simply making mobs dispel in T10 lol, negates drake and makes its frustrating as hell to boot $$

just end up doing it buffless lol

doesn't drake go in song window?

Can we get a separate topic for Drake so ideas like the one posted above which would make Several classes (enchanter/shaman/druid) non existant as well...  Don't clog up actual T10 discussion..

so far throughout this thread there have been

-No Water zones
-Progressively harder mobs as you go deeper into the tier
-Rare drops off of bosses, in addition to the regular drops
-Multiple zones comprising of the single tier (expansion if you will)
-Harder encounters through spells, abilities, mechanics of the mobs/bosses
-No weird scripting, ie kill 173.3 mobs to get a chance to spawn A and kill to get a chance at B spawn
-Kill A to spawn B to spawn C type named
-Co-op grouping/raiding
-Top level gearing to accomplish goals in T10 (UW's, UC's, Resists, RoA's, SoA's, Strike Augs, etc)
-Length of tier, ie not able to be completed with a short period of time
-Depth of tier, side questing
-Upgrades to existing older quests (SoT, Whip, leaves, resist stones)
-No Water!
-T6 modeling, above, harder progression as you march forward
-T5 modeling without the insane rarity of certain bosses
-No AFK zone models (ie, you need to piss, zone out) *odd request, but hey w/e*
-True difficulty in terms of strategy to engage and overcome
-No mindless farming of mobs to collect items to spawn xyz
-Task type models so you can complete as your time permits (short playing time players rejoice)
-Warring factions throughout the tier (dragons vs dwarfs vs giants, etc)
-Roaming mobs as well as static groups
-No zone repop timers (ie T7 4hrs)
-Zone clearing, completion point to gauge (unlike T9 with constant repop every 10mins)
-No class specific drops (ie T8 kill one mob 47 times for a cleric bracer)
-Leash named to a certain flat, open area to avoid mob hang up in hills, trees, etc
-smaller zones with less computer taxing vs a T9 with 600 mobs respawning all the time
-Lots of weapon skins, differing off slot items, shields, etc to choose from (no cookie cutter crew anymore)
-No buy your way, must grind it out on your own, earn your way
 

there are others that I cant think of, please add to this list to get a compiled "what we want" list

Thats about what I've seen, and so far a pretty damned good list.

One thing we need, I think, too, is an "Oh, shit!" factor.....for example, during Halloween, you're killing/grinding and something unexpected pops. In that case it was a boss chain....but the first time it happened I remember thinking, "WTF?? I'm about dead as it is!". I'd like to see setups that cause mobs to hit you when you dont expect it....like after you've killed something gnarly and are looting his corpse, his bigger, older prison inmate brother comes around the bend with a disturbing look in his eye. A Roy Scheider "You're gonna need a bigger boat!" moment.

Forcing grouping on progression 12 tiers in is moronic... if you want to group goto p99...

I like the concept of adding grouping but not for progression maybe on an alt zone like tofs... Forcing the dozen or so active t9 people to have to group to progress is stupid. Most are setup to box and have adapted to that setup. I.e pull for 20 min go play with kids/pets etc or play at work.

Let alone that when you have multiple toons from multiple I.p.s seen to bog the zone and makes it lag

Hate already indicated EZ won't be changing towards a multiplayer player required content model.

Lol 'warring factions' is NOT something the general public is clamoring for.

Lets see a show of hands who found cursed venomfangs and giant spiders as something that 'enhanced' their enjoyment of t9....

yeah, thats what i thought.

As for having an AFK-friendly spot in a zone, thats the nature of a casual-type server. Once you log in 6-12 toons you really dont want to log them off if u have to run an errand or eat lunch or some other short-range afk activity. Having a spot in each zone to accomplish this is almost a vital part of EZ infrastructure.

Only place where this was ever much of an issue was really in Postorms where ppl afk at the zone in would die horrible deaths if anyone attacked the green dragon north of the Zone-in. lol. good times.

And of course losing the tunnel in t9 if you afk for a full game day.. no biggie tho... Or those maddening instances in t9 where you pee, smoke a cigarette and come back and find out that some black bear that you tagged 30 minutes ago and got into a tussle with a cursed venomfang ... won with 10% health, and slowly crawled over to your camp and gingerly steamrolled your entire AFK crew because you had yet to put a ninja-click (for exactly only this specific reason: afking in t9) on your enchanter and you gotta rebuff and zone all 12 toons...

blah blah blah.. once again.. Warring factions is effing stupid and it's not like we're looking for roleplay immersion here in the first place. Haven't been to many roleplay event weddings or cookie bake offs in kelethin since i first rolled up my toon army. Just sayin.. ;)

Damn those spiders.  Happens everytime.  I just used the group CoH click to aggro wipe whenever some warring faction decided to interrupt the trains.  Warring factions out in the kill zone is a mess.  If you instead wanted to use NPC hubs that decide what cosmetic set of gear you get, and have an associated faction, then warring factions is fine.

perhaps off topic but stat crunch please...  I dont even know if my pally is healing for 150k or 1500k most of the time.

Its hard to tell on healing...my paladin may not be doing shit because with 78% stonewall and 230984823904820308 regen I might just be fooling myself....

I am going to pull the pally out today just to see if he does anything...i have noticed I can tank 3 t9 junk mobs on my tank and take no damage....I have not tried with more than that....


would be funny if all this time it was the regen doing the healing and not the paladin.....

This.   

T5 was challenging to complete.   It was exciting getting there and knowing you had to clear the corals in 2 hours (or 4 w/e) in order to get the 4.5.   Mechanics rocked.     Water not so much.

T8 and 9 are fun as well.   I also really enjoyed T6.   It was a nice dps check and made me have to adjust my group in order to be able to clear it quickly.    A new zone in one of the later expansions would be cool.   I quit live in PoP so have never really seen any of the "newer" zones.

Something ild love to see in T10 would be a pet only weapon with a proc.

This would help ballance pet dps vs the war rog ranger dps .

The dps comparisons show recently that even with pet bag and uw pure casters are lagging behind so having a pet weapon that has a proc or high white damage may close the gap a little when paired with a UW in pet bag.

Also if the weapon has a click effect of summon same weapon,, this could be given to Beast pets to help them gain some dps without being made to overpowerd by giving them a pet bag.

No idea if it would work out but if hate wants to up the dps of pet classes this way the weapon could be uped or lowered if needed :)

Working on it in another fashion. ;-)


-Hate