EZ Server

I noticed something recently that I found a bit frustrating:  from tier 4 to about tier 8, the weapon skin upgrades are practically worthless, as far as their contribution to overall DPS assuming you're doing a good job with your strike augs.  I'm cleaning up the last few boxes in T8, and when a weapon drops that's usable by one of my DPS, it doesn't excite me at all because I know it's a negligible upgrade as far as DPS is concerned, and it's more for the HPs and heroics and whatnot. 

Is there any reason it was designed this way?   I don't think weapon skins should be a replacement for strike augs, or give people a reason to slack off on them, but it feels like it's gone too far in the other direction where equipping a full team with the next tier's weapons probably affects your overall damage less than 5%.  Just feels off, to me.

you're supposed to grind UC's for all 28 of your toons

You might want to look towards the ultimate weapon quest line - Its fun, I promise :)

http://wiki.ezserver.online/Ultimate_Weapon

I have UW8, I'm just referring to that missing feeling we all got back in live EQ every time we got a weapon upgrade as a melee class.  I hate that weapon skins don't have that excitement to them except for when you get your T1 weapon skins in Dragons.  That was the only meaningful weapon skin upgrade that I've noticed from any tier, particularly because of how much damage we get from strikes and UW.

It would be good to see Goblin UWs drop as a rare say 3-4 zones behind the true UWs so goblin 6 would drop in Tier 7 .

how about adjusting the DPS of the skins so the are ~half of an equiv. level UC (instead of what they are now, like 2%. lol.)

tier9 UW 2HS white dmg = 221,600
tier9 2HS white dmg = 8,600 - ROFL(not a typo, eight thousand vs two-hundred-twenty thousand)

tier9 UW spell dmg = 568,750
tier9 NS = 325,000  :'(

Welcome to EZ, you must be new here.   UCs are important.    UCs are not optional.    A UC1 does not allow for you to do T10.

Please stop trying to nerf content based on your inability to do what is necessary to progress.     Many people have now finished T10.    Magelo those toons/guilds to get an idea of what it takes.   Check out Blood Legion,  Victory,  STONE etc to get an idea.    People did not roll into T10 with UC1s and expect to win.    That is just silly.   

To quote Fugitive: "not everyone gets the shinies"       Relating back to old school EQ or WoW or <insert mmorpg raiding game here>,  there are strict requirements for progression and there would be strict requirements for entry into a guild doing certain tier progression.    For example you had to have X amount of resists. 

Just stop the QQ,  suck it up and do your UC2/UC3s on your toons.    It is not that hard.


With your gear,  your app to my guild would be auto denied. 

Ahhh, I see.   Well the spirit of my comment still stands. 

I know you're talking to Gell, but let me clarify my positon which may or not be consistent with his:  I don't want overall dps to increase here.  I just want weapon skins to feel meaningful as upgrades and have them be a greater part of your overall damage, with a small reduction to strike aug damage to compensate.

Parses could make the argument stronger, and I admit I have none at the moment, but I can still say with certainty that my box dps is increasing 10-15% on average per tier by upgrading strikes while new weapon skins are negligible.   The gap between the skins and strikes also increases drastically. T4 skin base wep damage is 6% of gmajor ninja strike while T7 skin base damage is 1% of LP ninja strike.

I would love if non-UW weapons were like 30-40% of the box's overall damage instead of the paltry amount it feels like it is right now.  Getting weapon upgrades should be at least somewhat exciting. It always has been in every RPG I've ever played.  Didn't it feel great getting your broad sword in Dragon Warrior?

It felt great when I got my first UW.   Felt great each one thereafter.   

Agreed.

However, in the other thread, there was discussion about level req'ing UWs or something similar in order to encourage players to tier advance and not farm UWs while they're still in low tiers.  It seemed to be a well-supported argument by other posters in the thread.

Should someone follow that path, forced by development or not, that means they would go an awfully long time without being excited about a weapon upgrade for their warrior or any other box. 

It's not as easy to be excited about finally getting your hands on 2 SLS to combine your next tier strike aug.  A rare weapon drop would be much more fun.

meant UW yes. of course...

not interested in joining your guild, thanks anyway. lol

You need to stop personifying your boxes...they are an army of stick figures and nothing more. Dont allow them to make you think it should matter if  it is white damage or the aug....its all damage from a stick figure.

I get what you are saying but really dont think this should even come close to being in the top 10 things worthy of Akka/Rent's time. This kind of change would take a significant time commitment testing and tweaking to implement without completely fucking over the balance of the classes (which isnt exactly perfect to begin with). You think a bard is useless now? Try upping their white damage and taking away their proc damage. All that work to essentially net to zero change (if i understood your position correctly).

Personally i prefer to be happy my toons have a new weapon graphic and not pay attention to the fact that its the aug upgrade that will give me my true boost in damage and let Akka spend his time on something more meaningful.

Getting UCs, Mana Necks, UWs, UA, T10 Citrines was exciting.

There is an "Overall" concept on this server that a lot of players that are relatively new overlook.

toon X's overall progression includes all the side quests to make a truly nice toon.

its about the UC, the earring, UW, ROA, SOA, etc, etc.

while I agree that the feeling in live of getting a new weapon that increased your dps, etc was very cool; it doesn't apply as much here. here it is about the overall grind applied to each and every toon and after a metric ton of grinding you see toons blossom into a DPS machine.

Although I will admit its easier to look back down the hill after years of farming/grinding than it is to look up. Its extremely hard to catch up to the top end gamers.

New weapons may or may not be coming down the pipeline in the future. Our weapon system now is vastly different from what Hunter had in place at one point, I don't know that it will change, but new ideas are coming forward regarding exciting shiny items and how they will affect our gameplay.

At present though the "skin" is basically just that, its a hull to hold the augments. you get the new hull and put the new augments into it and there isn't much excitement in that. The excitement, for me at least, was building those side quest items and really seeing the toon explode in terms of DPS, stats, etc.

Bottom line, I see what the OP is saying here, but this is the system we currently have. Akkadius is committed to bringing home the bacon for us on this server though, as am I. Everyday we are storming new ideas to make this server more and more attractive.

Plus the overall stats have to also include the Epic aug.  The combination really shouldnt be any different then the stats before the change.

Shawn

epic aug goes in the UW also, so we're back to square one.
fact: weapon skins white dmg is pathetic.

"its about the UC, the earring, UW, ROA, SOA, etc, etc."

nah it's about the HP you get from the tier armor, the strike augs, and the epics.
it's very easy to progress up to T10 with just those 3 things on your toons.
I cleared T6 with just 4 toons, only 1 real dps.  didn't take that long. only 2 had UC(1), no UW no earrings(!!)... at T7 I realized it would be slow without a few more toons, so I added 2 dps toons and 2 pet/buffer class, a total of 8 toons cleared T9 just fine.

maxing all those things on multiple toons (or all...) should allow you to faceroll max-level content (T10 whatever) with one hand while watching TV. it shouldn't be required to progress. that's just my opinion of course, many will disagree, naturally most of them already have all the items and don't want it "nerfed", that's a normal reaction I guess..

If you only realized this at t7, you truly are living in your own world.


Nobody gives a shit.


If you think you need all of the side items to progress, you're wrong. You absolutely don't, it just makes it faster and more efficient. There's always been tons of filler time between the top players finishing the current final tier and then going back and grinding more side shit, more UC3s, maxing RoAs on boxes, more Ult Weapons, more Earrings. This stuff is required on at least your warrior in T10, but that was a discussion that went down years ago even with making tier 9. At the time, around 95% of warriors past tier 7 had already maxed out an Ult Weapon for their tank. Therefore, the devs said "we're going to start putting HP on mobs with this in mind, otherwise new zones will be boring." Not only was it accepted but also gladly welcomed by the community, considering t9 offered almost no challenge whatsoever to the players that were hopping in it on day 1. The only difference between the crews was how much of the zone you could pull at once and how fast you could kill it all.

You seem to be missing the point of the server in general. Grind = Reward = Efficiency. Not Instant Gratification = Stomping thru content = I want the server adjusted to fit my playstyle.

You aren't a special snowflake. Everyone above you didn't just roll up with 18 characters or magically poop out Ultimate Weapons. They saw the possibilites, what they could achieve, and they adapted to strengthen their crew's damage output, stability, etc. This isn't your typical MMO of the past few years, with easy catchup mechanics, easy content, and a complete willingness to cater only toward the casual fanbase in order to produce the highest amount of $$$$$ in return.

LOL 

/bow to you!

I agree with everything but this line....when t9 was introduced it was hella hard! It was nerfed because people QQ'd about it.

In t9 testing, myself, Dimur, and Fugi were pulling 1/3 of the zone at a time.

Also, I feel like I should clarify and touch on the difficulty of ToV in its initial release. At the time, Rampage was in every zone and almost every mob on EZ. The thing was, at that difficulty and with the sheer amount of HP and mitigation warriors had, in order to make the mobs hit hard enough for it to be a viable challenge, the rampage damage was absolutely insane. Not only that, but every mob in the zone proc'd a 1,000,000 damage DD on hit randomly. Anybody who fought thru this onslaught and pounded the zone to the point where they got one of the first uc3's had fought thru immense amounts of pain. It got to the point where it was faster to solo trash pulls on the warrior, rather than to have your melee just run in and die. That was just how painful the zone was. So comparing that to what followed, the removal of rampage from EZ entirely (until tier 10), the revamp of Ult Weapons, the massive HP boosts to tier gear revamp, the difficulty of what was released when t9 hit was child's play compared to the previous tier.

The only thing that was ever nerfed was the spawn rate of the Hill Giant, which did need to happen, but that's not a nerf to the laughable difficulty of the zone. The design was terrible, the mechanics behind the bosses were ever worse. I don't there was any enjoyment whatsoever out of that zone for me from start to finish. Most of us try not to think about the time of that place being the endgame of the server  ;D

When the t9 first came out and the mobs were ramping and killing EVERYTHING! That was nerfed.....I remember making a druid because skin was the only thing that would keep you alive.....that zone was VERY hard when it first came out....this was when Hunter was still alive. I am not certain how soon it was nerfed after it first came online....Hate nerfed it more later

Oh for fuck sake.



Go back and look at the t9 is now live thread, or even the beta test thread. Nobody QQ'd at all about the difficulty. Because it wasn't.

Lol

Have been going through all posts regarding t9.....maybe I was wrong and my memory is just going....I could have sworn before it was nerfed it was MUCH harder...but can't find the proof to back up my claim...... ???


Still looking so far best I can find:

T9 was a fuckton harder when it was released, you couldn't even play in the zone when skeletons would spawn from 6pm to 6am because they'd all auto-agro you and swarm you no matter where you were on the map.  They hit for over 1mil mitigated, rampaged and numbered well over 100 spawns...even if you could survive a dozen of them you'd get smoked because they came from every angle, and that would be best case scenario if you somehow kept them off of every other toon in your raid while living through the rampage that fired on every melee swing.  It was a total shit show, balanced off of the fact that those damage output numbers were needed to have a chance to take out a fully decked out max UW warrior.  

People complained about needed a UW warrior to do T9, Hunter asked for a solution to not make the UW required and make the zone challenging.  The fix was pretty simple, as long as you could keep your warrior up you could do the content.  Warriors had no problems holding agro and living through the damage output, any non-warrior on the other hand, got shredded by the rampage.  Hunter said at the time, source code correlated rampage and normal melee dmg outputs and since lowering one would lower both, he removed the rampage everywhere in the game. It was a Band-Aid fix and it was done at the behest of a vocal part of the player base that didn't want to have to put a UW weapon on every toon just have have  enough hp to survive, it also coincided with lowering the hp on the UW and shifting the focus of HP gains onto the armor progression. T9 got further nerfed when Hate bent to the demands of whiners fresh out of T8 and undergeared for the then-end-game zone, but whatever.

Rampage removal also opened up the Pandora's box of only needing to allocate all resources on the tank while totally ignoring the rest of the toons in a person's setup.  People started hoarding their essences to work on UW's to trivialize the content they were grinding through, totally ignoring strike augs and mana necks. It's all well and good, without any threat of damage on anyone but the tank you can bulldoze your way through everything up to T10. T10? Yeah I suppose it would be pretty tough with a bunch of ucv1 toons relying on the shitty strike and spell dmg they mod even level relevant strikes to...the shitty hp return on a ucv1 compared to ucv3, yeah that'll probably be noticeable...heals being modded with a ucv1 or ucv2, yeah probably not gonna maximize healing output that way.  You certainly can get to T10 pooling all resources into the main tank, and the current game state actually encourages it just by making it possible.  Just don't expect to be able to consume as much content as someone whose overall gear obsoletes your own in a zone that was specifically made to counter the pussification of the rest of the content.
 

tldr; T9 was initially hard as fuck and eventually got nerfed to the point of a laughable joke, along with everything outside of T10.

Thanks Dimurwar.....I thought maybe my mind was slipping.....for fuck's sake!  ::)

I don't know how this got on UC, RoA, T10 etc etc... It was about the weapon skins and how low their white dmg is.

I remember at one point (in 2010 or so) Hunter saying he was running into problems increasing white damage on the later tier weapons, due to some kind of bug or limitation in Emu. It was rolling over into negative dmg or something... Pretty sure that was the entire and sole reason for creating the Strike augs. Obviously this was fixed somewhere along the way, since the UW has half a million white dmg.  Due to this, a simple pass thru the epic skins to fix them seems like an easy and completely reasonable thing to do. Nobody is asking to take your lollipop away...

I think your damage should come from strike augs...if you want white damage go with UW. Strike augs (with the UC of appropriate tier) add a WHOLE heap of damage.  What I see here is someone wanting to reinvent the wheel.


To be honest what I do see is someone who wants to increase white damage because they are in t10 and dps is slow because that person didnt take the time to do something as simple as a UCv2 (which is the EASIEST upgrade to heal/spell damage you can get!).....your lack of motivation to appropriately gear your toon is noone else's fault but your own.

no this affects everyone, from T1 on up.

I must be out of the loop, has something changed to make it more  difficult to advance through the lower tiers that warrants a total revamp of what's been working for years?  I was under the impression that the upgrade paths that already exist were entirely sufficient and reflective of the intended rate of progress.  Color me skewed, but how is arbitrarily raising white damage on weapon skins fixing anything?  Or is this request just an attempt to get something without trading something off in return?

With appropriate UC and strike augs the content is pretty easy as is?  Are you asking to have white damage upped and strike aug damage reduced?  There has to be a give and take here...you can't have both.  You also don't know if there is something else lined up further up the pipe that may change things later on.....once again i don't see where there is anything to complain about IF you are keeping up with each tiers strike augs and ultimate charm....unless you just want to smack the crap out of a mob and see HUGE numbers for each hit.  If that's the case...get an UW

As a veteran I have no knowledge of how difficult the lower tiers are these days. I assume they are as hard as they were when I originally did them. Since us vets always use our uber toons to rofl stomp old zones it's easy to assume they are "easy" when in reality they are anything but - when being done for the first time with zero support.

That said I do agree white damage on skins is laughably low and could be looked it, but personally I would want to see a small decline in strike damage to counteract any increase. A lot of other stuff should probably be done before this though imo.

Only problem Godtank, they arent as hard.  With all the uber buffs that are available, almost every hour, the content is rather laughable now....so to say that you need to see big hits....maybe I can see this if we were to level limit buffs DRASTICALLY and then look at upping white damage and retarding strike damage.

Given the other recent thread of newer players actually complaining that it is too easy and they would prefer a bit more of a challenge, i dont think the earlier tiers are that hard....unless you make it difficult on yourself by not gearing up key items.

I believe this thread started out primarily as a complaint that white damage was low and there is no reason to looking forward to the new weapons from tier to tier. I would agree with this but i think its been covered pretty well that 1.) its not as easy as just upping white damage and 2.) a major re-work is not worth it for this reason alone.

I for one don't think there should be any changes to what we have now, too much work to balance everything back out for something that is working fine.
That being said it would be cool if there was a second set of weapons in each tier that were just melee dmg weapons without an aug slot. Something that would be a bit more dps than the strike augs from previous tiers but not as good as using strike augs for the current tier. This way people get to play around with actual melee dps but it still wouldn't be as good as UW or even the strike augs (unless you take the time to work on the few melee dmg modifiers in game to get more dps than the augs).
Like I said though, it would be cool. It's not something that would be worth putting too much effort in to.

As I've said before, no T10 folks can say early tiers are "easy" today unless they level up a new group with exactly zero support from the other toons in their arsenal - today. Zero gear, zero plat, no knowledge of the game, zero buffs and of course, no uber war killing everything for them. I don't know why folks don't understand this basic requirement. No T10 folks do this, because it would be a colossal waste of time when it's approximately 1,000x easier to use our shit to some degree or other.

We can't just say "they have buffs!" and call it easy - it's not even remotely accurate. Besides the fact that buffs for lowbies were nerfed, T1-10 was hard as shit for me, and I suspect it's the same for anyone else doing it for the first time unless they are Orthanos and all games are a joke apparently. EZ is still anything but easy for new players (it's hard AF). To this day, having finished T10 armor on GT, I can say without hesitation I'm still sure we lose way way way more players to burnout than to, "I won and now I quit." I'd be curious if Akka could show us server pop active and inactive by percent of lvl 79, 78, 77, 76 etc. I bet the vast majority of inactive are lvl 73, 74 or some such and not 78, 79.

Nah. A year or so ago I was told there was no way you could get a group of 6 to 70 with no help in a normal single session, so I ran through a group with absolutely no help from my older chars....NO buffs from other players, just a war, a cleric, a chanter, 2 zerks and a monk. Was very easy. Considerably more so than when I started. I went through to 70 and farming time gear less than 5 hours after I started the characters. A day later I was in CT and a day after that I was in T1.

One thing I could NOT avoid, though, was knowledge. I knew how to maximize what I had, I knew how to get the most out of the zone I was in....but arguably with all the wiki info and whatnot readily available any player starting from scratch does to an extent as well.

 If its somehow "hard AF" you are either doing it wrong or can claim Warcrap was your first MMO.

But even when I started (2009) it wasnt hard here. It was pretty easy. Just far more time consuming farming some things because no instance system like EZ has now, and boxing wasnt as "simple out of the box" as it is now. I went through playing a warrior and boxing a shaman, no MQ2, with a few friends helping. Again, simple, not much of a challenge other than just spending the time. Only challenge spots back then were Kronos, Shadow (his regen was ridiculous, as were the old AE effects he had) then, later,  Warlord (always hated Death Touch).

As for the amount of players who fall off mid tiers....how is that different from any other MMO?? Its ALWAYS that way, has been since I started playing these games in '97 (well, 93 if you count AOL's NWN)....and its seldom because of how hard the game is. People decide its not what they wanted....they decide they dont like the player base....or, and this according to Massively is the NUMBER ONE reason players quit before end game: they get bored. The game doesnt hold their interest, for a variety of reasons, but top in the list is that its just not challenging.

I'd been trying to hold on for a long time, but T9 killed me. I walked into the zone with T8 gear, ONE UC3 in my team and a single UW (7) on my warrior. I could just about solo three trash mobs even with that gear. Within 2 hours in I was mass pulling one to two dozen mobs at a time. After upgrading to a UW10 and getting full T9 armor I was soloing the undead swarm. It was pathetically easy. Granted it didnt start that way, but Hate and Hunter's fixes to some of the issues went overboard.

Then T10 hit. Loved how hard the mobs hit, loved what seemed like a decent challenge. But Hate took our suggestions on encouraging people to team up to succeed a bit too far, and made it no instance. Then he completely removed ANY means of characters shedding agro....which is find if you are single boxing and can manage agro, but its a death sentence for your DPS if you box. These two issues made it less than fun for me. Got tired of feeling like a douche because I was using a camp someone else needed and didnt want to group with them because I wouldn't piss on em if they were on fire and had em on ignore.

So....I avoided T10, except for times I knew the zone was empty, and or was able to team with friends or guidlies. But the zone never felt right for me for whatever reason: maybe memories of early bugs, or maybe I just hate the way its setup....dont know. I just get bored of it after 30 minutes any time I play.

But too hard? Hardly. And from talking to a dozen or so players who I helped get started here who have since left, I can tell you only one said it was because it was too hard....but that had a lot to do with him trying to box on a Windows XP system with 3 gig ram and a second gen (Prescott) P4.

T10 reaped your soul, no more explanation needed.    Enjoy your retirement.

I guess EZ is super easy then  ::) btw T10 is still a royal pita. Love it.

I will undoubtedly be back, after things settle down from the move.