EZ Server

Player input regarding T12

T12 (Vex Thal) is under construction, and while it seems like these developments get to a point fairly quickly and then everything becomes a slog from there, I'm at a point where I would like some input from the community.

So, a few questions:

 • Assuming current Kael difficulty as a baseline, would you like to see new content:
   
   Much Harder
   Slightly Harder
   Same
   Slightly Easier
   Much Easier
 
   We have also been working on the idea/scripting to implement a 'hard mode*' in new content, so if you think the general zone should be slightly easier with hard mode, then that's good as well.

   *Hard mode would be an increased difficulty for all NPC's in the zone, both in damage output and hitpoints, but they would also award loot more often, and possibly multiple kill credits for quests etc.

  • Do you find the background lore, NPC emotes, quest background stories etc. engaging or entertaining, or don't really care much either way?

  • Is there any mechanic that we've used previously that you would, or would not like to see repeated?

  • Feelings on bane weapons?

  • Aside from the content, what would you like to see 'fixed' as part of this Tier? Example I've heard: Item effects are not very useful/being re-used. But it's open ended, whatever you'd like to see done better in some way, or fixed.

  • Since this post will probably get people's attention, is there anything currently broken or janky that you feel needs to be addressed? (completely separate from the Tier).

Anything else that comes to mind, by all means let us know here.

Draca & Sarthin

Slightly harder...and a hard mode. Once you are finished with the first run through (slightly harder than current tier)...making it more difficult with a better drop rate(in hard mode).

Not sure what "hard mode" will bring because.... after a week or two, it will be known if it's more beneficial to kill more mobs in easy mode, or if you can kill less mobs in hard mode, and which delivers more drops for total time played.  For simplicity, let's say you can kill 10 mobs in 10 minutes normal, but only 5 mobs in 10 minutes in hard mode.  That means unless hard mode delivered more than 2X the loot, no one will do hard mode.  And conversely, everyone will do hard mode if it is more than 2X loot.  Maybe things will be more complicated than that an part of the fun will be to figure out what's most efficient?  Could be.

The only instance I see this working, is if hard mode is so hard that it isn't possible for a non-Spud player to do it until you've gotten enough T12 loot to make up for, in this case, my gimpness.  At which point when reaching the ability to get plus 2X you would never go back to normal mode.

At first glance, it "seems" like a good idea.  In actuality I'm not sure if it's just an unnecessary complication both in the setup of the zone and the play.  I'm not against it, but am wondering if it's worth the programming effort.  Hard mode will make it quicker for the top tier players to complete the zone.  I don't have an issue with that, I'm never racing to be first or even 10th, but from the top 10 perspective, it seems like they'd have more downtime and overall less fulfilment in the game-play, unless that is, the encounters are so hard that it takes them more time to figure out in the first place, thus a higher level of achievement feeling.

Other than that, I really like the mechanics of T11 with chain bosses, buff removals during encounters to make you pay attention are cool too.  Like having the gambling coins or something similar as that keeps interest as well.

Love the last zone and looking forward to the next.  It will be fun with or without hard mode I'm sure.

my recommendation based on a player who was end game in 2014 and is now coming back would be to approach this with a similar model as we see in successful RPG/MMO. Keep the current tier difficult, IE a step up from Kael, but bring down the entry point grind a bit on the earlier tiers. The point is that folks coming in will burn out before seeing your top 3-4 zones. I get it, folks grinded it in previous years, but that was when it was end content and the grind was the end game, nows its tiered grinds to get to, say Kael.

Also, when Aaron did old commons, it was tuned for a 12 box.. we seemed to have gotten well past those numbers. Would be nice to have an idea where we plan on tuning the content going forward. IE 12-18-24 plus.. scaling would definitely help that, and hard mode so we are on the right track.   I have been away for so long, that I am having fun just leveling a group up and immersing myself in content but the actual fact is, I need to pull another group in for the later tiers.

Also, since nobody asked, would be nice to see a way to increase DPS on pure melee outside of Rogue. May be as easy as adding a 0 at the end of monks/zerker skins in t8-t10..  understand in ST skins get huge dps increase and we get UW's which are a grind pre-ST.

I think the concept makes more sense if you spread it across several zones instead of just the existing top zone, you could even make a quest that unlocks the feature ensuring that people can't just Jump into hard mode, they need to accomplish X first..  The "normal mode" should be tuned for the first time you get into the zone.  The Hard mode could be applied to earlier zones that allow gearing a new group of toons, faster and easier but at much higher scaling.  Adding a "Hard mode" to Kael/VP would absolutely have players going back to those zones if they aren't already maxed, and give newer players more to do as they break into higher tiers, extending the life of each zone.

Bane weapons = Could that be factored into a hard mode?  Where you'd need to farm bane weapons in the normal mode of a zone to work towards the hard mode? 

Would love a balance pass on class DPS without having to nerf rogues.  It's been many years since this was done and I know spud/sarthin can dps meter up most stuff or already have that data.  Other classes don't need to do More than rogue, per say, but at least be somewhat close.  I could run 12 rogues like many do, but meh.

I cant comment on tier 12 as I am currently working through T5.

However, here is my 2cents since you asked about what currently works/doesnt work/is a bit janky...

1) Group Scaling - I think the expectation that someone bring more than 12 characters is out of touch.  Personally, I think everything should be attainable (albeit not efficiently) completed with a single group of 6, maybe 12 at most.  A suggestion I have is to scale difficulty in personal instances based on number of players in the instance, if that isnt possible/isnt on the roadmap, perhaps balance around a group of 12.

2) Ramp up to current tiers.  The grind to get to T12 is too steep.  As someone before me stated, I get it, others had to grind to get to T12, but as tiers increase, the grind to get to current content becomes less and less attainable.  I think that tier 1-7 should be accelerated so that newer players don't get burned out.  Here are some ideas to lower the grind:

A) Time and LDON - Drop a page for every character that damages a boss
B) POD tier 2 increasing the drop rate of dragon class armor
C) HoH increase dedicated token drop rate for each avatar so that its easier to target farm tokens needed.
D) Airplane (T4) - Introduce a dragon class armor type drop to help shorten that tier
E) Abyss (T5) - decrease timed spawns from 30min to 15min, add all bosses to the random spawn pool and increase the random spawn rate to help speed up the grind.

3) What is Janky

A) Casters in general are complete garbage until later tier.  They need to be buffed at lower levels, i know in talking with Draca its hard to balance at lower tiers, but since those tiers are largely "throw away tiers" buffing these classes will really help to make them enjoyable to level
B) Mages - Honestly pet classes in general.  Pets randomly disappear, do terrible damage, they just feel like a burden to maintain.  On top of that Mages really dont come into their own until they get Shylo's Bolt, but that is gated pretty far into progression. Suggestion here is to introduce a summoned armor/weapon spell that increases by tier to drastically increase pet damage, perhaps something like appropriate ninjastrike aug level of proc damage for the tier.
C) Tank Variety - Warriors are exponentially better at tanking than any other class with the only other viable tank being an SK, but viable is a very very loose adjective.  I honestly dont know the answer here, but there has to be some opportunity to improve SK mitigation to bring them closer if not equal to a Warrior.  I hesitate to suggest making changes to Pally's since they are so strong as healers that they could become incredibly OP, but a 3rd option to tank would be nice to have some variety in the game.  Perhaps Beastmaster pets could get some buffs to make them viable tanks, this is probably a stretch, just thinking of trying to bring purpose to a rather rarely used class.
D) DPS Variety - Rogues are so far above other DPS.  Can we get some buffs to Monks, Beastmasters and Berserkers to bring them more inline with rogues. This would promote variety while maintaining optimization.
E) Shamans - Shamans feel like they dont really have a place, they are basically buff bots with a bit of melee dps, but they really struggle to find a place in a group.  Suggestion, revisit slows make them more effective perhaps this helps with making smaller groups more viable as slow could reduce incoming damage significantly enough to make up for missing a healer?
F) Ultimate Charm v1 quest is absurdly grindy.  Suggestion - Increase drop rates in LDON for the dedicated drop.  Right now there is no real way to target farm charmv1 upgrades and getting them on 12 characters is 100's of hours of grind for something that is off of the progression track.  Likewise increase the drop rate for v2 charm upgrades in HoH and/or add them to T5 drop pool.

What is working?

1) Epic progression is awesome, it's really fun to do the epic quests / upgrades each tier they feel meaningful for most classes.
2) Custom zones are a breath of fresh air compared to vanilla.  Very fun.
3) Custom quests - things like sceptor of time, illusion mask, pet sword, etc.. are really fun with good fun rewards.
4) Clicky toys - great utility, fun to use, wish there were more for other classes

I think that is my 2cents

Thanks,

Kirigami

First, I'll caveat this with I've only just barely dipped my toes into t11 so I don't entirely know what I'm talking about yet. But that also means I have a recency bias because it's more fresh than those who's been doing it the last 8 months.

As is, I think the difficulty is just about perfect. My tank is basically capped out (outside of LRoA) on everything I can get prior to T11, with the exception of Hills of Shade items. Distant Relatives are about where I hit my limit. Meaning, I can kill just barely enough to gear up, which means it'll be a slow crawl to start before I can finally tackle all the stuff that spawns afterwards. Any harder and it becomes a frustrating game of wiping for hours and hoping I get lucky every once in a while with respawns so I can try again. That's not fun. Much easier and it just starts to become a check the box exercise of just killing everything and the "challenge" of the zone is one of time (which is typically what happens after you've hit the halfway mark of a tier, which I think is a good area to shoot for).

As far as things to look at, I do wonder if you have a roadmap for how long you want each tier to take. And by that I mean an estimated amount of hours. I blew through T5 in a week or two, but I also play a solid 8 hours a day (which is to say, time in weeks isn't how to measure, but hours). I bring this up because of a comment in ooc a while back regarding T11 being significantly longer than T10. And T10 is one of those things that I think needs more tuning. From what I can tell, it was developed to essentially be the end game without any content afterwards. The issue is, I spent a few hundred hours there and that seems like way too much. I know people like to talk about how it "used to be harder" with things like PB spawns and faction, but those things are more an issue for that initial break in. Once you get them out of the way and get your tank geared, you still have an insanely long grind. While I actually enjoyed the grind, I imagine most people will hit that wall and leave the server forever.

But if your goal is for it to take a minimum of 200 hours and cater to people like me who will grind and grind and grind, then I suppose it's in a good place (I should also caveat this with how I'm still not actually done with the zone and need several more hammers and tokens to "complete" it).

As for T12, I'll agree with Tnonim here. Players will always choose the path of least resistance. If the numbers show that two modes are equal, they'll choose the easier. If hard gives significantly more rewards, normal mode will go unused. Balancing this where it's an actually worthwhile feature seems like it could end up a waste of time as you'd be trying to predict human psychology and nailing the perfect numbers.

Regarding your other questions:

1) Lore: I honestly didn't notice any of it until VP, but it definitely makes it more engaging for there to be a story. That said, trying to read Venril spam 50 lines of text at me while I'm trying to kill him sometimes becomes a bit distracting.

2) Mechanics: For the love of god, please no more crazy knockbacks. I thought the juggernauts were bad (and they are super annoying), but then I met Ro'kki for who some reason kicks you halfway across the zone. Why is this a thing? It just makes it annoying, not difficult. Same with Master in ST, the knockback is so large that when you're on a boxing server that relies on proximity (and hits) to heal, there's not really any strategy involved, it's just obnoxious. I obviously can't comment on what the T11 knockback was like, but with how difficult it's been to break in already, I can't imagine that was enjoyable.

The DoT thing is interesting. In my mind I see it as a coding trick to basically account for the fact that the numbers are starting to get too big, so you basically set a handicap for the zone. To add to the "things that may need changing," I do find it odd that VP necros (and dragons obviously) are theoretically harder than T11 trash because you've got an AoE DoT versus single target. They make it incredibly difficult to break into VP because you've essentially got to overcome that handicap to survive (and with how rare things like GSS are in T10, that means the grind there becomes even longer).

3) Bane weapons: In theory they're fine. In practice I loathe them because now I've got to haul extra weapons around. Or if I forget to change them out (especially on every single box), suddenly I'm mid-fight and struggling against content that should be easy.

4) Other: I think people have struggled with the RNG of T5 for a very long time. I do wonder if the rate of random and trigger spawns shouldn't be increased by maybe 10% or even as high as 20%? Additionally, I'll agree on the timed ones being way too long. You can get around it with instance hopping, but that just seems like almost a roundabout way of cheating the system. And if you can get around the system so easily, why not just lower or remove it?

I'll just add this last one since you asked, even though I noted it not that long ago, but there's some kind of conflict with healing when you've got T10 Orc BP and UCv4 equipped at the same time that completely cancels it out. It's not a huge deal cause whatever, just put a different BP on, but still seems broken.

I've sat on this for a couple of days, as I'm not entirely sure that I'm qualified to respond.  I'm not in T11 yet.  I'm not even in T7 yet (almost!).  However, you do ask about things on the server that could be addressed.  I'm sure you've heard everything across the spectrum, and I wasn't going to respond at all.  Then this morning a comment was made in Discord about old content "never being more trivial" in light of current knowledge of the game and server and the availability of end game buffs.  As a new-ish player to this server, who has committed a not so trivial amount of time to "only" be T6, I almost walked away from EZ.  And that's coming from someone who has enjoyed the server and what it has had to offer.  The previous content is not trivial, nor is it not without its faults.

Wings offers a great advantage when it's available.  Even with that advantage, T3/T4 you're stuck waiting on token drops and chance drops for characters to gear up and move forward.  I don't have the creative brain to suggest a solution, but at some point there's a tipping point where you've "finished" the content and it's punitive to farm the tokens and then have to kill the same NPC 100+ times to get one, singular drop.  That's AFTER you've geared 11 other characters fully, with (I wasn't counting) how many other kills along the way.  While it's effective at "slowing down" the (apparently trivial) progression through the game, it's also somewhat...unvaried and uninspired.

You've heard plenty on T5.  I actually enjoyed T5 and found it a refreshing change in pace from the tedium of T3/T4.  It's by far a more enjoyable Tier than T6.  However, it leads me to the next point - box/bot management.  EZ Server promotes itself as a "Solo boxing server."  The wiki says "12 and beyond," but we all know that people are easily running 18.  Mage group CoTH is broken, making moving characters around in large zones extremely tedious.  For the most part, MQ handles this fairly easily.  Occasionally you'll end up with a zone that has broken navmeshes, like Illsalin/Abyss, where you can easily spend several months playing.  Without a better bot management system, you're stuck tabbing across 12+ screens trying to move characters "up" over a ledge to get them in line with your primary driver.  In game there does exist a mechanic to do this, but it's locked behind a paywall that is reserved for a select few that have been with the server for a period of time, or those who happen to catch a donation window that appears as elusive as the random named(s) in T5.  I do not fault bringing down the donation system.  However, with group CoTH broken, and no other way at lower tiers to solve this...it's a simple QoL fix that could be adjusted.

Looking forward, I agree with what's previously been said - bane weapons as a whole become a nuisance for a boxing server.   Having to keep track of 12+ characters, who has what equipped for which NPC "type" and then switching back, swapping out epic augs along the way, we'd spend more time managing equipment than we would playing the content.  Perhaps that's the goal, but if so...it seems less engaging than what I've experienced so far!

I always find the comments/emotes/NPC interactions to be entertaining.  Please continue them.  As a Type A personality, I know that I could never come up with that level of engagement, so it's fun to see (even the names, like the bosses in T5, were amusing to me).  While I don't catch the "lore" behind each tier that I've gone through, I do randomly see the text and get a chuckle the break up the monotony.

Sorry for the gripes - I meant this more as an encouragement that the content itself as presented IS in fact fun and engaging.  Each tier has presented new and unique opportunities.  Always fun to see some new stuff, and play along with new people.  

I think baseline difficulty should probably be in the neighborhood of halfway between current kael and original kael.

I like 'hardmode' making it significantly harder.

I think bane weapons are a terrible idea, I've always hated bane weapons in EQ. Especially on a box server as others mentioned.

I hope the constant small knockback mechanic is not reused, especially in a cramped zone like VT.

I would much prefer "run in" adds or pops rather than instant appear/aggro.

I enjoyed the "stop fighting and do a thing" mechanics, but not if that thing is something a single random character in your box group has to do (emote or click stuff ect)

Jank would be stacking of effects as always within eq.

I think a stat squish is needed, I wish it was as easy as cutting everything down a few orders of magnitude, but I don't know how that would actually work in practice.

I don't want to respond point by point yet. Still watching what's coming through.

I will offer what insights I have in the next couple days.

Being relatively new to the server and its particular mechanics and content, I am not really in a position to comment about the higher level tiers as I have not reached them yet, I will however comment on some of the lower tier activities I have done.

1) I will agree with some of the comments listed previously that casters do seem to be in need of a "buff" to bring them somewhat in line with the melee classes, as a person who primarily plays casters in MMO's in general, I would love to be able to "main" one of my casters, which I sadly cannot do as things are currently. I have heard that they do improve in later tiers, but I would ask why is there that delay?

2) FG/CG: I can see the need to do these on one character if you so wish to do so the "old fashioned" way but when you are looking to do them for a party its a pain to put it mildly, sadly, Misty Thicket appears to be extremely buggy to put it mildly, in regard to this I am unclear if that is something that is awry with the zone itself, or if it is something that is occurring on client side (aka if i have a corrupted file somewhere). I am going to throw out a suggestion, since FG/CG appear to be nostalgia runs for the most part, why not add a vendor that sells the items needed to proceed with the quest, which would be another option, this would allow those who maybe are seeking another way to complete these two quest lines for an entire party another way to do so. This would eliminate some time that is spent running through multiple chars working to get these two requirements completed, I have seen this done on well an AC server, and it doesnt detract from the experience but rather adds another option for players to progress.  A further thing to consider this is no different really then those who have the option to purchase a completion flag from the ez credit vendor, except it would be open to all which would also help especially as donations are no longer accepted at this time.

3)Going to add to the LDON statement here, I would like to see that as well (in regard to what Acaelis mentioned), I would go so far as to suggest that the bosses also drop more then one page at a time, this would also cut down in the length of time players spend doing these tasks.

I guess really in the end a decision needs to be made if the server wants to be welcoming to newer players, and by this I mean in regard to shortening the time it takes (and effort and frustration) to get through the the earlier tiers I personally can say there have been a few times that I have been frustrated with either the drop rates (qvic etc) or some of the more "tedious" elements of progression to the point where I needed to step away from playing for a bit, and I am typically more patient  then most gamers.  In closing I would agree with the opinion that the acceleration for tiers 1-7 could do with some tweaking as that would be one most players would get frustrated and be more prone to lose interest and quit.

 • Assuming current Kael difficulty as a baseline, would you like to see new content:  
   Harder (should be a struggle to break in) With Hard Mode to make it interesting later in the tier when its just grinding.

  • Do you find the background lore, NPC emotes, quest background stories etc. engaging or entertaining, or don't really care much either way?
   I enjoy the lore/emotes/etc at the beginning.  But seeing the same stuff over and over as we grind gets...ehh.

  • Is there any mechanic that we've used previously that you would, or would not like to see repeated?
   Having all the same mob types that do the same spells/ae at the same % is a bit boring.

  • Feelings on bane weapons?
   Wouldn't want chars to be entirely useless until they get the bane.  At this point most have ultimate weapons...if they are not ultimate and we have to use banes doesn't make sense to me.  Bane Augs maybe?  But, if we have to switch weapons/augs around on all our chars for QoL it needs to be mq accessible.

  • Aside from the content, what would you like to see 'fixed' as part of this Tier? Example I've heard: Item effects are not very useful/being re-used. But it's open ended, whatever you'd like to see done better in some way, or fixed.
   Pets/Pet Weapons have been a complaint for awhile.
   If strike augs are going to keep getting updates, have weapons for all the classes that could use them.  Kael doesn't have any firestrike or icestrike class options.  2h classes ultimate proc aug options suck.
   At some point in the tier is becomes no longer about survivability or tactics it turns into how to do more dps, Hard mode may help with this but if there was something else to shake things up, randomness, changes to the zone over time?
   As its mostly about just mass killing, a quest that rewards you for a very large amount of mobs killed...i would be interested to know how many mobs each tier I've killed progressing through, maybe after X mobs you get...something.  Trophy that ranks up each time you complete the quest?...i would be fine with it having no use for the tier or no utility just flavor like the mago t-shirt.
Or i'm not sure if is possible in the code to check for the existing of the trophy to change the scripting...after X kills they just emote "sigh...you again?" then and xx kills its "just leave me alone already" and so on to have fun with it.
  
  • Since this post will probably get people's attention, is there anything currently broken or janky that you feel needs to be addressed? (completely separate from the Tier).  
   Still waiting on my reward :P  
  

Lower Tier Content

Lower tier content isn't necessarily ignored by Sarthin and I, and if there glaring issues that have just gone unfixed, we will certainly take a look at what we can do now to fix it. Content itself though, and the time required or difficulty/grindiness of it just isn't something that will change. While some people take this as just being stubborn, it really isn't. EZ Server's history, the legacy of it's creator and those who followed are in those zones. They existed as they are, and were deemed by the developer to be in the state that they wished it to be. Abyss, for example, was designed to be the end of EZ Server's progression, hence the amount of time required to complete. Reducing the time required would diminish the feeling of accomplishment, and the collective understanding that every one who has finished it feels when someone '/ooc About to start Abyss, wish me luck'.  EZ Server, while one of the more populated EQEmulator servers, has not been, and will not become a server where the attrition of players who just don't prefer the style of gameplay it provides (and the occasional desire to bash your head on your desk), will dictate changes to content. I realize that sounds harsh, but it is what it is.

Lower Tier Class Balance

This is honestly a short answer, and mostly because trying to explain how difficult it is to balance content is very difficult to do, to people who haven't tried to do it. Lower tier classes cannot be buffed, due to the amount of time to re-balance for their increase in power, and the lack of available testers to provide accurate data, makes it impossible to justify even trying. This is especially true, when the majority of players do not make any attempt to maximize the classes they have, instead relying on the typical Warrior tanking, Paladin healing, most of the rest in auto attack melee. To illustrate this point, I stealth buffed a mid-Tier magician spell about a year ago to nuke as hard as the Idol of the Jailed, and it wasn't discovered for the 6 months it was Live. People just don't try that hard to make the most of what they have, when the next level requires all that min/maxing to happen all over again. I understand why, I didn't either.


I know neither one of these answers is what some people are looking for, but sometimes neither is the content that EZ provides. People will come and go, that's not new, and not something we're actively trying to mitigate through concessionary changes to earlier Tiers.


Hard Mode/Difficulty

Got some notes on where people want to see difficulty.

Hard mode is planned to add several things, at least in T12.

First, and the most obvious is that mobs will hit considerably harder and have more hitpoints.

Secondly, they will cast spells where other regular NPC's would not, or cast more and/or more powerful spells than regular NPC's do.

Third, they will have Hard Mode level loot. This will be a combination of more general loot drops such as essences, spells/spell components etc., but will also drop items that are hard mode versions of the regular armor, but with improved stats.

Beyond that, there are some other ideas that we can play around with, but we'll see how much development time it adds doing some stuff twice.


Other Things

Spells/Effects:
There will be a concerted effort to add some additional useful item effects and class spells, though working with spells which drive everything from item effects to AA's to spells themselves is second to balancing in terms of difficulty. Spells sometimes just refuse to work, or they do not stack as they should, or they work too well and become difficult to balance. That's no one's problem but ours, but it's certainly a topic of thought for us.

Bane Weapons:
Nothing that was planned for T12 specifically, but it seems an interesting possibility for specific fights, though not through a painful, required camp.

Emotes/Interactions:
These are enjoyable from a development standpoint as well, so those will continue.

Box numbers:
There has definitely been an inflation in the amount of boxed characters that people are playing. Some of it is the desire to kill faster, some is more recent efforts by certain players to develop rules abiding macros that make maximizing those groups much simpler. There is no need for massive groups in any zone, and while breaking into Kael is easier with 42 characters, that's also 30 more mouths to feed than a group of 12. Yes, it's more of a struggle with less characters, but it's impossible to finish content, it's just a question of whether you like the challenge of less characters who don't require nearly as many overall kills/bosses, or would rather have the security of numbers.

Along these lines, it is increasingly likely that T12 will limit the number of characters allowed in the zone at once. No final decision on what the number would be.

I have played in spurts over almost 10 years now.  I have been working my way through progression the same order it was released in.  Currently in ST and VP.  I have not done anything in T11 as of yet.

On the topic of Bane Weapons, I was in T7 when UW was introduced into the server.  I was 18 boxing at the time and by the time I had all the armor, spells and accessories.  I had bane weapons for my crew to kill Floating Skull and complete the tier.  I did not find any problems with needing them to kill a targeted boss.

Expeditions is something a lot of people do not look at.  Sure, the end goal of hive shards for UW things is not worth it till you can do the T10 Old Blackburrow but they do offer other things for toons within that tier.
I could see adding HoH token drops to Catacombs of Dranik being an option that might bring people to have more interest in them.  The Charm Prism Upgrades that drop and can be purchased count for both v1 or v2 charms.  I used to do them daily as it was a easier source for essences then attempting to farm bosses.  They can also be turned in for 1 hive shard each so I do not foresee their drop rate being increased.
I do not know if its possible to bring back the T5 expedition (the random boss spawns was a nice alternative from trying to get them to spawn in zone).  I know it was disabled due to an exploit but that is about it.

On the toon count, currently I have a 30 box.  Tracking who needs how much of what has been interesting but that has also caused me to dig into the macro side of EZ.  Creating the macros I have has helped a lot with item tracking and other random things that have come up.

For myself the inflation of box numbers was not due to requirements/macros/need.   It was a function of wanting something else do to when I tired of the same thing over and over again.

If I had stuck with my original groups, I would probably already be done with T11 and then what...back to waiting for a group on live?

5 toons up to T5 because my computer only supported that many boxes at that time.
7 more added after I got a new computer till T10
12 added while progressing through T10 because I got bored farming gss before Veeshan was released.
12 added when I got bored with just killing Tunare every 3 days (but didn't get them leveled to T11 until I wanted a break from giants and Halloween was on)
For current total of 36

If I finish T11 before T12 I may add more or replace some, depending on how bored I get waiting and if my CPU will handle it :)  

I don't remember who, but someone has soloed to T10 (they had support/wings) but, it's possible without the numbers.  Past T10 probably not though.

When new users ask for box numbers, we need to rememeber our own progression/evolution as a caveat to the totals the end users provide.  The recommendations that some of the new users have to start with large boxing groups is wrong imo and I feel adds unnecessary barriers to the server.   I feel that by the nature of the progression and length that its natural to bring more along, eventually, if you stick with the server for as long as a lot of us.  

Limiting the number of toons that can be use in T12 that we have spent a lot of time to gear/progress would be annoying.   Having to gear more toons is itself a large penalty for having that many, but we have had years to do it at this point.

Would it be possible to add DPS balance to High tier content?  Things like an epic aug on the lower dps classes (bard, ranger etc.) effect that adds some damage to bring them closer (but not above) rogue damage.  I believe this was done somewhat recently with Monk and Zerk?

You could start it at 10/11/12 whatever works for easier development.

 
Harder/Much harder. I'm not against an "easy component" but I think there should be some content in game that inspires players to consider their actions, to understand the abilities and pay attention to strategies. I think the structure and mechanics on the server are really nice and it's a shame to not flex it a little. I think some easier content should be as difficult as original kael and some should be considerably harder. Ideally this content would exist but not be required for progression, it could be totally orthogonal. Hard modes of bosses for small rewards would require relatively little investment and since they aren't required, precise tuning isn't as important. If an encounter is too hard, we can grow into it.  


Gnonim hit the nail on the head with this. Hard mode that drops more of the same or offers faster progression towards the same goals only will be basically impossible to balance and will leave you in one of two extremes: (1) its not rewarding enough, farming easy content three times as fast with no risk is faster than farming difficult content for 1.5x the reward. Even if you, by some miracle, balanced these things you'll still pick the easy option because it's consistent.  (2) The hard mode content is 3x harder (or whatever, for kael it probably needs to be in the 3x range to be interesting), and it legit pulls you through progression 3x faster, but now you have a ton of bitching that it's impossible to complete in easy because it takes too long or the hard mode content is too short. Furthermore "you now have less to do" is kind of a lame reward for putting the effort into learning new mechanics and doing more dangerous content. I think the issue is to make content that will be meaningfully challenging, it'll will need to be many times harder than current kael yet you can't scale common drops by that factor without making easy mode feel worthless. However, you CAN make things 4x harder and offer distinct rewards that are some tiny fraction better than what's available through easy modes.

I talk about this above, but I really love the solution where encounters can be done on hard mode for small additional bonuses to stats or whatever... just enough to be a reason to do it. it's a challenge that exists and it doesn't even matter if it's "too hard", heck it may even be literally impossible at our current gear levels. All that really matters is that it gives the player a reason to care about playing well, learning the mechanics, making good choices and about gearing up. However, I think this is a nightmare without talking about raid size because it may just inspire larger and larger raids so......

Fixed raid size is a really good concept and I think it should happen. It will GREATLY ease balancing and tuning of content. I think it is overdue and removes one of the aspects of the server people tend to get hung up on and worry about too much. I really think that standardizing raid size will allow a much smoother, more precise content development process that will benefit the server a lot. I think this bit of normalization is essential to making interesting and challenging content. Otherwise you will always have to plan for people simply adding more as a way to meet challenges. I'm not worried at all about the characters I leave behind, they'll provide a useful bench for me to give my raid compositional flexibility and I'll probably just end up starting second teams with them; furthermore, I don't really feel any emotional attachment to any of them. Having to think about and justify the inclusion of specific classes is more fun than just "well add 6 more because why not".


I can't care about this at all. I'm not against it but just please don't make me read it. If it's enjoyable to develop then by all means keep it going!


My biggest suggestion is that it would be good if different mobs had different abilities and forced different considerations and approaches. In Kael every mob is the same roughly speaking. In VP there's basically 3 mob types (dogs, dragons, necros). The necros and dragons are already quite similar but I think that diversity in the mob population is really good for forcing the player to keep their brain going. As an example, in VP when doing huge pulls, I always had to think about when I was going to kill the dragons, the way; this only matters because they have unique abilities compared to the dogs that change the dynamics. It's just a way to keep the content more engaging and make pulls different from one another. I think the more unique "base type" mobs you have the better. I know this is time consuming, but even just 3 or 4 different types makes for very diverse pull combinations.


Neutral more or less, sounds kind of like just an annoyance but maybe if implemented right it would be fine.


Item effects are always an issue but I don't think that's immediately fixable. There's so few available improvement avenues for old-school EQ, original upgrades. You can have one of each effect and there's only a few possible effects, the original framework just wasn't meant to enable the kind of slow, graded power increases that we expect in modern games. This also ends you up on the "addiction model" where since you need that effect you can only replace it with something else with that effect and so it ends up with very ridgid itemization (arms always have effect x, boots have y, etc). My too-much-work idea for fixing this would be to just steal one of the meaningless stats in the game... corruption resistance or something and set power (whatever that might mean, let's say the level of your UC effect) scale off of it. That way upgrading is straight forward and you aren't "hooked" on individual pieces because they don't contain unique effects. This is essentially the way WoW solved this problem in vanilla through "spell power".


Obviously donations are needed because so much QoL is locked behind them. I am generically in favor of the way they work at the moment because I think compensation for the nice content and experience on EZ is well justified. I know there's some issues with the ability to accept them right now but what if the donations went to compensate those who currently keep the server alive, bug free and experiencing current content. I would be very in favor of compensating our GMs with that money. I think it makes a lot of sense and is really the way the money should be distributed. I would also be in favor of just setting it up as a money that gets channeled to charities, some combo of children with cancer, vets, animals, I don't know. It doesn't matter much what you chose, there's a lot of obvious choices.

Alot of great feedback.  What Gnomin said is correct regarding balancing.  I also agree with what Pubis is saying about a fixed raid size.  We choose to overcome the challenge by zerging with more characters, hence the increase in more toons to box, and usage of server resources to support said characters.

Maybe a limit of characters for the new zone, say 30 max but scales down to amount in raid of up to one group of 6.  Difficulty would scale up or down according to group size.  I know that could inconvenience the players with more than 30+ but it would also be easier to balance imho. 

I would love to see an increase in dps for other classes such as rangers, zerker, monks, pets of pet classes.  Is it possible to add to mobs some kind of piercing immunity, not full immunity maybe partial?  It would lower rogues dps somewhat and would need other dps classes to make a well rounded group.  Would also prevent the all rogue group compositions lol.

I vote "No" to bane weapons.