Everyone,

Check this link here if you have a modern PC. The old guidance on shaders and a few other things are incorrect (some stays the same) for newer PCs.

https://almarsguides.com/eq/gettingstarted/boxing/PopularEQIssues/ReduceYourLag/

I was excited about the hideafk feature but ss far as I can tell, our client doesn't have it.

Really? Mine equips both 12.5 and staff of nightmares. I don't have a 12 anymore to check.

• Assuming current Kael difficulty as a baseline, would you like to see new content:

 
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.  

• 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.

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".

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

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!

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

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.

• Feelings on bane weapons?

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

• 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.

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".

• 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).

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.

In my opinion, the zone is currently extremely loot heavy, which is a good thing it puts it in line with the old HW zone. This 4 day stretch I spent in TD likely increased my raid dps as much or more than the entire time I've been in Kael. Each set of 3 bosses is 1/40th of a weapon better than uw13, 1/40th of the best damage neck in the game that benefits every class and a chance at pieces to spawn CT, who will drop an item that give a 10-20 million dps boost. In the meantime you also have the best KD essence farm in the game (I have more essences from TD than I have from completing kael ~2 times) as well as shards for pets/aug, food/drink and the random item drops. It will be an unpopular opinion, but I don't really think any drop rates need to be changed, they all seem very reasonable and time in this zone is already beyond well compensated compared to time in other zones.

Characters - 30

gear - pretty complete up to this tier

efficiency - 30s is pretty typical but it does vary.

Time played - I don't know, it's variable but I've been playing a lot I probably get about 5 hours a night. Sometimes I can hop in or an additional 30 minutes or hour just to get a few things done. The first week I played substantially more on some weekend days.

Progression quest: Just finished enraged.
Shield: first shield took 16 AoWs. I have the ability to spawn ~5 AoW and just missing velk heads for 7 more after that so it's probably fair to say ~2 shields in the course of doing enraged could be expected.
UCV5: I finished 75/80 before the shard changes and just finished my first one right after finishing enraged. Now they are quite fast and I'm already pretty deep into my second ucv5. Based on my kill numbers I would have completed roughly 3.5 UCv5 in the process of doing enraged had this drop rate been around the whole time.
Mantles: Finished roughly 2 mantles to rank 5. The only significant piece in this is Relics of Norrath. The essence combine item is very similar to flawless GSOA from VP where it requires a much more valuable component (essence of kael) to make something that drops relatively often from Rot. Perhaps there is a relic combine I don't know about but they come rather slowly.
Armor: I counted armor pieces as a function of enraged kills along the way. At last check I had 650 enraged total had 82 pieces of armor. So a drop every ~8 enraged implying a player should expect 125 armor pieces over the course of doing enraged (an 18 man group needs 126 pieces total). Of course, 1/4 of this will be leather and in general you will get duplicates and rots. When I finished enraged my warrior had ~30/60 armor rot hand-ins. I should say, at some point I stopped killing DR so I hadn't used Ymir to supplement armor drops. Ymirs mechanism is huge for progression in that it lets you direct what pieces you get. He is also extremely common from my experience so that helps a lot avoiding situations where you get very unlucky with one piece. I've still never seen a chain breastplate drop from Voltanis, for instance, yet I have 3 full sets of chain thanks to Ymir. This is a good mechanism.
UW13: I finished 2 UW13s which means I had roughly 240 essences drop in the span of doing enraged (36 for NS augs). I also have been saving AoWs which seems to be good for like 2-3 per clear so I probably farmed the equivalent of 250-260 essences if you count those unredeemed heads.
Roxy Aug: My MT is on sparkling which I guess is the 4th rank. I'm probably slightly unlucky here because I spent almost 90k coins total on this last upgrade. Although RNG will be high here, I suspect most will be at sparkling after enraged are done.
Cold delivery: I skipped as many wolves, bears and sirens as possible while grinding enraged so I'm nowhere on this quest (3 of 30). I'll probably put some effort into this now. Right now this quest is tangential to most of the rest of the zone, not sure if that's good or bad.

Favorite features - I have a lot of positive things to say about the zone in general. I like that you have to keep your brain engaged and think things through. You need to pay attention to what you are killing (for instance, to shape the drops you need), you need to pay attention to kill order (for instance if you have a boss and a named up to not waste a possible boss pop or if you have too many in camp to kill animals first to avoid possible chains). I like that using your brain is beneficial to your productivity and as a result I've very rarely, if ever, felt bored in Kael. I like that the bosses have mechanics that are well-telegraphed and clear (compare to like zeixshi for instance). I like that there is a real sense of progression as you move through the zone, you will get more capable you will get stronger. I like that the content presents a real challenge that pushes players to hone their play. I like that there are tons of small things to work on (AoW spawn, armor, spells, UV5, UW, mantle, coins/augs etc) while you are progressing through the overarching "Long grind" of enraged.

Areas for improvement - I don't have much here. I think this is a good step but I'd love to see this approach to boss design continued as we move forward. I'd like more mechanisms more often so you don't just zone out while a blob of HP drains away; Ragnar is a decent example of this, without his second enrage the fight is basically done at 80%.

I guess one thing is that Kael is homogenous, the entrance is basically identical to the deepest parts in terms of difficulty. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have difficulty gradients or particularly difficult parts, VP had this a little bit, but it was bypassed by binding in the zone beyond the challenges. I think that aspect was a good feature of the zone.

Glad to hear your parents are getting the care they need, Draca. Looking forward to a really good era of ez content  Thanks again for your dedication.

Nice! Previously, halloween weapon ended up becoming more of an annoyance because you have to remember to get rid of it when you make a UW. I think this is an overall good change!

Two ideas: one is that there are multiple installs of mq2 on your system and you are looking in the files for the wrong one.the second idea is that the file you are looking at has extensions hidden and isn't actually .xml, it's just a file named with the right name followed by .xml.txt or whatever. Maybe if you say how you solved it the first time it would make it more clear what's going on?

Why would someone need to farm 10 hours? The fastest is the fastest no matter how long you do it for. And it's not that people play longer than you, they play more efficiently. Every time I have given you advice or seen someone give you advice you say you can't be bothered to do x y or z and then blame something external or say you "can't be assed" to do that even when it's as simple as "use this defensive spell". The outcome of not taking any of those suggestions is that you farm slow, your time is less productive than someone who thinks about how to improve and plays better. This is a hole you dig for yourself and then come here and act shitty towards literally everyone because you view it as everyone else fault and the server must change to accommodate you. You act shitty toward players trying to give you advice, you act shitty towards draca because he "lied" about changing some trivial thing or that something is STILL broken as if you are an impatient boss.

Once you learn how to do Tunare it takes 15-30 minutes regardless of party size. You not doing it has nothing to do with the time and everything to do with what I wrote above. You pulled the trash once, declared it was impossible unless you have 40 boxes and ignored the torrent of advice finally declaring you "just can't be assed to heal that much damage". You are better equipped than most people who do this with items like the gm gift aug that they can't even get.

I would say xp in VP is very good. The crystals you get a worth way more than any mob massacre in any other zone I would say.

Yeah vp is the best in the game if you need to focus to 1-10 characters. For more it lags for sure. Overall I like that there are ups and downs with it. VP doesn't need to simultaneously give the best rewards for everything.

Warrior epic ... Great but 30 minutes up time is and has always been terrible and not everyone can compile a massive macro to encompass every single buff possible with timers in so they self buff and nor should we have to.

This doesn't require anything extravagant like you describe. Just a single line "/if (${Me.Buff[Warrior's Defense VIII].Duration} < 100) /itemnotify 13 rightmouseup" will refresh it when duration is below ~10 mins. you can juts put it on any old button you hit more often that once every 10 minutes.

Curious if you got this figured out?

I haven't seen a difference in incoming damage in that section either.

Did you do that poem with Chat GPT?

No way! It clearly says a human wrote it!!

Halloween Event thru the weekend
Double Loot
Double Exp

No credits as of now, check back here, I will update if they become available.

          ↑↑↑↑ -Draca


          ↓↓↓↓ -Pubis

Oh plants, how great you are!
You bring life to the world near and far
From the tallest tree to the tiniest weed
Your beauty and usefulness we all need

Your leaves and flowers give us air to breathe
And your roots anchor the earth beneath
You provide food, medicine, and shelter
Your importance to us cannot be helter-skelter

Your variety is amazing to behold
From cacti to ferns, your stories are told
You thrive in deserts, forests, and seas
And you help keep our planet at ease


But how does this relate to Everquest, you ask?
Well, my dear friend, it’s a fascinating task
For in this game, plants play a vital role
In ways that may surprise and console

You see, in Everquest, you can be a druid
A master of nature, whose skills are astute
You can heal, protect, and summon plants
And use them to aid your fellow combatants



But that’s not all, for plants in this game
Can also be used for a different aim
They can be harvested for crafting items
That are sold to players, creating income

Herbalism and alchemy are skills to acquire
To make potions, poisons, and more, that will transpire
In battles, where the right concoction can save the day
And lead your group to victory in a heroic way

So, you see, plants are not just a pretty sight
They have a purpose, both in life and in fight
And in Everquest, they are an essential part
Of a game that has captured many a heart


So let us celebrate plants, in all their glory
And acknowledge their role in our story
For without them, life would not be the same
And Everquest would not be the best-selling game.