What exactly are you attempting to create? and which items are you using to try to create it? Would be easier to help you solve the issue if we had more information on what you are doing other than that you are trying to create a strike aug of some sort, and believe you have the recipe correct.

@Warbash

The Problems that you quoted were not problems that currently are in the game, they were problems that would be come present if Hateborne were to use my idea of reducing the rate AAs are gained and the worth of AAs, because if AA rates were changed but we kept our current amount of AAs, people would be able to jump up hundreds of ranks of RoA just from what they currently have banked.



Also, the reason the use of AA as a "currency" of sort for items is a positive thing and IMO should not be removed, is because no matter what you do, you'll gain AA... if you're bringing up a new toon to put in your group, farming UWs, progressing... everything gives AA, it is a nice little benefit just for playing the game to be able to work on long term items like the RoA, sure people can just sit and grind AA as efficiently as possible to max it, but you dont HAVE to which is a very big boon.  There is already so much stuff you have to work on SPECIFICALLY on this server that being able to work on ANYTHING and get a little bit better even if you didnt get what you were after is good for the server.  just my opinion

[THE CURRENT PROBLEM]

This is going to be a long post so apologies ahead of time for that.  Before I get into the meat of this post however I want to make one point: This thread is mainly for trying to help Hateborne with a solution to the AA problem he is stuck with attempting to resolve and is being posted on the forums instead of PMed directly to him in an attempt to get discussion on the idea put forth so that everyone can give their opinions on the idea.  Also, Hateborne mentioned in previous threads "to hell with it" basically since people were complaining about him trying to solve the problem, so hopefully if we can keep this constructive we can attempt to persuade him to keep AAs relevant in EZ. 

Ok, with that out of the way lets get into this! 


THE CURRENT PROBLEM

   There are several points I wish to cover in this post, but the first and most important of which is the actual problem.   When Hateborne first brought this issue to people's attention all they saw was "I want to reduce the XP mask/XP reward items" and people instantly started shooting it down because they didn't want the current grinds to take longer.  So let me try to word it a bit differently so that hopefully people can see the actual problem and not just what Hateborne had in mind to fix it. 

THE PROBLEM IS
1) With the rate AA xp is currently going Hateborne cannot do anything with AAs because with the rate we get them if they were any higher/faster we would LOSE them instead of GAINING them.  There IS a cap on how much xp a single event can give before it rolls over into a negative number or 0.  We all experienced this with aggro roll over in the past and know how much that sucked.  2) We burn through the current ___ Of the Ages series too quickly and putting in more items to the series would make them either too easy to obtain or require astronomical amount of AAs that made them impossible for the majority of people to ever realistically achieve. 3) Big XP buffs break the leveling process somehow

The problem IS NOT!!!!!
Hateborne doesn't like how fast we gain things in the game so wants to take our ball away and push us in the mud.

Nor is it that he does not have ideas on ways for us to spend our AAs beyond what we currently have and need more AA sinks implemented into the game that he can't come up with ideas for.

MY PROPOSED SOLUTION
   I know when people see things getting changed their initial reaction is to be against it, its human nature.  With that said, I think people were a bit overzealous when they saw Hateborne say he wanted to cap XP buffs at 350% because all they saw was they only get 1/3 the power they once had.  My idea is (hopefully) one that other players as well as Hateborne will both support.  Let me preface this by saying this proposal SHOULD have almost no negative effects on gameplay, while making Hateborne's job a hell of a lot easier.

Solution
Leave XP mask and reward XP items how they are
Make AAXP 10% of their current rate
Make AA cost of EZ custom items 10% of their current rate
Make AA crystals 10% of their current value

BEFORE PEOPLE FREAK OUT!!! let me give you a bit of math to illustrate how this will make everything work EXACTLY THE SAME as it does right now.

I just did an hour grind in Anguish with Rymo's 835% buff on my UW10 warrior.  I gained 14 AA per kill. In that hour I gained roughly 18k AA which at my current level of RoA (627) would give me 9 ranks of the RoA (2k per level).

With the change: 1 hour in Anguish with Rymo's 835% buff on my UW10 warrior.  I would gain 1.4 AA per kill.  In that hour I would gain roughly 1.8k AA which at my current level of RoA (627) would give me 9 ranks of the RoA (200 per level).

As you can see this would make numbers MUCH more manageable for Hate, as well as give him the freedom to make higher tiers actually give decent xp, without breaking the server.  But for those who need a bit more convincing...

Before and After Values

ROA
                                 Before                   |      After
1-100: 100 per rank 2k Hell Levels         | 10 per rank 200 HL
101-200: 250 per rank 5k Hell Levels     |  25 per rank  500 HL
201-300: 500 per rank 10k Hell Levels   |  50 per rank 1k HL
301-400: 750 per rank 15k Hell Levels   |  75 per rank 1.5k HL
401-500: 1k per rank 20k Hell Levels      | 100 per rank 2k HL
501-600: 1.5k per rank 25k Hell Levels   | 150 per rank 2.5k HL
601-700: 2k per rank 30k Hell Levels      | 200 per rank 3k HL
701-800: 2.5k per rank 35k Hell Levels   | 250 per rank 3.5k HL
801-900: 3k per rank 40k Hell Levels      | 300 per rank 4k HL
901-1k: 3.5k per rank 45k Hell Levels     | 350 per rank 4.5k HL
TOTAL:    2,367,600 AA                          |  236,760 AA

EoA

                    Before      |      After
1-49: 20K AA per rank |  2k AA per rank
50:   50k AA per rank   |  5k AA per rank
Total: 1,030,000 AA     | 103,000 AA

AA Crystals

          Before      |      After
Minor: 2K AA      | 200 AA
Lesser: 4k AA     | 400 AA
Greater: 10k AA | 1k AA
Major: 20k AA    | 2k AA


Kills to max RoA

Just to give a bit of math to show to people still hesitant that the results in game will be the same under both conditions.
Currently:
2,367,600 AA to max / 14 AA per kill = 169,115 kills (rounded)

Propsed:
236,760 AA to max / 1.4 AA per kill = 169,115 kills (rounded)

Values being only 10% of what they currently are will do nothing to players in game but make the numbers on the screen scrolling by smaller.  But for Hateborne on the development side these changes would:
1) Prevent rollover
2) Allow double xp weekends (something he mentioned wanting to be able to do for us)
3) Allow zones higher than t6 to give proportional xp to the difficulty
4) Give Hateborne room to create new items that use AA with higher difficulty than current items that wouldn't take a year to get a single rank
and more I'm sure that I'm not thinking of currently.

Issues this could cause and solutions to said issues.

Now, I do know this idea does not come without flaws of its own,  I have however thought of several of the potential issues that could arise and come up with several solutions to them.  I personally can't think of any other issues this may bring up but I am sure it is possible so if there are any feel free to point them out and we can try to address them.

Problem #1
This doesn't address the problem caused by giant AA buffs being cast on low level players. 

Solution: Cap XP buffs on toons below lvl 70 at 100%.  Simple.  Done.  Leveling here is easy enough that 100% faster is plenty and will not hinder a low level toon not having it be even quicker.

Problem #2
What to do with AAs currently banked on toons

Solution: This problem can be handled several ways that I have thought of, some of them may not be possible though so thats why I have given multiple possibilities depending on what is do-able by Hate.
1) Take current banked AAs and reduce them to 10% of what they already are the next time a toon logs in.  Not sure if Hate can edit this in a table somewhere, or put in a piece of code that the firs time a toon zones after this change they lose 90% of their AA.
2) Put in an NPC previous to this change going live that allows toons to talk to them and trade AAs for No Trade AA Crystals.  My thoughts on this were either 1k AA for a 100 AA crystal, or 5k for a 500 AA crystal for those with a lot banked.
3) This is my least favorite option of them all, but if none of the above would be possible do like Hunter did when the RoA for AA was first implemented:  Next purchase of either RoA, EoA, or Mask will give you the next rank and reset AA count to 0. 

Problem #3
But wait!  If we do all this to change it so we can spend tons of AAs on items what about the newbies that start here and need them to buy actual AAs the way everquest intended?!???!?

Solution: Again, a couple different ways this could be handled some of which are better than others.
1)  Allow the Level Up Wench (or other NPC) to also grant all ranks of AAs for their current level up to a certain cut-off, I personally was thinking 74 since by then they will get the vast majority of their AAs and be able to grind Anguish to gain the rest fairly easily.  Before old timers complain, we all know how easy it is to get a toon max AA so they can start using them on items, giving them a little bit for free isn't going to drastically impact anything as AA are maxed by time people leave qvic anyway.
2) Provide a quest or item that can be obtained (perhaps a new mini of PoTime difficulty) that a toon can then use to be granted all of their AA up to their current level.
3) Again, my least favorite option but if none of the above is possible: Let them grind it out, yes it will be harder than it is now, but the xp buffs won't be nerfed, and double xp weekends will be possible so it still shouldn't take very long to grind it out... especially with half of them being useless like +stats anyway.


TL:DR
Proposal to Hate to try to fix the AA rates, and not nerf anything for the players. 

Would love feedback on this from players, what do you guys like? What don't you like?  Did I miss any possible problems this could cause?  Lets keep this constructive and try to work this out,  I don't know about the rest of you but I'd really be bummed if Hate decided to not use the AA system for future items but I wouldn't blame him with how things went the first time he suggested this.

Was just running the t7 mini and had my warrior die due to my own stupidity. I tried to zone back in but was instantly teleported out to the Nexus when I got in and was told that my lockout was not yet finished.  Still had the Foreman and Geode alive and the rest of my group still in the instance.  It would seem besides the weird bugs with the geode that there is a problem somewhere with the lockout code as well. Have a SS of the text and tasklog if it helps at all. 

Depending on how you have your clients setup you should have no problem running a vast army of toons with 32g ram.  When I played on other servers (PEQ and EQTitan) and needed to run my own raids I had no issue running 24 off of 12g with UF.  I could even bump it up to 30 when necessary but then it took forever to zone, and that was back before I had EQ installed on a SSD.

 With clients optimized properly you should use around 750mb-1gig on your main with all of the settings on and between 2-400mb per box if you lower them all the way.  Using those numbers should give you a good idea how many toons you can load up before memory becomes your bottleneck, although once you start reaching those numbers processor and video card become bigger issues than running out of memory. 

This was all several years ago though, so not sure what the exact numbers look like now with RoF2 client, and I dont personally load up more than 18 ever anymore.  Although I've gone from 12 to 32g of ram, bought an SSD card, as well as new video card and proc (GTX 970 and AMD FDX-9370 8-core).  So with the type of machine it is possible to build now I have no doubt it'd be possible to run 42+ toons on a single computer, although I don't see why anyone would even want to attempt to do that. 

Appreciate the quick response chunka, I already know I am putting Pal, Zerk, Cleric, Enchanter in my second group. Plus I already have War, pal, zerk, monk, rog, druid as my main group so I wasnt sure if I should add some more single target dps like the mage and ranger or bard, or just load it up with more zerkers for a ton of aoe. With your answers though I think I have a good idea of how to handle the last two spots for the second group.

Hey guys been thinking of running my second group again and had a few questions about the different classes that I was hoping people could help me with to determine which toons I want to add to the second group.

1. Shaman epic click is nice, and I know they have kraken to add dps to all the melee, is there anything else they add? Does the dps from kraken justify logging them in full time or  are they best just being kept up to date as a buff bot.
2. Cleric epics have group heal procs like the paladin but I cant find anything on how powerful it is, are they equal? If not how strong are they in comparison.
3.  Bards use ninja augs and tempest blade for boosting other melee but how are they dps wise compared to the other melee? Worth adding over an extra zerker?
4. Max with mana neck, aummoners pack, good weaps, etc how is mage dps nw compared to other dps toons?
5. If I was going to add an enchanter or mage which would be better? I'm guessing enchanter because of vt2 but not sure.
6. How is ranger dps? Is the single target dps worth it over another zerker if I already have a monk and rogue?

Also wanted to add, I've tried with and without macroquest without any different results.

Been trying to log in most of the day with very poor results.  I am not exactly sure what is wrong, but I do not think it is on my end, and am curious if anyone else has been experiencing this or has any ideas on how to address it. 

I was playing all weekend without any issues, I was able to load all of my characters in the first time and had minimal DC's all weekend.. probably less than 5 total.  I have not changed any settings on my computer at all in weeks, and the only changes I have made to my install of everquest was updating my spell and server files earlier today hoping that it may help even though it shouldn't (and wasn't) be related to my issues.

When I get past the main splash screen of everquest to the login screen I put in my password and then get 1 of 2 results: 1) it takes me to server select and gives me no issues, or 2) it hangs for 5-15 seconds and then gives me an error reading "A connection to the server could not be reached. Please check your internet connection to make sure you are online. blah blah blah".   

If I am able to make it past that screen and onto the server select screen I am sometimes greeted with yet another error message saying something along the lines (sorry for not being able to be specific it doesnt pop up often) of "your client seems out of date please relog and run the patcher before proceeding".  When I get this error it does not seem to make a difference as I am able to just press ok and go about my business of selecting EZ Server.  When I do this however it either sends me through to character select as normal or hangs for a bit, around 30seconds, and then pops me back to the login screen.  I seem to get booted back to the login screen much more frequently then actually making it to character select.

Once I am finally able to get to character select I have mixed results YET AGAIN!  one of two things happens at this point as well: 1) I select my character, it hangs for 30sec or so and then gives me a black screen saying "The Server is Not Responding" followed by another black screen with the dreaded "You Have Been Disconnected From the Server". (this result happens about 75% of the time that I actually make it to character select.) or 2) I finally make it into the game.

I have only been playing 6 toons recently as I have not had the energy to load in all 12 and try to play them, but it took me over 45minutes to just log in my 6 toons this morning, and the very first time I zoned 3 of them crashed.  As you can see from the myriad of issues that can cause me to be unable to log in a character on a single attempt why it can take such a long time to get my crew logged in.

If anyone can think of anything I can attempt to resolve this issue or is having the same difficulties I would love to hear it.  Also, as I said in the beginning of the post I have not made any changes that should affect my ability to log into the game, and my internet connection to all other things have been just fine all day so I do not think that the issues are on my end.  I know Hate/Akka have been experiencing Desync issues with t10 and have been working on attempting to resolve it so felt I would be as descriptive as possible with this post in case the issues are deeper than just t10 so they can attempt to fix everything that could possibly be wrong.

Unable to see EZServer on server list on my Zerker/Beastlord who got disconnected when zoning after they died. All of my other toons are still in however if that helps.

Two small things that I think would be a good addition to the server.

1: Add a new type of essence, that has the same drop chance as the current essence in that tier and call it Ultimate Essence I, Ultimate Essence II etc.  Then use those essences for UW, and double current essence drop rates.  That way you can still limit how fast UWs are able to be acquired, still make people do the exact same grind, but also allow people to progress on the "mandatory" items at a faster pace without also speeding up UWs.

So for example (random numbers picked out of the air for easy math):
Qvic would drop - Ultimate Essence 1 5% of the time and Qvic Essences 10% of the time
CT would drop - Ultimate Essence 2 5% of the time and CT essences 10% of the time
and so forth up through all of the tiers .. this could also even allow you to lower the drop chance of Ultimate Essences to make UW grinding harder and still let people progress on Augs, SoA, etc.

2: Make a zone (I think The Void would be perfect for this) where it is faster to grind tokens/crystals to spawn bosses.  This zone would be for more advanced toons just wanting to go back through t1-4 in order to grind essences or gear up a new toon.  The Void is broken up into different islands, have each island contain a boss that has hp roughly equivalent to the total hp of all mobs you would kill for a specific type of drop, and have them drop the average amount that would be expected during a clear.

So for example (again... random numbers just to illustrate my point):
Island 1 would have Big Dragon with hp equal to about the same amount as all the T1 dragons in PoD and 20 mini bosses health and would drop between 10-15 Fire/Water Crystals
Island 2 would have Bigger Dragon with hp equal to about the same amount as all the T2 dragons in PoD and 20 mini bosses health and would drop between 10-15 Earth/Ice Crystals
Island 3 would have Big Avatar with hp equal to all the Avatars and little minions in Hoh and would drop between 30-40 t3 tokens
Island 4 would have Bigger Avatar with hp equal to all the Avatars and little minions in HoH and would drop between 15-20 t4 tokens

The damage on these named could be set high, about the same as OMM or a t7 boss since the whole point is to just allow people who could already steamroll the zone a faster way to collect the crystals/tokens.

Instance cost could be set to the cost of 2 HoH instances and 1 PoD instance since if you cleared all 4 bosses thats essentially the same thing, maybe slightly higher to account for the convenience, perhaps instead of 160k have it be 200k or something like that (not exactly sure on cost of a PoD instance).

To add to the list Kaid listed I think Solteris would be a really good zone to see added.  Was always my favorite raid zone as well as not being widely viewed by the player base because when it was released it was pretty challenging and because of that a lot of guild skipped it since Sony was releasing expansions so quickly at that point in time. 

I also 2nd Korafax and Citadel of the World Slayer (tower)... those 2 were high on my list of favorite zones.

and grammar is for when I want to look like an educated person who takes time to think about what is being said instead of mashing keys and saying "good enough it's just a game"

fixed that for you

It's been a while since I've played on EZ and it seems a lot has changed, I tried searching through the forums to try to find answers to questions but I haven't found answers for a couple.   Last time I played it was before ToFS was released but it was being worked on to give an idea of the time frame since I last played. Going to break this up into a few different sections so it's easier to read.

My goal right now is to get all of my characters ready for t5 before I start working on t5.  So first up, here is my current group:
1. T4/UC/4.0'd Warrior
2. T3/UC/4.0'd Paladin
3. T2/3.0'd Zerker
4. T2/4.0'd Bard
5. T2/3.0'd Druid
6. T2/3.0'd Enchanter
7. T2/4.0'd Cleric
8. T3/4.0'd Monk
9. T2/3.0'd Mage
10. T2/No Epic Rogue
11. T2/3.0'd Ranger
12. T2/4.0'd Shaman

WARRIOR WEAPONS

Last time I played I was told my best bet for warrior was to use the 2h epic with SOTA in my back until the shield was better hp than a 1h epic then use 1h/shield.  Is that still what I should be doing, or should my warrior stick with 2h weaps, or swap back to DW?

EPICS

Last time I played epic weapons were still implemented and not augs, so with them being weapons I know several classes wanted a certain number of epics at certain levels for specific procs/clickies.  I am curious how many epics each class will want.  Ex: Before Bards wanted 2 highest lvl epics, and 1 3.0 for the clicky.  Rangers wanted 3 highest lvl epics so they had 2 swords and 1 bow etc.  

If possible I'd like to know how many epics each class wants maxed and at specific epic levels so I can farm all of the epics up before I start t5.

ULTIMATE WEAPONS

Ultimate weapons weren't in place when I last played so not sure when/who I am supposed to get these on... should I have this started by time I start in t5 or is it something that shouldn't be started until a later tier, and if so when is it recommended to start working on it.  Also, is the UW supposed to go on my warrior, or is it better on a different character?

ULTIMATE CHARMS

ToFS was still being designed so I haven't had much time playing around in it, but I noticed v1 charms dropping there when I decided to mess around on lvl 1 a bit.  Is it better than LDoN for farming v1 charms now, or should I still be doing LDoN to farm up charms if my only goal was to quickly farm v1 charms.  If I should be in LDoN is there a specific level that is recommended over the others?

I have my warrior and Pally UC'd already, does the order after that matter?  If so which order should I want to work on them?

AUGS/MANA NECK

Going to stick 2 questions together here cuz they are both related so... Would I be better of doing either augs or necks first to help me farm the quickest?

 Does it matter who I give neck to first (mage vs. enchanter) or does it not matter and I should get them both one after another so it won't make a big difference?

SOTA

Before I took my break my Warrior was up to SOA 15, should I continue to work on that before starting t5? If so which lvl should I expect to try to have it at before starting t5?

RESISTS

These are new to me, but I've been working on putting the resist augs on my warrior, up to having a few rank 5s.  should I be working on resists on everyone before t5, or not until I start breaking into t6?  If I should be working on them what should I be aiming at before starting t5?

CONCLUSION

Thanks everyone who made it this far, I know this is a lot of questions but I figured if I had these questions other people might have them as well so having them all answered together might be helpful.  Really appreciate any/all answers I'm able to get to this stuff and thank you all who make this server so fun to play on!

AC has a soft cap. You are not gaining any AC.

That statement means nothing unless you say at what value the soft cap begins. How quickly do the returns diminish beyond that soft cap?

I see people talking about this soft cap on AC all the time but not once have I seen anyone mention what the cap actually is. Maybe your forum search capabilities are greater than mine.

To go into this slightly further, there is an ac SOFT cap, not a hard cap, and because of this ac is, was, and always will have SOME affect. For those who do not know exactly what ac does, you can check part 4 of http://samanna.net/gen.info/effects.shtml#4 for a brief explanation and chart showing the effects of ac before and after the soft cap.

While I agree with Xiggie that ac after the soft cap isn't as important as the ac gained before it, that is where my agreement ends. AC lowers the possibility for a mob to hit for its max DI value, while it doesn't remove the chance to be hit for max completely, because from what I've read over the years through various parses it seems there is always a chance to get hit for max, all AC goes towards lowering your chance of being hit for the upper DI values.

With the damage the monsters on this server do, depending on how high their DI values are set, the fact that we are over the soft cap on ac could be irrelevant because with current ac values, and how high DI values potentially could be to create the amount of damage mobs do on this server, it is possible that ac could be much more valuable than HP at the current stage of the game just because of the huge variation between hp and ac rates.