There are 3 Halloween zones and the first one is still a good fit for anyone beyond level 70 as it scales to your group.  You can work on getting Insane goblin pets in there on your tank and other toons (mitigation click).  At your level, getting at least 1 insane goblin pet on your tank is very important as you cannot get it outside of halloween events.  You can prob ask in ooc for anyone rotting that item and they'll just let you have it.

Awesome changes.  Thoughts on remastering of some other old content?  Whatcha got in mind?

How about LDON page farming or T5 adding some uber boss spawn chance that can happen after entire zone clear with a chance at dropping a few of the more rare spawn drops.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does that macro auto target the nearest mob that the main tank isn't targeting? 

Awesome work!!!

Having the shaman/druid heals be untargeted would actually be a really nice quality of life fix. 

These upcoming changes sound fantastic, especially pull scaling. 

Amazing zone.  Love the mechanics.  I think sarthin got to see me wipe to the Draco bomb in person.

Felt a little slow for a newly entering kael player, but only because the zone is only open 1% of a year.  If it was open every day, I'd say it's in a good spot.  Mechanic wise, it is extremely cool and feels like a old school fear raid but with way better gfx and mechanics.

Do we need to login to the test server to help with this or the normal EZ server?

Good changes!

This is a fair ask, though having just gone through T10, I got most of my hammer pieces from zone pulling in BB using the GC.  Perhaps just leaving it available in that zone or increasing the chances of hammer parts to drop in there, could be a balance adjustment when the GC nerf hits?

Characters: I have 24, but due to the scaling and my current gear, I'm using 18 that have the highest DPS.  War, 4 Pal, 3 Mnk, 2 Rog, Sk, Wiz, Mage, Rng, 2 Brd, Cleric and Zerk.  Benched chanter/war/druid/bst/necro and one other i forgot.
Equipment: Tank is VP geared fully, halloween augs, but no War token items.  Healers have Ucv4 on 2 pallies and a cleric, 1 Ucv3 pally and 1 Uc pally.  DPS is a mix of maybe 6 or so UW and 6 or so rank 50 earrings
Combat Efficiency: Several minutes per mob.
Time Investment: 30ish hours
Quest Progression: Just starting
Loot Accumulation: 0 (but for the time investment and mob kill speed, this is expected)
Favorite Features: It's fantastic.  The quests, the gambling, the boss spawn chances, it's all fantastic.
Areas for Improvement: I'd like to solely comment on the DPS aspect of this zone and to at least some extent, Tunare/VP.  The tank/healing for these zones progression wise feels fine.  The DPS seems to have taken a massive requirement spike after T10.  This likely feels very natural for the old guard players who have already finished putting rank 50 earrings on every toon, gathered a UW for each toon and other items.  Though I can see at least some of them are still struggling with the time investment in the zone.  I wanted to suggest perhaps following the previous formula of adding "budget items" at certain points in the game.  Sleepers/Halloween weapons are a good example.  They aren't meant to be replacements for the UW, and those items should be top tier, but could we do the same thing with DPS oriented items.  Take the earring for example.  Rank 50 is 200%.  What if you added a mod to existing jewerly that drops in tier zones that adds 10% per tier and having it end up at something around 100% in T10 and not have it stack with the existing earring.  Such and item would be worthless to well geared old guard players, but would give new players a progression path into these well made new zones, without having spent the 8+ years grinding GSOA.  It could be any number of solutions, or none at all, but just my feedback.  Lastly, loving the new content and seeing Sarthin/Draca talk about already working on multiple new zones is absolutely spectacular so please don't take this as a negative thing.  All this new stuff is an absolute positive.

Another thing to consider is without GC zone pulls, certain items like GSOA/GSS are going to be harder to come by for players that aren't already in kael.

But that can also be balanced.

GSS's are available in VP in far greater quantity than SR
GSOA's won't have any changes to their drop rates, as everything below SR can be ZP'd by any T10 warrior, with out without GC

How about letting players use Double/Triple in Veeshan?

Another thing to consider is without GC zone pulls, certain items like GSOA/GSS are going to be harder to come by for players that aren't already in kael.

But that can also be balanced.