If you do dranik expedition back-to-back, you'll basically always get thrown into an empty dranik b, and dranik c instance (that you must #e destroy) each time you try to get a new expedition. This adds an extra 4 zone times to the 5 you already have to do to complete it

6 of the last 6 times i've tried.

1. complete dranik expedition
2. turn in
3. accept new dranik (or proving grounds)- which then places you in dranik b, or dranik c.
 

That is giving people a BIG benefit.  New players, from my experience of reading /ooc, do not bother to read the wiki.  How many times a day to you see questions asked in /ooc that were EASILY answered if some lazy schmuck would just take the time to read the frigging wiki? A LOT!

In their defense.....most of them are a product of US public education. I have my doubts many of them CAN read. My current theory is that they play using some form of text to simulated voice interface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUM3uuAqBV0

If mgmt feels the higher tier buffs trivialize the lower tiers they could restrict them by level (as they did with the XP mask).

As far as giving gear away, if you've made it to say Tier 5 and some Tier 9/10 guy is clearing the zone for ess's you're just going to get your gear/flags a little faster - you still need to get the flag to be in the zone in the first place.. That's a bit different than a brandnew 70 getting a 400k Hp buff (when they naturally have something like 8-10k) and solo'ing Plane of Time..

I'd argue that having a high level rush you through t5 is exactly equal to having high level buffs in pot. Both just cut time off of whatever thing you're doing.

My feeling is, let people play how they want to play.

If you don't want to buff, don't buff. If you don't want to rush someone, don't.
If the people begging for buffs bothers you, just ignore them.

Finally in regards to the people who afk in nexus, I'd hazard a guess and say more than half of them are established people's characters staying logged in generally to save time. All of the lag in nexus is graphical lag, and even that generally fades as soon as you finish rending the stuff the first time (except that first time Rymo buffed 1k and destroyed the zone)   

UW Mace X (I believe IX did not work as well) proc does not seem to be returning any health.

I couldn't find anything indicating that it was no longer suppose to be a tap/heal proc.

I've been playing on and off, for about 4 years.
Initially started and got to right where i was ready to do MCP, I had my UC all ready to go and decided to take a break to go back to other games/rl.
When i returned i was happy to find the wall of content had been slightly shifted up to t5, with the .5 epic steps introducted, DT removed from MCP ect, I had a blast starting to get my group up to date, i did avoid getting aug stuff in favor of begining the grind for UWs, ending up finishing uw2, and 100 dmajors and 50dminors before another break time, but that also brought me about halfway through t5.
recently returned and i've found the below list (exluding stuff t6+ since i'm not there yet) to be basically exaclty the answers to why I was 'burning out' each time.
Back many years ago I did do cutting edge EQ progression, the 30+ hour camps for each piece of VT key, or original epics, ect.
And I do think a lot of the grinds on EZ have a great concept behind them, but I personally know that my burnout would be reduced with reduction on the gear walls to see newer content.
I know charms drop much more from many more places, resists too, but I do feel like the entrance "fee" of time here so to speak should be pushed up some. A lot of people here talked about how t5 is the "gut check" and that they were happy it was causing people to burn out and quit, but what benefit is there to encourage that feeling?

some people at the top talking about how they're bored there so it's a good thing other people burn out earlier so they don't have to feel the pain of being bored at the end game, I don't understand this mentality.

If you're at the top and bored you always have the option to go back and create challenges for yourself (start a new group, limit yourself by not using zerkers or something)
Why campaign against lowering the bar for entrance into content though, the more people in each tier the better the feedback can be.

The people on the highest end will always be able to remain on the cutting edge if they want to, other people progressing at a faster pace than you did years ago does not diminish you.

Posted this from work sorry it's not clearly formatted and intelligent.

TL;DR I think hulk's suggestions would be pretty much all really great for increasing player base/retention.

Since Hulk can't follow basic directions/requests from a GM, I'll help him along

Recently I had the pleasure of leveling another set of characters through all the tiers except t9 and wanted to provide some suggestions as to how the experience could be made potentially more enjoyable for future and current players. Addressing these issues could reduce player burn out/frustration and further increase the population of the server. Most of these changes are not making the game easier, rather they're addressing the issue of time investment vs. reward. This game has never been hard, just time consuming.

New ideas:
1.) Add crystal quests to progression zones
2.) Allow more classes to throw down ae damage similar to zerks
3.) Make paladins and Sks beefy enough to tank
4.) Reduce hp of mobs in Velks lab
5.) Add a quest that rewards an arch type beneficial item that may be upgraded in each zone from 1-70.
6.) Make lower level charm upgrades stackable.
7.) Make resist Augs stackable by rank
8.) Remvoe aug combine recipes from t1 and add in augs to treasure chests.
9.) Implement XP mask earlier in the game and allow players to upgrade via quests as they level. (E.g. rank 1-10 = 2 rare drops from first zone / set amount of aa)

Waypoints:
Add NPC that sells waypoint item and explains how to use it.
Reduce cost of instance creation/reset.

Tserrina tank pet buff item:
Remove this item from tserrina's loot table and make it a quest item for T1 pet classes.

Crystal quest:
Implement some kind of one time quest that rewards newly leveled characters with 200-500 or so aa.

SoT quest:
Make the reward yield a rank 3 or 4 scepter instead of rank 1 and make rank 1s rare drop off lower tier bosses. Rare drop scepters could increase in rank as players go up in tier maybe 1 rank per tier like resistance stones.
Add more ranks past rank 10 attainable via higher level quests.

Qvic:
add armor exchange vendor like in T1
Change rare boss to spawn after x amount of bosses killed.

LDON:
significantly increase drop rate of all cards since ldon armor is under used.
reduce the amount of cards needed per armor piece

CT:
add armor exchange vendor like in T1

T1:
increase drop rate of essences to 20%
Change ancient dragon spawn to spawn after x amount of bosses killed

T2:
increase drop rate of essences to 20%

T3:
increase drop rate of essences to 20%

T4:
Add armor exchange vendor
increase drop rate of essences to 20%

T5:
increase spawn chance of triggered mobs

T6:
add Jelvan's keepsake to list of chests that may be opened with /open

T7:
Increase respawn time of zone to >8hours

T8:
Increase drop rate of scales for UCv3/add rare spawn chests containing scales
add armor exchange vendor
Increase drop rate of essences on bosses

Is it possible to remove the stupid root from the pets, going from the 3.0 to 3.5 beast pet is according to my admittedly small amount of testing a ~5% increase in damage, at the cost of it now roots also.

As funny as it is watching pets just being in the fight make the rangers dps drop huge amounts...yea.

any pets involved?

All of the non-caster classes t3 spells are like this. I believe it's intended for you to put it on click it quick take it off (to encourage you to actually play the character instead of afking it) with that said, understand that most of the t3 non-caster spells suck so bad they're not worth even mentioning ever.

It's rather rare you'd actually have to cast feral guard more than once a minute, but it's safer to cast it on cooldown, twice a minute. It makes it so you never have to heal (assuming there is some minor kind of group heals going on to take care of ae magic damage).

Your pet is so much more damage than anything else you could possibly do that the 2 seconds to cast feral guard is the best 2 seconds you could possibly spend.

cast feral guard, a lot and always and your pet will be fine unless it's attacking from the front/tanking (pets arn't supported to tank in t1 stuff, even though a bst pet can solo t1 trash in like 5 seconds)

I believe it has to do with the bugged nature of the shaman buff, it has a listed %mod to damage in the buff (which actually generally lowers your damage by that %) and innerflame increases your damage by a bigger % in the same spellslot so it overwrites it.

I don't even bother logging on my shaman anymore because the hp is almost never worst losing a bunch of physical damage.

bump.

As much fun as it was to have an extra boss spawned on my head, then have the group that spawned the extra boss steal my boss also after wiping me, could people avoid doing things like that?

The accidental spawning I get, but the fact they purposely stole my boss after is pretty messed up.

The really big problem with the ae lifetap thing is, it super encourages you to completely ignore the weaker classes even more than now, since they can just be a net loss bringing them.

Unless niche rolls are fleshed out a lot more.

Ranger dispelled first try!

Divine Balance