EQ Classic? Not really.

The third eq expansion (Luclin) introduced AA or alternate abilities, basically you could continue exping at max level to get additional abilities, some activated and some passive bonuses. IMO the first set of these were pretty good, they took a while to grind (less than a regular high level but still time consuming) but the devs put a good amount of thought into them, especially the class specific ones so you actually felt a significant increase in character power as you accumulated them. the expansion after that continued the trend (planes of power) but after that things really went downhill and they got lazy and 90% of the new AA's were just a higher rank (+gooder whatever stat) or in some cases homogenizing the classes. I think now a days almost every class can FD, gate, summon pets, crit, etc etc. I think the two schools of thought on when eq went to shit was either before AA's, (most classic servers stop at velious, just before AAs) or after the first 2 AA sets, ending with planes of power, like eqmac. I don't think I've ever heard a tank say they cant wait to spend hours grinding from combat agility/stability rank 38 to rank 44 or whatever the fuck silly shit it is now.

There were some unique abilities.

AA's had multiple functions. There were general "everyone can use these" AA's. Once you've spent 6 in the general pool you're able to get into the 2nd tier, Archetype, which is split between caster or melee.
After spending 12 points in the Archetype pool, you get "Class" AA's. These unlock new abilities, increase the strength of some basic abilities, and are generally more fun.

I was a Wizard in EQ Classic. A break down of AA's would be like this.
General: Run speed increase and Improved Health Regeneration rate.
Archetype: Lower Threat from casting spells, Lower mana-cost per spell and chance to get a critical strike with a spell.
Class: Reduced cast time on damage spells, another increase in critical strike chance, a new spell called "Manaburn" which was an unresistable spell you could cast every 6 hours. It used 100% of your mana, and could hit REALLY hard. They also gave you fun spells like the ability to summon 3 mostly useless pets to attack during a single battle. They also look neat.

Well, what started off as a nice way to improve your character, became a requirement for many guilds. If you even wanted a CHANCE to join a guild, you had to have 50-60 points worth of "mandatory" AA's. Just something else you had to accomplish prior to getting a guild invite. So the more expansions that pass, and more AA's are added, that's an even bigger requirement for future guild members. An extremely time consuming requirement.

That's the negative. The concept was great, and I loved the additional power ups I received from doing what I was doing anyway, but they were detrimental due to the requirement some guilds put in.

New expansions released every 6 months back then, and each added literally hundreds of new AAs. So imagine every new content patch for newer games requiring you to relevel over and over to reach the new max. But instead of quest grinds it's straight mob grinding.

Yeah, they added too many AA's, and made some of them too good (i.e. mandatory as already said) They should have either left the power gained extremely small or focus more on flavor. An example was paladin's had an AA that let them crit undead. Hardly a balance issue even if it was powerful because only so many mobs were undead.

Six months? EQ's early expacs were about a year apart, not six months. (SoV was like 9 months though)

Luclin didn't add new levels either, so you had a full year to make your required AAs after having all of Kunark and Velious to make 60. PoP's 5 levels went by faster than Kunark's. I think I did mine in like 4 days or something.

On EQmac I went from level 1 to level 60 with 120 AAs in about 3 months. Granted my experience is atypical. (I stopped at 60 intentionally)

I liked AAs because they gave you something to do. It was like a diminishing power curve. You got the most powerful AAs first, then eventually your AAs gave you less and less power. In modern games you just hit a wall after leveling and getting all your gear. In EQ at least you could always get +2 more fire resist by helping a friend get his more needed AAs, or just grind more for epeen.

AAs became easier and easier to get over the expacs due to a variety of reasons, which helped the newcomers. PoP zones had huge ZEMs with high level mobs for example. (higher level mobs granted a lot more exp) I rather liked that new players had to go through some older content before reaching the new stuff though, personally.

zzeris_sl said:

AAs weren't around in the early expansions before Luclin. PoP took 10 months but after that there were 2 expansions a year for a while.

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Ykesha and LDoN didn't add AAs though, if I'm not mistaken. I recall some people in my guild not even buying Ykesha. Post-Omens EQ isn't 'early EQ' anymore.

Mandatory AAs aren't a problem any more than mandatory levels are a problem. Either way it's a required exp grind. AAs just might not feel like you are progressing as much as a level would. You could argue that AAs might require too much exp, but I didn't feel they did. After all, EQ's progression wasn't supposed to end a week after an expac's launch like modern games.

AAs weren't perfect, but I'd rather have imperfect variety in games than perfect uniformity. (i.e. every game a clone)

Torrid_sl said:

Ykesha and LDoN didn't add AAs though, if I'm not mistaken. I recall some people in my guild not even buying Ykesha. Post-Omens EQ isn't 'early EQ' anymore.

Mandatory AAs aren't a problem any more than mandatory levels are a problem. Either way it's a required exp grind. AAs just might not feel like you are progressing as much as a level would. You could argue that AAs might require too much exp, but I didn't feel they did. After all, EQ's progression wasn't supposed to end a week after an expac's launch like modern games.

AAs weren't perfect, but I'd rather have imperfect variety in games than perfect uniformity. (i.e. every game a clone)

Click to expand...

I would disagree with you about the amount of experience required for AA points but it's really hard to be annoyed as a wizard who exploited the fucking shit out of AA exp with you.

There weren't very many mandatory AAs. Each class needed a few, such as MGP, FT or EQ+AM. The amount of "required" AAs could be obtained in a matter of like two weeks, you could grind 2-3 AAs per hour if you weren't slacking and no expansion added more than at most 50 AAs that could possibly be considered mandatory. You didn't have to have hundreds to start raiding or whatever, and once you did, they just added up automatically through general gameplay. What AAs did accomplish was to provide long-term progression goals that weren't exclusive to raiders, something that literally no MMORPG has ever done since. Even WoW had that gap you'd meet after like a month when the only way to further your character was through raiding.

You absolutely could not grind 2-3 AA's per hour early on. Hell, when I quit the game at the end of PoP, you still could not grind 2-3 per hour. And I was quad kiting plane of fire mobs back then.

When we had the boss dog groups in plane of valor cave, we could get one every 8 hours I think.

I feel like I was getting at least 1 per hour AE kiting Halls of Honor as a bard, but that was hardly the norm.

You could get 1 an hour in a normal group in PoP.

Actually it was one every 6-8 hours at fast velks ledge... and PoP cave was about 4x faster than that.