EQ Live - Swarm Balancing (Headshot, Decapitate etc)

i'm probably the guiltiest party on Test who employs these tactics. i'm more worried for live. this is truly going to piss off alot of people who speak with their wallets.

i'm moot on it, unhappy- but, whatever. i've gotten everything ive needed done, done with them. it's a shame though, mass decapping/swarming was pretty fucking fun. but, it'll be nice to be forced to group again too.

i know this will shrink Test's server population by a considerable amount, so that's a bummer. it was just getting high again, general nearly maxes out.

i wonder if the entire SoE team is just tired of dealing with Everquest, and this may be a subtle way of slowly pulling the plug on 'er, hoping people will find themselves back in EQN when it releases.

I know the beam lag is a big issue that disrupts people that have nothing to do with it and i hardly hear anyone defending it, even the people selling beam PL's seemed to do it discreetly or even hire a bard to actualy get the pull rounded up for the mage, but the HS/decap stuff was just as cheap because there was zero risk involved in generating shit tons of xp in about the same amount of time (factor in the pull and set up and one beam is huge xp but you can only do one or two in an hour after all is said and done where as decap trains in grounds could basically go forever since the respawn is so good and the return on a LB mob from there was significant). I leveled up a ranger at one point and when i could finally HS pofire I really had that "wow this is cheap and feels too good to be in game, but its fun so fuck it". Just because they were around for a long time doesnt mean they were ok , and as the power inflation ages as it always does they become even more powerful. I just cant sympathize with the 3-4 classes that had tricks to gain literally 10 times the xp as the other 11 or whatever classes with next to no risk. I think there has been an influx of new and returning players since eq went f2p, slowly but surely. Thats a good thing for the health of the game, but after said newcomers find out that buying your way to end game is a million times more efficient even if you work at mcdonalds for 8 bucks and hour, somethings fucked up. As with all big nerfs people will bitch long and hard, but eventually find new tricks. Its not the nail in the coffin this time just like it wasnt the last umpteen times such was proclaimed. I'd never admit to someone IRL how much time this damn game has comsumed of mine over the years but with the current shit fest of mmos i still come back to it for lack of a better term, the eq-ishness of it. cry on but i highly doubt eq will be closing down anytime soon

- edit forgot to mention the huge gap in power between a new comer who levels up and someone with good gear/augs, AA, clickies, and most of all volumes of eq know-how. this idea probably has a lot to do with bridging the gap for the recent influx. would you want to try out an oldschool game you never got around to only to learn in this day and age it still takes 80,000 man hours to even be an acceptable recruit to an end game guild?

Fucking awesome. I mentioned headshot bullshit in the EQ thread and some douchenozzle said "I dont know what I'm talking about"....yep, sure thing there. That panned out. It's cheap. Now is it cheap to the point I am butt hurt about it? No, obviously not it's a 15 year old game and most shit is instanced now anyway so while it certainly can cause minor problems, it's by no stretch a "major issue". The idea behind it is fine, kill weak ass mobs faster, but the implementation is garbage since classes with these skills can literally farm levels of magnitude faster than those without. Its not a 2.5 vs 1.0 speed issue.

As far as granting all of the aa. I actually heavily disagree with that. Again I get it, they want people to join back up and feel like they can do stuff, but I think just adjusting that aa xp curve again would suffice. You can already get level 90 and 5k aa if this were the only game you play in about 1-1.5 months. And at that level you are well on your way to joining a raid guild if you chose or just enjoying modern group content. There is really no need to just autogrant up to underfoot. Yet, again this is not some huge deal breaker, just unnecessary. I've already gained aa at an insane rate and I barely play(not double xp test, real server). Change the curve and leave the current theme.

If they really want to "draw people back to eq", which is clearly not possible in any real sense of the discussion, they should instance all raid content from vanilla through pre-PoT except for maybe a few notable exceptions of roaming dragons and shit. How many people want to come back and farm the ol' ToV/VT/VP/Sky/Hate/Fear? Shit, half the people you see posting in these "return to EQ threads" join up for a month to slaughter old shit and never even try the new missions or tasks. Funny part is they never get to kill their old rivals because that shit is camped 24/7 by god knows who, also somewhat funny since most of the items from said zones are no drop and the ones that can be dropped sell for what? 50k? I suppose if you lock it down you could buy your monthly krono and play eq for free.....

If this is truly an attempt at bringing back new people or retaining more of those who do return but don't last long they need to rethink their strategy. Handing someone aa or making the "PL market" go away will not keep folks around. Those folks just leave anyway. In my opinion, of course up for debate they need to do a few simple things:

1.) Make nostalgia possible, as stated above instance most "memorable" raid content pre-pop so it's not on lock down allowing return players to get their jollies off. Shit make everything no drop if you are seriously worried about the economy. We know they can make the instances start with as little as 1 person too so that's not the problem
2.) I agree that for those that wish to genuinely catch up and join friends it can suck, but another adjustment of the AA curve(and potentially leveling curve? say 1.5x xp prior to 75 or something?) would easily fix that without a shotgun grant of aa. If anything the shotgun grant causes problems. All of a sudden you hit 80 and have 45 hotkeys to place down, the descriptions are mostly ass and unless you forum read or ask for help you have no idea what's good and what's not, etc. If you doubled the curve there is no way someone wouldn't catch up in no time at all and yet it still retains that "im earning it" feeling when you see the AA numbers go up and get to spend points.
3.) While the whole killshot crap has issues it's far from game breaking and there is even a little economy around it. I say leave it in game, maybe reduce the levels a hair or some other minor crap. Honestly it's not a big deal. This coming from a class that doesn't have it(necro).
4.) Fix chat channels, that goes a long way for a new person to be able to meet people and find a guild
5.) come up with some kind of system to encourage doing some of the new instances/missions involved with each expansion. Let's face it, everyone has calculated in EQ what the best XP/sec is or some insane crap. That will never change. But make achievements for doing missions/tasks/expeditions for the first time give a reward of 10aa(made up a number). Now you help solve the aa problem and encourage people to do interesting content instead of just headshot farm. Plus it will also develop an, albeit temporary, market for people "pushing through" low levels. Everyone gets to the see the fucking 15 years of decent(? I have not done even close to half of it but that which I did was not bad at all) of content and not feel like they wasted an hour they could have been PLing.

Anyone explain this raid currency duping? I noticed an item I was putting in my shared bank to move to my Trader was still there on my main even after I took it out on the trader; it's happened enough for me to notice it but I haven't tried to purposefully do it (and the item seemingly getting duped is some worthless junk)...

Anyhow; I'm ambivalent on the swarming/insta kill/beam nerfs. I believe it will drastically change both the leveling environment and population of Test/FV. You'll probably see people more willing to form groups but also less people overall playing (and far less alts).

We shall see. I personally will be surprised if this makes it to Live in their suggested form.

As for the AA for Gold shit; I'd rather they just cut down the cost of the AA's in half than give us free ones.

Personally I think the problem is that the exp awarded for trivial kills is too high. (and/or way too low for harder kills) Leveling up and getting AAs, it was just far more rewarding to grind in the earliest expansions I could find that still had light blue cons than it was fighting in newer zones with dark blues. If this were readjusted, then swarming and insta-kill procs would become far less rewarding.

Granted I can't be bothered to do things like quest and look for groups.

mkopec_sl said:

Well, what were these people mostly swarming for? To get AA, right? So if they give you free AA there is no use for swarming. Right?

I agree, shitty changes, but people brought this on themselves. I will probably never log on my ranger again.

Click to expand...

The biggest thing is to PL levels/AA for plat (which apparently lots of people then turn to RL cash). Considering that it's very difficult to find exp groups on FV (and especially Test), this will severely impact the game on those servers. Not sure what the regular Live servers look like.

lol, I just read the official forums on it. Assuming they are being honest, apparently the problem with swarming isn't XP but massive spikes in CPU usage that causes problems for all zones hosted on the server. They put up a little graph of how a few swarmers make the thing peak out at like 90% capacity.

Sort of agree with AA changes, although not the method. I am extremely casual these days (play a month or two each year, mostly solo) and I usually manage 30ish AA per hour max. 2-3k to is still hundreds of hours you need to do at a certain level (you'd be crazy not to do it at one of the "optimal" levels) before you can realistically progress.

Skipping AA until the end isn't really an option because of the huge bump up in mob HP and damage output as you move up in levels. My 71/300 paladin can solo light blue PoP mobs 6 at a time, move up a few expansions and a single dark blue will kick my ass, not to mention the mob has far more hp so it takes ages to kill.

I was skimming the list of comments and somebody implied that the SK epic clicky was also being nerfed, which is pretty lame. I'm surprised that they even care enough to make this level of nerfs so late in the evolution of a game.

The AA change is interesting. On one hand, it removes the need to AA at certain benchmark levels, which allows for more control over your level and gameplay. On the other hand, there's only so much content to experience at a given level when you remove the need to AA prior to level 85 or 90 or whatever it is that they've capped up until.

Yea, but there are so many better ways to handle it. Just inflate the AA xp curve again. Make the first 2.5k come as fast as the first 100. Then give AA rewards for actually doing content instead of just PLing or whatever. Add something basic like a 3aa award to all solo tasks from TSS up and a 5aa award to all group tasks/missions from TSS up...make in this addition to whatever the current reward is.

Now you have more aa coming in without this retarded auto-grant nonsense which is just confusing and overall detrimental, but people will still earn more AA and maybe actually do some of all the cool content they spend so much time creating over the last 15 years.

Well the difference between what your saying Rangoth and what they are doing is work. Giving people the free aa's will take no effort on the developer, whereas adding an achievement system like that would. Although I do agree that the curve should just be adjusted instead of just giving people that many free aa's.

Sure glad I got my fill a year ago. Fuck solo grinding 5k aa. There are no PUGs in Everquest. Game is too old for a change like this, it's retarded.

I found actually spending the AA's to be a huge hassle honestly, specially while powerleveling. If you could pre-spend them or they could come up with some non retarded pre-spend tracks instead of just banking them and getting stuck at 30aa, it would be a lot easier. When they do double xp on test, i was spending like half my time allocating AA's amongst several characters instead of actually playing.