Time to fix the AA curve .... [Archive] - EQ2 Forum Archive @ EQ2Wire

View Full Version : Time to fix the AA curve ....

Odys

08-09-2011, 10:22 AM

People levelling normally reach 90 with 170 aas, with a 50/50 convertion you probably reach 90 with 220 aas (assuming you run quests).So people do farm AAs in the most stupid way, they simply mass pull zones and aoe them.Aas were supposed to be achivements : quest, named, exploration.It's time to increase a lot AA given by named / exploration and quest and to decrease combat -> AAs conversion.A player folllowing the quest line and visiting at least half of the instances should reach 90 with 260 aas (minimum) .It's rather disturbing to be in a situation where a mass pull of 20 drovlarg in TT brings more AA than killing a raid mob.

Kizee

08-09-2011, 10:50 AM

<cite>Gorock@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>People levelling normally reach 90 with 170 aas, with a 50/50 convertion you probably reach 90 with 220 aas (assuming you run quests).So people do farm AAs in the most stupid way, they simply mass pull zones and aoe them.Aas were supposed to be achivements : quest, named, exploration.It's time to increase a lot AA given by named / exploration and quest and to decrease combat -> AAs conversion.A player folllowing the quest line and visiting at least half of the instances should reach 90 with 260 aas (minimum) .It's rather disturbing to be in a situation where a mass pull of 20 drovlarg in TT brings more AA than killing a raid mob.</blockquote>That is funny that you say mass pulling zones is stupid because I think doing quests is stupid.Decrease AA combat > AA conversion?? Really? So I should be forced to do quests until my eyes bleed on all my alts I want to play? Ummmm no.

Nevao

08-09-2011, 10:50 AM

<cite>Gorock@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>People levelling normally reach 90 with 170 aas, with a 50/50 convertion you probably reach 90 with 220 aas (assuming you run quests).So people do farm AAs in the most stupid way, they simply mass pull zones and aoe them.Aas were supposed to be achivements : quest, named, exploration.It's time to increase a lot AA given by named / exploration and quest and to decrease combat -> AAs conversion.A player folllowing the quest line and visiting at least half of the instances should reach 90 with 260 aas (minimum) .It's rather disturbing to be in a situation where a mass pull of 20 drovlarg in TT brings more AA than killing a raid mob.</blockquote>While I do agree with some of this, there are people who would much rather dungeon crawl levels and AA. Both options should be viable.

Elskidor

08-09-2011, 11:17 AM

<cite>Gorock@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>People levelling normally reach 90 with 170 aas, with a 50/50 convertion you probably reach 90 with 220 aas (assuming you run quests).So people do farm AAs in the most stupid way, they simply mass pull zones and aoe them.</blockquote>Heck no. If anything increase the combat xp per mob kill. Maybe not in heroic dungeons, but in the solo overlands where most quests are offered. I have 6 toons that have done anywhere between 1500-2750 quests. Nothing wrong with it but I'm sick of it, and would like the a good alternative for solo grinding. Quests are so freaking linear and dull it's really pathetic what's become of mmos.I'm all for named rewarding double the amount of aa too, but forcing people to do silly quests was never a good idea.

Banditman

08-09-2011, 11:30 AM

After doing the same quests SEVEN TO NINE TIMES I can safely tell you that it gets very old and a viable, equivalent way to grind a character up is needed. Right now, AA is only available one way - quests. That needs to change aside from the "first" time kill of a named mob. It needs to be more than a conversion of XP, or at the very least the conversion needs to be FAR more favorable.A "new" player who arrives at L90 should do so with something very close to 300 AA, and, depending on the increase, it may be more. A player who rolls his first character should, without doing reams of research, be able to cap his character out without painful grinding.A true "newb" today would need to set his conversion to about 93% in order to do this, assuming he does 800 or so quests on his way to 90.That is ludicrous.

Xalmat

08-09-2011, 11:40 AM

i fail to understand why people feel the need to remove/lessen a major form of progression. i mean its bad enough leveling speed is crazy fast.however i would like to see aa experience bonus for every character you have at the aa cap, similar to the bonus you receive for max level characters. however it should not apply to combat-xp-to-aa-conversion AA, but rather only AA earned via the normal means (quests, named kills, exploration, etc).

feldon30

08-09-2011, 11:46 AM

<cite>Gorock@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>decrease combat -> AAs conversion.</blockquote>FAIL

Nevao

08-09-2011, 12:05 PM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote>i fail to understand why people feel the need to remove/lessen a major form of progression. i mean its bad enough leveling speed is crazy fast.however i would like to see aa experience bonus for every character you have at the aa cap, similar to the bonus you receive for max level characters. however it should not apply to combat-xp-to-aa-conversion AA, but rather only AA earned via the normal means (quests, named kills, exploration, etc).</blockquote>I think my point is more neither option should be immediately better than the other. Remember how annoyed people were in RoK that they had to do the quest lines to level quickly? I think this falls into the same camp. Both options need to be viable and we shouldn't be forcing people into one type of content to progress their characters.

Xalmat

08-09-2011, 12:20 PM

No one is forcing anyone to grind XP to earn AA. There is PLENTY of content out there to help you reach the AA cap. In addition to mentoring and doing lower level quests/dungeons for named AA, daily missions, daily quests, and public quests all reward healthy AA.You have:Daily Moors of Ykesha tradeskill questsDaily void shard missionsDaily Mark of Manaar missionsDaily Velious missionsDaily Velious faction questsDaily Odus tradeskill missionsDaily Thurgadin tradeskill missionDaily Chronomagi missionPublic Quests in the Great Divide every hour, on the hour, where one of your rewards is AA experience.Dailt missions in The HoleWorld events as they pop up (the tinkerfest quests rewarded a good chunk of xp, especially for repeatables).And thats just to start.personally i find doing missions far more entertaining than blind xp grinding.

Bremer

08-09-2011, 12:30 PM

They shouldn't decrease the combat AA xp gain, they should increase the quest/named AA xp gain to make it a viable choice. I recently leveled a Dirge to 90, mostly with solo quests and killing every name that crossed my path and I hit 90 with 170 AA. And then after 2h XP grind on the double xp weekend I gained 60 more AAs. The 100s of nameds and quests were worth less AA than killing a few 100 mobs. This discrepancy should be fixed. When I'm doing a quest or kill a named I should get the same AA xp as if I had spent that time killing trash mobs.

urgthock

08-09-2011, 12:36 PM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote>No one is forcing anyone to grind XP to earn AA. There is PLENTY of content out there to help you reach the AA cap. In addition to mentoring and doing lower level quests/dungeons for named AA, daily missions, daily quests, and public quests all reward healthy AA.You have:Daily Moors of Ykesha tradeskill questsDaily void shard missionsDaily Mark of Manaar missionsDaily Velious missionsDaily Velious faction questsDaily Odus tradeskill missionsDaily Thurgadin tradeskill missionDaily Chronomagi missionPublic Quests in the Great Divide every hour, on the hour, where one of your rewards is AA experience.Dailt missions in The HoleWorld events as they pop up (the tinkerfest quests rewarded a good chunk of xp, especially for repeatables).And thats just to start.personally i find doing missions far more entertaining than blind xp grinding.</blockquote>None of which are anywhere near as fast as a good grind spot during a double exp event. So if it takes 1 hour to gain 1 AA questing or 1 hour to gain 10 AA grinding... it certainly feels like I am being forced to grind for AA exp. People need to stop calling for decreases to AA gain while grinding and start calling for increases to AA gain while questing. I think a lot of people would choose to quest more if the exp gains were competitive.

Nevao

08-09-2011, 12:57 PM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote>No one is forcing anyone to grind XP to earn AA. There is PLENTY of content out there to help you reach the AA cap. In addition to mentoring and doing lower level quests/dungeons for named AA, daily missions, daily quests, and public quests all reward healthy AA.You have:Daily Moors of Ykesha tradeskill questsDaily void shard missionsDaily Mark of Manaar missionsDaily Velious missionsDaily Velious faction questsDaily Odus tradeskill missionsDaily Thurgadin tradeskill missionDaily Chronomagi missionPublic Quests in the Great Divide every hour, on the hour, where one of your rewards is AA experience.Dailt missions in The HoleWorld events as they pop up (the tinkerfest quests rewarded a good chunk of xp, especially for repeatables).And thats just to start.personally i find doing missions far more entertaining than blind xp grinding.</blockquote>I think I mispoke or you misunderstood. What I meant is that we shouldn't be taking away grinding XP as option. Missions = Quests and that is good, don't get me wrong. But don't kill grinding as an option as there are people that do enjoy that.

Valentina

08-09-2011, 01:07 PM

Unfortunately, even if you change the combat xp -> aa xp conversion, you're still going to have (mentored) high-level people training entire zones like Sanctum of the Scaleborn, (or large chunks of Seb) so they can PL groupmates. I think THAT is a bigger issue, as something that directly impacts others' play (it's rather hard to quest in SoS, for example, when one or two groups of one mentored 90 and 1-n appropriately leveled players monopolize the entire zone). I don't have a problem with the conversion itself... if people want to grind to get aas, that's their business.

Lantis

08-09-2011, 02:41 PM

A mistake done by early EQ2 designers IMHO was that whenever increasing the level cap, they would always add 10 new levels. Since the content for the first 7 levels was usually bland compared to the content you could do during the last 2-3 levels, those 7 levels were wasted on a race to level. They could have as easily reduced those 10 levels to only 5 (and increasing the required XP for each level if need be), and it would have felt a bit less wasteful.So levels became insanely easy to gain, with a lot of people hitting any new level cap within days of the expansion launch. SOE's answer then was AAs. Except that 300 AAs is starting to be a lot of ranks to grind through, and the current T9 content is so challenging that whenever you level an alt, you have to grind through at least 250 of those AAs before you can even play said alt in those current instances.Bottom line is, I agree with the idea that, once you have gone through the pain of going through 90 levels and 300 AAs, you shouldn't have to repeat that again with all your alts. 10% bonus per toon at cap is too small IMHO. Make it easier for people with alts to reach the cap, and you will have fewer persons doing on a rampage fest in contested instances whenever a bonus weekend hits the servers.Some games do this by allowing you to get an instant higher level toon whenever you already have one at the level cap. That could be a way. A few ideas:- For each toon at level 90 / 300 AA' allow one instant alt that is at least level 80/250 AA (i.e. high enough to skip the grinding, yet with some level/AA to gain so they can actually learn to play that alt)- Increase the bonus earned for each character at the cap (and extend that to AAs as well)- Tweak the vitality bonus, so instead of spending 4 hours in a row monopolizing a shared instance, people would do it for less time, and actually come back only once they've gained some vitality back. I.e. make vitality worthwhile enough to make grinding less a continuous rampage and more a staged one.

Kizee

08-09-2011, 02:48 PM

<cite>Valentina@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote>Unfortunately, even if you change the combat xp -> aa xp conversion, you're still going to have (mentored) high-level people training entire zones like Sanctum of the Scaleborn, (or large chunks of Seb) so they can PL groupmates. I think THAT is a bigger issue, as something that directly impacts others' play (it's rather hard to quest in SoS, for example, when one or two groups of one mentored 90 and 1-n appropriately leveled players monopolize the entire zone). I don't have a problem with the conversion itself... if people want to grind to get aas, that's their business.</blockquote>And it is only going to get worse with SoE eliminating all the good instance places to grind AA.

DuneWarrior

08-09-2011, 02:49 PM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Valentina@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote>Unfortunately, even if you change the combat xp -> aa xp conversion, you're still going to have (mentored) high-level people training entire zones like Sanctum of the Scaleborn, (or large chunks of Seb) so they can PL groupmates. I think THAT is a bigger issue, as something that directly impacts others' play (it's rather hard to quest in SoS, for example, when one or two groups of one mentored 90 and 1-n appropriately leveled players monopolize the entire zone). I don't have a problem with the conversion itself... if people want to grind to get aas, that's their business.</blockquote>And it is only going to get worse with SoE eliminating all the good instance places to grind AA.</blockquote>yup