Rygorr armor sets no longer require velium shards, so what's the point of making them? [Archive]

Valena

10-05-2011, 03:33 AM

<cite>Lera@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>I really hope they re-think this and this change doesn't go live. The heroic DoV dungeons are still current content, and the Ry'gorr armour is what you work up to for group zones. Not everyone raids, and if this change is meant to give everyone a free set of basic raid gear, then what was the point of grinding all those shards - which some of us didn't speed through a month after launch.This is just one more big giant easy button. Haven't we had enough of those the past couple years? If you want super-easy, go play WoW. But I don't think that's what the EQ2 player base wants, and making it more like WoW isn't going to get WoW players to suddenly transfer to another 6-year-old game.</blockquote>+1People need a target to be able to work to, and earning tokens to get Rhy'gorr has been the major motivator in running dungeons. Without that motivation then a lot of people will have no reason to run dungeons at all, especially on their 2nd / 3rd alts.I like StarTrek Online (a guilty pleasure at times) but stopped playing as it was so easy to gain end-game gear. It looks like EQ is going the same way and I hate it.

Kruschev2086

10-05-2011, 03:34 AM

I will edit with exact numbers from Guk, but gems if you buy them from the broker will range from 1p-100p, depending (citrine/jaundice last time I looked were still expensive). So is the armor expensive? Not really. I leveled a toon through the SF questline, vendor selling armor as I got replacements/useless items. On average when I ran toons through that series, I made around 200p. Between buying experts, and then gems, you wont have enough for the armor. Oh wait! There is another xpack of quests to do for another 100-200p worth of vendored armor + quest rewards. Now go buy your gems, ask the 20-30 people on your server who have the recipe who wants to make it, offer then 30-40p for the combines, and you are now ready for anything.Prices:Black Marble: 2-30gEmerald: 33-60gCitrine: 70-80pJaundice: 80-90pDiamond: 80-90pLava Ruby: 80-90p

Felshades

10-05-2011, 04:02 AM

<cite>Lera@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Talathion@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>Good change.</blockquote>How is this in any way good, other than making it easy?SOE might as well just start people with a full set of T2 gear and level 90, as easy as this game's become.It's no wonder people are bored with this game. They're able to rush through everything in a month, and then complain that there's nothing to do. And then they leave.</blockquote>It makes raiders' alts easier to gear because they don't want to run the shard zones for a week or so to get the 120 shards you need to get a full set.

Felshades

10-05-2011, 04:04 AM

Wirewhisker

10-05-2011, 04:26 AM

On AB, the black marble and the emerald re sub-plat, the citrine and the diamond range from 40-80, and the jaundice gem and lava ruby are around 100 plat.Predictions:<ol><li>PQ's will die, followed by;</li><li>The price of gems will skyrocket, followed by;</li><li>Kael contested will be solidly camped, 24/7. Plat farmers especially will be packed in there.</li></ol>

Valena

10-05-2011, 05:39 AM

<cite>Tanerah@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>On AB, the black marble and the emerald re sub-plat, the citrine and the diamond range from 40-80, and the jaundice gem and lava ruby are around 100 plat.Predictions:<ol><li>PQ's will die, followed by;</li><li>The price of gems will skyrocket, followed by;</li><li>Kael contested will be solidly camped, 24/7. Plat farmers especially will be packed in there.</li></ol></blockquote>Agreed. Why do PQ's when you can just buy the Rhy'gorr?

denmom

10-05-2011, 06:19 AM

I'm willing to bet it's due to the Dungeon Finder for this change.Far easier for those who are getting into L90 content, as either first time or alt, to gear up.

Gladiolus

10-05-2011, 06:35 AM

This doesn't need to be changed. The Drunder armour does.

Kitalya

10-05-2011, 06:53 AM

This is such a disappointing change. As others have mentioned, the Ry'Gorr armor should be something that's earned. It's going to have a negative effect on groups, a negative effect on the price of gems, and turn Great Divide and EW into a complete wasteland.It was already disappointing enough to have the CritMit requirements eliminated on all the Great Divide and EW mobs, along with all the Great Divide and early EW instances. This is just another example of eliminating any sort of challenge from this game, including the hard work (and practice) involved in earning the shards.If they wanted to make Great Divide easier to walk into, then the Mark of Manaar armor should have had it's mark requirement lowered or eliminated. Same deal for Void Shard armor, to be honest. But really, nerfing all of the current content, and now nerfing the cost of the gear, is just leaving the existing player base (the biggest fans, and the most vocal supporters) with a bad taste in their mouth. Whoever is making business decisions at SOE needs to stop. They obviously don't realize that short-term gains often do not translate into long-term success. Making EQ2 into a WoW clone, where everything is handed to you, will not save this game. Making intelligent decisions will. And these nerfs and changes are far from intelligent.I agree with another point from earlier in this thread, these changes will destroy PQ participation, will cause the gem prices on the broker to skyrocket, and fill the contested zones with farmers, ruining the average person/group's chance of getting anything useful. It will raise the bar of "average" gear, increase the quantity of players with that gear, and severely lower the quality of players with that gear. It's going to be VERY hard to find good groups anymore, and the Dungeon Finder is likely to flop shortly after launch, because no one will know whether they're going to get a group of decent folks, or a group of complete newbies. Pick-up groups of any sort will likely become a thing of the past, and you'll need to be in a guild in order to get anything heroic accomplished.Bad change, SOE. Please make sure this change never leaves test, and gets reverted as soon as possible. This is yet another nail in EQ2's coffin for me and many, many other loyal players.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 07:38 AM

2 thumbs up!This is a great change.I raid with my main, and have around 20 level 90 alts. Half the fun for me in this game is alts, as apart from raiding, I don;t play my main too much as there is realyl nothing he could benefit from from doing ANY heroic content.However, the thought of grinding through 2400 shards for alts just to be slightly effective is a chilling thought, and therefore this change, for me, is awesome.I am sure there are many many people with at least 4 level 90 alts - but faced with the prospect of going through redundant content time and time again on shard farms see their play time dwindle to the point they just say to themselves, why should I bother, and quit.Adding this change frees people up to actually choose what to play, rather than being funneled into a WoW-esque faction/shard grind over and over.And don't bother coming back with 'sense of achievement' as there is ZERO sense of achievement for repetitively doing instancesa just to obtain a piece of armor for tokens.Eliminating the faction grind on all toons for rygorr and thurg was a good start, reducing the shard cost from 40 to 20 was a good start - devs, don;t listen to a small but vocal minority threatening to quit over this change - many more will eventually bleed out of the game due to the endless necessity of shard farming.

Valena

10-05-2011, 09:05 AM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>Eliminating the faction grind on all toons for rygorr and thurg was a good start, reducing the shard cost from 40 to 20 was a good start - devs, don;t listen to a small but vocal minority threatening to quit over this change - many more will eventually bleed out of the game due to the endless necessity of shard farming.</blockquote>But Shard farming is a good reason to run instances, it's what keeps better equipped characters playing (farming shards for alts).If the need for shards is removed then people will ignore those dungeons that drop the worst gear (all pre-Kael ones) totally. That is 6 discaded zones to start. Then they will pour into Kael, often fresh from soloing up to 90, and will struggle as those with the better gear will have moved on to the harder KD zones or Drunder. People will see IK as the new entry level instance, and peole wil be very wary of getting more clueless people in their PUG and resort more and more to Guild only groups, or just grouping with those on their Friends list.I see this as a massive disincentive to group, not a good move at all.

Zylara

10-05-2011, 09:08 AM

Personally speaking as one of those who have a million alts, I like going thru the zones and earning my shards therefor earning my armour, I don't see where the necessity is in removing this aspect. None of the other shard armour in previous expansions got nerfed to this point so why this time??@ Cratoh you say this is a great change as you have around 20 lvl 90's and half the fun is your alts in this game, my question is wheres the fun in having your armour just handed to you? You are running those zones for fun anyways so hows it actually hurt you to have those shards, they will still drop etc so instead of using your shards for your armour and adorns your gonna have a crapload of shards going to waste instead!!2 thumbs down, this is taking away AGAIN the fact that alot of us worked our cute little behinds off to get our armour and now anyone can come along and just get it easily BAH this game is getting so dumbed down my dog could play it soon,instead of facerolling now playing our toons we can have paw petting keyboard ftw

DonnyOddlegs

10-05-2011, 10:06 AM

So this update introduces dungeon finder to make finding heroic instance pickup groups easier and simultaneously removes the primary reason for running those instances in the first place?

Lempo

10-05-2011, 10:27 AM

<cite>DonnyOddlegs wrote:</cite><blockquote>So this update introduces dungeon finder to make finding heroic instance pickup groups easier and simultaneously removes the primary reason for running those instances in the first place?</blockquote>Apparently so.Very well stated, I'll just second that because my real opinion of it can not be expressed w/o violating the forum rules.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 10:40 AM

<cite>Zylara wrote:</cite><blockquote>@ Cratoh you say this is a great change as you have around 20 lvl 90's and half the fun is your alts in this game, my question is wheres the fun in having your armour just handed to you? You are running those zones for fun anyways so hows it actually hurt you to have those shards, they will still drop etc so instead of using your shards for your armour and adorns your gonna have a crapload of shards going to waste instead!!Shards I can use for adorns. I would be far more inclined to use some of those alts doing those same zones but going for rare drops from rare mobs, while wearing decent armor.2 thumbs down, this is taking away AGAIN the fact that alot of us worked our cute little behinds off to get our armour and now anyone can come along and just get it easily BAH this game is getting so dumbed down my dog could play it soon,instead of facerolling now playing our toons we can have paw petting keyboard ftwIt's been a very simple game ever since they introduced chests dropping rares, and the introduction of legendary tier and common fabled drops, instances dropping fabled, instanced raid zones - adding a timesink in the form of shards does not make for interesting or challenging gameplay. Repeating content over and over to get tokens to buy gear is not a challenge at all and therefore this is my reasoning for the 2 thumbs UP <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></blockquote>

Brytak

10-05-2011, 10:44 AM

This is a fail. Changing the fundamental reward mechanisms for current tier content is ridiculous. Doing so with no community discussion is absurd. How can a player plan what they will do to progress their character when every 3 days a core aspect of the progression is modified?It is definately not fun to log in to see items progression nerfed, or become pointless ie (TORZ/Spire BP). Thurgadin armor was always usless.It is not fun to have the pleasure of having finaly prepared to surmount some particular challenge, to have it nerfed so that it is no longer the challenge prepared for. It's like preparing for summit ascent of Everest, planning, gathering supplies, and training for a year, then upon reaching base camp finding someone removed the mountain and placed a few stairs up to a slightly elevated patio one day. When waking up the next morning to make the best of it and planning to have a barbque with the kids on the patio and finding a sign with an arrow pointing at a small muddy pond that says "Hey look! You can fish here now!" Err....um...derp....How about they just get rid of gear, make all characters autogrouped into Drunder, with a bunch of mob corpses and chests in the zone? Ya, that sounds great.Honestly, I'm not sure I can muster up the motivation to even log in anymore. All I keep thinking about is what will be screwed up next.

thewarriorpoet

10-05-2011, 11:18 AM

I'm trying to see the point of this change. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I just don't understand how this could been well intended. I see a few different rationales.1 - This was done for raider alts. Which would tell me, as a predominately heroic and x2 player, that I am not wanted as a customer.2 - They intended to "fix" their error with Thurgadin (which everyone skips anyways) and Ry'gorr armor not scaling right between the PQ and Drunder armor by pretending it doesn't exist. By making it so common everyone ignores it the problem is "solved". Granted the problem wasn't and still isn't with those two armor sets but with Drunder as a zone. This tells me they are just going to continue to sweep itemization under the rug and pretty much leave it in this horrible condition - remember it isn't just broken at 90, but all the way down the teens.3 - They are doing this on TEST in hopes that people will come over and test drunder because they are planning to finally address it and they want a specific gear set for the tests. Unpresidented and totally a pipe dream, but dammit I can dream. If this has a remote chance of being true, it would tell me they are actually planning to try to use test to test unstead of testing on live.Some rationale from a redname would be another great wish come true on this.

Brytak

10-05-2011, 11:24 AM

This will likely be live with some exceptionally brilliant bugs before a red name posts.

Kizee

10-05-2011, 11:27 AM

/shrug it is not like the armor is free.You still need the gem to make it which, depending on how your luck is on rolls, a lot harder to get than 20 shards.I like the change since I was dreading running heroic instances for shards to gear up my alt to aceptable crit mit values to run EM raids with my guild when they are lacking that class.Not to derail the thread but they really need to put in a way to exchange raid shards for heroic ones. I am sitting on hundreds of raid shards that will never get used.

ObsidianNightmare

10-05-2011, 11:34 AM

NM my rant about shards. I see you're not removing the gems trade in.But adding in separate "Tokens" for drunder gear? Why more and separate currency? Is the gear on the merchants worth locking players into the path of getting this separate currency?What is the purpose for the gear that drops from the mobs in these zones?

thewarriorpoet

10-05-2011, 11:41 AM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote>/shrug it is not like the armor is free.You still need the gem to make it which, depending on how your luck is on rolls, a lot harder to get than 20 shards.I like the change since I was dreading running heroic instances for shards to gear up my alt to aceptable crit mit values to run EM raids with my guild when they are lacking that class.Not to derail the thread but they really need to put in a way to exchange raid shards for heroic ones. I am sitting on hundreds of raid shards that will never get used.</blockquote>Aw crap, thats a good point. I spend more time going for gems then I do shards. I have the needed 120 LONG before I get all the gems. Why'd you go and make logic. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />edit - the issue I do see is that tower will be more of a waste land then it already is and labrynth will become one. I like those zones. I want to run them at least once with my alts. That is now much more unlikely. /shrug

Jrel

10-05-2011, 11:58 AM

<cite>Kruschev2086 wrote:</cite><blockquote>I will edit with exact numbers from Guk, but gems if you buy them from the broker will range from 1p-100p, depending (citrine/jaundice last time I looked were still expensive). So is the armor expensive? Not really. I leveled a toon through the SF questline, vendor selling armor as I got replacements/useless items. On average when I ran toons through that series, I made around 200p. Between buying experts, and then gems, you wont have enough for the armor. Oh wait! There is another xpack of quests to do for another 100-200p worth of vendored armor + quest rewards. Now go buy your gems, ask the 20-30 people on your server who have the recipe who wants to make it, offer then 30-40p for the combines, and you are now ready for anything. Prices:Black Marble: 2-30gEmerald: 33-60gCitrine: 70-80pJaundice: 80-90pDiamond: 80-90pLava Ruby: 80-90p</blockquote>With the previous game updates, getting enough shards for Ry'gorr wasn't a problem anymore; so dropping shard requirements for Ry'gorr is a jaw-dropper. Thurgadin armor.... who wasted their shards on the armor anyway? No one I've seen.THIS is the problem: the drop rate of jaundice and lava ruby gems.Oh, and this too: requiring separate tokens for Drunder armor.Prices on Bristlebane for polished gems:Emerald 22gBlack Marble 44gCitrine 55pDiamond 84p+Lava Ruby 108p+Jaundice 120p+I was going to include citrine up there, but it seems they've been dropping more than when I was hunting for a single one for a week. I'm surprised to see diamonds that high since I've got many in my bank for alts. They should be worth 30-50p.

Kruschev2086

10-05-2011, 01:35 PM

Progression is apparently to rush to 90. Then, get some plat, and find someone with the thurg recipes. Have them make you a full set. 5p/piece, 30p. Now, go do quests for a BP from the docks, do zones for plat to buy the gems, or kael zones for gems. Another 5p/combine, get rygorr. Since CM isn't an issue in any non-drunder, run them all you want. This kind of approach would not have flown in TSO or SF. Why do you think it will fly now? Honestly, why do you think now is the time to just hand over this stuff? You put in the recipes. Faction isn't a requirement. There is no gating mechanism at all with this change.When this goes live, I guess I will be making plat handily as I spam channels saying I am making the armor. Not that I really need it, but hey why not.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 01:37 PM

Lots of 'sky is falling' and sweeping generalisations in this thread concerning some needed changes. G.D/EW going to be a wasteland? They already are. There is nothing in either except for an ungodly amount of solo quests. This will not be changed. Once again, getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor to DO those zones is nonsense.I hope they will add other items to be purchasable with shards - a mount for 300 shards could be good. Rare mob jewelry for 250 shards is good. No thanks to allowing raid shards to transfer to group shards ( although I would really love this as I have several hundred spare raid shards :/ ) but instead allow a transfer the other way. Heroic shards to raid shards at a 10 -1 conversion rate, allowing people who have SLR purchased a weapon to buy red adorns for it at a rate of 100 heroic shards.Keeping the gem requirement is good.That person saying, oh they never drop. NONSENSE.They drop at an average rate of 3 per 2 instances of ISK for me when I solo it.

TigerLotus

10-05-2011, 01:39 PM

<cite>Kitalya@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>This is such a disappointing change. As others have mentioned, the Ry'Gorr armor should be something that's earned. It's going to have a negative effect on groups, a negative effect on the price of gems, and turn Great Divide and EW into a complete wasteland.</blockquote>I think the main mistake is, that SOE placed Rygor Gear at the beginning of the gear progression. You saythat Rygor Armor should be earned - and I agree with you. But if it NEEDS to be earned to be able to proceedin heroic content, it is a must have and becomes an obstacle for people who don't have much playtime andcan't proceed any further.I would prever a "Highend" Heroic Armorset that requires different shards from all heroic DoV instancesincluding Pools->KD->Drunder->... And it could only be completed by doing all those instances.Something like a Mythic Armor Timeline <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />This way people would be really rewarded at the end of heroic progression. And this armor could be the bestheroic armor in game. People who don't have the time or don't feel the need to get this Armor wouldn't beforced to get it.

Gninja

10-05-2011, 01:40 PM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>NM my rant about shards. I see you're not removing the gems trade in.But adding in separate "Tokens" for drunder gear? Why more and separate currency? Is the gear on the merchants worth locking players into the path of getting this separate currency?What is the purpose for the gear that drops from the mobs in these zones?</blockquote>No new token is being added for the Drunder armor. It hasn't changed from the way you would have gotten it before this patch. We made a couple changes to the drunder loot as well where as when you break down the armor drops wtihin drunder you now recieve a large amount more of the ore needed for the combines as well as making the same individual armor pieces drop from creatures within the drunder towers.So you should only need to use the ore/shards to create the drunder armor for the few pieces you might have been unlucky to get as drops.

Gungo

10-05-2011, 01:40 PM

<cite>Kruschev2086 wrote:</cite><blockquote>I am waiting for them to go back and make TSO and SF no longer require marks and shards. Just some plat and faction.</blockquote>You are trying to be funny but this is actually a good idea. who in thier right mind would spend time token grinding gear that will be outdated in a few days.

Lcneed

10-05-2011, 01:56 PM

So without shard, you don't need to buy DoV expansion to wear Ry'gorr armors right? Just need to get the tradable gems and a crafter to make them. Nice!

Onorem

10-05-2011, 01:58 PM

<cite>Gninja wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>NM my rant about shards. I see you're not removing the gems trade in.But adding in separate "Tokens" for drunder gear? Why more and separate currency? Is the gear on the merchants worth locking players into the path of getting this separate currency?What is the purpose for the gear that drops from the mobs in these zones?</blockquote>No new token is being added for the Drunder armor. It hasn't changed from the way you would have gotten it before this patch. We made a couple changes to the drunder loot as well where as when you break down the armor drops wtihin drunder you now recieve a large amount more of the ore needed for the combines as well as making the same individual armor pieces drop from creatures within the drunder towers.So you should only need to use the ore/shards to create the drunder armor for the few pieces you might have been unlucky to get as drops.</blockquote>You've addressed the Drunder stuff a couple times now. Could you comment on what the thought process is in removing shard cost from Ry'Gorr and Thurg armor? Is there a plan to introduce new things to spend shards on?

Gninja

10-05-2011, 02:04 PM

The Thurgadin, Rygorr, and Drunder armor sets are direct upgrades to each other. They should scale in difficulty to obtain and that difficulty was off. That was one of the reasons the Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. If its easier to obtain better armor somewhere else then why get that armor to begin with? With these changes the lower tier armors are a bit easier to obtain making the chase be more for the drunder armor sets rather than having to do the shard grind repeataed for each tier.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 02:06 PM

Lempo

10-05-2011, 02:07 PM

Onorem

10-05-2011, 02:07 PM

Lempo

10-05-2011, 02:09 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>Thank you.Now could you possibly look into removing or substantially lowering mark of manaar armor costs?And possibly adding a mount or other prestige housing items, temporary potions exp pots/AA pots etc to a central Primal Shard vendor please?</blockquote>If this is considered please make some higher tier items available for Pure Primal Shards as well, just like in previous expansions.

Valentina

10-05-2011, 02:16 PM

Seems like a good change. Thurgadin armor might actually get purchased occasionally, now that shards are not required. I'm fine with shards being more for adornments and special items. I'd also like to see better rare drops added to the heroic instances, to make them still attractive once the need for shard grinding has been removed.

serenader

10-05-2011, 02:17 PM

I just dont understand some of these changes being made, for most of us veterns the hard work in these zones has been done, shards farmed, and progressed through the zones to get betterIts a slap in the face, do these ideas come at a whim?It does not even require faction for alts to get the armor with a purchase of a token for faction, so the endless amount of shards we have aquired can be spent for out alts, and at 40 its reasonable, I spent around 80 each for mine plus gems and there was not a recipe book at the time, those changes I agree withWhat I think will happen if the Rygorr change goes in<ol><li>There will be a major decrease in wanting to run any of the lower heroic zones, I mean whats the point</li><li>Alot of people who progressed and work hard to get thier armor are going to be very aggitated</li><li>We have alot of shards to do what with exactly?</li><li>Over all interest in velious will go down, as a result people will get bored and look for games that require a little more challenge</li></ol><div>I been playing EQ 2 since launch, I came from EQ1, when the game first launched I was some what satisfied, there was no more corpse runs, but we had shards we had to recover, over the years the game is getting dumbed down so much I wonder why I some times play it anymore</div><div></div><div>Stick with your roots, it what made Everquest to start with so popular</div>

Laiina

10-05-2011, 02:24 PM

The problem is that the vendor only accepts yellow shards. As A raider, I have hundreds of blue ones, almost zero yellow ones. I end up running a few of the instances to get enough yellow to buy adorns for the 3-adorn armor items, but I am not about to run them over and over for useless loot to buy gear for alts.

Banditman

10-05-2011, 02:25 PM

<cite>serenader wrote:</cite><blockquote><div>I been playing EQ 2 since launch, I came from EQ1, when the game first launched I was some what satisfied, there was no more corpse runs, but we had shards we had to recover, over the years the game is getting dumbed down so much I wonder why I some times play it anymore</div><div></div><div>Stick with your roots, it what made Everquest to start with so popular</div></blockquote>So many people say that, but forget, or don't remember, that there just wasn't any competition at all then. There was absolutely NOTHING like Everquest available. UO was as close as you could get. What made EQ popular was it's position as a ground breaker.It took five years before anyone was able to bring a true competitor to market.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 02:26 PM

<cite>serenader wrote:</cite><blockquote>I just dont understand some of these changes being made, for most of us veterns the hard work in these zones has been done, shards farmed, and progressed through the zones to get betterI've been subbing since day 1 and I expect, as in any MMO that towards the end of an expansion, things will become easier. Its a slap in the face, do these ideas come at a whim?It's not a whim, its obviously based on the fact that some of the armor was ot used and possibly player feedback? Possibly at the cancel subscription stage?It does not even require faction for alts to get the armor with a purchase of a token for faction, so the endless amount of shards we have aquired can be spent for out alts, and at 40 its reasonable, I spent around 80 each for mine plus gems and there was not a recipe book at the time, those changes I agree withWhat I think will happen if the Rygorr change goes in<ol><li>There will be a major decrease in wanting to run any of the lower heroic zones, I mean whats the point</li><li>Alot of people who progressed and work hard to get thier armor are going to be very aggitated</li><li>We have alot of shards to do what with exactly?</li><li>Over all interest in velious will go down, as a result people will get bored and look for games that require a little more challenge</li></ol><div>1. With the right incentive such as prestige items peopel will still want to. But even if they don;t I don;t see it as a problem, as there is only so much time in a day for semi casual people to play anyway. Pick and choose.</div><div>2. People expect it, its part of any game.</div><div>3. See !, hopefully prestige items.</div><div>4. Interest in velious will more likely go up as more people will do drunder, EoW and be able to pug raid etc as well, rather than soloing, and harveting while praying someone will let their weak little alt join a pools group.</div><div></div><div>I been playing EQ 2 since launch, I came from EQ1, when the game first launched I was some what satisfied, there was no more corpse runs, but we had shards we had to recover, over the years the game is getting dumbed down so much I wonder why I some times play it anymore</div><div></div><div>Stick with your roots, it what made Everquest to start with so popular</div></blockquote>

Loxus

10-05-2011, 02:36 PM

I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.

feldon30

10-05-2011, 02:40 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor to DO those zones is nonsense.</blockquote>I think you meant to say:getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor is the foundation of all MMOs including EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Kizee

10-05-2011, 02:43 PM

<cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>IMO getting shards shouldn't be THE reason you run zones. You should be running zones to get a certain piece of gear out of that zone.The shards were added to suppliment people walking away from zones with nothing and somehow elvolved into the main reason for running them.

Mathrim

10-05-2011, 02:43 PM

A couple of things I would like to point out and ask since a Dev is responding and everyone else is hitting on it.Are the dev's comfortable with the drop rate % on rare gems and the average market price of the rare gems being 70 to 150pp currently? Are they comfortable with the fact that Kael contested is fixing to become farm city and that the prices of gems are going to skyrocket?I have no problem believing that we will go back to 300 to 500 pp gem costs for the rares if this happens. Yes, I know more people will be farming Kael which means more gems incoming, but being able to gear up the thousands of level 90 alts with just a gem purchase will burn through that quickly in my opinion.

Neskonlith

10-05-2011, 02:47 PM

If maintaining value in velium shards is a concern, how about adding in recipe to convert shards into Drunder ore?ie: 5 shards = 1 ore

Mathrim

10-05-2011, 02:50 PM

<cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)</blockquote>What does everyone think about adding a Black Market Vendor back into game? We had it with TSO and SF. While the Thurgadin and Rygorr merchants have a couple of items on them that can be purchased for 25 shards, it is nothing compared to TSO/SF black market vendor.If the Devs are really going to remove the shard requirement, and the only use for them will be adornments, then the rate they pile up is going to be insane. Why not consider putting the common Fabled drops up on a black market merchant and leave the new rare named mob loots in the instance as a bonus.This will give us something to spend shards on for our alts or for that drop we just don't have any luck of getting. My only concern is that the shard cost needs to be reasonable. I would say 40 to 70 shards per item. Anything over 100 and you are just getting into the territory of I would rather farm the platinum and buy it than grind zones for weeks to earn shards.

Kizee

10-05-2011, 02:50 PM

<cite>Mathrim@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have no problem believing that we will go back to 300 to 500 pp gem costs for the rares if this happens.</blockquote>The cost will cap way before then. It will get to the point where it will be cheaper buying raid equip in auction.

thewarriorpoet

10-05-2011, 02:53 PM

Amanathia

10-05-2011, 02:54 PM

Leave shards at 20 per piece it's fine.Leave increased ore creation rate for drunder armor in place.Make drunder armor require the ry'gorr piece+ore+10 shards.Problem solved, reasonable risk vs. reward for all, and progression, yay... No one was complaining about the shards on the Ry'gorr stuff once it was made 20 everyone was pretty happy about that, it's just about perfect.

Onorem

10-05-2011, 02:57 PM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>IMO getting shards shouldn't be THE reason you run zones. You should be running zones to get a certain piece of gear out of that zone.The shards were added to suppliment people walking away from zones with nothing and somehow elvolved into the main reason for running them.</blockquote>That might make sense if there were worthwhile drops from the easier zones. Chest and ranged items are about the only things I can say I know where to farm for. Nothing else I can think of is interesting enough for me to even pay attention to where it drops. (Strike that...I know where to go for a charm also I suppose) Why farm easy zones for bad gear when you can buy your way past them and farm harder zones for better gear?

Brytak

10-05-2011, 03:11 PM

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td width="100%"><img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/styles/EQ2/eq2_default/images/common/icon_minipost.gif" border="0" width="12" height="9" /> 10/05/2011 10:26:30 Subject: Re:Rygorr armor sets no longer require velium shards, so what's the point of making them? </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><hr /></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><cite>serenader wrote:</cite><blockquote>I just dont understand some of these changes being made, for most of us veterns the hard work in these zones has been done, shards farmed, and progressed through the zones to get betterI've been subbing since day 1 and I expect, as in any MMO that towards the end of an expansion, things will become easier. Things become easier because the gear progresses, people level and the strategies become known not because the devs decide in the middle of the night to give everyone gear.Its a slap in the face, do these ideas come at a whim?It's not a whim, its obviously based on the fact that some of the armor was ot used and possibly player feedback? Possibly at the cancel subscription stage?Its still a slap in the face. Thurg armor is still useless, it just costs less shards which are also going to be useless. Why buy it other than appearance or maybe kicks?It does not even require faction for alts to get the armor with a purchase of a token for faction, so the endless amount of shards we have aquired can be spent for out alts, and at 40 its reasonable, I spent around 80 each for mine plus gems and there was not a recipe book at the time, those changes I agree withWhat I think will happen if the Rygorr change goes in<ol><li>There will be a major decrease in wanting to run any of the lower heroic zones, I mean whats the point </li><li>Alot of people who progressed and work hard to get thier armor are going to be very aggitated </li><li>We have alot of shards to do what with exactly? </li><li>Over all interest in velious will go down, as a result people will get bored and look for games that require a little more challenge</li></ol><div>1. With the right incentive such as prestige items peopel will still want to. But even if they don;t I don;t see it as a problem, as there is only so much time in a day for semi casual people to play anyway. Pick and choose.</div><div>2. People expect it, its part of any game.</div><div>I certainly dont't expect it, and it is not part of any game. This is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. it is not fun to be entirely uncertain about the core progression in the game. I generally would expect to log into the same game logged out of the previous day. Now, I have no idea what will be completely borked. I suppose at least I know to look at all my gear, AA, and spells every day so I can make sure they still do what they did yesterday. </div><div>Now knowing what I should work on to progress is going to involve looking at the Patch notes in detail. </div><div></div><div>3. See !, hopefully prestige items.</div><div> Oh great, Hope....and Change..... I've heard that before somewhere...</div><div></div><div>I can do low level content for a while in the hopes it wont change every patch before I have a chance to actually play it.</div><div></div><div>4. Interest in velious will more likely go up as more people will do drunder, EoW and be able to pug raid etc as well, rather than soloing, and harveting while praying someone will let their weak little alt join a pools group.</div><div>Interest is going to go out the cancel account window. Why don't we just allow /claim HM x4 gear? Then everyone can get right to Raiding when the new features, er..."Expansion" comes out.</div><div></div><div>Weak alts won't be running pools because, noone will be running pools. Weak alts will be lfg praying someone will let them join drunder. Same game different name. People with no friends or guild are stuck soloing, or boxing.</div><div></div><div><div>I been playing EQ 2 since launch, I came from EQ1, when the game first launched I was some what satisfied, there was no more corpse runs, but we had shards we had to recover, over the years the game is getting dumbed down so much I wonder why I some times play it anymore</div><div></div><div>Stick with your roots, it what made Everquest to start with so popular</div></div> </blockquote></td></tr></tbody></table>

ObsidianNightmare

10-05-2011, 03:13 PM

<cite>Wirewhisker@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite>On AB, the black marble and the emerald re sub-plat, the citrine and the diamond range from 40-80, and the jaundice gem and lava ruby are around 100 plat.Predictions:<ol><li>PQ's will die, followed by;</li><li>The price of gems will skyrocket, followed by;</li><li>Kael contested will be solidly camped, 24/7. Plat farmers especially will be packed in there.</li></ol><cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>Thank you Gninja for the explanation. I appreciate it and makes sense but,these two posts above, I feel, sum up the logical path of what is going to happen as a result of this change. It's clearly going to negatively impact players in these ways.As others have stated it's not the shards.. its the progression and difficulty of zones and the actual NEED for the gear in those zones. Even the combination of shards & gems was cumbersome Others have stated that in SF, save for the amount of Marks needed, the system made sense. Turning in crappy gear for the cost of the old gear also made sense, this started popping up in TSO. So what became of the thougth process going into DoV? From KoS - SF at least there was a logical progression of zone difficulty, some decent and unique itemization that attracted people to those zones. The farming for currency was expected. And as stated by feldon, this is a theme in all MMO's. What is going on with this in DoV?Think back on previous expacs, there always was and should always be a challenging zone that does eventually be come easier to the general population through gear obtained and eventual nerfs because something new is on the horizon. But what is new isn't dropping things spectacular enough to draw people to the content, but the changes being made are going to bastardize the preceeding content. This needs to be resolved.I think Gninja is on the right track tho

Anklesteiner

10-05-2011, 03:20 PM

Hate to break it to everyone, but this is just a ploy to get people to use the create your own dungeon feature that will launch in just 5 weeks with Age of Discovery. Because, really think about this one – the EQ2 development team has just now made ALL the Great Divide instances completely worthless. The entire reason why people bothered with them was for the white velium shards for armor. But now, with both Thurgadin and Ry’Gorr armor requiring no shards, what is the point in running any of those zones? Then, consider that both the Kael and Drunder instances are still challenging, and even with Ry’Gorr armor unless you go in there with people who know what they are doing, you’re not going to be able to do those zones. So, you have instances that are now completely worthless to run, and instances that are still too hard for the casual player – what exactly are you suppose to do? Use the create a dungeon feature. I’ve been dealing with Sony Online Entertainment for over 12 years now. I know exactly how they think, and I know the real reason behind everything they do. If they destroy the content of one thing, it’s because they want people to use the content of something else, in this case they want people to use the create a dungeon featuring launching with Age of Discovery in 5 weeks.inb4 a mod deletes this post because it's true.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 03:24 PM

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 03:25 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>Hate to break it to everyone, but this is just a ploy to get people to use the create your own dungeon feature that will launch in just 5 weeks with Age of Discovery. Because, really think about this one – the EQ2 development team has just now made ALL the Great Divide instances completely worthless. The entire reason why people bothered with them was for the white velium shards for armor. But now, with both Thurgadin and Ry’Gorr armor requiring no shards, what is the point in running any of those zones? Then, consider that both the Kael and Drunder instances are still challenging, and even with Ry’Gorr armor unless you go in there with people who know what they are doing, you’re not going to be able to do those zones. So, you have instances that are now completely worthless to run, and instances that are still too hard for the casual player – what exactly are you suppose to do? Use the create a dungeon feature. I’ve been dealing with Sony Online Entertainment for over 12 years now. I know exactly how they think, and I know the real reason behind everything they do. If they destroy the content of one thing, it’s because they want people to use the content of something else, in this case they want people to use the create a dungeon featuring launching with Age of Discovery in 5 weeks.This isn't a new thing - it is what all entertainment companies do when they bring in new themes, nothing sinister about it.inb4 a mod deletes this post because it's true. </blockquote>

Kizee

10-05-2011, 03:26 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>IMO getting shards shouldn't be THE reason you run zones. You should be running zones to get a certain piece of gear out of that zone.The shards were added to suppliment people walking away from zones with nothing and somehow elvolved into the main reason for running them.</blockquote>That might make sense if there were worthwhile drops from the easier zones. Chest and ranged items are about the only things I can say I know where to farm for. Nothing else I can think of is interesting enough for me to even pay attention to where it drops. (Strike that...I know where to go for a charm also I suppose) Why farm easy zones for bad gear when you can buy your way past them and farm harder zones for better gear?</blockquote>Oh, I know. That is the way it was way back when....before we had the itemization mess of DoV where nothing makes sense.

Alenna

10-05-2011, 03:27 PM

<cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>The bolded part why have the recipies drop now if you are going to take away the one thing that made going to a tradeskiller desirable. Not a good move here. change it back

Loxus

10-05-2011, 03:29 PM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>IMO getting shards shouldn't be THE reason you run zones. You should be running zones to get a certain piece of gear out of that zone.The shards were added to suppliment people walking away from zones with nothing and somehow elvolved into the main reason for running them.</blockquote>I agree, it shouldn't be, but their lack of attention to detail on the itemization at all levels is what it turned it into. And to think, we have 6 more months of this... /headshot

Titigabe

10-05-2011, 03:30 PM

<cite>Amanathia wrote:</cite><blockquote>Leave shards at 20 per piece it's fine.Leave increased ore creation rate for drunder armor in place.Make drunder armor require the ry'gorr piece+ore+10 shards.Problem solved, reasonable risk vs. reward for all, and progression, yay... No one was complaining about the shards on the Ry'gorr stuff once it was made 20 everyone was pretty happy about that, it's just about perfect.</blockquote>I can't agree more with you. This is exactly what I think about this all!I hate when players can skip the normal progression. If content can be skipped, why to create it?20 shards is a good amount, not too much, not too few, and it should stay as it is. This model should also be applied to SF Manaar Marks armors.

Kizee

10-05-2011, 03:30 PM

<cite>Alenna@Guk wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Loxus@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I would re-think the idea of removing shards from Ry'gor armor as it throws off too many items.One: What is the purpose of earning shards now? Other then adorns, which your choices are limited anyway depending on class due to the continued itemization SNAFU. (Priest casting speed anyone? Fighter MA anyone?)Two: It totally removes Tradeskillers from needing to faction up to buy the books other than gem refinement. Furthermore completely cuts them out of the equation all together for making armor. One of their strongest selling points was TS'ers could make the armor at a reduced shard cost then what was merchant sold. I'm completely baffled as to why this change is needed in the face of completely trivializing the need to farm shards (READ: run zones) and screw over Tradeskillers. It makes zero sense and I would love to hear the logic on it. Trust me, you're itemization fixes weren't that good to keep us in the current zones, the only reason we're there is because the need for shards. You take that away, you take away any reason to run anything in DOV.</blockquote>The bolded part why have the recipies drop now if you are going to take away the one thing that made going to a tradeskiller desirable. Not a good move here. change it back</blockquote>Leave the shard cost on the vendor and let the crafters make it for no shard cost.

Kizee

10-05-2011, 03:34 PM

<cite>Titigabe wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Amanathia wrote:</cite><blockquote>Leave shards at 20 per piece it's fine.Leave increased ore creation rate for drunder armor in place.Make drunder armor require the ry'gorr piece+ore+10 shards.Problem solved, reasonable risk vs. reward for all, and progression, yay... No one was complaining about the shards on the Ry'gorr stuff once it was made 20 everyone was pretty happy about that, it's just about perfect.</blockquote>I can't agree more with you. This is exactly what I think about this all!I hate when players can skip the normal progression. If content can be skipped, why to create it?20 shards is a good amount, not too much, not too few, and it should stay as it is. This model should also be applied to SF Manaar Marks armors.</blockquote>Progression is fine..... FORCED progression is not.If I can make do with less, why should I take a step back before I can go forward again.

Gungo

10-05-2011, 03:39 PM

<cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor to DO those zones is nonsense.</blockquote>I think you meant to say:getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor is the foundation of all MMOs including EverQuest and EverQuest II.</blockquote>Not really shards in eq2 were first introduced to allow players doing zones to buy items that had horrible drop rates on. It turned into a shard grind.This is idea going forward is 10000x better. Now you grind faction fo ryour first set of gear. Then you go into a zone to collect your upgrade. If you have horrible drop rates and get a bunch of items no one needs like fighter items you brake down those items and use those components to make the item you need and just had bad drop rates on.This does make progression faster but it seems in DOV players are behind on the progression curve.

Neskonlith

10-05-2011, 03:50 PM

<cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>This does make progression faster but it seems in DOV players are behind on the progression curve.</blockquote>Agreed. More players should be running KD contested and getting excited about Drunder rather than being content with going no further than the same handful of release zones.Also, with more zones and content on the way, Ry'Gorr really shouldn't be viewed as the end of the line for heroic players, it's actually still a beginner's set when you consider the rest of DoV and the upcoming releases.<img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />

Lcneed

10-05-2011, 04:00 PM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote>Leave the shard cost on the vendor and let the crafters make it for no shard cost.</blockquote>That actually sounds pretty good. If you are going to remove the shard cost, why not just throw the tradeskillers a bone? If someone wants the armors without shard, go look for a tradeskiller!

Onorem

10-05-2011, 04:01 PM

<cite>Neskonlith wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>This does make progression faster but it seems in DOV players are behind on the progression curve.</blockquote>Agreed. More players should be running KD contested and getting excited about Drunder rather than being content with going no further than the same handful of release zones.Also, with more zones and content on the way, Ry'Gorr really shouldn't be viewed as the end of the line for heroic players, it's actually still a beginner's set when you consider the rest of DoV and the upcoming releases.<img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /></blockquote>What progression curve? Hit 90. Buy Ry'Gorr. Start in Drunder. One time through the other zones for AA I guess as needed.Until the rest of DoV and the upcoming releases are actually here, they aren't worth talking about. Ry'Gorr isn't a beginner's set. It's the second best set available for heroic players. Looking at how an entire expansion destroyed gear the way DoV did to SF, I really hope that groups of instances released periodically won't do that to the previous content now.

Loxus

10-05-2011, 04:04 PM

It still cracks me up as to how we got to this place. We've gone from people grouping together to run zones to get the expansion's best loot and armor drops to people doing nothing more than hamster-wheeling faction and shard grinds.What ever happened to making the best loot drop - you know - in the actual zones?

Onorem

10-05-2011, 04:24 PM

<cite>Gninja wrote:</cite><blockquote>The Thurgadin, Rygorr, and Drunder armor sets are direct upgrades to each other. They should scale in difficulty to obtain and that difficulty was off. That was one of the reasons the Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. If its easier to obtain better armor somewhere else then why get that armor to begin with? With these changes the lower tier armors are a bit easier to obtain making the chase be more for the drunder armor sets rather than having to do the shard grind repeataed for each tier.</blockquote>I know I've already quoted and responded to this once, but I have new thoughts.Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. OK...so lower and/or remove shard cost from Thurg armor. Maybe have the Ry'Gorr merchant buy Thurg armor for half the plat and shard cost in trade when buying new gear. Don't require it for new gear...but make it an option to trade back for some benefit. Was Ry'Gorr also rarely purchased? (I assume that you do take tradeskillers creating the items into account.)I think most of my 90 alts have at least PQ gear by now... (other than a few SG items because SG is horrible and a waste of time) ...but this change will pretty much kill even RW for any new alts coming up. I might hop in for a few gem runs in Kael, but Tower and Rime are now worthless wasted zones. If I don't have a guildmate that needs help with a quest update, there's no reason at all to go back.You are correct that this change reduces the need for a shard grind. Unfortunately, this game has become focused on shard grind...If shards are only good for adornments, then adornments need a lot of attention to make them interesting enough to run otherwise worthless content for.

Ahlana

10-05-2011, 04:29 PM

Suggested change to this Lower Thurg Armor to 15 Shards bought, 10 Crafted and the leave Rygorr as is but increase gem drop rates

lollipop

10-05-2011, 04:31 PM

Please increase the cost of the gear min 100-300p per.

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 04:33 PM

There is no problem with gem drops.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 04:37 PM

<cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>Not really shards in eq2 were first introduced to allow players doing zones to buy items that had horrible drop rates on. It turned into a shard grind.This is idea going forward is 10000x better. Now you grind faction fo ryour first set of gear. Then you go into a zone to collect your upgrade. If you have horrible drop rates and get a bunch of items no one needs like fighter items you brake down those items and use those components to make the item you need and just had bad drop rates on.This does make progression faster but it seems in DOV players are behind on the progression curve.</blockquote>If this is going to be applied to raid gear as well then yes if not not itis not 10000x better it is a million times worse.I have not saw any official word that this drunder forge is going to be the new way, but if it is not going to reward one playstyle more than another then yeah it might be worth a run for a bit.

Ahlana

10-05-2011, 04:43 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>There is no problem with gem drops. </blockquote> There is less of a problem getting shards then there is getting gems.

Talathion

10-05-2011, 04:47 PM

Good Change, IMO.

Prrasha

10-05-2011, 04:54 PM

<cite>lollipop wrote:</cite><blockquote>Please increase the cost of the gear min 100-300p per.</blockquote>That's less intelligent than removing shards in the first place, you're just exchanging a daily shard grind (current content) for a twice-weekly Protector's Realm plat grind (ancient content).Or you're putting all the illegal plat-sellers back in business, as though gifting wasn't doing that already.

Kade

10-05-2011, 05:10 PM

I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle

Cratoh

10-05-2011, 05:14 PM

<cite>Kade@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote> I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle</blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 05:14 PM

<cite>Talathion@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>Good Change, IMO.</blockquote>You are leaving on Dec 20th anyway aren't you? Don't see why you care either way if that's the case.It is a horrible change.Player -> Hail Gear Dude!Gear Dude -> Got good lootz here do you want some.Player -> YES!Gear Dude -> Great! Take a look at my warez.(Merchant window opens)Player clicks on items they want and they appear in inventory. (Why not just make them attune and equip at that point, sve the effort)Gear Dude -> Glad to have been of service. Come back when you want some more easy lootz.Yeah what a great change this is.

Anklesteiner

10-05-2011, 05:15 PM

I also hope people fully realize that the EQ2 developers don't care about anything we have to say. This thread is 95% negative feedback, with virtually everyone detailing how this is an unwanted change. Despite this, the EQ2 development team will still impliment the changes, because they will continue to do whatever they want despite the ciriticism of the subscriber base - you know the people that pay monthly fees to play the game that they work on, providing them with a job.

Wirewhisker

10-05-2011, 05:17 PM

<cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Mathrim@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have no problem believing that we will go back to 300 to 500 pp gem costs for the rares if this happens.</blockquote>The cost will cap way before then. It will get to the point where it will be cheaper buying raid equip in auction.</blockquote>Which will have the secondary effect of causing SLR's in Auction to inflate dramatically.

Amanathia

10-05-2011, 05:19 PM

<cite>Ahlana wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>There is no problem with gem drops. </blockquote> There is less of a problem getting shards then there is getting gems.</blockquote>I don't think getting the gems is a problem. Get a group and run Kael a couple times a week==voila, there's your set.If you get unlucky and get say, 4 diamonds and 0 lava rubies, no big deal, you can sell a couple diamonds and buy the lava ruby, since this stuff is brokerable it's no big deal if drops are streaky. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> The gems priced at 100pp or so is fair imho, the gear is worth that. If you don't wanna run Kael at all you can buy them with money you can get from simply running around mining, selling collectibles, or however...we aren't talkin 'bout thousands of plat here, we're talking about ~300pp if you don't want to try to get the gems yourself, and nothing if you do. I see tons and tons of groups forming for Kael zones daily, and people make ry'gorr and buy gems at a healthy rate on Crushbone. Risk vs. reward on this seems great, everyone is doing it yet the gems, well, some of them remain priced fairly high. This to me means that the system for this armor is healthy, in a good state.

Valentina

10-05-2011, 05:23 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>I also hope people fully realize that the EQ2 developers don't care about anything we have to say. This thread is 95% negative feedback, with virtually everyone detailing how this is an unwanted change. Despite this, the EQ2 development team will still impliment the changes, because they will continue to do whatever they want despite the ciriticism of the subscriber base - you know the people that pay monthly fees to play the game that they work on, providing them with a job.</blockquote>30ish people on a message board post (including some of the usual vocal posters) does not = a subscriber base. I don't agree with all of SOE's decisions, and I think their QA process and scheduling is abysmal, but I also think kowtowing to the tiny subset of the game who post in threads like this is a recipe for disaster.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 05:25 PM

Gungo

10-05-2011, 05:31 PM

<cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>Not really shards in eq2 were first introduced to allow players doing zones to buy items that had horrible drop rates on. It turned into a shard grind.This is idea going forward is 10000x better. Now you grind faction fo ryour first set of gear. Then you go into a zone to collect your upgrade. If you have horrible drop rates and get a bunch of items no one needs like fighter items you brake down those items and use those components to make the item you need and just had bad drop rates on.This does make progression faster but it seems in DOV players are behind on the progression curve.</blockquote>If this is going to be applied to raid gear as well then yes if not not itis not 10000x better it is a million times worse.I have not saw any official word that this drunder forge is going to be the new way, but if it is not going to reward one playstyle more than another then yeah it might be worth a run for a bit.</blockquote>You would have a point if the heroic progression path past raid progression at some point. With the nerfing of EOW EM gear the best obtainable CURRENT heroic (non HM) gear is still worse then the easiest OLDEST raid gear.Also you would have had a point if raid GEAR was a shard grind, but it is not.

Alenna

10-05-2011, 05:39 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kade@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote> I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle</blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote>Did you miss where they said they were saying the shard cost was not prohibitive now. If they had started with the 25/20 shards from the beginning maybe Kade's guild would have been further and the devs made a smart move when they made that change. But this change which does not take into consideration that the Tradeskillers who have the recipies for the Ry'gor armour who will be negatively effected by this is the stupidest move they made. NO to this unneccessary change.

Moxicar

10-05-2011, 05:50 PM

Tyvvvvm for changing this!

Onorem

10-05-2011, 05:57 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kade@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote> I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle</blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote>So what if new content is inbound? Old content could be relevent if they wanted it to be...but instead they're going to make everything pre-drunder worthless because new content is inbound? Not everyone is at endgame. Why destroy their potential progression? Repeating content is boring. Limiting the instances that are worthwhile to run makes boring happen sooner.

Gungo

10-05-2011, 06:02 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kade@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote> I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle</blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote>So what if new content is inbound? Old content could be relevent if they wanted it to be...but instead they're going to make everything pre-drunder worthless because new content is inbound? Not everyone is at endgame. Why destroy their potential progression? Repeating content is boring. Limiting the instances that are worthwhile to run makes boring happen sooner.</blockquote>You act as though all those older zones dont have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. They just added a bunch of rare named. They just increased the drop rates on loot. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements. They just removed ALL the crit mit requirements PRE DRUNDER. Now instead of repeating the same 3-6 instances you can actually get gear to do 3-9 instances.

Anklesteiner

10-05-2011, 06:04 PM

<cite>Valentina@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>I also hope people fully realize that the EQ2 developers don't care about anything we have to say. This thread is 95% negative feedback, with virtually everyone detailing how this is an unwanted change. Despite this, the EQ2 development team will still impliment the changes, because they will continue to do whatever they want despite the ciriticism of the subscriber base - you know the people that pay monthly fees to play the game that they work on, providing them with a job.</blockquote>30ish people on a message board post (including some of the usual vocal posters) does not = a subscriber base. I don't agree with all of SOE's decisions, and I think their QA process and scheduling is abysmal, but I also think kowtowing to the tiny subset of the game who post in threads like this is a recipe for disaster.</blockquote>Is that a fact? Because from what I can tell - and this is just me really paying attention - the feedback of these changes currently being discussed on every EQ2 related forum out there on the internet, as well as the top EQ2 raiding guilds message boards I have visted that have a thread on this subject, as well as the talk on the test server in the chat channels, as well as the talk in the chat channels on Crushbone, as well as the 50+ people so far I have discussed these changes with on Vent have been nothing but negative. There are a few positive comments, but 95% of the feedback regarding this change, anywhere you go has been negative. Nobody wants this change.Perhaps you should rethink your position on this, and do a little bit more research.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 06:05 PM

<cite>Moxicar wrote:</cite><blockquote>Tyvvvvm for changing this!</blockquote>Wouldn't you be more happy with a chrono-mentor and playing in the Wailing Caves?

acctlc

10-05-2011, 06:06 PM

This and more is needed for folks trying to break into raiding in a guild that is already into HM. Full set of Rygorr armor at minimum is required to get drunder armor and most guilds are coming to the grim reality that they can't touch raiders in lower tier armor sets. Their just isn't the time to backtrack and gear. If Drunderx4 EM dropped 2 armor pieces instead of 1 it wouldn't be such a big thing but it doesn't currently.

Rainmare

10-05-2011, 06:07 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Zylara wrote:</cite><blockquote>@ Cratoh you say this is a great change as you have around 20 lvl 90's and half the fun is your alts in this game, my question is wheres the fun in having your armour just handed to you? You are running those zones for fun anyways so hows it actually hurt you to have those shards, they will still drop etc so instead of using your shards for your armour and adorns your gonna have a crapload of shards going to waste instead!!Shards I can use for adorns. I would be far more inclined to use some of those alts doing those same zones but going for rare drops from rare mobs, while wearing decent armor.2 thumbs down, this is taking away AGAIN the fact that alot of us worked our cute little behinds off to get our armour and now anyone can come along and just get it easily BAH this game is getting so dumbed down my dog could play it soon,instead of facerolling now playing our toons we can have paw petting keyboard ftwIt's been a very simple game ever since they introduced chests dropping rares, and the introduction of legendary tier and common fabled drops, instances dropping fabled, instanced raid zones - adding a timesink in the form of shards does not make for interesting or challenging gameplay. Repeating content over and over to get tokens to buy gear is not a challenge at all and therefore this is my reasoning for the 2 thumbs UP <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></blockquote></blockquote>See I'm your opposite Cratoh. the only thing that keeps me wanting to play is my alts needing those shards for gear. they they need to gear up and I need to run the instances to get the shards to do so.you get what? 3 shards an instance? and adornment is what? 5 shards? I bet I could get 2 adorns worth of shards a day, easy. I bet I could get all the adornments I need for a toon in a month. so I guess maybe if we all have 20 alts...yeah that might be enough of a time sink. but for anyone with 4 or less...they'll be gone in a few months. there simply won't be any carrot left to dangle.

Onorem

10-05-2011, 06:14 PM

<cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kade@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote> I consider myself a pretty casual player, as are - generally - the rest of my guild. We're probably the sort of people they're targetting with these changes... we have been adventuring a lot in TOFS and the Velks zones, and have slowly been rising through that content. They're mostly a breeze for us now, and we're just starting to delve in to the Fortess Spire and have explored parts of contested Kael if that gives you an idea as to where we're at. I don't think the shard costs on the armor is prohibitive. Lowering them recently was a good call but they don't need to be lowered any further. Many of my guild have been experiencing the benefits of that change and like I said we're nearly to a point where we're able to move further into the content. We're proud of what we've accomplished along the way. The feedback I hear is not that the shards are a problem, but rather that the gems can be very expensive (and we can't earn them as drops yet, although we got one, once, while exploring Kael contested). I can't speak to the Drunder issues, I've never set foot there (though I hope to soon). But one thing I'd like the devs to consider: some changes have already been made to address the progression issues, and those changes are just now starting to bear fruit as us casual folks are able to get full (or nearly full) sets of Ry'gorr and are on the cusp of moving forward. My suggestion is to keep the shard cost in place... maybe lower it by 5 per piece at most... but either increase the drop rate on the gems slightly (NOT A LOT) or make it so that the final foes in some of the Great Divide instanced dungeons drop the gems as well (i.e. the Librarian, Cara, Lord Bob, etc.). Someone who gets a gem will be motivated to use it! Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle</blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote>So what if new content is inbound? Old content could be relevent if they wanted it to be...but instead they're going to make everything pre-drunder worthless because new content is inbound? Not everyone is at endgame. Why destroy their potential progression? Repeating content is boring. Limiting the instances that are worthwhile to run makes boring happen sooner.</blockquote>You act as though all those older zones dont have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. They just added a bunch of rare named. They just increased the drop rates on loot. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements. They just removed ALL the crit mit requirements PRE DRUNDER. Now instead of repeating the same 3-6 instances you can actually get gear to do 3-9 instances.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with crit. PQ drops and/or faction merchants work for weapons. I think I've seen a bad blade or two in ascent, but definitely never targeted any weapon that wasn't a bow from anything in the tower or rime zones.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 06:14 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Valentina@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>I also hope people fully realize that the EQ2 developers don't care about anything we have to say. This thread is 95% negative feedback, with virtually everyone detailing how this is an unwanted change. Despite this, the EQ2 development team will still impliment the changes, because they will continue to do whatever they want despite the ciriticism of the subscriber base - you know the people that pay monthly fees to play the game that they work on, providing them with a job.</blockquote>30ish people on a message board post (including some of the usual vocal posters) does not = a subscriber base. I don't agree with all of SOE's decisions, and I think their QA process and scheduling is abysmal, but I also think kowtowing to the tiny subset of the game who post in threads like this is a recipe for disaster.</blockquote> Is that a fact? Because from what I can tell - and this is just me really paying attention - the feedback of these changes currently being discussed on every EQ2 related forum out there on the internet, as well as the top EQ2 raiding guilds message boards I have visted that have a thread on this subject, as well as the talk on the test server in the chat channels, as well as the talk in the chat channels on Crushbone, as well as the 50+ people so far I have discussed these changes with on Vent have been nothing but negative. There are a few positive comments, but 95% of the feedback regarding this change, anywhere you go has been negative. Nobody wants this change. Perhaps you should rethink your position on this, and do a little bit more research.</blockquote>You have to love that in all the threads about this there is a predominant vocal outcry against it vs a small # of people saying it is good.Then they proceed to say that "kowtowing to a tiny subset" is a recipe for disaster, yet and even tinier subset is what they need to listen to as a resipe for success.Can you not see they are not interested in fact? They have no interest in doing research they are licking their chops ready to hail the NPC and get loot for nothing.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 06:17 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>You act as though all those older zones dont have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. They just added a bunch of rare named. They just increased the drop rates on loot. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements. They just removed ALL the crit mit requirements PRE DRUNDER. Now instead of repeating the same 3-6 instances you can actually get gear to do 3-9 instances.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with crit. PQ drops and/or faction merchants work for weapons. I think I've seen a bad blade or two in ascent, but definitely never targeted any weapon that wasn't a bow from anything in the tower or rime zones.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.

Onorem

10-05-2011, 06:26 PM

<cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>You act as though all those older zones dont have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. They just added a bunch of rare named. They just increased the drop rates on loot. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements. They just removed ALL the crit mit requirements PRE DRUNDER. Now instead of repeating the same 3-6 instances you can actually get gear to do 3-9 instances.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with crit. PQ drops and/or faction merchants work for weapons. I think I've seen a bad blade or two in ascent, but definitely never targeted any weapon that wasn't a bow from anything in the tower or rime zones.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.</blockquote>The statement was that you NEED "jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements."I do know the difference. Neither jewelry nor weapons have any crit mit benefit. My neck has crit chance. No other piece of jewelry does. What jewelry are you using to bump up your crit chance? There aren't any interesting weapons to farm for in tower or rime, and I'm not likely to farm tower or rime for a new neck for long...

Kade

10-05-2011, 06:30 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote> I would agree with you if we weren't finally making some progress. What I'm suggesting is that the changes they made a month or two back (lowering the shard costs and tweaking the difficulties in some of the instances) have already had a huge impact for us. Rather than being stuck doing the first couple of floors of TOFS and Pools, we've been able to progress at a pretty reasonable pace for a casual guild like ours since that point. I don't mind having to work through more old content to be able to reach the "new content" you mention. People who are getting bored with the current content and have begun to master it should be the first to explore that new content. Being casual players we don't expect to be on the vanguard! There's still lots of existing content we have yet to explore, and look forward to delving into - I can't speak for my entire guild but personally I don't need to rush through content as long as I feel I'm making consistant progress like I am now. It's when we were stalled (i.e. late spring/early summer) that it was getting frustrating. Someone else mentioned that if our guild does instances a few times a week, etc. that this progression - since the recent changes - is reasonable, and I honestly agree. That's exactly the type of guild we are. We do instances on weekends mostly, and help lower levels and do random questy bits during the week. Many do the solo shard every day or every other day unless they just can't stand that instance anymore. <winks> So I don't think that our current progress is profoundly broken (again, a little tweaking on the gems would be nice, but otherwise it seems about right). YMMV of course, some guilds may still be stuck and getting frustrated. I'm simply sharing my experience, and hopefully pointing out something the devs might not yet have considered (that their earlier changes are just now starting to bear fruit). Respectfully, -Kade Goldha, Guild Leader of Restoration on Antonia Bayle

Skeez1e

10-05-2011, 06:47 PM

I think its a good move. There are dozens of styles of play but one thing is a constant - people play this game to have fun. The removal of the shard requirement for armor isn't taking away from anyone's fun - it actually may enhance the opportunity for many. People are mentoring down and running the Silent City instances for shards - where is the fun in that? Things like that just make the grind repetitive and boring.The fun is working your way through a legitimate encounter, whether it be solo, duo, boxing, group or raid, seeing a chest drop, the anticipation of what's inside and then when that's seen - who gets what. Upgrades are what everyone is looking for - no matter what level/style of play they are at or zone they are in.If no shard armor gives more chances for more people to do that then I'm all for it.

Amanathia

10-05-2011, 07:10 PM

<cite>Skeez1e wrote:</cite><blockquote>I think its a good move. There are dozens of styles of play but one thing is a constant - people play this game to have fun. The removal of the shard requirement for armor isn't taking away from anyone's fun - it actually may enhance the opportunity for many. People are mentoring down and running the Silent City instances for shards - where is the fun in that? Things like that just make the grind repetitive and boring.The fun is working your way through a legitimate encounter, whether it be solo, duo, boxing, group or raid, seeing a chest drop, the anticipation of what's inside and then when that's seen - who gets what. Upgrades are what everyone is looking for - no matter what level/style of play they are at or zone they are in.If no shard armor gives more chances for more people to do that then I'm all for it. </blockquote>Yes, working your way through something and then seeing the chest is nice. The anticipation of whats inside is what keeps people playing, which is why the drunder changes were needed--you'd know something inside was not an upgrade for what oyu were wearing and the difficulty didn't match the reward....However, you don't have to work "much" to get 20 shards for a piece of ry'gorr. Really, it's super easy. Yes 50/40 was too much, 20 is just right. The easy Velious instances can be cleared pretty fast even with a PQ geared group. Kael dominance rewards 14 shards, rime 12, tofs 8. None require any crit mit now. Do the dominance, don't hafta do it all in one night either. Do an instance or two a day and you'll have the ry'gorr pieces in no time. Do a bunch of instances a day and you could have it all in a week or so if you desired. That's pretty darn quick.

Anestacia

10-05-2011, 08:02 PM

While I dont like this change personally, I can see where it would work. However, please consider adding desirable items with semi high shard costs b/c besides yellow adornments that are dirt cheap, there will be zero incentive to run groups for shards.

serenader

10-05-2011, 08:46 PM

second post kind of off topicThe changes being made currently and ongoing, are dumbing down the game, this one inparticular really gets me very aggitatedFor casual players the game is fine for them, through out the years I have seen the game get easier and more tailored to casual player, for example travel has been made easier, its pretty much point click your in a dungeon, instead of an adventure to get there, half the people I bet even see most of an overland zone now its so easy to travel, and with 130 mounts if you do have to, its very quickThe game has been tailored enough to casual players period, why are not the issues that need to fixed getting attention?

lollipop

10-05-2011, 08:59 PM

<cite>Prrasha wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>lollipop wrote:</cite><blockquote>Please increase the cost of the gear min 100-300p per.</blockquote>That's less intelligent than removing shards in the first place, you're just exchanging a daily shard grind (current content) for a twice-weekly Protector's Realm plat grind (ancient content).Or you're putting all the illegal plat-sellers back in business, as though gifting wasn't doing that already.</blockquote>The game needs more plat sinks even the devs have agreed. This could be one of them. Make the items 100-300p or more per item.

Amanathia

10-05-2011, 09:30 PM

<cite>serenader wrote:</cite><blockquote>second post kind of off topicThe changes being made currently and ongoing, are dumbing down the game, this one inparticular really gets me very aggitatedFor casual players the game is fine for them, through out the years I have seen the game get easier and more tailored to casual player, for example travel has been made easier, its pretty much point click your in a dungeon, instead of an adventure to get there, half the people I bet even see most of an overland zone now its so easy to travel, and with 130 mounts if you do have to, its very quickThe game has been tailored enough to casual players period, why are not the issues that need to fixed getting attention?</blockquote>Let's not derail this into a casual vs hardcore player issue, it's really not. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Some of the changes (ie drunder ones) are mostly good, this one (shard removal) has received mostly negative feedback, SOE will hopefully listen to that feedback.

Lempo

10-05-2011, 10:49 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.</blockquote>The statement was that you NEED "jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements."I do know the difference. Neither jewelry nor weapons have any crit mit benefit. My neck has crit chance. No other piece of jewelry does. What jewelry are you using to bump up your crit chance? There aren't any interesting weapons to farm for in tower or rime, and I'm not likely to farm tower or rime for a new neck for long...</blockquote>Since you still do not understand the mobs have crit avoid requirements meaning you have to have enough crit chance to crit them. Jewelry, weapons and CHARMS which drop there. I have all EM/HM gear there are no drops for me in there.

Gungo

10-05-2011, 11:59 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>You act as though all those older zones dont have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. They just added a bunch of rare named. They just increased the drop rates on loot. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements. They just removed ALL the crit mit requirements PRE DRUNDER. Now instead of repeating the same 3-6 instances you can actually get gear to do 3-9 instances.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with crit. PQ drops and/or faction merchants work for weapons. I think I've seen a bad blade or two in ascent, but definitely never targeted any weapon that wasn't a bow from anything in the tower or rime zones.</blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.</blockquote>The statement was that you NEED "jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements."I do know the difference. Neither jewelry nor weapons have any crit mit benefit. My neck has crit chance. No other piece of jewelry does. What jewelry are you using to bump up your crit chance? There aren't any interesting weapons to farm for in tower or rime, and I'm not likely to farm tower or rime for a new neck for long...</blockquote>charms, belts, neck, weapons, range all have crit chanceThe heritage quest dagger from tower is one of the better scout/plate fighter weapons.You need crit chance to do drunder zones or you wont HEAL or dps enough.

Amanathia

10-06-2011, 12:25 AM

You know I did think of one potential upside to this change--it would make betraying very very painless for those in that gear level...that's one cool thing about it.

Onorem

10-06-2011, 12:45 AM

<cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.</blockquote>The statement was that you NEED "jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements."I do know the difference. Neither jewelry nor weapons have any crit mit benefit. My neck has crit chance. No other piece of jewelry does. What jewelry are you using to bump up your crit chance? There aren't any interesting weapons to farm for in tower or rime, and I'm not likely to farm tower or rime for a new neck for long...</blockquote>Since you still do not understand the mobs have crit avoid requirements meaning you have to have enough crit chance to crit them. Jewelry, weapons and CHARMS which drop there. I have all EM/HM gear there are no drops for me in there.</blockquote>I do understand. It's a nice effort on your part to deflect.

Loldawg

10-06-2011, 01:09 AM

Part of me wonders if they are doing this to move people into Drunder and EoW zones, to go along with their new philosophy of no major expacs w/ new content, just a rolling series of updates that slowly release content on an ongoing basis. In this new model, how do you signal that its time to move on? This change seems like this kind of signal...

Lempo

10-06-2011, 01:12 AM

<cite>Amanathia wrote:</cite><blockquote>You know I did think of one potential upside to this change--it would make betraying very very painless for those in that gear level...that's one cool thing about it.</blockquote>This could have been handled by a merchant that allowed exchanging the gear that had been earned/purchased it did not have to go the route of being handed free gear for logging in.

Lempo

10-06-2011, 01:14 AM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Jewelry doesn't help with player crit mit, it does however have everything to do with MOB CRIT AVOIDANCE, by the CRIT CHANCE it has.You need to learn the difference between the 2 before you off and post something that invalidates pretty much anything you have to say on the topic.</blockquote>The statement was that you NEED "jewlery/weapons from these zones to even do drunder since they have CRIT AVOID requirements."I do know the difference. Neither jewelry nor weapons have any crit mit benefit. My neck has crit chance. No other piece of jewelry does. What jewelry are you using to bump up your crit chance? There aren't any interesting weapons to farm for in tower or rime, and I'm not likely to farm tower or rime for a new neck for long...</blockquote>Since you still do not understand the mobs have crit avoid requirements meaning you have to have enough crit chance to crit them. Jewelry, weapons and CHARMS which drop there. I have all EM/HM gear there are no drops for me in there.</blockquote>I do understand. It's a nice effort on your part to deflect.</blockquote>I'm not trying to deflect anything 2 people corrected you here, so either your statement is misleading or you are wrong.

Felshades

10-06-2011, 03:54 AM

<cite>Anestacia wrote:</cite><blockquote>While I dont like this change personally, I can see where it would work. However, please consider adding desirable items with semi high shard costs b/c besides yellow adornments that are dirt cheap, there will be zero incentive to run groups for shards.</blockquote>There's already no incentive to run shard zones with pugs."Hey guys, I need white shards for adorns. Who wants to do the Dominance?"*gets guild group* *blows through dominance quest*"K guys thanks. Don't need to do that for a while again. Woot!"

Korhallen3

10-06-2011, 09:15 AM

I love this change, because it's stirring the pot. Obviously the vocal minority (yes ~100 people is a minority in this game) are concerned for all sorts of reasons, but the harsh reality is, people need to see new zones or they'll stop paying for their subscription. No one wants to do Tower or Rime for a year. This is moving people in to Kael/Drunder en masse, and "refreshing" the game for the masses. There comes a point in every gamers career where they accept change and start to be pragmatic, instead of wild-eye idealists. The raiders cling to desperate hopes that they'll be recognized and lauded, the try-hards always want content to be more difficult "like the good ole days," and the casuals want to have fun and see more than their current schedules or abilities allow. It's the same accross every game, in every genre, in every market. I fall somewhere between casual and try-hard, but even then, I can see that while SOE has made mistakes, they also have made a game I haven't been able to put down yet, and whatever changes they make to ensure that game stays up and running I will accept. You can kick and scream all you want, but at the end of the day the only thing that will be different is when you say "Hey guys!" in Ventrilo your voice will be hoarse.

Whilhelmina

10-06-2011, 09:21 AM

the shards only be needed for "yellow adorns"? One still needs more shards for a full Drunder set than for a Ry'Gorr set right?

Valena

10-06-2011, 09:22 AM

<cite>Korhallen3 wrote:</cite><blockquote>I love this change, because it's stirring the pot. Obviously the vocal minority (yes ~100 people is a minority in this game) are concerned for all sorts of reasons, but the harsh reality is, people need to see new zones or they'll stop paying for their subscription. No one wants to do Tower or Rime for a year. This is moving people in to Kael/Drunder en masse, and "refreshing" the game for the masses. There comes a point in every gamers career where they accept change and start to be pragmatic, instead of wild-eye idealists. The raiders cling to desperate hopes that they'll be recognized and lauded, the try-hards always want content to be more difficult "like the good ole days," and the casuals want to have fun and see more than their current schedules or abilities allow. It's the same accross every game, in every genre, in every market. I fall somewhere between casual and try-hard, but even then, I can see that while SOE has made mistakes, they also have made a game I haven't been able to put down yet, and whatever changes they make to ensure that game stays up and running I will accept. You can kick and scream all you want, but at the end of the day the only thing that will be different is when you say "Hey guys!" in Ventrilo your voice will be hoarse. </blockquote>Just giving people access to Rhy'gorr doesn't mean that they will be able to do Drunder / EoW instances. They require more co-ordination than earlier zones and not everyone is able / willing / wanting to do harder instances.This change will make the first 6 zones pointless as they won't drop shards or gear upgrades worth getting. IK will become the entry zone and Temple / Throne will still be a challenge for many. To me it is giving "casuals" just 1 zone to run rather than the 7 that they have now.

Kenazeer

10-06-2011, 09:47 AM

<cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>There is a lot of content, that doens't mean that everyone that rolls a toon should get to see it because they make it to 90/300 if they do not put the time to progress through the zones (which is not as bad as it is being made out to be) to get to Drunder then the solution is not giving a free pass to the zone</blockquote>I actually thought EQ2 was getting to a good place. In EQ1 there was always a small, but significant, portion of the playerbase that was able to take in the top content areas in the new expansions. More players and guilds took in this content one expansion after it was released. That resulted in almost always having something new to do unless you were a "hardcore" player.Of course, this could only happen because there were not total gear resets between expansions, and even though you were killing a boss one expansion late, chances were pretty daggone good that whatever you got was going to be useful, even in the most current content if you were to play in it.The problem EQ2 has now though is that they are not releasing content with the expansions and instead only releasing features. I wonder, for example, if we will ever see another significant overland zone in that model. This is probably why they are driving the people that are a little behind to get moving to the unused old content. If you are not realeasing easy content for a new expansion you better get people playing something new else they look back and think "What in the world new did I get out of this?" They can sell us on features all they want, but those features have little to no meaning outside of being used in content, and the old zones aren't designed to require these features, so these new features might go unused. Again, this would leave people thinking "What did I pay for?"So in my mind, the new way they are doing expansions is what we have to thank for them making things easily achieveable, or at least much more easily than in the past. A more laid back player would play the easy content in a new expansion then go back to the harder content of the old expansion. When there isn't stuff like new overland zones they have to get people moving on to something.I think they should move back to old way and make sure that content and gear overalp from one expansion to the next instead of being laid end to end. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have lots of unused content in front of people as long as they are progressing, happy, and have stuff to look forward to.

feldon30

10-06-2011, 11:14 AM

<cite>Whilhelmina@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>the shards only be needed for "yellow adorns"? One still needs more shards for a full Drunder set than for a Ry'Gorr set right?</blockquote>Drunder gear also drops off bosses. Nobody is going to mess with shards and making ore to get Drunder gear.

Cratoh

10-06-2011, 11:18 AM

Sweeping generalistaions are rife within this thread. Whiplash - people will run the other 6 zones for - fun, variation, HZs, rare loot, AAs for first runs, HQs, quests, faction and yes - shards. This is simply going to make the game more FUN for casual players, and players with alts. FUN = more subs staying subbed for a greater amount of time.

Onorem

10-06-2011, 11:20 AM

<cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lempo@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>...</blockquote>...</blockquote>...</blockquote>I do understand. It's a nice effort on your part to deflect.</blockquote>I'm not trying to deflect anything 2 people corrected you here, so either your statement is misleading or you are wrong.</blockquote>This is really getting off topic now so I'll make one last reply to break down how I see how I think this part of the conversation went.Me: You're making easy zones mostly worthless by allowing people to buy armorGungo: Those older zones have drops that are upgrades and NEEDED for drunder. You NEED jewlery/weapons from these zones.Me: Neck is the only jewelry piece with crit on it. A couple points of crit for a better neck isn't worth grinding old zones for. PQs and faction can get you weapons that are as good or better than Tower/Rime drops, and portal event weapons are worth mentioning also. I am glad I got a couple bows early. They'd be worth grinding for a bit it if you don't have access to x2 or better. (I haven't mentioned crit mit up to this point)Lempo: Jewelry doesn't help with crit mit, but it matters for crit chance. Learn the difference before you dare speak.Me: I know the difference. Weapons and jewelry don't matter for crit mit. I never said they did. A couple points of crit from an Tower/Rime necklace above a quested one isn't really worth worrying to much about. No other jewelry has crit chance on it. The weapons from those zones aren't good either. Lempo: You still don't understand that mobs have crit avoid. (I don't?) Now charms are brought up. That's a new point in the conversation. Yep, there are a couple nice charms...which drop regularly and won't keep people coming back to those zones for long.Gungo: Charms, belts, necks, weapons, ranged have crit chance. (Thanks for the update.) The HQ dagger is one of the best. (lol. It works, but isn't NEEDED to advance.) You need crit chance for drunder. (Again, thanks for the update.)Faction items and regular drops will give you what you NEED to advance. If there isn't something new to spend shards on, I don't know how this change will do anything but make Tower/Rime groups much harder to find.

ObsidianNightmare

10-06-2011, 11:21 AM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>Sweeping generalistaions are rife within this thread. Whiplash - people will run the other 6 zones for - fun, variation, HZs, rare loot, AAs for first runs, HQs, quests, faction and yes - shards. This is simply going to make the game more FUN for casual players, and players with alts. FUN = more subs staying subbed for a greater amount of time.</blockquote>After thinking about it, I think you are right.

Deneir_Allaston

10-06-2011, 11:33 AM

<cite>Korhallen3 wrote:</cite><blockquote>I love this change, because it's stirring the pot. Obviously the vocal minority (yes ~100 people is a minority in this game) are concerned for all sorts of reasons, but the harsh reality is, people need to see new zones or they'll stop paying for their subscription. No one wants to do Tower or Rime for a year. This is moving people in to Kael/Drunder en masse, and "refreshing" the game for the masses. There comes a point in every gamers career where they accept change and start to be pragmatic, instead of wild-eye idealists. The raiders cling to desperate hopes that they'll be recognized and lauded, the try-hards always want content to be more difficult "like the good ole days," and the casuals want to have fun and see more than their current schedules or abilities allow. It's the same accross every game, in every genre, in every market. I fall somewhere between casual and try-hard, but even then, I can see that while SOE has made mistakes, they also have made a game I haven't been able to put down yet, and whatever changes they make to ensure that game stays up and running I will accept. You can kick and scream all you want, but at the end of the day the only thing that will be different is when you say "Hey guys!" in Ventrilo your voice will be hoarse. </blockquote>I think I would have to agree... it seems like good timing too with the advent of the Dungeon Finder.

clizzy2000

10-06-2011, 11:36 AM

We are one of these casual groups. Usually just 3-4 of us playing, and we spent the past 2-3 months gearing up to be able to run TOFs, pools, ascent. We have about 2-3 Ry'gorr pieces already, and were excited we could do TOFs every day now for 3 shards. The daily gives us 4, so that's an armor piece a week. Now all that work is gone, the excitement is deflated, because all that we built up to is just being given to anyone with enough plat.Pretty dissapointing!

Wirewhisker

10-06-2011, 11:45 AM

Cratoh

10-06-2011, 11:51 AM

<cite>Wirewhisker@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>clizzy2000 wrote:</cite><blockquote>We are one of these casual groups. Usually just 3-4 of us playing, and we spent the past 2-3 months gearing up to be able to run TOFs, pools, ascent. We have about 2-3 Ry'gorr pieces already, and were excited we could do TOFs every day now for 3 shards. The daily gives us 4, so that's an armor piece a week. Now all that work is gone, the excitement is deflated, because all that we built up to is just being given to anyone with enough plat.Pretty dissapointing!</blockquote>I agree wholeheartedly. The shard grind will now be replaced with the plat grind.Which I guess could explain the lack of red-name interaction on this -- it helps Sony if people are buying lots of timecards to sell for plat to, in turn, buy Ry'Gorr with.</blockquote>There isn;t a lack of red name input on this thread - it is simply that their reasonaing has been concisely staed, then largely ignored.

Kizee

10-06-2011, 11:56 AM

Lempo

10-06-2011, 11:58 AM

<cite>clizzy2000 wrote:</cite><blockquote>We are one of these casual groups. Usually just 3-4 of us playing, and we spent the past 2-3 months gearing up to be able to run TOFs, pools, ascent. We have about 2-3 Ry'gorr pieces already, and were excited we could do TOFs every day now for 3 shards. The daily gives us 4, so that's an armor piece a week. Now all that work is gone, the excitement is deflated, because all that we built up to is just being given to anyone with enough plat.Pretty dissapointing!</blockquote>It is refrshing that there are still some players that play this game that have a desire to work at something until they are able to defeat it, you are not the only one 2 or 3 others have expressed sentiments similar to yours. It blows that your hard work and perserverance has all but been invalidated here but you should revel in what you accomplished and do not get deflated because SOE is so eager to appease the ones that are not willing to put forth the time and effort, that isn't your fault.

Kenazeer

10-06-2011, 12:04 PM

The other thing that I think will be amusing is if by trying to make the Dungeon Finder a success, making it easy peasy to get the gear to run most all dungeons, they will end up making it a failure, because the people who are now "qualified" to run the dungeons really aren't, skill wise, which will in turn make the groups unenjoyable and people will quit queing.

Lempo

10-06-2011, 12:14 PM

This is also an effect that I would not be sad to see happen as a result of this poorly thought out decision.

Kizee

10-06-2011, 12:23 PM

<cite>Kenazeer wrote:</cite><blockquote>The other thing that I think will be amusing is if by trying to make the Dungeon Finder a success, making it easy peasy to get the gear to run most all dungeons, they will end up making it a failure, because the people who are now "qualified" to run the dungeons really aren't, skill wise, which will in turn make the groups unenjoyable and people will quit queing.</blockquote>I seriously doubt that the DF will work anyways.Did SoE ever fix the BG group maker? I have a feeling that if the new DF makes groups with mostly fighters/dps and no healers a couple times, people won't use it anymore.

Koleg

10-06-2011, 12:52 PM

The shard costs have never been anything other a gating mechanic to separate the players into HM, EM, Casual and Weaker tiers. It is nothing more than a grind and the precieved level of the grind is different at each of those levels. HM/EM players could easily gather enough shards (@20/piece) to get a full set (120) of Ry'Gorr in under two weeks, Casuals maybe 2 or 3 months and those weaker players would never be able to get a set. Thinking that this type of Gating mechanic is good for the game is foolish. Its like having a stop sign on the highway (casual players) when the HOV lane (HM/EM players) only has a caution sign if anything at all. The cost of the shards, whether 50/40 per piece or 20, is nothing more that a bottle neck. Why bother at all. The truth more often than not is that HM/EM raiders gear their alts through their raid drops such as gear go to Raid Mains to Raid Alts to SLR. For them Ry'Gorr is nothing more than a started set to be muted in a weeks time or more accurately "Fill" and poor quality filler at that.Someone mentioned they felt that the 2 or 3 pieces of gear they paid 20 shards for are now defined as time wasted. Without regard for anyone who paid 50/40 per piece. Casual players can gather about the same shard count @20 that HM/EM players could gather @ 50/40. Its very selfcentered to think this reduction is any less than the last one was. The difference is when shard costs were lowered the first time by half+ everyone thought it was a good idea. How is this any different. it is opening up gear and content to a different level of player which would have gotten the same effect in a matter of TIME.TIME ... DOV Part 2 is rumored for 2/12 ... 4 to 5 months. Drunder and EOW are lucky to get ~1 or 2% of the population running instances in it nightly. Those zones have gear upgrades which will most likely be needed for DOV 2.0 (Sleepers?). The player base won't accept a GU which they cannot run instances in due to gear gating restrictions.GEAR ... Anyone who runs EM/HM raids or buys SLR has passed this gear level long ago. There is no real reason to care beyond vanity. This change is not for EM/HM players it is for Alts and it is for casuals. It is to bring the harder content to the forefront rather than have it be over shadowed by the shard GRIND for the non-EM/HM players. I have guild mates which still struggle in TOFS x2 in a full 12 man raid and might not ever kill Tserrina with or without Ry'Gorr where many of you know people that might be 6 manning this content for the plats. Its easy to think this change might effect you but it really doesn't other than MAYBE lowering the SLR net profit.ZONES ... Will the older zones be run? YES! Maybe not as often, but everyone up-and-coming still needs droped from them. They may not be run as often becasue "some" of the players will progress into the next tier (Kael/Drunder). I don't think a simple set of Ry'Gorr with Ascent jewelery and a decent weapon will make the "average" player any better than they all ready are. This won't allow the pure casuals to clear ToRZ or Drunder 1 any faster, better or easier. This will only allow those who haven't progressed, due to the Gating mechanic, to do so.TOFS, Velks and Kael still need to be run for the jewelry and rare drops, the difference is that people will no longer need to run them dozens of times after they get the loot they need. They can move on to the harder stuff rather than repeat the old stuff time and time again. I feel bad for those who shelled out 240 shards for Ry'Gorr. I was happy that I spent 120 shards on Ry'Gorr for my main and 2 alts. My 4 or 5 other alts will be estatic to spend zero shards on Ry'Gorr.

Koleg

10-06-2011, 12:54 PM

And if that wall-O-text didn't spell it out ... I am for this change and think it is a good thing for the game in more ways than bad.

Onorem

10-06-2011, 01:24 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The shard costs have never been anything other a gating mechanic to separate the players into HM, EM, Casual and Weaker tiers. It is nothing more than a grind and the precieved level of the grind is different at each of those levels. HM/EM players could easily gather enough shards (@20/piece) to get a full set (120) of Ry'Gorr in under two weeks, Casuals maybe 2 or 3 months and those weaker players would never be able to get a set. Thinking that this type of Gating mechanic is good for the game is foolish. Its like having a stop sign on the highway (casual players) when the HOV lane (HM/EM players) only has a caution sign if anything at all. The cost of the shards, whether 50/40 per piece or 20, is nothing more that a bottle neck. Why bother at all. The truth more often than not is that HM/EM raiders gear their alts through their raid drops such as gear go to Raid Mains to Raid Alts to SLR. For them Ry'Gorr is nothing more than a started set to be muted in a weeks time or more accurately "Fill" and poor quality filler at that.Someone mentioned they felt that the 2 or 3 pieces of gear they paid 20 shards for are now defined as time wasted. Without regard for anyone who paid 50/40 per piece. Casual players can gather about the same shard count @20 that HM/EM players could gather @ 50/40. Its very selfcentered to think this reduction is any less than the last one was. The difference is when shard costs were lowered the first time by half+ everyone thought it was a good idea. How is this any different. it is opening up gear and content to a different level of player which would have gotten the same effect in a matter of TIME.TIME ... DOV Part 2 is rumored for 2/12 ... 4 to 5 months. Drunder and EOW are lucky to get ~1 or 2% of the population running instances in it nightly. Those zones have gear upgrades which will most likely be needed for DOV 2.0 (Sleepers?). The player base won't accept a GU which they cannot run instances in due to gear gating restrictions.GEAR ... Anyone who runs EM/HM raids or buys SLR has passed this gear level long ago. There is no real reason to care beyond vanity. This change is not for EM/HM players it is for Alts and it is for casuals. It is to bring the harder content to the forefront rather than have it be over shadowed by the shard GRIND for the non-EM/HM players. I have guild mates which still struggle in TOFS x2 in a full 12 man raid and might not ever kill Tserrina with or without Ry'Gorr where many of you know people that might be 6 manning this content for the plats. Its easy to think this change might effect you but it really doesn't other than MAYBE lowering the SLR net profit.ZONES ... Will the older zones be run? YES! Maybe not as often, but everyone up-and-coming still needs droped from them. They may not be run as often becasue "some" of the players will progress into the next tier (Kael/Drunder). I don't think a simple set of Ry'Gorr with Ascent jewelery and a decent weapon will make the "average" player any better than they all ready are. This won't allow the pure casuals to clear ToRZ or Drunder 1 any faster, better or easier. This will only allow those who haven't progressed, due to the Gating mechanic, to do so.TOFS, Velks and Kael still need to be run for the jewelry and rare drops, the difference is that people will no longer need to run them dozens of times after they get the loot they need. They can move on to the harder stuff rather than repeat the old stuff time and time again. I feel bad for those who shelled out 240 shards for Ry'Gorr. I was happy that I spent 120 shards on Ry'Gorr for my main and 2 alts. My 4 or 5 other alts will be estatic to spend zero shards on Ry'Gorr.</blockquote>I'm not a fan of the whole shard idea in general. I didn't like it in TSO, and don't like it now, but that's the concept this expansion was launched on, and they can't just remove 3/4 of heroic progression because they suddenly realize that gear is messed up. (Way to pick up on that by the way. People have only been telling you that since beta.)The game does need gating. If there's nothing to work for, there's no reason to play. I find myself trying to find something productive to do less and less lately. I guess the idea is now just to buy gear and log in for raid night. I do have a reasonable amount of fun running old instances, but that's largely because I know that while it's trivial, at least I'm working towards something for my alts.It takes longer for casual players to get gear? Holy insight batman. What's your point? It should take longer.If new zones require old gear, then people will farm for old gear to take on the new zones. Why cut out part of the equation months in advance? I agree that just having this gear won't make someone ready for Drunder...but for the average player, what will be the motivation to run ascent over and over when the zone offers no upgrade and the shards are worthless?

Amanathia

10-06-2011, 01:35 PM

Korhallen3

10-06-2011, 01:55 PM

<cite>clizzy2000 wrote:</cite><blockquote>We are one of these casual groups. Usually just 3-4 of us playing, and we spent the past 2-3 months gearing up to be able to run TOFs, pools, ascent. We have about 2-3 Ry'gorr pieces already, and were excited we could do TOFs every day now for 3 shards. The daily gives us 4, so that's an armor piece a week. Now all that work is gone, the excitement is deflated, because all that we built up to is just being given to anyone with enough plat.Pretty dissapointing!</blockquote>You can still do all of those things, your goal-posts have just shifted to bigger, and better things. If the only thing keeping you in TOFS/Rime is that you need shards, that's a bad thing. You aren't there for drops, you aren't there to learn it, to enjoy it, and to master it... you're only there for shards. (Insert Why Valor Points Velium Shards are a bad idea here).And besides, those shards are used in Drunder armor. So sharpen your swords, and put on your breastplates, because it's time to go giant slaying. I'm seriously concerned with the state of players in today's games, when people are always concerned with how everyone else is doing and not themselves.

denmom

10-06-2011, 01:59 PM

<cite>Whilhelmina@Storms wrote:</cite><blockquote>the shards only be needed for "yellow adorns"? One still needs more shards for a full Drunder set than for a Ry'Gorr set right?</blockquote>This is something most are forgetting: white shards are still needed for making Drunder gear. I looked it up on my Armourer recipes last night. 40 minimum of ore and white shards are needed for the recipe.So you still need to run instances/dailies for white shards for Drunder gear, so the removal of shards for Thurg and Rygorr gear makes sense. Having three sets which need white shards would be a raging hellacious mind-numbing grind.

clizzy2000

10-06-2011, 02:18 PM

The ry'gorr to me became a rite of passage. If you had ry'gorr on, people knew you put in the time to get it, and more often than not you were a good player. I'm a monk, and it's terrible to get a group. I usually just play with people i know due to that. We had just got geared enough to do tofs every night, so yeah we were excited, and it was a kick in the nuts.Now that badge of honor is going to anyone who has plat. Yeah we start again with Duner or whatever, but that's dissapointing when you were just barely there on earning your Ry'gorr.Kolog, I wanted to hate your post, but very well done.

Cratoh

10-06-2011, 02:33 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The shard costs have never been anything other a gating mechanic to separate the players into HM, EM, Casual and Weaker tiers. It is nothing more than a grind and the precieved level of the grind is different at each of those levels. HM/EM players could easily gather enough shards (@20/piece) to get a full set (120) of Ry'Gorr in under two weeks, Casuals maybe 2 or 3 months and those weaker players would never be able to get a set. Thinking that this type of Gating mechanic is good for the game is foolish. Its like having a stop sign on the highway (casual players) when the HOV lane (HM/EM players) only has a caution sign if anything at all. The cost of the shards, whether 50/40 per piece or 20, is nothing more that a bottle neck. Why bother at all. The truth more often than not is that HM/EM raiders gear their alts through their raid drops such as gear go to Raid Mains to Raid Alts to SLR. For them Ry'Gorr is nothing more than a started set to be muted in a weeks time or more accurately "Fill" and poor quality filler at that.Someone mentioned they felt that the 2 or 3 pieces of gear they paid 20 shards for are now defined as time wasted. Without regard for anyone who paid 50/40 per piece. Casual players can gather about the same shard count @20 that HM/EM players could gather @ 50/40. Its very selfcentered to think this reduction is any less than the last one was. The difference is when shard costs were lowered the first time by half+ everyone thought it was a good idea. How is this any different. it is opening up gear and content to a different level of player which would have gotten the same effect in a matter of TIME.TIME ... DOV Part 2 is rumored for 2/12 ... 4 to 5 months. Drunder and EOW are lucky to get ~1 or 2% of the population running instances in it nightly. Those zones have gear upgrades which will most likely be needed for DOV 2.0 (Sleepers?). The player base won't accept a GU which they cannot run instances in due to gear gating restrictions.GEAR ... Anyone who runs EM/HM raids or buys SLR has passed this gear level long ago. There is no real reason to care beyond vanity. This change is not for EM/HM players it is for Alts and it is for casuals. It is to bring the harder content to the forefront rather than have it be over shadowed by the shard GRIND for the non-EM/HM players. I have guild mates which still struggle in TOFS x2 in a full 12 man raid and might not ever kill Tserrina with or without Ry'Gorr where many of you know people that might be 6 manning this content for the plats. Its easy to think this change might effect you but it really doesn't other than MAYBE lowering the SLR net profit.ZONES ... Will the older zones be run? YES! Maybe not as often, but everyone up-and-coming still needs droped from them. They may not be run as often becasue "some" of the players will progress into the next tier (Kael/Drunder). I don't think a simple set of Ry'Gorr with Ascent jewelery and a decent weapon will make the "average" player any better than they all ready are. This won't allow the pure casuals to clear ToRZ or Drunder 1 any faster, better or easier. This will only allow those who haven't progressed, due to the Gating mechanic, to do so.TOFS, Velks and Kael still need to be run for the jewelry and rare drops, the difference is that people will no longer need to run them dozens of times after they get the loot they need. They can move on to the harder stuff rather than repeat the old stuff time and time again. I feel bad for those who shelled out 240 shards for Ry'Gorr. I was happy that I spent 120 shards on Ry'Gorr for my main and 2 alts. My 4 or 5 other alts will be estatic to spend zero shards on Ry'Gorr.</blockquote>Very insightful, and you've hit the nail on the head over and over again in your post.As to the part 'ZONES' the strange thing is that people are saying 'we will never get groups for velks/tower' while missing the point that at the moment hardly anyone gets groups for drunder/EoW and this change will help that.

Anklesteiner

10-06-2011, 02:34 PM

It the day since the change regarding velium shards and Ry'Gorr armor went live on test, there has been nothing but negative feedback. From this message board, to EQ2 Flames, to other EQ2 related message boards, to all the top tier guilds saying how stupid this change is, from the chat channels on Test, Crushbone and AB, to all the people I have directly talked to, to my entire raid force - everyone thinks this change is a horible idea and does not want it.With this incredible amount of negative feedback regarding the changes, do you think the EQ2 development team will actually care? More and more they continue to prove just how little they actually care about what the subscriber base - the people that actually employee them - are saying about the game and the changes they continue to make. I understand over the summer months, EQ2 saw some really major declines in subscription numbers...well, why do you think that is? If the EQ2 development team continues to make changes that recieve a tremendous amount of negative feedback, it will continue to upset people, who will in turn cancel their subscription to EQ2.At the end of the day, isn't the EQ2 development team suppose to be working for us?

Koleg

10-06-2011, 03:26 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>It the day since the change regarding velium shards and Ry'Gorr armor went live on test, there has been nothing but negative feedback. From this message board, to EQ2 Flames, to other EQ2 related message boards, to all the top tier guilds saying how stupid this change is, from the chat channels on Test, Crushbone and AB, to all the people I have directly talked to, to my entire raid force - everyone thinks this change is a horible idea and does not want it.With this incredible amount of negative feedback regarding the changes, do you think the EQ2 development team will actually care? More and more they continue to prove just how little they actually care about what the subscriber base - the people that actually employee them - are saying about the game and the changes they continue to make. I understand over the summer months, EQ2 saw some really major declines in subscription numbers...well, why do you think that is? If the EQ2 development team continues to make changes that recieve a tremendous amount of negative feedback, it will continue to upset people, who will in turn cancel their subscription to EQ2.At the end of the day, isn't the EQ2 development team suppose to be working for us?</blockquote>Out side of having people think you aren't "One of them" and going with the "Flow" ... WHY do YOU think this is a bad idea?Shard costs went from 240 at launch to 120 mid-stream to zero (test) now... whats the big deal? Really? People who are slow to progress get a bigger benefit, does THAT upset everyone? Does everyone think that people "Stuck" in Tofs:SC/Ascent/Pools should remain there and "Work" their way past their own personal road blocks, becasue thats the way "I" did it when "I" was your age/level? Is Ry'Gorr armor any easier to get than SLR x4 EM gear? Is there really any gear block in heroic content, and before you answer remember there ARE people clearing Drunder 1 & 2 in pure heroic now. So why don't YOU think this is a good idea? Really?Amanathia thinks that holding people back based on time is not considered Gating. I personally think placing intentional time-sinks in the road of progression is the true definition of Gating in an MMO, whether that is faction quests or gear grinds. Gating should be handled via content difficulty and player ability. "Giving" slow progressors better gear is not taking away from that, the fact is SOE has already done this TWICE now with the free Legos in the Icy Fingers and again with the PQ fables, all free upgrades to the majority of the player base and on-par stat wise with the Thurgadin and Ry'Gorr sets. This is very little difference. PQ has enough CM to raid EM x2 & x4 and do some of the harder heroics. SOE "Giving Away" Ry'Gorr (Still need 300p+ in gems) isn't going to do anything except reenergize some of the base. <-- Base .. Majority ..Anyone that can clear 3 DOV instances per night can get enough white shards for a full set of Ry'Gorr in fourteen days, but yet we are seven+ months into an expansion (which #1 gave free gear upgrades to every one more than once and #2 provided all mechanics to successfully run EM x2 & x4 with as little as 1 or 2 weeks worth of work) and yet there are still many people not running EOW and Drunder. We don't need to bring the zones down to the players level, we need to bring the players up to the level of the zones. This is a step in that direction.

Prrasha

10-06-2011, 03:43 PM

<cite>lollipop wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Prrasha wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>lollipop wrote:</cite><blockquote>Please increase the cost of the gear min 100-300p per.</blockquote>That's less intelligent than removing shards in the first place, you're just exchanging a daily shard grind (current content) for a twice-weekly Protector's Realm plat grind (ancient content).Or you're putting all the illegal plat-sellers back in business, as though gifting wasn't doing that already.</blockquote>The game needs more plat sinks even the devs have agreed. This could be one of them. Make the items 100-300p or more per item.</blockquote>OK, you want a plat sink and not a barrier-of-entry. This is the wrong implementation. Anyone who has 600-1800pp (or more!) per alt to waste probably doesn't need a bunch of RyGorr armor at this point. Anyone who needs the armor will be trio'ing tPR and such.If you just want a plat sink, you have to put a high cost on things that people with 10,000+ plat want. Right now, you're creating a barrier-of-entry to the poor and calling it a plat sink for the rich.

Shaolin Sam

10-06-2011, 03:45 PM

<cite>Kenazeer wrote:</cite><blockquote>The other thing that I think will be amusing is if by trying to make the Dungeon Finder a success, making it easy peasy to get the gear to run most all dungeons, they will end up making it a failure, because the people who are now "qualified" to run the dungeons really aren't, skill wise, which will in turn make the groups unenjoyable and people will quit queing.</blockquote>Hasn't been a problem for WoW (over 20 million subs) and Rift (over 3 million subs) so I don't think it'll be a problem for EQ2 (less then 70,000 subs).Unless it's from the REALLY vocal minority that is.

ObsidianNightmare

10-06-2011, 03:47 PM

Kenazeer

10-06-2011, 03:56 PM

<cite>Shaolin Sam wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kenazeer wrote:</cite><blockquote>The other thing that I think will be amusing is if by trying to make the Dungeon Finder a success, making it easy peasy to get the gear to run most all dungeons, they will end up making it a failure, because the people who are now "qualified" to run the dungeons really aren't, skill wise, which will in turn make the groups unenjoyable and people will quit queing.</blockquote>Hasn't been a problem for WoW (over 20 million subs) and Rift (over 3 million subs) so I don't think it'll be a problem for EQ2 (less then 70,000 subs).Unless it's from the REALLY vocal minority that is.</blockquote>I am not sure it will happen, but I think the circumstances are a little different.Pretty much a regular occurence on the forums are people talking about how bad a group experience was, either because of some snob or some "noob," and that was with people making their own groups.I have played battlegrounds quite a bit. I certainly hope they have substantially upgraded the matchmaker (and that was across all server).I am not so certain that the DF is going to be able to make dungeon crawling a pleasureable experience if the players cant.What was the barrier to getting groups before? What was the cause of unhappy dungeon crawling experieinces? No one wanted to lead? No one wanted to take charge? People were undergeared? People in the group wanted to progress through the dungeon at different rates? People didn't know the scripts? Dungeons really needed a decent group setup and those classes werent LFG at the time, so an adequate group couldn't form?If you agree that those are all valid questions observations I am not sure how you could think that the DF is going to solve them...well except maybe for the undergeared part.I think they might have to add a "public quest" kinda loot thing for the DF in order to get people to use it. People suffered through BGs to get usable loot, and when that went away the BGs pretty much died. If groups can't perfom with the DF, they wont be getting any loot either, and it will die also.I hope I am wrong.

Koleg

10-06-2011, 03:58 PM

Koleg

10-06-2011, 03:58 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Shaolin Sam wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Kenazeer wrote:</cite><blockquote>The other thing that I think will be amusing is if by trying to make the Dungeon Finder a success, making it easy peasy to get the gear to run most all dungeons, they will end up making it a failure, because the people who are now "qualified" to run the dungeons really aren't, skill wise, which will in turn make the groups unenjoyable and people will quit queing.</blockquote>Hasn't been a problem for WoW (over 20 million subs) and Rift (over 3 million subs) so I don't think it'll be a problem for EQ2 (less then 70,000 subs).Unless it's from the REALLY vocal minority that is.</blockquote>Sub != Accounts .... it is well known that Blizzard always claims non-sequential Accounts created not actively paid Subs. Even so, the fictious number of 70K is still a PILE of money @ 15 clams per month. Any business with 12 million USD anual income is doing well and IT houses have very low overhead costs compared to manufacturing or retail. But I'm willing to bet there are more than that many EQ2 paid subs.</blockquote>

Koleg

10-06-2011, 04:17 PM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>Someone mentioned shards not dropping at all for these zones now. Is this true or will shards continue to drop in boss & key chests as well as completion of missions? </blockquote>What is the difference between Cost, Reduced Cost and No Cost. Its a matter of TIME and an artificial barrier that one effects the people participating in it.At this point in the game a player, given the time, could acquire 84 to 100 white shards per week. Whether they buy Ry'Gorr armor @240 (2.5 weeks), @120(1.2 weeks) or @0 they end up in the same place at relatively the same time. The shards are esentially a pointless grind. In reality players spend thier TIME in the game differently and will gear up accordingly, this is not changing in nature only in mechanic. I'd guess @ the current level of 120 shards total HM would take 2 weeks, casuals 4 weeks and sub-casuals 4 months. If the shard cost was only "Reduced" by half again, you see HM geared in under a week and casuals in 2 and I'd guess the sub-casuals would still take 2 or 3 months, becasue its not important to them.Beyond this, removing shard costs will basically "Force" players into Kael, because the Gems are now the barrier, but a barrier which players feel they can some control over. They can grind the gem or grind the plat giving them a CHOICE where they wouldn't have a choice with shards invovled. I know players now who have played since launch and still don't have a full set of PQ gear (minus chest/weapon), I seriously doubt they will care at all about the shard cost of gear regardless of what it is.So, what does it do FOR the game ... new-comers will not need to GRIND for gear they can effectively WORK on acquiring it. The gear is not free they still need the gems. The farmers will make tons of plat. The players will upgrade their gears. The game populations will become stronger and progress to current levels. The base will prepare itself for DOV 2.0

Shaolin Sam

10-06-2011, 04:27 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>But I'm willing to bet there are more than that many EQ2 paid subs.</blockquote>You'd lose the bet <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Cratoh

10-06-2011, 05:19 PM

ObsidianNightmare

10-06-2011, 05:58 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>Someone mentioned shards not dropping at all for these zones now. Is this true or will shards continue to drop in boss & key chests as well as completion of missions? </blockquote>What is the difference between Cost, Reduced Cost and No Cost. Its a matter of TIME and an artificial barrier that one effects the people participating in it.At this point in the game a player, given the time, could acquire 84 to 100 white shards per week. Whether they buy Ry'Gorr armor @240 (2.5 weeks), @120(1.2 weeks) or @0 they end up in the same place at relatively the same time. The shards are esentially a pointless grind. In reality players spend thier TIME in the game differently and will gear up accordingly, this is not changing in nature only in mechanic. I'd guess @ the current level of 120 shards total HM would take 2 weeks, casuals 4 weeks and sub-casuals 4 months. If the shard cost was only "Reduced" by half again, you see HM geared in under a week and casuals in 2 and I'd guess the sub-casuals would still take 2 or 3 months, becasue its not important to them.Beyond this, removing shard costs will basically "Force" players into Kael, because the Gems are now the barrier, but a barrier which players feel they can some control over. They can grind the gem or grind the plat giving them a CHOICE where they wouldn't have a choice with shards invovled. I know players now who have played since launch and still don't have a full set of PQ gear (minus chest/weapon), I seriously doubt they will care at all about the shard cost of gear regardless of what it is.So, what does it do FOR the game ... new-comers will not need to GRIND for gear they can effectively WORK on acquiring it. The gear is not free they still need the gems. The farmers will make tons of plat. The players will upgrade their gears. The game populations will become stronger and progress to current levels. The base will prepare itself for DOV 2.0</blockquote>Your response has nothing to do with my question. Also they are removing cost from armor only. AFAIK runes (as trivial as the cost may be) still require shards as well as jewelry/weapos which are still valid in a pinch. Thus.. my question.TRADESKILLS<ul><li style="font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><div>Thurgadin and Ry’gorr armor set recipes no longer require velium shards.</div></li></ul> ITEMS<ul><li style="font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><div>Thurgadin armor sets no longer require velium shards to be purchased. Faction and coin are still required.</div></li><li><div>Rygorr armor sets no longer require velium shards to be purchased. Faction, refined gems, and coin are still required.</div><div></div></li></ul>

Sinn

10-07-2011, 12:27 AM

I'd like to add a perspective. I've played the game for over 6 years, but as a casual player and I'm far from expert.I think this change will 'possibly' improve grouping. I have a few lvl 90/300 toons. For the most part I solo'd them to where they are. These days, getting in a group requires crit mit. Its a de facto standard for group leaders to ask what you have before an invite. I can get my toons to around 120% or so, soloing, buying a few yellow adorns etc., but 120% doesn't get you into groups. It's that classic dilemma ..need a job to get experience but firms won't hire you without experience. IE you want to run in the current instances to get shards for the crit mit gear, but you can't get into groups that run them because you don't have crit mit gear.I'm not saying that giving everyone the 'Easy Button' is the answer. But from what I see day to day in chat, lack of grouping is a concern. People complain about lack of groups, and at the same time, turn down people wanting to group on the basis of gear.

Daggster

10-07-2011, 04:04 AM

<cite>clizzy2000 wrote:</cite><blockquote>The ry'gorr to me became a rite of passage. If you had ry'gorr on, people knew you put in the time to get it, and more often than not you were a good player.</blockquote>I've grouped with a full raid-geared pally that coudn't keep mobs off the dirge (let alone the dps's). So no, gear doesn't prove anything.Edit: was that other tank, that had only some raid-gear pieces, that couldn't hold the mobs even off the healer.

Daggster

10-07-2011, 04:30 AM

On the topic, my initial reaction was "W T H, this is stupid", but the more I think about it, the more like the change. I have full ry'gorr and easily the shards to buy the set and adorns and then some for my only lvl 90 alt, so I'm not directly benefitting much from it. But I'm eagerly awaiting if the change makes it so, that instead of 99% of groups being gathered are headed to ascent/pools, they're headed to KD or maybe even Drunder instead. And I'm awaiting that some time in a hopefully near future when I'm gathering a group for ToS or ToRZ, it won't take an hour to fill (where currently on my server you'll get a group for ascent going in a matter of few minutes). Sure, it won't benefit hardcore players/raiders, but it won't hurt them either.

feldon30

10-07-2011, 04:53 AM

<cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor to DO those zones is nonsense.</blockquote>I think you meant to say:getting shards through loads of runs through zones in order to buy armor is the foundation of all MMOs including EverQuest and EverQuest II.</blockquote>Not really shards in eq2 were first introduced to allow players doing zones to buy items that had horrible drop rates on. It turned into a shard grind.</blockquote>Incorrect. The Shadow Odyssey introduced shards to buy your sets of Tier 1 and Tier 2 heroic armor. Tier 1 was pretty good. Tier 2 had slightly better stats and Crit Mit. There was no other way to get the 6 heroic armor pieces other than shard quests. 38 shards isn't that much though. Of course grey shard runs made this happen super fast.They didn't introduce an NPC to buy fabled heroic drops until like 6 months later.Sentinel's Fate mixed and matched shards for certain armor slots, and then put in dungeon drops so you didn't really need shards. Most people I know did not mess with much of the shard armor/items because the costs were ridiculous, like 75 shards for 1 piece of armor.Velious should have copied the TSO armor numbers. The Thurgadin set would be 38 shards. The Ry'Gorr set would be 112 shards.The problem with making armor a "faction grind" is the Token of Loyalty. My shiny new Beastlord will login on day 1 with +50k faction with Ry'Gorr because of that token.Can I say I'm really shocked you want solo quests to give heroic rewards. Because Ry'Gorr armor no longer requires stepping in a dungeon -- just lots of plat. <cite>Sinn wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have a few lvl 90/300 toons. For the most part I solo'd them to where they are. These days, getting in a group requires crit mit. Its a de facto standard for group leaders to ask what you have before an invite. I can get my toons to around 120% or so, soloing, buying a few yellow adorns etc., but 120% doesn't get you into groups.</blockquote>You have not needed Crit Mit to do Fortress Spire or Iceshard Keep for over a month now. Also you never needed more than about 80% Crit Mit to do Pools. Probably less. PQ gear -> Forgotten Pools. <cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>No offense, but this post illustrates exactly why further changes are needed. You've only just started making in roads into spire. Where the first breastplates drop. New content is inbound very soon.</blockquote>February is very soon?Here's another thing to think about that nobody has mentioned. I was planning to make Design Your Own Dungeons planned around a range of difficulties from ToFS to Ascent to Iceshard Keep. With this change, I guess all DYOD need to be designed on the basis that the BASIC armor is Ry'Gorr?

feldon30

10-07-2011, 05:06 AM

<cite>Lolkatt@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>Part of me wonders if they are doing this to move people into Drunder and EoW zones, to go along with their new philosophy of no major expacs w/ new content, just a rolling series of updates that slowly release content on an ongoing basis. In this new model, how do you signal that its time to move on? This change seems like this kind of signal... </blockquote>This transition would have happened naturally if Drunder and EoW weren't heavily scripted with huge gear checks. They are basically six person raids. Believe it or not, some people like group zones where you don't have to pay undivided attention. Some of us like having a Deep Forge or Sanctum of Scaleborn like zone.They could have lowered shard costs, increased gem drop rates in Kael contested, and nerfed Drunder 1 more and people would go there of their own accord, without needing to be forced there. <cite>Whiplash@Splitpaw wrote:</cite><blockquote>Just giving people access to Rhy'gorr doesn't mean that they will be able to do Drunder / EoW instances. They require more co-ordination than earlier zones and not everyone is able / willing / wanting to do harder instances.This change will make the first 6 zones pointless as they won't drop shards or gear upgrades worth getting. IK will become the entry zone and Temple / Throne will still be a challenge for many. To me it is giving "casuals" just 1 zone to run rather than the 7 that they have now.</blockquote>That's the best summary of the situation I've seen yet.

Cratoh

10-07-2011, 07:27 AM

The best summary you've seen?It makes no sense. 7 zones down to 1? That's just plain false. It's possibly losing 6 zones, 5 of which people hate running anyways - pools, all 3 tofs and spire - and adding x2 tofs, all 3 kd, all 3 drunder and via those zones vuulx2, EoW and ez mode x 4 raids.The seemingly irrational opposition to this change leaves me scratching my heads and wondering if it is mainly SLR raid guild members that are behind the opposition as this could, and will enable more casual players to obtain those items themselves without having to hand 400 - 2000p over to bored hardcore raidguild farmers.

feldon30

10-07-2011, 07:31 AM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>The best summary you've seen?It makes no sense. 7 zones down to 1? That's just plain false. It's possibly losing 6 zones, 5 of which people hate running anyways - pools, all 3 tofs and spire - and adding x2 tofs, all 3 kd, all 3 drunder and via those zones vuulx2, EoW and ez mode x 4 raids.The seemingly irrational opposition to this change leaves me scratching my heads and wondering if it is mainly SLR raid guild members that are behind the opposition as this could, and will enable more casual players to obtain those items themselves without having to hand 400 - 2000p over to bored hardcore raidguild farmers.</blockquote>These changes squeeze casual players from both ends.Nobody will want to do ToFS 1-3, Pools, Ascent, or Spire because shards are now worthless.But casuals aren't going to get anywhere in Drunder or EoW no matter how much Ry'Gorr armor you give them. Drunder and EoW are scripted 6-person raids.Most of the people succeeding in Drunder or EoW are in Ry'Gorr gear with a smattering of EM x4 raid gear plus ToFS x2 jewelry.What group players do you know that are suddenly going to succeed in Vuul, Drunder 1-3, EoW, and EM x4 raids just because they get Ry'Gorr gear?Yeah I think it's an apt summary to say that "most" group players without access to raid gear or guild groups who are organized enough to succeed in Drunder are going to be reduced to just 1 dungeon -- Iceshard Keep.If you thought SLR was bad before, wait til after this change when people can't get groups in the dungeons they know, they'll try and fail in Drunder, and then end up buying all kinds of jewelry, cloaks, weapons, and armor from there. How many Drunder armor pieces still haven't been Discovered on each server?By the way, I'm not in a raid guild.

Cratoh

10-07-2011, 07:40 AM

Except this just completely isn't true.People are assuming that because a player is casual they don;t know how to play their character which is biased at best ignorant at worst. Dungeon finder set to random will plonk a level 90 in full rygorr in anything from Erudin Library to Drunder 3. This change is to ensure casuals can actually use the dungeon finder. What is so hard to grasp? Also - you might not be in a raid guild but surely you can see that the way things are at the moment is hardly any different anyway? People harvest/farm and buy plat via 2ndry sites or SC gifting and outright buy raid gear. Instead they will maybe buy 2 gems to get 4 rygorr pieces then go play themselves.'Casuals aren't going to get anywhere in drunder' is a ridiculous standpoint. Once again presuming that all casual players are noobs that can't play their class.Being confined to one dungeon is an absolute fallacy.

Voltana

10-07-2011, 07:42 AM

From my guild's point of view, we are pretty bitter about these proposed changes. We aren't a raid guild, and we've geared to the level of Ry'Gorr by running the instances and 'progressing' the armour.Ok, I understand the issue of Thurgadin armour not being used because of the shard costs. But, rather than remove the necessity to run DoV instances (ie, the need for shards), how about making only the Thurgadin armour shardless?This would still allow a solid, purchasable DoV 'entry' level armour, but still push people to run DoV instances for the shards needed to Progress their armour to Ry'Gorr.As it stands, my guildies are all asking what was the point of the last 8 months?! The general feeling is of betrayal after putting effort into obtaining the shards to get the Ry'Gorr to then progress to harder dungeons. With these changes, you could effectively buy your Ry'Gorr armour from the broker...that's not progression imo.

Cratoh

10-07-2011, 07:45 AM

Did you not notice or comment on the forums when shard costs were cut from 40 to 20? The point of the last 8 months? Playing a game with friends and doing the content.This is just going to open more content for more people on more characters.

Daggster

10-07-2011, 08:05 AM

<cite>Voltana wrote:</cite><blockquote>From my guild's point of view, we are pretty bitter about these proposed changes. We aren't a raid guild, and we've geared to the level of Ry'Gorr by running the instances and 'progressing' the armour.Ok, I understand the issue of Thurgadin armour not being used because of the shard costs. But, rather than remove the necessity to run DoV instances (ie, the need for shards), how about making only the Thurgadin armour shardless?This would still allow a solid, purchasable DoV 'entry' level armour, but still push people to run DoV instances for the shards needed to Progress their armour to Ry'Gorr.As it stands, my guildies are all asking what was the point of the last 8 months?! The general feeling is of betrayal after putting effort into obtaining the shards to get the Ry'Gorr to then progress to harder dungeons. With these changes, you could effectively buy your Ry'Gorr armour from the broker...that's not progression imo.</blockquote>So you're admitting that you didn't enjoy the game for the last 8 months and hated the shard-grind, but everyone should need to do it also, because you did it? Why are you still playing, if you feel the last 8 months playing the game were a waste?Edit: besides, chances are, the ppl that possibly get access to Ry'Gorr gear because of this change (at least the pieces that require the cheaper gems) still have wrist/finger/cloak/BP/ears upgrades waiting for them in at least the rime zones and that should be reason to run the zones. Going back there for the umpteenth time to grind shards is a poor and boring reason to run the zones, there's no anticipation of "Will I get it this time?" because you already have better gear than that zone provides, you're there just for the shards. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Koleg

10-07-2011, 10:53 AM

The main issue, from what I see people discussing, is that players which were in full Ry'Gorr + x2 Jewelery do not want players which previously didn't have that gear level to waterdown or infiltrate their groups or zones. It seems like tier class warfare between the Haves and Have-Nots is abundant. Those of us/you who put in the effort to gear in full Ry'Gorr and those of you/us that did not. The simple fact that 8 months into the expantion is anyone who wanted to be geared in full Ry'Gorr could have been already. This change only brings those of you/us who either couldn't or wouldn't gear up to the level of those who could/did. The gear is NOT the issue here, just as the CM was never the issue when removed from heroic dungeons. The issue is the designed progression. If the zones allowed players to progress in a linear fashion then anyone who already geared into Ry'Gorr would have been OUT of the zones which this change to gear will bring people witout Ry'Gorr UP to. If you geared into Ry'Gorr months ago and didn't SLR x4 upgrades then your STUCK in Kael 1, 2 and 1/2 of 3. People in pure Ry'Gorr have a pretty difficult time in Drunder and EOW so they are FORCED into Kael untill they SLR enough to move forward.Now with the DF in place and If/When the Ry'Gorr armor becomes standard then I think you'll see the Drunder and EOW content be addressed as it should have been long ago. The top tier heroic content (Drunder) is undoable by second-to-top-geared heroic players (Kael). This is why there is a bottleneck in effect. Who cares if those formerly non-Ry'Gorr players stuck in Rime 1 & 2 can now move to Kael 1 & 2. The issue is that those players previously geared in Ry'Gorr that were formerly stuck in Kael 1 & 2 CANNOT move forward to Drunder 1 & 2. So the gene pool in Kael 1 & 2 will be a little watered down now with L2PNoobs that UberIhaveRy'GorrGears don't want to play with.Wait a week .. it will change, Drunder I mean.

feldon30

10-07-2011, 11:18 AM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>People are assuming that because a player is casual they don;t know how to play their character which is biased at best ignorant at worst. </blockquote>I'm probably gonna regret this but... Before people get all offended by my term "casual" and use it to divide people, I personally feel that casual players are what keeps EQ2 in business. They're the bulk of the population. I think if you're casual, there are any number of things you might do, but I don't think you:<ul><li>grind dungeons on XP weekends to get to 300 AAs</li><li>roll alt characters just to fill a raid slot</li><li>betray alignments (and then back) just to pick a certain deity that increases your DPS by 1% (as an example)</li><li>find the shortest route to the best possible rewards and skip other routes</li><li>run ACT, check your parses, and experiment with different casting orders to improve DPS, healing, etc.</li><li>consult the other EQ2 forum for advice on best gear, AA setups, etc.</li><li>fully adorn all your gear with suitable (if expensive) adornments to maximize DPS, healing, tanking, etc.</li><li>farm certain heroic or raid zones just for the plat to buy adornments, gear, etc.</li><li>don't consider your character "complete" until you have X items from X zones or a full set of gear from X</li><li>have a checklist of items that you are working towards getting on your character</li></ul>If you do those things, great, but does the word "casual" really apply anymore?It's a game, and we're here to have fun. Some people want to do measurably and demonstrably well. Some people just want to explore and have a good time. Both are perfectly valid playstyles.Let's put it this way: If you sometimes ask yourself if EQ2 is a part-time job vs. a game, you've probably crossed the line from casual into hardcore.I talk to people all the time who have "hardcore" characters but they also keep characters that don't have all that pressure to succeed, to gear up, to excel. They play those other characters just for fun. I just think pretending there's no difference is where things get confusing. <cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>Did you not notice or comment on the forums when shard costs were cut from 40 to 20?</blockquote>I sure didn't. And before making shards worthless, I might have lowered the price more, to say 8-12 shards per piece.

feldon30

10-07-2011, 11:20 AM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main issue, from what I see people discussing, is that players which were in full Ry'Gorr + x2 Jewelery do not want players which previously didn't have that gear level to waterdown or infiltrate their groups or zones. The gear is NOT the issue here, just as the CM was never the issue when removed from heroic dungeons.</blockquote>I couldn't disagree more. Yes, getting all those shards appears to have been wasted effort.My main ranger has full Ry'Gorr. My monk has 3 pieces. My conjuror and dirge are all waiting in the wings for shards and gems.Yet I am against this change.I was also puzzled by removing Crit Mit. Most players already had more than enough Crit Mit to run all the dungeons that CM was removed from. It was a band-aid fix because players who didn't know any better were sending tons of /feedback saying "I can't do dungeon X because I don't have CM" when that was never true.I've never heard of an MMO that, within 6 months of an expansion, rules that half of that content is now irrelevant. Yet here we are.

ObsidianNightmare

10-07-2011, 11:27 AM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main issue, from what I see people discussing, is that players which were in full Ry'Gorr + x2 Jewelery do not want players which previously didn't have that gear level to waterdown or infiltrate their groups or zones. It seems like tier class warfare between the Haves and Have-Nots is abundant. Those of us/you who put in the effort to gear in full Ry'Gorr and those of you/us that did not. The simple fact that 8 months into the expantion is anyone who wanted to be geared in full Ry'Gorr could have been already. This change only brings those of you/us who either couldn't or wouldn't gear up to the level of those who could/did. LOL!! This phrasology is dead wrong. It's irrevelant to the issue and most definitely NOT the MAIN reason. People want to gripe about unskilled players getting into zones also know full well regardless of what gear is on someone (yes, even plat bought raid gear) they will be terrible at their class if they don't try. People like to say this to stir the population to try harder. Get your head out of Politico in into the relavance of these changes as they affect the Player Base of EQ2. In fact that phrasology doesn't even apply to the current economic issues in the US and is a rediculous vote-grab in desparate times for the repubs. What you don't seem to grasp is that EVERY expansion has seen the top end heroic dungeon(s) nerfed and sometimes nerfed again before the next expac is on the horizon. It brings those not up to speed the ability to get up to speed and have access to gear that will help them through leveling. Leveling however is not the case for new content but this stuff has been out and is due for nerfage by the mere passage of time. It's "opposite of blow" but that's the history of this and other MMOs. I don't agree with it and many dont but try to stop SOE from making a change, putting it on "test" and putting it out anyway regardless of feedback.Your second and third paragraphs are more on target.The gear is NOT the issue here, just as the CM was never the issue when removed from heroic dungeons. The issue is the designed progression. If the zones allowed players to progress in a linear fashion then anyone who already geared into Ry'Gorr would have been OUT of the zones which this change to gear will bring people witout Ry'Gorr UP to. If you geared into Ry'Gorr months ago and didn't SLR x4 upgrades then your STUCK in Kael 1, 2 and 1/2 of 3. People in pure Ry'Gorr have a pretty difficult time in Drunder and EOW so they are FORCED into Kael untill they SLR enough to move forward.Now with the DF in place and If/When the Ry'Gorr armor becomes standard then I think you'll see the Drunder and EOW content be addressed as it should have been long ago. The top tier heroic content (Drunder) is undoable by second-to-top-geared heroic players (Kael). This is why there is a bottleneck in effect. Who cares if those formerly non-Ry'Gorr players stuck in Rime 1 & 2 can now move to Kael 1 & 2. The issue is that those players previously geared in Ry'Gorr that were formerly stuck in Kael 1 & 2 CANNOT move forward to Drunder 1 & 2. So the gene pool in Kael 1 & 2 will be a little watered down now with L2PNoobs that UberIhaveRy'GorrGears don't want to play with.Wait a week .. it will change, Drunder I mean.</blockquote>

RedBaron

10-07-2011, 11:29 AM

most of us are casual players, any option that makes it easier to get good armour is welcomed in my book..As was the introduction of the 1-90 solo timeline, EQ1 was a pain in the a%s trying to find groups..

gatrm

10-07-2011, 11:32 AM

Personally, I think the whole shard experiment should just be scrapped and they should go back to having gear drop from mobs. The Rygorr stuff can be added to the loot tables for the boss mobs in each zone. It gives people a reason to run the zones, because they want the armor that drops and you aren't always grinding the same zone over and over to accumulate shards. The Thurgadin stuff was always pointless to get, so maybe that could be still purchaseable- or perhaps it could somehow be tied into pq gear via a tradeup, so you have to have the current best PQ item in that slot, then using the PQ item and some coin, you can get the item, as long as you have enough faction.Running instances was more fun when you thought there would be something you wanted out of the chest that dropped after killing a named mob. Running instances since TSO introduced shards feels more like going to work.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 11:33 AM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main phrasology ...</blockquote></blockquote>I THINK we're saying the same thing ... I can't do big words though.

ObsidianNightmare

10-07-2011, 11:41 AM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main phrasology ...</blockquote></blockquote>I THINK we're saying the same thing ... I can't do big words though.</blockquote>No we're not. You're saying the main issue is "Class Warfare" where it is not. The main problems in feedback are progression of zones, itemization as it applies to progression, actual design and cost to the player of the shard systems and inconsistant thought process through out all of DoV from production and development. It has very very little to do with who can play well and who can not and the right to gear that people have because that arguement is irrevalant with the purchase of loot rights.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 11:42 AM

<cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main issue, from what I see people discussing, is that players which were in full Ry'Gorr + x2 Jewelery do not want players which previously didn't have that gear level to waterdown or infiltrate their groups or zones. The gear is NOT the issue here, just as the CM was never the issue when removed from heroic dungeons.</blockquote>I couldn't disagree more. Yes, getting all those shards appears to have been wasted effort.My main ranger has full Ry'Gorr. My monk has 3 pieces. My conjuror and dirge are all waiting in the wings for shards and gems.Yet I am against this change.I was also puzzled by removing Crit Mit. Most players already had more than enough Crit Mit to run all the dungeons that CM was removed from. It was a band-aid fix because players who didn't know any better were sending tons of /feedback saying "I can't do dungeon X because I don't have CM" when that was never true.I've never heard of an MMO that, within 6 months of an expansion, rules that half of that content is now irrelevant. Yet here we are.</blockquote>IF not .. then WHY do you care that another player is geting an opportunity to upgrade their gear?Becasue you worked harder than they have to now? ... but only half as hard as those who got Ry'Gorr at launch shard prices!By the process of progression ALL past effort is wasted in future endevors ... If you think your "wasting" your time then why do it? There are tons and tons of things in the game which change with time negating those who efforted "first". Is their time wasted as well... The 3 or 4 months someone spends leveling their first toon certainly seems wasted when they can Power Level a Beastlord in 3 to 4 hours doesn't it? Unless, of course, you enjoy it both ways.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 11:46 AM

ObsidianNightmare

10-07-2011, 12:00 PM

Koleg

10-07-2011, 12:17 PM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main phrasology ...</blockquote></blockquote>I THINK we're saying the same thing ... I can't do big words though.</blockquote>No we're not. You're saying the main issue is "Class Warfare" where it is not. The main problems in feedback are progression of zones, itemization as it applies to progression, actual design and cost to the player of the shard systems and inconsistant thought process through out all of DoV from production and development. It has very very little to do with who can play well and who can not and the right to gear that people have because that arguement is irrevalant with the purchase of loot rights.</blockquote>HA! ... and how exactly does Zone Progression have ANYTHING to do with the cost of Shard Armor?I don't think your being honest with me, them or yourself. I've read all the posts and is boils down to vanity, but it is becasue you can't go to Drunder due to itemization, I agree with that. If the old Ry'Gorr players were in Drunder then they wouldn't be so hurt now!</blockquote>Vanity eh? I can go to any zone I want on many toons and be quite successful. My raid experience is top end and extensive so I have no issue going and getting whatever gear I want. You have no idea who I am and basing my opinion off previous posts is also irrevalant and dumb and likely from 5 years ago when I was in VERY different place playstyle wize in this game. Shards are a zone progression roadblock just as much as the bad decisions that have been made with zone progression by the makers of this game. I see them fixing it and frankly.. As I've stated before, It's not much of an issue for me after reading and thinking it through and will allow more fun to be had by more people IMHO. At least some of the population will have easy access to gear for their 20th alt they didn't want to spend shards on.</blockquote>I realize you can ... but why Gate others and expect/demand they walk up hill both ways in the snow? Thats all I'm saying and again .. I think we are saying the same thing, at least now we are.I also see them (SOE) fixing the zone progression as well. I also think that with the base raised; meaning more players with Ry'Gorr having less of a reason to run Ascent 5 times a week and moving into Kael 2 & 3; will only expidite that with the Dev team. The Dev team doesn't always listen accutely to the players at the top end, but when they are flooded with QQ from the Base they will finially respond. IMO.

Lera

10-07-2011, 12:27 PM

<cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>The seemingly irrational opposition to this change leaves me scratching my heads and wondering if it is mainly SLR raid guild members that are behind the opposition as this could, and will enable more casual players to obtain those items themselves without having to hand 400 - 2000p over to bored hardcore raidguild farmers.</blockquote>There's nothing irrational about wanting SOE to quit adding easy buttons to the game. If the Ry'gorr armour is meant to be the best heroic set, players should have to work to get it. 120 shards isn't that hard to get - if all you do is solo, that's four months just from the solo shard quest, or one piece about every three weeks. Add in a run or two through TOFS or Pools each week, especially on Daily Double days, and you can get one piece about every two weeks.Now, all you have to do is buy the gems, which you can get for somewhere around 400-500 plat. These days, that's not really a lot anymore.If the reason for this is that SOE want people to catch up and all be ready for the next round of dungeons, that's also bad. New players shouldn't expect to be running current content within a month or two, skipping over most of everything else, although that's where the progression is now - which means new people are more likely to buy their Ry'gorr armour, run through the latest dungeons in a couple months, and then quit until the next expansion, instead of playing for a couple years going through all the expansions. There's so much to do in EQ2, but it seems like people only focus on the latest stuff, and SOE encourage this by making it so darn easy to get to 90 now.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 12:53 PM

<cite>Lera@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cratoh wrote:</cite><blockquote>The seemingly irrational opposition to this change leaves me scratching my heads and wondering if it is mainly SLR raid guild members that are behind the opposition as this could, and will enable more casual players to obtain those items themselves without having to hand 400 - 2000p over to bored hardcore raidguild farmers.</blockquote>There's nothing irrational about wanting SOE to quit adding easy buttons to the game. If the Ry'gorr armour is meant to be the best heroic set, players should have to work to get it. 120 shards isn't that hard to get - if all you do is solo, that's four months just from the solo shard quest, or one piece about every three weeks. Add in a run or two through TOFS or Pools each week, especially on Daily Double days, and you can get one piece about every two weeks.Now, all you have to do is buy the gems, which you can get for somewhere around 400-500 plat. These days, that's not really a lot anymore.If the reason for this is that SOE want people to catch up and all be ready for the next round of dungeons, that's also bad. New players shouldn't expect to be running current content within a month or two, skipping over most of everything else, although that's where the progression is now - which means new people are more likely to buy their Ry'gorr armour, run through the latest dungeons in a couple months, and then quit until the next expansion, instead of playing for a couple years going through all the expansions. There's so much to do in EQ2, but it seems like people only focus on the latest stuff, and SOE encourage this by making it so darn easy to get to 90 now.</blockquote>You suppose people should be happy with an iPhone 2 when an iPhone 4 is available?The game is TOP heavy, you either play there or you play by yourself. The only people, IMO, not at cap are ::<ul><li>Veterans that want to run progression</li><li>New players which are experiencing the game for the first time (and finding it a ghost town) and may or may not be around for more than a few months.</li><li>Well .. thats about it .. </li></ul>Players "Feel" locked out of progression, part of that was the misunderstood Crit Mit which was removed (for no reason), part of that is the misunderstood Gear Itemization (where Ry'Gorr is thought to be Uber compared to PQ gear, but it is not), but most of it is Zone Progression flow and heroic geared casuals are hitting a wall after Kael 1. It has nothing to do with an "Easy button" or SLR, it has to do with design, but that will be addressed soon enough.Yes, DOV part2 will be out and the instances in it will hopefully be PROGRESSION, but from where ... If now its is tofs>rime>kael>drunder then when WW1 and WW2 come out I hope they fall in line after Drunder not before it. However, if there is only 5% of the base able to clear Drunder then who the Hell is going to use the DOV part2 content? There are "easy buttons" and there are Developers that know what they are doing, at this point in DOV part1 I'm leaning towards support of the player base over the Devs who thought at DOV launch the base would be further through the progression than they are now, but aren't.

ObsidianNightmare

10-07-2011, 01:39 PM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The main phrasology ...</blockquote></blockquote>I THINK we're saying the same thing ... I can't do big words though.</blockquote>No we're not. You're saying the main issue is "Class Warfare" where it is not. The main problems in feedback are progression of zones, itemization as it applies to progression, actual design and cost to the player of the shard systems and inconsistant thought process through out all of DoV from production and development. It has very very little to do with who can play well and who can not and the right to gear that people have because that arguement is irrevalant with the purchase of loot rights.</blockquote>HA! ... and how exactly does Zone Progression have ANYTHING to do with the cost of Shard Armor?I don't think your being honest with me, them or yourself. I've read all the posts and is boils down to vanity, but it is becasue you can't go to Drunder due to itemization, I agree with that. If the old Ry'Gorr players were in Drunder then they wouldn't be so hurt now!</blockquote>Vanity eh? I can go to any zone I want on many toons and be quite successful. My raid experience is top end and extensive so I have no issue going and getting whatever gear I want. You have no idea who I am and basing my opinion off previous posts is also irrevalant and dumb and likely from 5 years ago when I was in VERY different place playstyle wize in this game. Shards are a zone progression roadblock just as much as the bad decisions that have been made with zone progression by the makers of this game. I see them fixing it and frankly.. As I've stated before, It's not much of an issue for me after reading and thinking it through and will allow more fun to be had by more people IMHO. At least some of the population will have easy access to gear for their 20th alt they didn't want to spend shards on.</blockquote>I realize you can ... but why Gate others and expect/demand they walk up hill both ways in the snow? Thats all I'm saying and again .. I think we are saying the same thing, at least now we are.I also see them (SOE) fixing the zone progression as well. I also think that with the base raised; meaning more players with Ry'Gorr having less of a reason to run Ascent 5 times a week and moving into Kael 2 & 3; will only expidite that with the Dev team. The Dev team doesn't always listen accutely to the players at the top end, but when they are flooded with QQ from the Base they will finially respond. IMO.</blockquote>On some points we are yes. But not on your "class warfare point. However I did ask a question way back a page or two ago and you responded with why should I care and went on a tear about something that had nothing to do with the simple question I asked. I even explained why I cared. I'll even add that I like to stockpile shards in the event they add Cool Appearance Item or Mount #2342908347 because I absolutely love when things like that are avaialble without having to purchase with IRL monies.So please, if someone can answer whether or not they are removing shard drops from the original Dov End Mob/Missions/Key Chests I would appreciate it. Someone mentioned it way back in passing in this thread or the other one and I would like a clarification.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 02:06 PM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>On some points we are yes. But not on your "class warfare point. However I did ask a question way back a page or two ago and you responded with why should I care and went on a tear about something that had nothing to do with the simple question I asked. I even explained why I cared. I'll even add that I like to stockpile shards in the event they add Cool Appearance Item or Mount #2342908347 because I absolutely love when things like that are avaialble without having to purchase with IRL monies.So please, if someone can answer whether or not they are removing shard drops from the original Dov End Mob/Missions/Key Chests I would appreciate it. Someone mentioned it way back in passing in this thread or the other one and I would like a clarification.</blockquote>Off Topic:I do not know if shard drops in DOV instances are being removed with the removal of the Shard component of the Faction armor from Thurgadin or Ry'Gorr. The test patch notes did not say they were. One person in a huge QQ thread mentioned it in passing without revealing a source. We ASSUME at this point that white shards will still be used to buy yellow adornments and those shards would require a source, such as now from DOV instances.At this point, if I wanted to know, I would roll a tune on test and check it out, but I gave up on test a while ago for reasons surrounding itemization testing.

Cratoh

10-07-2011, 02:45 PM

To Feldon -My and yours opinion of what casual vs hardcore is differs compeltely. I base mine on time to play, you base your's on playstyle in game so there is some confusion at least cleared up.My casual players - 5 or 6 hours a week - maybe 12 whatever, they ar...Oh I cant be bothered. I see this change as a very needed help to get more players into the perceived endgame, to open up drunder etc to a wider audience, and to tag and hold new subs, existing subs, and increasiningly busy veteran players.I do not see for a second what hardship it would mean to anyone at ALL who is already in raid gear, drunder gear, rygorr gear w/e. I myself have 5 raid geared toons, about 10 rygorr/kd drop and a smattering of SF geared - I'm not fussed that a player who joined 2 months ago can level up super fast - get rygorr armor and join me in KD/Drunder w/e.

Anklesteiner

10-07-2011, 03:16 PM

I was asked in this thread why I think removing the shards from Thurgadin and Ry'Gorr armor is a bad idea. It's simple - I'm not a lazy player. The basic concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is progression. You make progression the more you play and the more you dedicate your time to the game. The simple concept of "grinding" to obtain certain items that can later be exchanged for better items is one of the basic fundamentals of a MMO. More and more the notion of progression is being removed from EQ2 to supplement the growing casual player fanbase that exists on EQ2X - and as we all know the casual player is a person who does not want to put any real work in into progressing their characters and would rather have everything handed to them.I ran the easier velious instances for months in order to accumulate enough shards to outfit my characters with decent enough gear in order to progress into harder content. But, the one thing that running the easier velious group instances over and over and over again does for everyone, is that it gives them the basic understanding of what to expect from the next set of group instances. By running the easy velious group instances over and over again it made me a competent player for velious content. I was able to deduce what exactly I needed to work on, and what exactly I needed to obtain for my characters in order to be able to play them better, so I can properly progress into the other content. Now, players can just bypass this step, go into the harder dungeons without any real grasp of what the entirety of the DoV expansion in terms of mobs and dungeons entails and I fear this is going to be a disaster.But my other problem is that with this change, SOE is seemingly hellbent on funneling all people into the Drunder and Kael zones. Because, if this change is allowed to go live, then what exactly would be the point in running any of the TOFS instances, Ascent, Pools, Fortress Spire, and Crystal Caverns anymore? The entire point of doing those zones was to obtain shards in order to purchase/craft better gear that would allow your character to progress into the Kael zones and do more challenging content. But since shards are no longer needed, there is absolutely no point in running any of the zones I listed anymore. This expansions is only 7 1/2 months old and already SOE is rendering a good chunk of its content obsolete. Why? Why is SOE making this change, and rendering some of the DoV content obsolete already? It doesn't make any sense.People are free to think whatever they want. But I see more people agreeing with my sentiments than those who disagree.

Ahlana

10-07-2011, 03:18 PM

Why don't they make it like the sets in say EoF... Thurg pieces drop in the easier dungeons on a smart loot system like in the past... Rygorr on the slightly harder dungeons.You still have progression, no shards ect...

Lempo

10-07-2011, 04:44 PM

<cite>Ahlana wrote:</cite><blockquote>Why don't they make it like the sets in say EoF... Thurg pieces drop in the easier dungeons on a smart loot system like in the past... Rygorr on the slightly harder dungeons.You still have progression, no shards ect...</blockquote>That wouldn't be bad the problem is the people they are making this appeasement effort towards have no desire to earn it in the first place, they want instant gratification.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 05:29 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>I was asked in this thread why I think removing the shards from Thurgadin and Ry'Gorr armor is a bad idea. It's simple - I'm not a lazy player. The basic concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is progression. You make progression the more you play and the more you dedicate your time to the game. The simple concept of "grinding" to obtain certain items that can later be exchanged for better items is one of the basic fundamentals of a MMO. More and more the notion of progression is being removed from EQ2 to supplement the growing casual player fanbase that exists on EQ2X - and as we all know the casual player is a person who does not want to put any real work in into progressing their characters and would rather have everything handed to them.I ran the easier velious instances for months in order to accumulate enough shards to outfit my characters with decent enough gear in order to progress into harder content. But, the one thing that running the easier velious group instances over and over and over again does for everyone, is that it gives them the basic understanding of what to expect from the next set of group instances. By running the easy velious group instances over and over again it made me a competent player for velious content. I was able to deduce what exactly I needed to work on, and what exactly I needed to obtain for my characters in order to be able to play them better, so I can properly progress into the other content. Now, players can just bypass this step, go into the harder dungeons without any real grasp of what the entirety of the DoV expansion in terms of mobs and dungeons entails and I fear this is going to be a disaster.But my other problem is that with this change, SOE is seemingly hellbent on funneling all people into the Drunder and Kael zones. Because, if this change is allowed to go live, then what exactly would be the point in running any of the TOFS instances, Ascent, Pools, Fortress Spire, and Crystal Caverns anymore? The entire point of doing those zones was to obtain shards in order to purchase/craft better gear that would allow your character to progress into the Kael zones and do more challenging content. But since shards are no longer needed, there is absolutely no point in running any of the zones I listed anymore. This expansions is only 7 1/2 months old and already SOE is rendering a good chunk of its content obsolete. Why? Why is SOE making this change, and rendering some of the DoV content obsolete already? It doesn't make any sense.People are free to think whatever they want. But I see more people agreeing with my sentiments than those who disagree.</blockquote>First off .. thank you for an honest answer .. and although I do respect your opinion I have to point out that this is just the attitude I was talking about. Just becasue you played within the games rule set at the time where Ry'Gorr armor cost 120 shards, you Feel that everyone from that point forward should have to do the same thing. I am guessing that you didn't feel the same way when shard costs dropped from 240 to 120 though which, to me, seems a bit hypocritical. According to you; players that are labeled as Lazy (unskilled) shouldn't be given everything ... I agree with that 100%. What I do not agree with is the idea that Ry'Gorr is everything. It very well might be everything to the players who don't have it, but to players that do have it or have had it and since tossed it becasue they progressed it is literally nothing to them.I am of the opinion that of the zone you mentioned (TOFS instances, Ascent, Pools, Fortress Spire, and Crystal Caverns) they will be run more than before with this change. The lazy (unskilled) players are not going to RUN right up to Drunder and knock on the door which drops the loot that you want. They are going to run the zones which they can actually be lazy (unskilled) in and still sucede in doing. If, as you put it, those lazy players were already running those zones (TOFS instances, Ascent, Pools, Fortress Spire, and Crystal Caverns) they would have long ago had Ry'Gorr upgrades. Kael 1-3 & Drunder 1-3 are not contested dungeons, they are instances. You will most likely never see this players unless they win an SLR auction and jump in your raid to loot an item.OMG ... SOE wants the majority of the player base to be able to use the Drunder (or Kael) content, the Horror!!! SOE invested dollars in that content, Dev's invested time, and some might suggest they are emontionally invested as well, and yet those zones go mostly unsued. Sure there are a few x4 raiders picking up some tosf x2 upgrades or some decicated heroic groups in there working progression, but it is primarily going unused. There is no ROI in Drunder and EOW/POW for that matter and for the vast majority of the player base those zones don't even exist. SOE is 4 1/2 months away from dropping more new content on us. We all fully expect Western Wastes with a couple new Heroic series (6-9 zones) and a couple new Raids (x2, x4 EM/HM). We also expect them to be in Progression to what we have now ... and right now that means harder than Heroic Drunder 3 and harder than ToRZ x4 [Challenge], ignoring POW x4 [challenge].So, where do you think those, as you call them, LAZY players, belong in that content?? I don't know which is worst .. The Dev's having too much Pride to see they made illusionary progressions and dismissing the players that try and try and try to tell them ... or the players that have so much vanity that they can only measure their own worth against the players which they look down on and consider "lazy".

Anklesteiner

10-07-2011, 06:22 PM

Where have I ever used the terminology of "lazy" anywhere in any of my posts in this thread? I haven't. I referred to myself as an unlazy player because the mindset you were presenting was that of laziness. I, however, was drawing that conclusion based solely on YOU, not on the population of EQ2. That is an incorrect assumption on your part. I'm baffled why you would put words in my mouth, and make things up that I apparently said. Because you are currently making things up, or having problems with your reading comprehension, I'm a little confused as to how to properly to respond to the points that you made, because your long winded tirade delves into ideals and points that I never made and never said. So...I don't know exactly how to respond to you.Would you kindly respond to me in a manner which actually retorts the points that I actually made, instead of going on and on regarding points that I never made, and regarding things that I never said? It would make responding to you a lot easier.

Aerinn

10-07-2011, 06:33 PM

What's wrong with saying people who support the 'free armor' giveaway that others had to EARN are LAZY? I'd say it's the most polite of the possibilities:<ul><li>too snobbish to group (think they are too good for others at their skill/gear level)</li><li>too dim or slow to be capable at their toon</li><li>too unlikeable to group</li><li>too time poor to be playing games in the first place</li><li>too lazy</li></ul>Take your pick, though it's still most likely a combination. If you think the argument of population and time zone hold, then you're definitely whining to the wrong person. I live in Australia and can say that populations are next to nothing during my play times on my server...to that argument holds NO water.Dungeon finder and giving away armor isn't going to make these people any better. As soon as they infest dungeon finder enough in their gifted armor...they'll still be incapable, unlikeable, or lazy. In which case, those who aren't won't group with them and will ONLY use dungeon finder AFTER they've formed an acceptable group.Taking all effort and challenge to get loot from the game, while kicking dirt in the face of those who DO put forth the effort (repeatedly) is the stuff "game closing" announcements are spawned from.Who knows...if EQNext is not wanting to compete with EQ2...maybe this is an intelligent tactic to ensure that competition doesn't exist.

Koleg

10-07-2011, 07:23 PM

<cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote>Where have I ever used the terminology of "lazy" anywhere in any of my posts in this thread? I haven't. I referred to myself as an unlazy player because the mindset you were presenting was that of laziness. I, however, was drawing that conclusion based solely on YOU, not on the population of EQ2. That is an incorrect assumption on your part. I'm baffled why you would put words in my mouth, and make things up that I apparently said. Because you are currently making things up, or having problems with your reading comprehension, I'm a little confused as to how to properly to respond to the points that you made, because your long winded tirade delves into ideals and points that I never made and never said. So...I don't know exactly how to respond to you.Would you kindly respond to me in a manner which actually retorts the points that I actually made, instead of going on and on regarding points that I never made, and regarding things that I never said? It would make responding to you a lot easier.</blockquote><cite>Anklesteiner wrote:</cite><blockquote><snip>... It's simple - I'm not a lazy player. The basic concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is progression..<snip>..</blockquote>When you place yourself in one category, in this case a favorable one, you are inherantly placing other people in another category, in this case a negative one. Saying that you are NOT lazy becasue you have Ry'Gorr armor direcly implies that those whom do not have Ry'Gorr armor ARE lazy. <-- See?I do like the part about Progression as well .. not that I disagree with it .. but in the current game many people are stuck at Drunder ... its true .. really. Many of them consider themselves "Non-Lazy" players and yet they are not progressing. I am not sure how lowering the costs of tier 2 armor is prohibitive to progression, but it seems to be the context in this thread to some degree. Where progression is measured by the amount or quality of loot and not level and difficulty of content. I've never heard in any of my raids when doing farming nights that we ever felt that we made progression. I guess that the toons we asked to betry and were regearing saw some progression. I think the "lazy" people buying our SLR left-overs felt they made progression. I know our guild bank made some progression. But to me .. it is just not progress doing the same old thing again and again and again ...

Anklesteiner

10-07-2011, 08:06 PM

So you lack reading comprehension. Okay, that makes more sense. Because, you seem to have missed the part where I said; "I, however, was drawing that conclusion based solely on YOU, not on the population of EQ2." The presentation of everything you have said in this thread is that of a lazy player, hence why my resolutions on this matter I drew comparison of you and only you, and not of the entirety of the EQ2 population since my responses were in direct responses to you.I've read your replies in this thread, and the inherent mindset I seem to be getting from you is "All MMO players should be equal", which is drastically misguided. Playing a MMO is a all about how much time you are willing to sink into it. The more time you are willing to dedicate to the game the better yourself and your characters will be. This is in direct correlation to the concept of progression - the more time you spend on something the further you progress into it. But, your mindset, at least from what I have been able to gather based on your post is that everyone, from the time they start the game should be on equal ground, and remain on equal ground because of some misconception of "fairness". MMO's are not fair. They are not designed to be fair, nor should they ever be. It's like with everything else in life - there will always be people better than you, and there will always be people worse than you. If you want to get better at something, then you devote time from your life to whatever that might be. In this case - EverQuest 2 - A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.If you remove the concept of progression with Destiny of Velious, and put players into the harder zones without first being able to be competent enough - in both terms of skill and in terms of gear - it's going to be a disaster. The Drunder instances are hard. I've gone in there with extremely well rounded players in hard mode gear and we've wiped several times. I cannot fathom just how much of a disaster going into the Drunder zones will be with people in Ry'Gorr gear, who have little to no experience in the easier instances. This is where the concept of progression is needed. While spending all that accumulating enough shards to obtain comparable gear, the player has a more dynamic, thorough understanding of the DoV content. They learn more comprehensively exactly what to expect from the later zones, as well as what they need to work on in both terms of gear and terms of skill. This simple act of progression will help players better understand, and be more prepared for the later zones in both Kael and Drunder. But now, players can completely bypass having to accumulate shards, and having an understanding of just what to expect from the later, more hard zones, with experience from the easier zones. It's going to be a disaster. You cannot throw people off the deep end and expect them to swim, and that is exactly what SOE intends to do if this change is allowed to go live.Perhaps you are a person that wants equality, or perhaps you are a person that lacks thorough understanding about what a true MMO experience should be. Perhaps the concept of progression is something you wish to completely bypass because of an inept, misguided attitude of "fairness". Or perhaps, since you have said the word a dozen times and falsely claimed I have used it in a manner that dictates opinions regarding a majority of the population of EQ2 - which I clarified wasn't, but you still went on a long winded tirade - perhaps you are the lazy one, and hearing the word is upsetting you. Perhaps when you log into EQ2, you keep hoping for a /command that gives you a full set of easy mode so you don't have to work towards progression. Based on what you have said in this thread, I think those assumptions I am making are probably true.

Lera

10-08-2011, 01:04 AM

<cite>Koleg@Unrest_old wrote:</cite><blockquote>The game is TOP heavy, you either play there or you play by yourself. The only people, IMO, not at cap are ::<ul><li>Veterans that want to run progression</li><li>New players which are experiencing the game for the first time (and finding it a ghost town) and may or may not be around for more than a few months.</li><li>Well .. thats about it .. </li></ul>Players "Feel" locked out of progression, part of that was the misunderstood Crit Mit which was removed (for no reason), part of that is the misunderstood Gear Itemization (where Ry'Gorr is thought to be Uber compared to PQ gear, but it is not), but most of it is Zone Progression flow and heroic geared casuals are hitting a wall after Kael 1. It has nothing to do with an "Easy button" or SLR, it has to do with design, but that will be addressed soon enough.Yes, DOV part2 will be out and the instances in it will hopefully be PROGRESSION, but from where ... If now its is tofs>rime>kael>drunder then when WW1 and WW2 come out I hope they fall in line after Drunder not before it. However, if there is only 5% of the base able to clear Drunder then who the Hell is going to use the DOV part2 content? There are "easy buttons" and there are Developers that know what they are doing, at this point in DOV part1 I'm leaning towards support of the player base over the Devs who thought at DOV launch the base would be further through the progression than they are now, but aren't.</blockquote>All this change does is almost hand people a full set of Ry'gorr armour instead of them making work for it. We're not yet to the point where people can buy a token to allow alts to start at 90, but when one shows up in the next couple years, it won't surprise me one bit.This also isn't good for new people. Why rush people to the end (and get their $15 for a few months or a year) when you can have them run through all the expansions and keep them busy much longer? The progression shouldn't just include Velious, but start with the starting areas and go through all the expansions. Now it's just a rush to 90, and that (along with guildhalls, which are a separate topic) creates the ghost towns that make new people quit.If Drunder is so hard that almost nobody can run it now, then it either needs to be made easier, or people should wait an expansion or two to run it. But the solution isn't to hand people everything they need to run Drunder. The easy button comes when there's no longer any work to get geared up for it.If they want to remove the void shard cost for the level 80 armour, that's different. Those sets are no longer end-game armour, and you're not going to spend a year or two at 80 anymore. But with Ry'gorr still being current, people still need to work for it.

Keowrath

10-08-2011, 10:48 AM

I don't often post, as I see most posts that people make just get swept under the carpet or just plain ignored but if people don't at least attempt to make themselves heard, changes will go through without a second thought.Please do not make this change. Judging by the posts here "MOST" people don't want it save for a few people that have 20 alts or raid everynight. That's your choice guys... I raid 3 nights a week and have a total of 3 characters I play regularly at 90 all geared up through shard armour and then moving into EM gear.I just wish SoE would understand what they are doing to the game. The same thing happened when DoV went live, you are KILLING the older content of the game. It's easy to see a lot of time and effort was put into the previous zones and expansions. SF became absolutely worthless the day DoV went live except for the Epic Repercussions quest. This change is doing exactly the same to the existing Velious.People will no longer run the instances because let's face it, apart from 1 or 2 items, there's nothing really desirable in them. This whole issue stems down to itemization which SoE STILL haven't got right after an entire expansions lifetime. You jumped too far too fast with Velious, Big numbers on gear has thrown the entire game out of whack.I'm another who played EQ for years, tried a few other MMO's and came to EQ2 a little after launch. I can honestly say now that it isn't the game or content that's keeping me playing, it's my friends on the same server.When they decide enough is enough (which at the rate these changes are going it will before the new game update, gamepack, mini expansion or whatever it is) they will leave for something else and groups of people will follow.A LOT of people are getting upset with these changes you keep making. Your community is SHOUTING about these issues daily yet you don't seem to listen, you just implement anyway regardless how bug riddled it is (see the Temple Breastplate... And x2 breastplates still don't fit into the progression path!)Put on test, sure... But acknowledge what people are saying about it. We are the ones that play your game and no disrespect but there are some that know your game better than you yourselves. Listen to feedback and implement accordingly to what is said.Please, Listen to your subscribers and reconsider this change.

isest

10-08-2011, 11:09 AM

<cite>Gninja wrote:</cite><blockquote>The Thurgadin, Rygorr, and Drunder armor sets are direct upgrades to each other. They should scale in difficulty to obtain and that difficulty was off. That was one of the reasons the Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. If its easier to obtain better armor somewhere else then why get that armor to begin with? With these changes the lower tier armors are a bit easier to obtain making the chase be more for the drunder armor sets rather than having to do the shard grind repeataed for each tier.</blockquote>I had to rofl when I read this comment. Gninja, do you not realize by now the reason why folks are not running drunder is not the armor? It is the fact that it requires an optimal group, and if you have a fail group you will fail drunder. I seen folks go in drunder with x2/x4 stuff and still get a good whooping.Folks are not running drunder because it is not fun for most groups unless they are totally uber. I think you guys at soe are missing the reason all together why drunder is not being run.I don't mind the change now it will be easier to get the rest of my alts geared up, but if you honestly thing giving away the armor for nothing is going to make folks run the drunder zones, I think you all are in for a big shock.

gdawg311

10-08-2011, 12:16 PM

anyone know when this is going to hit live? im kind of excited about it tbh

Cratoh

10-08-2011, 12:53 PM

<cite>gdawg311 wrote:</cite><blockquote>anyone know when this is going to hit live? im kind of excited about it tbh</blockquote>Exactly, and thi sis the main sentiment I am seeing on live servers. Which is great. People excited about being able to do all dungeons and and fun doing it. EQ2 is a game, not a job.

Kruschev2086

10-08-2011, 02:33 PM

As I mentioned before, I look forward to making lots of plat making armor for people who didn't do it before it went live. When rygorr was only available from the merchant I refused to buy it knowing other options would appear. Then the recipes started dropping in the Far Seas missions. I spent my time and got the recipe books. Until that time I used rime drops, PQ drops, Kael drops. I survived zones just fine (pre-thunderclap nerf). I started making rygorr pieces as I had the gems. Shards were not much of an issue (healer main after all, when doesn't a pug need a healer?) so kept waiting for citrines and jaundices. Then those started to drop. At the time however, I was pushing 150odd shards, and in most spots had the kael drop. Kael gear with its blue stats made some of the rygorr undesirable. Giving up 5-7% cast speed for a bit more primary stats, some cb/potency per piece? I refused to do it. So it started going to alts. I have since changed mains but that healer is still wearing its instance mix of rime/kael drops with some rygorr thrown in. Did I "suffer"? I suppose. But I knew soe would be making this stuff cheaper and cheaper as time went on. Proven right when it went to 20/25. Proven right again if this goes live. The only thing we as the players can do is how SoE learns a risk/reward curve from this change, and going forward we don't have to spent 8 months waiting for them to correct it.

gdawg311

10-08-2011, 03:42 PM

all gear gets cheaper as time goes on.. it happens every single xpac.. its not a big deal and it actually makes it easier for ppl with lots of alts. and it also makes it easier for people who cant run the zones to get that many shards.. it also makes more people geared which allows for more grouping... more grouping = better... whats the complaint

Jenadara

10-08-2011, 05:20 PM

<cite>isest wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gninja wrote:</cite><blockquote>The Thurgadin, Rygorr, and Drunder armor sets are direct upgrades to each other. They should scale in difficulty to obtain and that difficulty was off. That was one of the reasons the Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. If its easier to obtain better armor somewhere else then why get that armor to begin with? With these changes the lower tier armors are a bit easier to obtain making the chase be more for the drunder armor sets rather than having to do the shard grind repeataed for each tier.</blockquote>It is the fact that it requires an optimal group, and if you have a fail group you will fail drunder. I seen folks go in drunder with x2/x4 stuff and still get a good whooping.Folks are not running drunder because it is not fun for most groups unless they are totally uber. I think you guys at soe are missing the reason all together why drunder is not being run.I don't mind the change now it will be easier to get the rest of my alts geared up, but if you honestly thing giving away the armor for nothing is going to make folks run the drunder zones, I think you all are in for a big shock.</blockquote>Agreed^^ Ever wonder why NO ONE even sees advertising for pick up groups for these zones? Even the drops in there S*CK. It takes so long to finish Spire of Rage, why even bother? Spire of Rage is supposed to be the stepping stone to your Drunder gear. Why is it so hard for Ry'gorr geared people to finish???? HM is easier <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> You see Kael groups advertising all the time! It's VERY easy to get Ry'gorr. They don't need to make it easier to get it. Plus, I agree it will make Great Divide a ghost town and crafters less useful.

Elskidor

10-08-2011, 05:22 PM

<cite>gdawg311 wrote:</cite><blockquote>all gear gets cheaper as time goes on.. it happens every single xpac.. its not a big deal and it actually makes it easier for ppl with lots of alts. and it also makes it easier for people who cant run the zones to get that many shards.. it also makes more people geared which allows for more grouping... more grouping = better... whats the complaint</blockquote>People with lots of alts have nobody to blame but themselves. If they can't handle that many toons they shouldn't have pointlessly rolled them.

isest

10-08-2011, 05:36 PM

<cite>gdawg311 wrote:</cite><blockquote>all gear gets cheaper as time goes on.. it happens every single xpac.. its not a big deal and it actually makes it easier for ppl with lots of alts. and it also makes it easier for people who cant run the zones to get that many shards.. it also makes more people geared which allows for more grouping... more grouping = better... whats the complaint</blockquote>Yes it normaly happens with an xpac wher eyou get 10 levles and new instances to go run and farm new goodies. We are not getting a level raise, were not getting new instances. So why invalidate the ones you have anf force folks into 6 zones, and obsolete the ohter 6 zones?

Hamervelder

10-08-2011, 05:47 PM

<cite>isest wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Gninja wrote:</cite><blockquote>The Thurgadin, Rygorr, and Drunder armor sets are direct upgrades to each other. They should scale in difficulty to obtain and that difficulty was off. That was one of the reasons the Thurgadin armor was rarely purchased. If its easier to obtain better armor somewhere else then why get that armor to begin with? With these changes the lower tier armors are a bit easier to obtain making the chase be more for the drunder armor sets rather than having to do the shard grind repeataed for each tier.</blockquote>I had to rofl when I read this comment. Gninja, do you not realize by now the reason why folks are not running drunder is not the armor? It is the fact that it requires an optimal group, and if you have a fail group you will fail drunder. I seen folks go in drunder with x2/x4 stuff and still get a good whooping.Folks are not running drunder because it is not fun for most groups unless they are totally uber. I think you guys at soe are missing the reason all together why drunder is not being run.I don't mind the change now it will be easier to get the rest of my alts geared up, but if you honestly thing giving away the armor for nothing is going to make folks run the drunder zones, I think you all are in for a big shock.</blockquote>You hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. The Drunder heroic zones are simply too difficult, for being heroic content. Tower of Tactics actually requires more crititical mitigation and crit chance than easy-mode Kraytocs Fortress. That's laughable. The vast majority of the non-raiding community simply don't have the gear or the coordination to survive in Drunder zones. I think we're going to continue to see less and less people running new zones, because the power curve is going to keep going up, to the point where only raiders are going to be able to do content successfully. Even so, SOE will scratch their corporate heads and wonder why people don't play the zones.

gatrm

10-10-2011, 12:20 PM

<cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>You hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. The Drunder heroic zones are simply too difficult, for being heroic content. Tower of Tactics actually requires more crititical mitigation and crit chance than easy-mode Kraytocs Fortress. That's laughable. The vast majority of the non-raiding community simply don't have the gear or the coordination to survive in Drunder zones. I think we're going to continue to see less and less people running new zones, because the power curve is going to keep going up, to the point where only raiders are going to be able to do content successfully. Even so, SOE will scratch their corporate heads and wonder why people don't play the zones.</blockquote>This.....And speaking as a casual raider, there's a reason I only raid two days a week. I want to have fun doing an instance and not have to work at everything every time I log in. I may have the gear on my raiding toon to do the Drunder zones, but that doesn't mean I have the inclination to do so, especially if it means I have to tailor my group to the zone. I'd much rather just take any 5 other people and do something that's more fun, even if I'm not getting any upgrades. Plus I'd rather use an alt on an off night, not play the same toon all the freaking time.I still say just put the gear on the mobs, go back to pre TSO where the armor you wanted was spread out among the bosses in different zones. It encouraged grouping and running of different instances not the same instances every day trying to farm shards or gems or whatever.

Davngr1

10-10-2011, 07:51 PM

this was a GREAT change. once in a while devs get something right.

Skeez1e

10-11-2011, 01:30 AM

It's midway between a GU and an xpac - caught between doable instances and Drunder people (me too!) are getting bored, looking for other things to occupy their time. No shard armor will enable those who need it to get it, those who don't can gear up alts and find new diversions.

Villail

10-11-2011, 05:48 AM

Current prices of Ry'gorr Gems on Splitpaw:Emerald 5ppMarble 10ppDiamond 102ppCitrine 118Ruby 142Jaundice 174Before this change was announced Marble was just a few gold.I think they need to up to drop rate if they want folks to be kitted out in Ry'gorr.It also seems strange to me that you get get Ry'gorr faction upto 40k very quickly and easily (in an afternoon) but takes forever to get Thurgg up to 40k (unless of course you already have a toon that has 40k faction).

Delethen

10-11-2011, 07:40 AM

<cite>Villail wrote:</cite><blockquote>Current prices of Ry'gorr Gems on Splitpaw:Emerald 5ppMarble 10ppDiamond 102ppCitrine 118Ruby 142Jaundice 174Before this change was announced Marble was just a few gold.I think they need to up to drop rate if they want folks to be kitted out in Ry'gorr.It also seems strange to me that you get get Ry'gorr faction upto 40k very quickly and easily (in an afternoon) but takes forever to get Thurgg up to 40k (unless of course you already have a toon that has 40k faction).</blockquote>This is the real problem - if they are going to get rid of any part of the requirement it should be the gems - if this change goes live as is, the chances are that those prices are going to at least double. Its all very well saying that getting plat is really easy but if you are talking about having to spend 300 plat just to get the boots made, who is going to do that?

Elskidor

10-11-2011, 11:19 AM

And the lazy continue to sound more lazy. You are catering to those who want everything handed to them, and I hope the gems start selling for 1k a piece.

isest

10-11-2011, 01:23 PM

<cite>Elskidor wrote:</cite><blockquote>And the lazy continue to sound more lazy. You are catering to those who want everything handed to them, and I hope the gems start selling for 1k a piece.</blockquote>They arelready were ans still are on guk for ruby and diamonds. Jaundice are goin 399-599 plat a piece.

Onorem

10-11-2011, 01:36 PM

Thank you any red name for acknowledging any of the concerns mentioned between when this hit test and when it hit live. Oh...wait...my mistake. You couldn't be bothered to comment.--edit--Sorry, that's not fair to Gninja who did respond about a week ago. It wasn't a response that sold me on the change, but the change wasn't ignored entirely.

Amanathia

10-11-2011, 01:38 PM

<cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>You hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. The Drunder heroic zones are simply too difficult, for being heroic content. Tower of Tactics actually requires more crititical mitigation and crit chance than easy-mode Kraytocs Fortress. That's laughable. The vast majority of the non-raiding community simply don't have the gear or the coordination to survive in Drunder zones. I think we're going to continue to see less and less people running new zones, because the power curve is going to keep going up, to the point where only raiders are going to be able to do content successfully. Even so, SOE will scratch their corporate heads and wonder why people don't play the zones.</blockquote>Yes its more difficult than some EM raid content which is NICE. The difficulty is fun and a refreshing change. If the vast majority of players don't have enough skill to beat the zones then they should man up--heroic doesn't necessarily mean easy. I've not beat TORZ heroic challenge mode, but I don't want the difficulty changed either. The issue was solely that the drops were awful for the difficulty. It's harder than most of one grouping the TOFS x2. Harder than one grouping some x4 content (and i don't mean pq). So that is why no one ran them (cept drunder3). Why bother. But with this patches changes and armor much easier to get, armor drops, rares made more common, etc, you will see people running them, I promise you. The zones will be great RvR now. Yes a really sub-optimal group might not be able to clear them gauranteed, like you will other heroics, but that's okay imho, as long as the RvR is good.

kdmorse

10-11-2011, 01:39 PM

<cite>Elskidor wrote:</cite><blockquote>And the lazy continue to sound more lazy. You are catering to those who want everything handed to them, and I hope the gems start selling for 1k a piece.</blockquote>Players: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Getting 20 shards is too hard!!!!SoE: Ok, ok, no more shards neededPlayers: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Kael Gems cost too much!!!!SoE: Ok, Ok, we'll.... wait a minute.... go get your own darn gems, we already upped the drop rate twice, we're not upping it again! (*)---------------------------------------------Seriously - the broker is not *the* way to get Gems. *The* way to get gems is to go kill things in Kael. Emerald, Black, Citrine, and Jaundice drop like candy in ISK. Diamond and Ruby can be a bit rare at times, but oh my, you might actually have to run ToS or ToRZ. The broker is a way for those who have extra gems to sell them to those willing to pay for them.Cheap Gems on the broker so that Rygor Gear is practically free is *not* a right. If you find a bargain, great. If you're willing to pay outrageous sums for gear up an alt, more power to you. But the game isn't broken, the drop rates aren't 'too low', if other people's spare gems cost 250p+. Don't like the price, go get it yourself.(*) We hope.

Onorem

10-11-2011, 01:44 PM

<cite>Ynnek@Kithicor wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Elskidor wrote:</cite><blockquote>And the lazy continue to sound more lazy. You are catering to those who want everything handed to them, and I hope the gems start selling for 1k a piece.</blockquote>Players: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Getting 20 shards is too hard!!!!SoE: Ok, ok, no more shards neededPlayers: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Kael Gems cost too much!!!!SoE: Ok, Ok, we'll.... wait a minute.... go get your own darn gems, we already upped the drop rate twice, we're not upping it again! (*)---------------------------------------------Seriously - the broker is not *the* way to get Gems. *The* way to get gems is to go kill things in Kael. Emerald, Black, Citrine, and Jaundice drop like candy in ISK. Diamond and Ruby can be a bit rare at times, but oh my, you might actually have to run ToS or ToRZ. The broker is a way for those who have extra gems to sell them to those willing to pay for them.Cheap Gems on the broker so that Rygor Gear is practically free is *not* a right. If you find a bargain, great. If you're willing to pay outrageous sums for gear up an alt, more power to you. But the game isn't broken, the drop rates aren't 'too low', if other people's spare gems cost 250p+. Don't like the price, go get it yourself.(*) We hope.</blockquote>What part of the current process makes you think that gems won't be the same or easier to obtain eventually? Sure, it's a slippery slope argument...but what do you see them doing that makes you think this change isn't coming?

Koleg

10-11-2011, 01:54 PM

<cite>Ynnek@Kithicor wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Elskidor wrote:</cite><blockquote>And the lazy continue to sound more lazy. You are catering to those who want everything handed to them, and I hope the gems start selling for 1k a piece.</blockquote>Players: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Getting 20 shards is too hard!!!!SoE: Ok, ok, no more shards neededPlayers: Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! Kael Gems cost too much!!!!SoE: Ok, Ok, we'll.... wait a minute.... go get your own darn gems, we already upped the drop rate twice, we're not upping it again! (*)---------------------------------------------Seriously - the broker is not *the* way to get Gems. *The* way to get gems is to go kill things in Kael. Emerald, Black, Citrine, and Jaundice drop like candy in ISK. Diamond and Ruby can be a bit rare at times, but oh my, you might actually have to run ToS or ToRZ. The broker is a way for those who have extra gems to sell them to those willing to pay for them.Cheap Gems on the broker so that Rygor Gear is practically free is *not* a right. If you find a bargain, great. If you're willing to pay outrageous sums for gear up an alt, more power to you. But the game isn't broken, the drop rates aren't 'too low', if other people's spare gems cost 250p+. Don't like the price, go get it yourself.(*) We hope.</blockquote>I think ... and I have experienced low gem drop rates in Contested Kael .. not in the Kael Instances. The Kael instance Bosses all drop a Gem and the trash has a chance to drop them as well. You are all but guaranteed a Ruby and a Diamond clearing the instance boss or the second last two bosses in the back. I've camped Kael for hours pulling out 4+ fabled gears and 4+ Masters only to have 1 Black Marble to show for it.Onething I hate is that Emeralds drop in Ornate chests while Jaundice drop in wooden chests. Although I do like thinking your going to loot an "advanced tailor" level 82 recipe and find a Janudice gem instead.

kdmorse

10-11-2011, 01:56 PM

<cite>Onorem wrote:</cite><blockquote>What part of the current process makes you think that gems won't be the same or easier to obtain eventually? Sure, it's a slippery slope argument...but what do you see them doing that makes you think this change isn't coming?</blockquote>I still have faith that sanity will prevail, that with Gems being the only gateing factor, they won't be silly enough to up the drop rate to the point where all six sell for pennies on the broker. That would be exceedingly dumb, even for SoE... right.... right??? (*)The current price bubble is just that, a bubble. It's fueled by three things:<ul><li>A) As soon as the patch hit test, and we knew this was coming, people snapped up gems in advance, before the price went up.</li><li>B) Today, and for the rest of this week, the entire world is buying up gems for their alts (or mains)</li><li>C) People are speculating on the market. </li></ul>The people who want their gear NOW, will pay a hefty price. But it will settle down. Once the demand drops, and the supply increases (people are running Kael until their eyes bleed as we speak), prices will fall back to 'normal' levels, which is still probably cheaper than they should be.Upping the drop rate would soften the short term bubble, and then when the bubble is past, crash prices down to absurd levels. (*) But you're probably right. It'll probably happen.

Alpharaz

10-11-2011, 03:00 PM

I'm not gonna waste a lot of time and energy on this one. Anyone that is seriously upset because of the prices of gems on the broker after they already took the shards out of rygorr armor and you don't want to do the work to farm for the gems, I really have no sympathy for you, period.

ObsidianNightmare

10-11-2011, 03:13 PM

So what have we learned with this "In Testing Feedback" post?Is it that this change was put on test merely to allow the people there to test the faction merchant and make sure it was no longer asking for shards? Maybe also to allow for some people on test to go into the DoV zones to check whether or not class peices were dropping from the mobs as stated?Was it for our opinion on whether or not this was a good change?

Koleg

10-11-2011, 04:46 PM

<cite>ObsidianNightmare wrote:</cite><blockquote>So what have we learned with this "In Testing Feedback" post?Is it that this change was put on test merely to allow the people there to test the faction merchant and make sure it was no longer asking for shards? Maybe also to allow for some people on test to go into the DoV zones to check whether or not class peices were dropping from the mobs as stated?Was it for our opinion on whether or not this was a good change?</blockquote>SOX regulation standards require a separation of Development, Testing and Production environments. Most companies simply deploy developed code into a testing environment prior to promoting it to production to follow industry standards. Everything on test is not ment to be tested for concept by the community but only for functionality...

Besual

10-12-2011, 05:41 AM

The solution could be so easy:gem + pp => buy from merchant vs. shards (maybe +expansive component from fuel merchant) => crafter made.Crafters wouldn't be left in the dust and people have different ways to accquire ry'gor armor.The shards cast could be changed a bit to represent the drop rate of the different gems. Hands + forarms = 10 shards / feet + head = 20 shards / legs + shoulders = 30 shards

Jenadara

10-12-2011, 05:37 PM

<cite>Amanathia wrote:</cite><blockquote>Yes its more difficult than some EM raid content which is NICE. The difficulty is fun and a refreshing change. If the vast majority of players don't have enough skill to beat the zones then they should man up--heroic doesn't necessarily mean easy.</blockquote>^^This is insulting and not constructive. The reason why it takes so long is because it is difficult, plain and simple. It has nothing to do w/skill. They intended the zones to be played by people starting with Ry'Gorr gear, and that just didn't work.Amanathia also wrote: The zones will be great RvR now. Yes a really sub-optimal group might not be able to clear them gauranteed, like you will other heroics, but that's okay imho, as long as the RvR is good. RVR? Realm vs. Realm? I'm not sure what you are meaning here...

Crismorn

10-12-2011, 05:49 PM

risk vs. reward

Jenadara

10-12-2011, 06:36 PM

<cite>Crismorn wrote:</cite><blockquote>risk vs. reward</blockquote>Thanks! Yes, makes sense. They are furthering their efforts to "fix" Drunder now, so we shall see. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Koleg

10-13-2011, 10:43 AM

<cite>Jenadara wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Crismorn wrote:</cite><blockquote>risk vs. reward</blockquote>Thanks! Yes, makes sense. They are furthering their efforts to "fix" Drunder now, so we shall see. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></blockquote>I say within three weeks from last Tuesday, 11/1, put me down for a dime.

Gaealiege

10-15-2011, 09:44 AM

While you may find Amanathia's post offensive, I fully endorse what he/she is saying. There is absolutely no reason that all content should be accessable to those that cannot be bothered to play optimally. There should be zones for those of us that are better at the game. Currently we have drunder and EoW. The sub-optimal players have ToFS, Kael, and Velk's. It seems that plenty of people are asking for the sub-optimal category to include all heroic zones. That seems more arrogant to me than stating someone else is worse at the game. You're suggesting that all content should be accessable to you and everyone else that can't manage to beat difficult content. So basically the game should revolve around the players that don't want to spend the time gearing or learning to play their class or work in a cohesive group.

Jenadara

10-15-2011, 09:16 PM

<cite>Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote>It seems that plenty of people are asking for the sub-optimal category to include all heroic zones. That seems more arrogant to me than stating someone else is worse at the game. You're suggesting that all content should be accessable to you and everyone else that can't manage to beat difficult content. So basically the game should revolve around the players that don't want to spend the time gearing or learning to play their class or work in a cohesive group. </blockquote>When Drunder was released, did you find it rewarding running the zones? Was it really worth your time to even run them twice or more like most poeple do all the other instances? Did you see people advertising for the zones at all? If your answer was "no" to any of those questions, then there's a problem with the zones, not the players.And another question to ponder: Why isn't drunder one of the areas for dominance mission?C'mon, the "learning to play" argument is tiresome.

Gaealiege

10-18-2011, 05:05 PM

Actually yes. I ran the zones enough to fully discover the paladin, inquisitor, defiler, dirge, warlock, and necromancer sets so that our group was fully geared for those zones. The fabled drops are better than x2 gear and the majority of the gear in Tactics was far better than any other heroic gear. People don't advertise for the zone because a PUG can't handle it. Do you see people calling for people for Elements of War? I don't. I still run the zone for items. I guess you can say the whole "knowledge/skill" argument is tired, but I would say the whole "make it easier because I'm an imbecile" argument against zones has long since tired itself as well.If you can't handle the zones, you don't need to be there. I don't see anyone here complaining that they can't just roll into HM content and faceroll it. Perhaps if they just redid Drunder as HM only, we'd alleviate these "tired" lines of argumentation. The label HM appears to be enough to keep the terrible players from raising their pitchforks and torches.

Jenadara

10-21-2011, 01:19 PM

<cite>Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote>Actually yes. I ran the zones enough to fully discover the paladin, inquisitor, defiler, dirge, warlock, and necromancer sets so that our group was fully geared for those zones. The fabled drops are better than x2 gear and the majority of the gear in Tactics was far better than any other heroic gear. People don't advertise for the zone because a PUG can't handle it. Do you see people calling for people for Elements of War? I don't. I still run the zone for items. I guess you can say the whole "knowledge/skill" argument is tired, but I would say the whole "make it easier because I'm an imbecile" argument against zones has long since tired itself as well.If you can't handle the zones, you don't need to be there. I don't see anyone here complaining that they can't just roll into HM content and faceroll it. Perhaps if they just redid Drunder as HM only, we'd alleviate these "tired" lines of argumentation. The label HM appears to be enough to keep the terrible players from raising their pitchforks and torches.</blockquote>I don't believe your answer because I've seen you complain about the loot on these forums. This is my last reponse on this matter.

bluefish

10-21-2011, 02:20 PM

I don't understand people sometimes ... for years people have been complaining they wanted challenge ineq2 .. no time sinks and no just kill x many mobs and no running here then running there..Here SOE gives zones with a great challenge .. the problem IS the people, because they have become spoiled and want things "given" to themI see it everyday ..the drunder zones are really not hard once you figure out the strategy. They are actually not bad at all .. the difference is the strats are none other like we have seen before and it takes team work where you can't have 2 or 3 people carrying the rest of the group ..rewards from a dungeon or zone can actually be more than just items dropped you know... for example, feeling accomplished you overcame a difficult dungeon ..no matter what, it seems someone is always crying boo hoo....it's too hard or takes too long or waa waa waa, well here is some tissue... now move along and go play hello kitty rainbow water park

thewarriorpoet

10-21-2011, 03:19 PM

Interesting.Think about this for a minute. One side is saying "Don't EM my content, that is the same as taking it away" while another side is saying "Give me more content I have out grown what I can do".So maybe, just maybe, there is a large group of people between tower/velks and drunder/eow. People who want to have a challenging zone to play in and are left without one and no means to get to one (I'll call them group 1). Balance that with raided out people who walk through most heroic zones (I'll call them group 2). The only fun they have available, outside of raiding, is in drunder/eow.The problem I see here, is NOT that drunder is too hard. The problem is that you cannot gear up for it smoothly. SOE, you shouldn't be F'ing with drunder. You should be adding content (or better yet, rescaling content from tower through kael) to give a more linear progression of heroic zones.The basic thing is, everyone wants a fun and challenging zone to run and right now no one has that. Drunder has been nerfed a lot and more is comming so group 2 screwed, while it still won't help gear people in group 1 for drunder.A lose-lose (trademark by sony) situation.

bluefish

10-21-2011, 04:32 PM

you have a good point, but also you have to understand that your gear, although may not be raid quality, has to be adorned for survivability .. and people don't want to do this .. they want all dps instead of hitpoints and crit mit .. well you can't do any dps if you are dead.it was stated the beginning drunder zones can be done in ry'gorr armor, but it was also stated right after that players may also need to adorn all crit mit and hit points to do so ..the key is survivability first, then as you progress and get better gear from within the zone and as it becomes easier, you now have the gear to progress into harder areas ... You have to learn to crawl before you can walk and learn to walk before you can run.Most of the people I hear say "Drunder risk is not worth the reward" have been to the zone only 2 or 3 times at most. there is always an exception though.You think those top end raid guilds went after a mob for the first time and tried 3 or 4 times then complained it was too hard and quit till SOE nerfed it?

thewarriorpoet

10-21-2011, 04:35 PM

How do you adorn for survivability when all your yellows are CM and there is few white options?

Fitz

10-21-2011, 06:10 PM

If you're in full ry'gorr and adorned completely in crit mit, you should be fully capable of doing drunder now. Find a good setup, and go for it. You may not be able to course through ToT, but in an optimal group, you should get several upgrades. After doing Drunder for a while, your gear will get good enough for EoW. And there are great options for white adornments...... Hit points, defense, parry, resists.......

Gaealiege

10-22-2011, 10:44 AM

You believe what you want, Jen. The best part of reality is its inability to be shaped by disbelief.Look up who discovered those items on Butcherblock. I bet you find my name next to them. I'm not certain what you're referring to in regard to saying the loot in Drunder isn't worth the reward. The only item that I've ever complained about was the broken breastplate progression, which was 100% correct. They fixed the breastplates, so now there isn't an issue.Otherwise in regard to gear, I've complained that 2-handers are missing adorns on some while others aren't. I've complained that the final collection reward isn't unique like 100% of the other final collection rewards (I also unbelievably discovered the healer one). And then I complained about the final signature charm not being unique. That one was also fixed.

rocthorne999

10-22-2011, 12:56 PM

so basically you complained alot? which you are damning other people for doing? i came back after a relatively decent hiatus i had othmir gear having to just get gems is a god send especially since im on vox where groups are few and far between. so please if your going to complain dont condem other people for doing it plus. if they arent good in crap gear they wont be good in good gear simple as that. also wow isnt as easy as you think i play it and its current raids are/were actually tough taking a good 2-3 hours to kill a boss or 2. with good gear and good players

Hamervelder

10-22-2011, 03:26 PM

<cite>Skeez1e wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Talathion@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>Good change.</blockquote>Big, very big, change. I'm sleeping on it. </blockquote>I wasn't sure about this change at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think that moving away from token systems is a good thing. DoV's token system is garbage, along with most of the rest of the expansion. There's absolutely no incentive to run heroic zones (aside from some rare named loot) because dropped armor is crap. I'd rather run instances and have a chance to get great loot, than have to grind faction, and then grind tokens, so that I can get one piece of armor and continue to run the same instances to get more tokens, etc.

Gaealiege

10-22-2011, 04:06 PM

My use of the word complain is sarcastic. I pointed out glaring issues with itemization that were then fixed. I'm not condemning people pointing out real issues. I'm condemning idiocy, the most rampant portion of these forums. We get casual players in here complaining about content they've played in for maybe 10 minutes and couldn't faceroll within those 10 minutes.Also I've played high end WoW for 3 years. The game is pathetically easy in comparison to this one.

Nrgy

10-24-2011, 11:24 AM

<cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>I wasn't sure about this change at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think that moving away from token systems is a good thing. DoV's token system is garbage, along with most of the rest of the expansion. There's absolutely no incentive to run heroic zones (aside from some rare named loot) because dropped armor is crap. I'd rather run instances and have a chance to get great loot, than have to grind faction, and then grind tokens, so that I can get one piece of armor and continue to run the same instances to get more tokens, etc.</blockquote>The token system still exists ... you still need ~215 white shards to craft the Drunder gear after farmingout the ore. With the time involved in running Drunder zones by people that actually need the gear as upgrades it isn't remotely the best way to get the white shards. Ry'Gorr geared groups will take 2 to 5 hours to clear drunder depending on gear level, strat's and group make-up. People that find that the Ry'Gorr tokens were hard to get @ 120 will be in trouble with the 215 needed for the Drunder gear. You'll be getting your white shards from the easy zones like tofs:SC and Pools.Plus, if you don't have the jewelery upgrades out of Rime and Kael zones they still need to be gotten for the Drunder runs. There are still plenty of reasons to run the old zones. There is just no reason to use the DF tool while doing it.

Amanathia

10-24-2011, 03:44 PM

<cite>Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote:</cite><blockquote>You believe what you want, Jen. The best part of reality is its inability to be shaped by disbelief.Look up who discovered those items on Butcherblock. I bet you find my name next to them. I'm not certain what you're referring to in regard to saying the loot in Drunder isn't worth the reward. The only item that I've ever complained about was the broken breastplate progression, which was 100% correct. They fixed the breastplates, so now there isn't an issue.Otherwise in regard to gear, I've complained that 2-handers are missing adorns on some while others aren't. I've complained that the final collection reward isn't unique like 100% of the other final collection rewards (I also unbelievably discovered the healer one). And then I complained about the final signature charm not being unique. That one was also fixed.</blockquote>Lol, yep...and I've complained and complained that the RvR was off for these zones, too, but I ran them nonetheless, as I'm stubborn--crafter friend must have gotten *at least* 10 discoveries for armor, and I've gotten many from the drops on my guard, lol. I sold the collectibles as the reward was kinda meh, but now I'll probably finish it on at least 1 or 2 chars. RvR is now nice, though, I have no more complaints. They've went and made the rare drops (belts that are very nice, for example) a lot more common, and armor can flat out drop off of things, ore is very easy to get now, etc. It's easy to gear up because even if you go in and only kill one or two bosses you'll quickly get ore for a ton of armor, too.You really hafta think of the drunder zones as kind of a 6-man raid, in a way. You are capable of killing in there with a Ry'gorr group. However, you may not be able to finish the zones. Some have said they could, and I believe them, they are probably more skilled than me, or had a warlock for Korok or w/e...but you wouldn't expect to be able to raid without at least somewhat optimal classes, either, so meh.... But you can go in, make progress, and get upgrades. You might not be able to clear the zones the first run, I sure couldn't, took me like a week to finally beat spire or rage when I first started doing it! <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />