Avatar gear nerfs

[Andu]

/double post

[Andu]

slippery wrote:

I really need to know what the developers are thinking, because if it boils down to it I will do a side by side comparson of all Avatar loot currently on live to other items currently in game with a detailed description of why said loot should not be changed (or should be changed in certain ways I've already pointed out) based on reasons I've already pointed out. I must have the feedback based on our feedback first. I've spent hours upon hours giving my feedback, but without feedback to that I'm not willing to spend hours upon hours illustrating in even more excruiating detail why this is wrong. I'd rather quit first.

This. I feel confident that Slippery isn't the only person. Tbh, your playerbase would probably be willing to do the work for you FOC if you just communicated your intentions with them.

People will only do so though if they have reasonable confidence that the time they put in will have an impact of some sort. Who is going to post the kind of detailed feedback you intimate you are after if they feel there is a real risk of it just getting lost on page 33 or ignored in your inbox.

[Barx]

Onra@Butcherblock wrote:

Why would SOE remove avatars as contested? It would be far too easy for them to bump the levels and make it new content! So someone is going to make new scripts to replace all of the avatars for contested?

Probably because the avatars haven't changed a whole lot script-wise, and so they're dumping the mix of so many different things that can spawn and going back to individual contested that can have:

1) A loot table consistant with their difficulty, since there shouldn't be any need for shared loot tables

2) Unique scripts on the few contested instead of seeing the same old avatar scripts just bumped up another 10 levels.

[slippery]

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Onra@Butcherblock wrote:

Why would SOE remove avatars as contested? It would be far too easy for them to bump the levels and make it new content! So someone is going to make new scripts to replace all of the avatars for contested?

Probably because the avatars haven't changed a whole lot script-wise, and so they're dumping the mix of so many different things that can spawn and going back to individual contested that can have:

1) A loot table consistant with their difficulty, since there shouldn't be any need for shared loot tables

2) Unique scripts on the few contested instead of seeing the same old avatar scripts just bumped up another 10 levels.

Could have been done with Avatars, especially the loot and the specific Avatar, which is what I spent the entirity of last expansion saying.

If each individual Avatar right now was on its own 15-18 (or 17-20) day timer and had the charm as a 50% drop we would be in a completely different contested expansion right now. I said this a ton last expansion, no one listened.

[Barx]

slippery wrote:

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Onra@Butcherblock wrote:

Why would SOE remove avatars as contested? It would be far too easy for them to bump the levels and make it new content! So someone is going to make new scripts to replace all of the avatars for contested?

Probably because the avatars haven't changed a whole lot script-wise, and so they're dumping the mix of so many different things that can spawn and going back to individual contested that can have:

1) A loot table consistant with their difficulty, since there shouldn't be any need for shared loot tables

2) Unique scripts on the few contested instead of seeing the same old avatar scripts just bumped up another 10 levels.

Could have been done with Avatars, especially the loot and the specific Avatar, which is what I spent the entirity of last expansion saying.

If each individual Avatar right now was on its own 15-18 (or 17-20) day timer and had the charm as a 50% drop we would be in a completely different contested expansion right now. I said this a ton last expansion, no one listened.

It could have been, but unforatunately they didn't and went with shared spawns and shared loot despite the unshared difficulty.

There's no reason that it has to or does not have to be "Avatars" that are the contested mobs. They're just moving away from basically 3 loot tables with varying difficulty depending on the chance (not referring to charms here) to invididual mobs instead, which should have a fixed difficulty. I'd rather have 3 or 4 contested with interesting scripts than have the avatars with basically the same scripts again (since it would be significantly more work to have all the avatars and yet still have all new scripts). My hope is that the new contested is going to be basically what you are saying there Slippery, only instead of it being an avatar it'll be some other mob name.

They may also come up with a "Lore" reason that the avatars won't be there in SF. If the fate of Norrath really does hang in the balance in SF, then maybe the Gods need their attention elsewhere rather than having manifestations of themselves to get beat up.

[Homeskillet]

Onra@Butcherblock wrote:

Why would SOE remove avatars as contested? It would be far too easy for them to bump the levels and make it new content! So someone is going to make new scripts to replace all of the avatars for contested?

Because its boring, redone and presents stagnation in the game lore. Avatar contested only happened around EoF really, because that was the return of the gods. You had Pumpkin Headed horseman as well for contested but that was the new and fresh thing. The Avatars have been just refreshed since then, its boring.

In Tier 5 you had interesting and relevant contested mobs, Lord Nagalik in Sol's Eye, Solusek's Fist in Lavastorm, Venekor's contested version in Cazic Thule. Cazic Thule, Permafrost, and Solusek's Eye were all the Tier 5 contested heroic dungeons and each had a placing of one to two x2 contested mobs, and each had a x4 as well. All of their gear was worth going for too! Every tier had contested actually, in both x2 and x4 form. When DoF came out this still held true. You had Terrorantula in Sinking Sands along with Siyamek and Barakah in Pillars as well as Maj'dul. There were x2 contesed as well still in Clefts of Rujark and Pillars of Flames. The triggered contested mobs in Maj'dul when each faction won control were kind of neat even if their loot tables were so-so (ignoring the fact that originally in DoF, ALL loot tables were scary pathetic).

In Kingdom of Sky we still had contested, Hurricanis the Patriarch in Tangle, the Princes in Barren Sky, and the triggered contested x2 along with the Shade in Bonemire. You also had the Mutagenic Outcast thing, and after that we had Avatars. EoF had Avatars. In RoK we had Avatars and the four Domini, Trakanasaur, but they were kind of overlooked as well. We had no more big named contested mobs in dungeons since the contested dungeon had been killed in favor of the instance. Mistmoore Castle did have contested Mayong and a couple other minor things, but many people remember how horribly laggy that zone was. It was barely fun to go through at all.

Shadow Oddysey literally had NOTHING but Avatars for contested, it was one big lazy effort. There is no contested dungeon, all instanced, and there is no raid contested mob in the Moors of Ykesha ( a scary thought with all the lag anyway), just Avatars.

I for one am looking for more interesting contested mobs that are not Avatars, as if we kill any more Avatars we are giving a big slap towards the basis of EQ2. The Gods were [Removed for Content] that we killed their avatars in their planes again and again and they are going to ignore us repeatedly murdering their Avatars upon Norrath as they try to return? Good lord that makes a whole lot of sense. In the end, I am bored of the idea of Avatars. I have only been able to kill one helping another raid and I kind of just lacked interest to even aspire to kill them for the sheer boredom of their concept. I welcome new and unique contested mobs.

Back to topic though, the EQ2 dev team needs to get their slack together with this stuff.

[Kindalar]

I get it.  The utterly plain truth of this all is that the average EQII gamer isn't putting enough time in to advance their character enough to be compeditive with the content coming out.  While the extreme gamers are devouring the content, ever widening the gap between casual gamers and hard core gamers, the casual players aren't upping their play time.

The gap is becoming to wide between casual and extreme gamers for them to release content for. It's becoming unmanagable.

So what they are doing is bringing everyone closer together in power so that the content can serve both parties.  It means encounter success can continue to rely on equipping a certain level of gear, but that once you have that gear, the talent needed to down it will probably be dropping.

That's it guys, that's the magic bullet we've been begging them to tell us.

Look at the change where they are putting in HOT Zones which will increase fabled drop rates.

Look at the nerfs that are occuring ONLY at the top end of the item spectrum.

NO T9 Avatars, that entire loot level poof, gone.

What this means is that there will not be AS noticible a difference between the characters that play 40 hours a week vs. the characters that play 20 hours a week.

The real truth is that it's probably going to take LESS time for the extreme guilds to master and beat content.  We won't have to play as much to get the best SOE has to offer.

It's a fundamental shift, and, keep watching through this venacular.  That's what's happening right now.

Winning the "don't nerf us" argument is impossible b/c they'd have to scrap their direction of condencing the range of character power in order to not do the nerf.  If they don't nerf us they have to commit to more developer hours to serve the wider power range of characters.  My guess is there just isn't the money to keep serving that wide a range of players.

Nerf rollback ain't happening.

So, now that you know, simply choose.

Kindalar

[slippery]

That is so far from the truth. The gap is the closest it has ever been. It is also why encounters are either blatantly overpowered or a joke to kill. Difficult encounters cannot be put in the game as long as you continually shrink the gap. Doing this is not making you more popular or even making the game easier to design for, it is doing quite the opposite. It doesn't even allow people to be motivated. I started playing 3 months after release. When I got to the level cap I was in a family guild, we didn't really do anything. We did the Splitpaw x2 occasionally when that came out. As I sat there in Splitpaw and looked at the gear of some of the players waiting to go in the x4 I was in awe. I wanted that. I had to have it. I wanted what they had. I didn't want to be that good, I wanted to be the best. So what did I do? I became the best. I used that desire to drive my motivation for more. That motivation is at the point where I question logging in every night because all I see is the direction of the game failing at every turn. It saddens me deeply that the whole desire of certain people in key positions is to completely remove that motivation and just make people as equal as they can get away with.

[Kindalar]

slippery wrote:

That is so far from the truth. The gap is the closest it has ever been. It is also why encounters are either blatantly overpowered or a joke to kill. Difficult encounters cannot be put in the game as long as you continually shrink the gap. Doing this is not making you more popular or even making the game easier to design for, it is doing quite the opposite. It doesn't even allow people to be motivated. I started playing 3 months after release. When I got to the level cap I was in a family guild, we didn't really do anything. We did the Splitpaw x2 occasionally when that came out. As I sat there in Splitpaw and looked at the gear of some of the players waiting to go in the x4 I was in awe. I wanted that. I had to have it. I wanted what they had. I didn't want to be that good, I wanted to be the best. So what did I do? I became the best. I used that desire to drive my motivation for more. That motivation is at the point where I question logging in every night because all I see is the direction of the game failing at every turn. It saddens me deeply that the whole desire of certain people in key positions is to completely remove that motivation and just make people as equal as they can get away with.

Well if the gap was the closest it's ever been why do you only have 1 or 2 avy killing guilds like last expansion?

You may have items that are more powerful coming from instances, but there are still a ton of guilds out there that can't get past gynok, or Anashti, or Field General, and this is after 9 months.

They have to tone down the difficulty of these mobs so more guilds can kill them and get to the end game.

And they can't make them that much simpler or the high end guilds will be killing the mobs and selling the loot within weeks of intiial release.

Look, I'm not suggesting that condencing the range of power is the right answer, I'm just trying to find the reality in the patterns we are currently trying to make sense of.

Kindalar

[slippery]

More guilds have killed Avatars on more servers than contested in any expansion since t5. It was not even remotely uncommon for guilds to lock down the contested scene from T6 through RoK. The same is not even remotely the case this expansion. Most of the servers that are locked down are locked down because of the dominating guild killing the Avatar within a very short period of it spawning, and they still some times lose them. As far as guilds not killing mobs, that has absolutely nothing to do with encounter difficulty. More often then not is a failing of raid set up, management, and execution of a simple strat. The actual power difference between players is by far the closest it has ever been. People just can't accept that maybe they are not as well organized or as good as other players playing the game for why they cannot do something that others can. The top guilds are on the top continually over expansions because they are better organized and put in more effort early. They are just far more effecient because of the quality of player, especially when since the power gap is so close the only way to make encounters difficult is to put in some failure mechanic to make sure you are paying attention. The "toning down" of mobs is by far more commonly simply taking out the bugs that make the encounters hard and or annoying. Field General, was difficult only because it was extremely random with the Sapper that was extraordinarily buggy. You basically had to cheat to kill it by putting people around to blue ae them because they could not be seen. When that was fixed the encounter became a joke. I don't call that a nerf, I call that fixing the encounter to how it was intended. The same can be said of Ykesha, who no longer ports Fighters or Priests. That was the main difficulty of the encounter, which was not difficulty at all, it was luck. It required you to set up raids certain ways or pray that important people didn't get ported.

[Lai]

Kindalar wrote:

slippery wrote:

That is so far from the truth. The gap is the closest it has ever been. It is also why encounters are either blatantly overpowered or a joke to kill. Difficult encounters cannot be put in the game as long as you continually shrink the gap. Doing this is not making you more popular or even making the game easier to design for, it is doing quite the opposite. It doesn't even allow people to be motivated. I started playing 3 months after release. When I got to the level cap I was in a family guild, we didn't really do anything. We did the Splitpaw x2 occasionally when that came out. As I sat there in Splitpaw and looked at the gear of some of the players waiting to go in the x4 I was in awe. I wanted that. I had to have it. I wanted what they had. I didn't want to be that good, I wanted to be the best. So what did I do? I became the best. I used that desire to drive my motivation for more. That motivation is at the point where I question logging in every night because all I see is the direction of the game failing at every turn. It saddens me deeply that the whole desire of certain people in key positions is to completely remove that motivation and just make people as equal as they can get away with.

Well if the gap was the closest it's ever been why do you only have 1 or 2 avy killing guilds like last expansion?

You may have items that are more powerful coming from instances, but there are still a ton of guilds out there that can't get past gynok, or Anashti, or Field General, and this is after 9 months.

They have to tone down the difficulty of these mobs so more guilds can kill them and get to the end game.

And they can't make them that much simpler or the high end guilds will be killing the mobs and selling the loot within weeks of intiial release.

Look, I'm not suggesting that condencing the range of power is the right answer, I'm just trying to find the reality in the patterns we are currently trying to make sense of.

Kindalar

Only a couple guild are killing them because the next closest competition loses interest and motivation by showing up and losing them every time...

Why are avatar killing guilds getting penalized because a family guild can't kill end game mobs?  Do you seriously think that the best guilds out there can't kill Gynok, Anashti, Ykesha w/o Avatar gear?  The entire point of this thread is that Avatar gear is now useless compared to their instanced counterpart, so there is no point in wasting time killing them anymore!  May as well take Avatars out of the game completely!  Why wait for T9?!

[Kindalar]

slippery wrote:

More guilds have killed Avatars on more servers than contested in any expansion since t5. It was not even remotely uncommon for guilds to lock down the contested scene from T6 through RoK. The same is not even remotely the case this expansion. Most of the servers that are locked down are locked down because of the dominating guild killing the Avatar within a very short period of it spawning, and they still some times lose them.

If you think contested are "truely" contested, I think your missing the point.  They aren't.  It's true that on every server (minus maybe 1 or two) a single guild has been "farming" Avatars.  That's the point.  It's concentrated reward to a smaller segment of the community than was intended.  That's my hypothesis anyways.

slippery wrote:

As far as guilds not killing mobs, that has absolutely nothing to do with encounter difficulty. More often then not is a failing of raid set up, management, and execution of a simple strat. The actual power difference between players is by far the closest it has ever been. People just can't accept that maybe they are not as well organized or as good as other players playing the game for why they cannot do something that others can. The top guilds are on the top continually over expansions because they are better organized and put in more effort early. They are just far more effecient because of the quality of player, especially when since the power gap is so close the only way to make encounters difficult is to put in some failure mechanic to make sure you are paying attention.

Your splitting hairs, captain.  It's odd when you read your sentence, "killing [a mob] has nothing to do with encounter difficulty."  If an encounter is more sensitive to setup than another, then by definition it's more difficult b/c you have to spend more time paying attention to setup!  It's another piece of the encounter you have to solve to beat it.

The POINT is, if you reduce encounter difficulty, by the countless ways that you can, you allow more folks to down the content.  I THINK this is what SOE wants --- more guilds 9 months into an expansion clearning the instances.

slippery wrote:

The "toning down" of mobs is by far more commonly simply taking out the bugs that make the encounters hard and or annoying. Field General, was difficult only because it was extremely random with the Sapper that was extraordinarily buggy. You basically had to cheat to kill it by putting people around to blue ae them because they could not be seen. When that was fixed the encounter became a joke. I don't call that a nerf, I call that fixing the encounter to how it was intended. The same can be said of Ykesha, who no longer ports Fighters or Priests. That was the main difficulty of the encounter, which was not difficulty at all, it was luck. It required you to set up raids certain ways or pray that important people didn't get ported.

No, it really isn't that simple, and as much as I dispise the suggestion that nerfing is the only option, I'm not going to take a position that I know is blatently false.  Taking bugs out of encounters is not the only way to reduce encounter difficulty.  Have no idea where your going with that one.  I can name dozens of guilds that are not yet killing the general after the bug fix to the sappers.  Again, that's my point.  I THINK SOE wants more to be downing this stuff.

Look at some simple facts about progression.  And keep in mind this is 9 months in!:

Antonica Bayle14 guilds killed switchmaster, 5 guilds killed anashti14 guilds killed Kultak, 4 killed general

Befallen and Fay9 guilds killed switchmaster, 3 killed anashti8 guilds killed Kultak, 3 killed general

Crushbone and Inny10 guilds killed switchmaster, 3 killed anashti10 guilds killed kultak, 2 killed general

Butcherblock and High Keep9 killed switchmaster, 1 killed anashti8 killed Kultak, 1 killed general

So folks are moving into the NEXT expansion without even the completed set gear or top end loot that was available in TSO.  Now add to that the set of guilds that have cleared and have everything.

Again, my point is, we have a WIDENING of power occuring, which is increasing the difficulty to create compeditive mobs for all ranges w/o significantly increasing dev hours.

I'm not suggesting that the outcome, NERFING, is justified.  On the contrary, I want to see ANYTHING BUT A NERF.  I'm just now able to put my finger, i think, on what they are thinking and WHY they would choose to do this.  There is some line of thinking that is putting them here, and this makes the most sense to me, unless you can throw some tangible facts out there that say ANYTHING different.

Kindalar

[Tehom]

Kindalar wrote:

Well if the gap was the closest it's ever been why do you only have 1 or 2 avy killing guilds like last expansion?

You may have items that are more powerful coming from instances, but there are still a ton of guilds out there that can't get past gynok, or Anashti, or Field General, and this is after 9 months.

The fact of the matter is that class composition and individual player ability play a huge role when first beating these encounters, before you gear up. Unlike most people who'd point at guilds and say, 'hur hur, they must all suck', I tend to think it's usually just poor class composition and not having the brute force for most of the fights. You can have pretty amazing players but that's not going to let you win with a terrible class mix.

It's also worth mentioning that out of the four or so different raid forces on our servers that killed avatars, all of us did it after we killed instanced Anashti, or very close to it. In other words, there wasn't exactly a huge gearing period on avatar gear to beat instanced mobs. Admittedly Antonia Bayle was dead last on contested progression this expansion, but still.

[Kindalar]

Chath@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Kindalar wrote:

Well if the gap was the closest it's ever been why do you only have 1 or 2 avy killing guilds like last expansion?

You may have items that are more powerful coming from instances, but there are still a ton of guilds out there that can't get past gynok, or Anashti, or Field General, and this is after 9 months.

The fact of the matter is that class composition and individual player ability play a huge role when first beating these encounters, before you gear up. Unlike most people who'd point at guilds and say, 'hur hur, they must all suck', I tend to think it's usually just poor class composition and not having the brute force for most of the fights. You can have pretty amazing players but that's not going to let you win with a terrible class mix.

It's also worth mentioning that out of the four or so different raid forces on our servers that killed avatars, all of us did it after we killed instanced Anashti, or very close to it. In other words, there wasn't exactly a huge gearing period on avatar gear to beat instanced mobs. Admittedly Antonia Bayle was dead last on contested progression this expansion, but still.

Couldn't agree more. And with TSO, gear played a HUGE role (crit mit).  In fact I thought that was how EQII was solving the rapid progression problem.  If you can't even beat a mob unless you have a 4 set of crit mit gear, now you have to farm before you can progress.  It slows down the extreme gamers, while probably not impacting the casuals as much

It takes a lot of commitment and a group that is committed to solving the script to nail it.  Folks toss out the "easy" comment so much and yet progression proves it ain't as easy as people like to say it is.  Which is why I think we deserve this great avy gear.  It took a LOT of sacrafice and time to get where were are now.  It's why the concept of "bringing us all closer" is painful, it's like our dedication and accomplishment are being silenced by the need to get everyone of various levels through the end game content.

I don't like it, I just want us to define why we the nerf is really happening, then try to work backwards from there to give ideas about how to do it ANY OTHER WAY than to nerf us.

[Gisallo]

Kindalar wrote:

Again, my point is, we have a WIDENING of power occuring, which is increasing the difficulty to create compeditive mobs for all ranges w/o significantly increasing dev hours.

I'm not suggesting that the outcome, NERFING, is justified.  On the contrary, I want to see ANYTHING BUT A NERF.  I'm just now able to put my finger, i think, on what they are thinking and WHY they would choose to do this.  There is some line of thinking that is putting them here, and this makes the most sense to me, unless you can throw some tangible facts out there that say ANYTHING different.

Kindalar

Both you and Slippery are right.  If you look at the Gear, and the actual numbers on it that are avaliable, Slippery is correct.  T2 and T3 shard armor is closer to the Raid instance gear set pieces than any non-end game raid gear ever.  The Avatar gear is REALLY good but again its not that much better than the instance raid gear and in some cases (set bonuses) is actually arguably worse.

You are correct in that there is a PERCEPTION that there is a widening of power due to gear but its not due to gear I think.  The problem is that this is usuing faulty logic.  Because someone has cleared harder instances does NOT mean that they only did it because of gear.  There are PLENY of guilds across the servers that have killed everything in the game and never dropped an avatar.  How could they do this if the gear was the thing? 

I have also seen guilds where people had all of the set peices possible due to their place in progression, and more through buying patterns, that couldn't kill Kultak if their life depended on it and even had issues with Strange Stalker.  Why?  because they either had bad group set ups (keeping a fury as the only healer in the mage group that gets one shotted by the AOE rather than bringing in another class like a shaman) they had issues with scripts, or just bad players.   It also has to do with organization.  On a fight where there are lots of one shot AE's are they still trying to have a druid solo heal a group because "well they are a founding member" even if this is clearly not a recepie for success?  Do they call people out when people make mistakes over and over in order to improve and if they don't replace them?  These I think are the real issues, its just easier to point at the gear as being the difference because as long as its something SOE has coded its not us.  Also it lets us to just point at Avatar guilds, they are such a small minority, rather than have to look at the entire raid community.

[slippery]

Kindalar wrote:

slippery wrote:

More guilds have killed Avatars on more servers than contested in any expansion since t5. It was not even remotely uncommon for guilds to lock down the contested scene from T6 through RoK. The same is not even remotely the case this expansion. Most of the servers that are locked down are locked down because of the dominating guild killing the Avatar within a very short period of it spawning, and they still some times lose them.

If you think contested are "truely" contested, I think your missing the point.  They aren't.  It's true that on every server (minus maybe 1 or two) a single guild has been "farming" Avatars.  That's the point.  It's concentrated reward to a smaller segment of the community than was intended.  That's my hypothesis anyways.

slippery wrote:

As far as guilds not killing mobs, that has absolutely nothing to do with encounter difficulty. More often then not is a failing of raid set up, management, and execution of a simple strat. The actual power difference between players is by far the closest it has ever been. People just can't accept that maybe they are not as well organized or as good as other players playing the game for why they cannot do something that others can. The top guilds are on the top continually over expansions because they are better organized and put in more effort early. They are just far more effecient because of the quality of player, especially when since the power gap is so close the only way to make encounters difficult is to put in some failure mechanic to make sure you are paying attention.

Your splitting hairs, captain.  It's odd when you read your sentence, "killing [a mob] has nothing to do with encounter difficulty."  If an encounter is more sensitive to setup than another, then by definition it's more difficult b/c you have to spend more time paying attention to setup!  It's another piece of the encounter you have to solve to beat it.

The POINT is, if you reduce encounter difficulty, by the countless ways that you can, you allow more folks to down the content.  I THINK this is what SOE wants --- more guilds 9 months into an expansion clearning the instances.

slippery wrote:

The "toning down" of mobs is by far more commonly simply taking out the bugs that make the encounters hard and or annoying. Field General, was difficult only because it was extremely random with the Sapper that was extraordinarily buggy. You basically had to cheat to kill it by putting people around to blue ae them because they could not be seen. When that was fixed the encounter became a joke. I don't call that a nerf, I call that fixing the encounter to how it was intended. The same can be said of Ykesha, who no longer ports Fighters or Priests. That was the main difficulty of the encounter, which was not difficulty at all, it was luck. It required you to set up raids certain ways or pray that important people didn't get ported.

No, it really isn't that simple, and as much as I dispise the suggestion that nerfing is the only option, I'm not going to take a position that I know is blatently false.  Taking bugs out of encounters is not the only way to reduce encounter difficulty.  Have no idea where your going with that one.  I can name dozens of guilds that are not yet killing the general after the bug fix to the sappers.  Again, that's my point.  I THINK SOE wants more to be downing this stuff.

Look at some simple facts about progression.  And keep in mind this is 9 months in!:

Antonica Bayle14 guilds killed switchmaster, 5 guilds killed anashti14 guilds killed Kultak, 4 killed general

Befallen and Fay9 guilds killed switchmaster, 3 killed anashti8 guilds killed Kultak, 3 killed general

Crushbone and Inny10 guilds killed switchmaster, 3 killed anashti10 guilds killed kultak, 2 killed general

Butcherblock and High Keep9 killed switchmaster, 1 killed anashti8 killed Kultak, 1 killed general

So folks are moving into the NEXT expansion without even the completed set gear or top end loot that was available in TSO.  Now add to that the set of guilds that have cleared and have everything.

Again, my point is, we have a WIDENING of power occuring, which is increasing the difficulty to create compeditive mobs for all ranges w/o significantly increasing dev hours.

I'm not suggesting that the outcome, NERFING, is justified.  On the contrary, I want to see ANYTHING BUT A NERF.  I'm just now able to put my finger, i think, on what they are thinking and WHY they would choose to do this.  There is some line of thinking that is putting them here, and this makes the most sense to me, unless you can throw some tangible facts out there that say ANYTHING different.

Kindalar

Are you actually raiding this content that you are trying to comment on?

First, they are more contested then they have ever been. Go look at progression on servers and see how many guilds have killed Avatars. Then go look at any previous expansion and tell me how many guilds killed a contested mob. It is more this expansion then any since T5. Not only that, you are trying to tell me that my effort to keep my server locked down so that only my guild is killing contested should be punished. Why is only my guild killing Avatars? Because we kill them within 30 minutes of them spawning. Period. There is at least one other guild capable of killing them that has the gear to do so, but they don't. Why? Because we are far better organized and don't give them the opportunity. People continually saying Avatars are not contested is insulting to me. You can have my spot in my guild and camp Avatars and log on at any time of day to kill it so that another guild doesn't get the opportunity and then tell me they aren't contested.

If the content wasn't so broken for so long and people could have progressed into earlier and gotten the crit mit to advance to farther encounters more would be clearing content.

Finally, you completely didn't read or understand my last statement. I in no way what so ever said that the only way to make encounters easier is to take out the bugs. I said that is the majority of how encounters have been made easier and even described such action to you.

Why aren't more guilds killing mobs? It isn't because they are hard. It is a combination of bad organization and raid set up, not enough willingness to actually spend time to try to kill them, and lack of player skill. The simple matter is that the farther the close the gap in player power the more they have to rely on fail effects to make encounters difficult. What does that accomplish? It means that the few cannot so easily carry the many as was so in the past. In the past all you needed was a few good players to do anything. That just isn't the case anymore with all the fail scripts. The fail scripts force everyoen to pay attention. That doesn't necessarily mean that the encounter is more difficult, it just means that it takes fewer people to hold you back. If the power gap is larger you can make gear more meaningful. The combat mechanics need to dump the diminishing returns so you can go to exponential growth, then the mitigation and resists on gear means something. When those mean something the difficulty of encounters can be larger do you have the gear from killing easier mobs to kill this encounter. Critical Mitigation accomplished this to an extent in forcing you to have certain gear to kill encounters but stacking healers helped avoid the mechanic.

The inverse of this and increasingly shrinking the gap in player power over the expansions has led to where we are now and have been for a while. An encounter is either bugged or it is not too difficult to kill. There is no in-between, barring Munzok, who just requires more specific builds then can be fielded my most. RoK was a great example of this, and TSO was also. As soon as a mob wasn't glaringly bugged it was killed by many. The only exceptions where Tangrin and Munzok who got killed by one guild and not by another for an extended period of time.

[Mordicus]

Slippery I think you should do that item by item comparison, I know its a lot of work but I think it could help Fyre.

Nerfing top end gear because it makes lower tier content trivial in an effort to close the gap between the HC and the casual player does not make a successful MMO model.  MMORPGs are all about making your character stronger and chasing the "carrot" as it were. So what if we can blow through Tomb twice as fast as guilds that are just getting started? Isnt that the whole point of farming gear? So we can become stronger and defeat more difficult encounters?

I hear a lot of people making statements that SoE wants to emulate WoW and cater to casuals but it isnt even like that there. I quit just before Wrath released and there were 4 guilds that were clearing Sunwell (top end t6) on Illidan. At the same time there were probably 30-40 guilds clearing Magtheridon and Gruuls Lair(t4). In the guilds that were clearing Sunwell you wouldnt find a single one of those raiders in lower tier gear, much less "welfare epics" (shard gear) or heroic epics.

Why? Because if you forced those top end guilds to wear t4 gear they wouldnt have the dps to beat enrage timers(battle weary), healing to endure AEs, stamina to live through AEs, mana pools large enough to sustain long periods of fighting etc. Yet you have people doing the hardest end game content wearing Trak gear, SoH gear, even gear from 2 years ago.

Those same guilds clearing Sunwell could blow through lower tier content like they were group zones. And it worked fine and no one complained.

 End result - a reason to keep playing, “chasing the carrot”, and the most successful MMO ever created.

Did anyone play AoC? Where crafted gear was the best you could have because of the slots for gems? Most guilds did raids just to say that they could beat them and then they all died because there wasnt any point.

End result- Another failed MMO.

Item progression in eq2 is so far out of whack its mind boggling, this isnt anything new, its been like this for a while. And really I didnt think it was possible to make it worse but with this recent nerf you certainly have.

I have no problem with avatars going away in t9 being that it fits with the lore of SF, just make enough instanced and contested content to keep the HC busy. Create contested x4s and x2s that have obvious difficulty progression and linear itemization. You could do something like 3 easy, 4 hard and 5 difficult x2 and x4 encounters, there would be mobs up all over the place. Youd put the contest back in contested. Youre always going to have a few guilds at the top leading progression so it would give the mid tier and lower end guilds a chance at experiencing the excitement of contested raiding, with the concentration of the majority of the contested being at the top end giving them something to work towards.

As it currently stands, my guild can clear the whole of TSO in one night, is that really worth $15 a month?

Again, for me, my concern has less to do with nerfs directly than it does with proper itemization and linear progression. Going forward Im hopeful that the gear rating system can accomplish this, little optimism to brighten your day

[Noaani]

Kindalar wrote:

If you think contested are "truely" contested, I think your missing the point.  They aren't.  It's true that on every server (minus maybe 1 or two) a single guild has been "farming" Avatars.  That's the point.  It's concentrated reward to a smaller segment of the community than was intended.  That's my hypothesis anyways.

Approximatly one third of all servers have had only one guild kill avatars this expansion. This number is getting smaller and smaller though.

Some servers have 4 or 5 guilds.

[Mordicus]

slippery wrote:

Are you actually raiding this content that you are trying to comment on?

Player Profile - Kindalar

Edit: Take a look at his gear, proves my point to a T

[slippery]

Another very relevant problem is the fact that all the instances are 2 days 20 hour reset. Lacking raid content and trying to make up for it with short reset timers just means too much loot enters the game. Zones need to have definable difficulty, not each scale up through the zone, that way you can control instance loot better as well.

[Xan]

you just cannot be serious.if you really get this nerf to the live-servers, you can just erase the avatar content out of the game. because the high end raid guilds will find better loot in group instances as all TSO shard instances.avatar gear is supposed to be high end. in all manners.guild and players have fought hard to achieve these items as they are now. they deserve these items and they have to be better than any other loot in that game.if you nerf these items away. it will be worthless to kill these encounters at all.you will confuse the whole system of item quality and bring it to a new level of stupidity.in addition, you will lose lots of costumers who are tired of fighting for their "right" of being a superior raider if they are in a high end raiding guild.why you developer always try to bring a well established system to the death by punishing all who spent much time and effort in this game...

[Tehom]

Kindalar wrote:

Couldn't agree more. And with TSO, gear played a HUGE role (crit mit).  In fact I thought that was how EQII was solving the rapid progression problem.  If you can't even beat a mob unless you have a 4 set of crit mit gear, now you have to farm before you can progress.  It slows down the extreme gamers, while probably not impacting the casuals as much

It takes a lot of commitment and a group that is committed to solving the script to nail it.  Folks toss out the "easy" comment so much and yet progression proves it ain't as easy as people like to say it is.  Which is why I think we deserve this great avy gear.  It took a LOT of sacrafice and time to get where were are now.  It's why the concept of "bringing us all closer" is painful, it's like our dedication and accomplishment are being silenced by the need to get everyone of various levels through the end game content.

I don't like it, I just want us to define why we the nerf is really happening, then try to work backwards from there to give ideas about how to do it ANY OTHER WAY than to nerf us.

I think they could do more to narrow the gap between casuals and hardcore by weakening physical AEs on instanced mobs a little at their extended ranges, give 2-3 more seconds on most of the cure or die effects, buffing druids, and maybe playing around with instanced itemization a little.

Like putting patterns on MMB - say gloves on the first little quad fight, helm on Yzlak, arms on Ozyk, legs on Umzok, and chest on Gozak. Meaningless to those of us who have all our sets done, but it tosses a bone to instanced guilds. Give a few more charm alternatives to avatar charms, give a priest proc alternative to symbol of the faydark, and then there's a fairly small margin between avatar/instanced gear without nerfing anything we have, I'd think.

[SinIsLaw]

The charms are kinda OP, considering they are 100% drop on kill!

So I wouldn't scream murder if they would be addressed in a sensible manner, which in my book is reducing stats, and not "revamping" the items, so that you remove -Stats- totally, which where the main reason why people got these items!

Just destroying these items is a lame and cheap way out!

Avatar loot table are sooo huge, that I can take up to weeks/ month before you see the item you really want! Each server had their rare piece ! And if it dropped in the past HUGE amounts of DKP were spend on them! Now SoE just asks them to bend over!

Also some of the reasons I read here from a Dev, just makes me feel I am being lied to straight to my face!

So Avatar gear needs to be tuned down, because even with item degradation it will be to strong in the next expansion, and in the same update a instanced mob gets an item added to it's loot table which put the now nerfed Avatar item to shame?How does that work out? Personally I feel not at all, and I am only seeing lame and weak reasonings, and that someone tries to keep us behind closed doors.

Avatar charms getting readjusted, fair enough if they keep the modifies but just lower numers, the other Avatar gear should be kept as it is, due to what is involved in getting them!!!

[arksun]

I like how not one dev has replied back to any of the concerns in this thread, but I bet we will get it shut down because someone said a bad word.

As others have previously said, the charms are understandable to tune down (not make worthless), and the crit mit on the bp/legs/helm is understandable.

Everything else is not, I would go as far as to say for example the 2 plate bp's (seathing/valor) even on live are not as worthwhile as the class bp, considering the stats, and 6 set combos.  

[Barx]

Digg@Permafrost wrote:

I like how not one dev has replied back to any of the concerns in this thread, but I bet we will get it shut down because someone said a bad word.

As others have previously said, the charms are understandable to tune down (not make worthless), and the crit mit on the bp/legs/helm is understandable.

Everything else is not, I would go as far as to say for example the 2 plate bp's (seathing/valor) even on live are not as worthwhile as the class bp, considering the stats, and 6 set combos.  

Devs commented in the other thread on this topic (which was since locked to have one thread). Both Fyreflyte (the itemization Dev) and Brenlo (senior producer).

Also, just because they are not commenting on everything doesn't mean they don't read it. Watch the 'whos logged in' bit on the bottom and you'll see red names there all the time that are reading threads and not necessarily commenting on them.

That and these threads typically degenerate into being >75% bickering and the like relatively quickly.

[arksun]

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Digg@Permafrost wrote:

I like how not one dev has replied back to any of the concerns in this thread, but I bet we will get it shut down because someone said a bad word.

As others have previously said, the charms are understandable to tune down (not make worthless), and the crit mit on the bp/legs/helm is understandable.

Everything else is not, I would go as far as to say for example the 2 plate bp's (seathing/valor) even on live are not as worthwhile as the class bp, considering the stats, and 6 set combos.  

Devs commented in the other thread on this topic (which was since locked to have one thread). Both Fyreflyte (the itemization Dev) and Brenlo (senior producer).

Also, just because they are not commenting on everything doesn't mean they don't read it. Watch the 'whos logged in' bit on the bottom and you'll see red names there all the time that are reading threads and not necessarily commenting on them.

That and these threads typically degenerate into being >75% bickering and the like relatively quickly.

Sorry I should have put I like how long its been since a dev reply. I know they both commented in previously.

[slippery]

So, for the record, since we seem to believe that Avatars are the source of the major increase in base damage this expansion, without ever equipping a single piece of Avatar gear as a Warlock on live right now I can 59% static base damage + a proc for 10% more, plus 2 separate proc's for 5% more each. That isn't counting that I can get 4% to all spells from an AA, 5% to all my poison spells from aa's, 10% to all my ae's from aa's, 30% to my ae's if I have my mythical clicked so they are single target, then I can get another 10% to 4 different spells through other aa's. Oh and Wizards and Conjuror's get 10% on their mythical, oh and enchanters get 15% from aa's instead of 4%. Lets not just falsely believe that Avatar gear is the problem and what caused the massive increase, because it isn't. It is the fact that raid itemization was designed so that every piece of raid loot no matter what mob from was as good as anything you could get in RoK, which never should have been the case, but you forced yourself into that situation with the crit mit gimmick. We where forced to upgrade so the pieces had to be better. But it wasn't even just raid gear, it was heroic gear too. Heroic gear was better then the top raid gear from the expansion before. See how wanting to make everyone more equal just creates problems? Know the difference between KoS and EoF? People still had to raid KoS stuff to get some gear for raiding in EoF. There was quite a bit of it going on. Can you say that RoK stuff still gets used except for pick up raids to get mythical updates? Top end raid gear should last you part way through the next expansions content or else there is too much inflation. Everyone cannot be equal or else encounters cannot be properly tuned, they are either killable or not with no in between. Gimmicks to force progression don't solve inherent flaws in the system.

[Noaani]

Durancer@Runnyeye wrote:

The charms are kinda OP, considering they are 100% drop on kill!

Not kinda OP, they are totally, 100% OP.

Compare them on live to the next best charms in the game, and then come back here and say they are kinda OP.

My first thought when I saw one drop was that it would get nerfed all to hell fairly quickly. I thought that maybe the set bonus on it was a mistake, or maybe it was supposed to have the set bonus, but not the effect.

Even after being nerfed down 40%, they are still well above any other charms in the game. They could almost take another 40%.

[slippery]

The only reason that is so is because there is a vacuum of raid charm drops. It is a slot that was forgotten. The Umzok charms are better then any of quite a few charms by themselves on live right now, especially with the cloak for the 2 set. If there was not a glaring whole in itemization when it comes to charms this would not be the case.

[Barx]

slippery wrote:

The only reason that is so is because there is a vacuum of raid charm drops. It is a slot that was forgotten. The Umzok charms are better then any of quite a few charms by themselves on live right now, especially with the cloak for the 2 set. If there was not a glaring whole in itemization when it comes to charms this would not be the case.

While true... even then the charms were OP.