Server Round Table (Community)

[xadien]

Tonight I made my first trip into VT, went in with Ramp, and Sosten. Great zone, I can tell some nice work went into the fights. The silence seems a bit intensive in the zone. I play a Hybrid Tank, A Bard, Necro, Mage, Zerk, Cleric. I'm not too sure what I'm supposed to do to hold threat on a tank when I can't cast spells. cant use clickies, just hit Taunt and hope for procs?

[Sian]

Well there are not many fights where you have to deal with adds while being hit by silence. You can always hide someway, more or less

[Dreos]

True but tanks other than warriors are pretty useless on bosses with the silences (hard to keep aggro with spells even though silences are a lot less frequent than before)! Pally pretty much just sits out and does nothing

[xadien]

One fight was more sensitive to Finger wigglers, and still did a silence pretty often? yuck.

[Skeletora]

Hi, thanks for the changes. I really appreciate the work going into THF.

+1 for aug distillers.
+10 for Lillithe's idea of cloud server hosting.

I like to raid with 1 toon (Necro), but add in more classes as required for the raid, with a max of possibly 4 toons.

On a slow night, it's normally about 5-6 real people raiding, on a good night, about 8-10. We still have a growing number of guildies progressing up to the higher tier raids.

Legion of Zek have been recruiting a fair bit, and we see people come and go. There seems to be a common reason people don't stay on THF, and one was due to the req of donor items to progress (i'm really glad GM's are fixing this issue), and second is due to connection issues, crashing on zoning, lag, etc.

A few things I've noticed that guildies have issues with;

1. Non donor melee classes like monks seem to have a hard time on trash in HoH, often we have the guild sitting at the entrance, while donor toons farm points for them. It's not that they are lazy and don't want to fight, it's just that they go splat on trash, and this seems to get them down a bit. Maybe increase the base AC on evolving HoH armor for melee/tank classes? Ive noticed that the T8 evolving armor isn't that much of an upgrade with AC compared to T6 VP gear. (i don't have hard info on stats, its just a feeling).

2. Non donor pets are also very squishy against T8 trash mobs, with our mages and necro's taking awhile to rebuff a new pet every few kills. Also the Rk II pets are also getting squished very often. Maybe increase the AC/HP of non donor pets? Just something to make them a bit more durable.

A few off topic suggestions I hear in my guilds chat a bit;

1. Remove trash ability to summon. This would give the solo type classes the ability to use their tricks of the trade as they love on Live EQ, like kiting.

2. Possibly reduce donor pets dmg (i cant believe i just said that...) and increase the damage DoTs and Nukes can do. We often here that Skeletora is Jebarn's pet and not the other way around It was great on live EQ when necro's got the short duration dots (3 ticks) that could crit for 120k, the same as a big wizzie nuke.

3. Ranger Headshot ability for T8 trash? maybe make it a nadox AA?

4. Possibly make mobs less resistant to spells, and maybe remove the bellycasting req for some bosses. Seems having to be in close only works for the big trains of toons that are/stick to 1 toon boxing.

My overall feeling is that the THF style of play is for tank/spank groups or boxers. I would love to see the kind of abilities my necro had on live EQ. A mini boss fight would go something like this; Scent debuff, pet attack, DD that turns mob undead for a few secs, Undead slow, heal pet, FD to lose agro, 3 x quick dots, FD again, 4 x slow dots, replenish companion, 3x quick dots, FD again... These fights were always a challenge, and you had to do a lot of casting/managing your spells rather than just /send in donor pet.

I kinda feel the solo classes like rangers/necro/mage/bst don't get the "fun" stuff they are used to when they join THF. The reason I mention this is due to new guildies saying "I havent played EQ in over 5 years, but i used to love my solo X class" and then to have them disappear when they realize they cant play the way they used too, and instead need a donor pet / item to be useful.

If anyone read all my comments above, then go rest your eyes.. my rants are over!

[Niixnec]

If you want to solo everything then yes, you may have to use donors. If you don't want to donate to help the server and improve your character then ok. You may need to add a few characters and box to perform the same thing. The alternative to either of those is find people that play the same time / way that you do and kill the same things. As long as the encounters are not so hard as to allow only those with donors to complete them then there should not be an issue. There has to be a reasonable alternative (another character, item x, etc.) and if we see something that seems out of tune then bring that to the devs.

My warrior has a few donors but nothing compared to full donored tanks -- he is not going to be able to tank the same things as the donored person without some support -- heals, debuffs, etc. That is fine, as long as I can still tank mob x with reasonable support.

When I first got into HoH I had a group of 6 (dsk / vp gear - 1 nec weapon donor). If I pulled more than 3 mobs I was probably going to die. Getting HoH evolved gear, then augs, then Nadox gear all helped with my survival to the point where I could pull 6-7 pretty easily.

Another timewarp -- Zethurim in Nadox. We spent multiple months gearing up toons, created new ones to perform certain duties, adding members to get past this mob. The first time we won we had 10 people on, running around 60 characters(mezzing the adds in one corner with two chanters, kiting with sk in the other). Now a few in the guild can solo box with the characters they have due to gear upgrades, donors, etc . It turned into a straight DPS fight or only one enchanter in the corner by the time we got to Vistrinda.

We shouldn't expect to walk into a zone and be able to kill everything or why play? What we want to look out for is if an encounter requires donors to complete or if the amount of healing / dps / hp would be out of range for a typically geared toon at that level.

If I remember correctly the rk. pets were toned down awhile back when it was thought that AA's would help raise the ability of the pets back to the same level. Maybe this could be looked at again. I for one do not want to see a "nerf" on donor items.

regards,
niix

[Slaybackaskani]

+1 to Skeletora. I couldn't agree more. The rk1 pets are way too squishy now, instantly dying any time a mob so much as reposites a few times on them. this is very frustrating having to resummon, buff, weapons, everything. Their pathing is screwy sometimes so i hit attack from my warrior on a boss and they run past the boss turn aroun and then attack from the same side as me which means they die and I am stuck resummoning mid fight.

Please check the pathing of mobs as well. The sleeper gets stuck under the world or down in the water and that makes it impossible to fight. had the same issue recently with trash and avatars in PoAir that would warp under the world and so i can target them but i couldnt hit them and they kill my whole group 1 by 1.

I would love to see the return of kiting, even if its just in T8 which im not to yet. that was a beautiful part of EQ that is missing. I would love to see rangers fixed. My ranger and monk both got parked because they were lacking too much and my monk was always dead from wild rampage in NTOV so he would sit parked at the entrance and i would COH him for loot but it wasn't worth having to res him after every fight. now he became a BL so i don't have to pay any attention any more. My ranger got parked just because his damage wasn't good enough and my second group had to have a bard to resist the AEs.

One way to increase ranger damage would be ranger only arrows that drop in each tier perhaps? Or increase AM3 to 200% instead of 100%? just throwing out ideas. Give them a buff like eagle eye that increases aim but add in increased damage too. I would love to bring mine out of retirement. besides that, please look at fixin the t8 pets. some of the nerf was needed but i think they got killed to the point where my mage would be retired if it wasnt for COH. his pet and damage is terrible now and dies constantly.

Thanks guys .

[Sian]

I wouldn't see the point of increasing power of RK1. Droppable pets got nerfed (and I was the first hit with my 3 pet class + draekons), especially rk1 for the simple reason that since they are droppable, they were totally trivializing progression on early tiers. Now they are good that way. They get destroyed in T8, well, rk2 are not too hard to get (mini drops it) and they are slightly better. RK2 gets destroyed on t8-t9 boss, RK3 are the solution, though harder to get (but far better now with twins change).
Anyway that's another debate that doesn't really belong here so I stop here

[shannix]

Hello,

We left the server in march, we had a lot of fun for a year and half with our guldies but we are not boxing 18 toons so the server is no longer for us as we don't have the time and the will to raid and the raid don't need players with 2 or 3 toons hand played.

99% of the game can be boxed by a single player, it's fine, everyone can play his own game but the server is loosing something, a social part.

There s no end game for non boxing players, we have nothing to do.

Here is our suggestion: create sort of group task(like ldon but with more diversity and difficulties), the task are not available for boxer(ip check). After the task you will get points and reward. With points you can buy loots( equivalent to raid loots like event loots).

With those hard and various tasks you will allow players that don't want to box to play on this server, and you will have again ooc with looking for group. A very nice group is a lot of fun in eq and i think that on this server it will be a must.

Have fun

Usinea/basheek ->jean
Bekrells/franknfurter-> holle
Siomei/meibel-> sacha
Jaclynne/catlynne->jolle

[Xorp]

Awesome post Skeletora, Agree with pretty much everything you said!