Server Round Table (Community)

[ColicTheScaled]

A bit late in responding, but:

[1] How many real people do you typically progression raid with?
1-2 Max
[2] If you box, how many characters do you typically box and what is your latest progression tier?
18 - T9
[3] If you box, how many characters would you prefer to box?
18

[4] If you box, how many times would you be willing to repeat the Epic/Flag/Aura/<insert tough quest here> quests and still have fun doing it? Once per group seems reasonable, although in reality having to repeat quests is a part of Everquest, and it also seems reasonable that this pain of having to repeat would be a penalty for boxing *Shrug*

My 2 cents on why I play, what I like about the server, why I box, and why I donate:

I'm not in college anymore like I was when I started playing EQ. I've got a wife (who hates computer games, I know shocker!), 1 baby and another on the way. I've got a job that takes 60+ hours of my time a week, but as a result I would say I'm blessed financially.

Most of my play time is in between dinner, spending time with my wife, playing with my kid or trying to get her back to sleep.

I like THF because it's laid back, I can box as many toons as I like, and I don't have to rely on a lot of other people to progress. While I would love to have the time to group with 6, or 18+ other real players like the EQ glory days of old, I simply don't have the time. My poor brother (Daelun) ,who I progress with, has to put up with me playing in 30 minute spurts here and there, and there is no way I could coordinate my play time with that many other players.

For the reasons above, I like the idea that I can use my real life money to donate to give me a leg up on players who have more free time than I do. (I've got more $ than free time at this stage in my life) I like the fact that if I donate, I can do with my 18-box what might take 3-4 players boxing 30 non-donor toons.

Final thoughts: I beleive all content should be doable by a specific number of non-donor players, be it 12, 18, or 30. However, donator items should give an advantage over non-donor players, that will allow you to do the same content, with fewer players/boxes. Players who do not donate (which is perfectly acceptable) would need to realize/accept that it will always take X number of non-donor toons to accomplish what might take 1/2 the number of donor toons.

PS: Our devs rock. Thanks for the great server!

[Sian]

To come back to a point that was mentionned by Blique at the very beginning of this thread, I was wondering, considering that now donor mana bracer gives 80k mana every 60s, if it would be possible to at least upgrade immaculate glowing black stone to improved gather mana 2 (which is 30k mana instead of 20k only or to even boost it to 40k so each upgrade of the spell would be the double of the previous), without changing the reuse timer of 4 minutes ?
That way, donor bracer would still be 4 times faster and 2 or 2,5 times better mana recovery wise but that t8 item would be a bit more interesting than it is already (20k mana is a bit less than half mana bar). Same thing could be done to Lithluran celestial orb which has the same 20k mana but with a long cast delay. Maybe boost the mana it gives, without touching the casting time, so Zenurix's will still remain better than it.

It's not BECAUSE donor has been upgraded that I am asking for it. As I said, that topic has been brought up already before, and the boost to donor mana bracer made me remember that we had mentionned this, and I wanted to see if you had any opinion about it.

[Blique]

I would like to propose a change to DSK3:

Change the way it is determined, that people are blocked for 24 hours from DSk3.

Frankly, I'm pretty aggravated that 5 of my toons were blocked for 24 hours, because hey somehow got on the hatelist from the zone in, and "Its just 24 hours" really doesn't douse my fire any, since I did nothing to earn it.

Particularly on a prime raid night.

Add some required damage, whatever it takes, so that this kind of thing can not happen.

This is kinds of thing that make long term players just sigh and log for the night, and newer players see and decide to move elsewhere.

[Nizzy]

Yes it was exciting to hear Blique whine about this in vent but he does have a point. This also made me think of something else. We have several mobs on the 24 hour some have the +/- factor in there but basically it is 24 hours.

Like the above mentioned lock out and mobs that are on a 24 hour spawn. I would like to see them rolled back to 20 hours and that be the standard "day" factored into content here. Can this be taken advantage of? Yes it can but then again any and everything has it's positives and negatives. I want to focus on the positive aspect someone else can chime in with negative as a rebuttal if they choose.

So you are an up and coming new player and or guild. Maybe you are a guild that played together on live and stayed in touch and started playing here. (Don't say it doesn't happen because after I started here I searched through old emails and found Alloran's information and got him here, case in point.) So now here you are on the THF 15 years later after you all played together on live. You now have jobs, kids or in our case teenagers(ugh!) you have to be somewhat responsible. You are chomping at the content and you have raids set up to start at 7pm to work through flagging, progression or being a general loot whore(like me). So that 7pm raid turns into midnight due to getting Vaion touched, someone was running late or the content is just a PITA and you don't want to click the spoiler tab on the wiki. You get done at 12am mission accomplished mob is dead.

Well now lookie here now you can't repeat that mob, encounter, task... ect.. until 12am the next day. So well your 7pm raid is a bust.

Fast forward you get to the point where NV and many other guilds are. You clear your guild instanced T7 and T8 for rares or new people to loot all the stuff you let rot. Then you move onto T9 (DSK3) got done late the night before? You start later the next day and get done later. Finally it gets to a point that you just have to fully skip a day. You all that play during normal established raid times go do stuff outside of THF(yes it does happen on occasion).

You have a couple members that you generally see on weekends because they are on the other side of the world say the Middle East or Japan. They get on see the mobs up and kill them. Now your 24 hour timer resets again and you have to wait. This could be prevented with communication utilizing your guild sub forum but that is not part of the point I am trying to make.

In closing.. I went to the drive through daiquiri shop and can no longer figure out what the point was I attempted to make.

I believe the short simple version is a policy change.
1 day repop on content = 20 hours.

[Blique]

I went out for a while, and gave this some thought away from the game, which led to a trip to east commons when I got home. East commons connects to one of my favorite original zones - Nektulos Forest - which because it is one of my favorites, I know full well it is closed content.

When you attempt to zone in, you get ported away and you get the message "You are not experienced enough to pass through an inter-planar portal".

In short, you are blocked at the source.

In DSK3, if you touch a mob you shouldn't, you get ported out.

Again, blocked at the source.

This leaves me with one question:


Why is a penalty necessary in the first place, if that content is blocked at the source, where simply porting people out with an emote that says "you are not experienced enough to kill this target" would accomplish the same goal?

I think that's a very fair question.

[Rude]

Hey again all! Still lurking around forums because I loved my time on this server for so long

I just wanted to drop a few suggestions on the dev team! I think there are some good ideas buried in here Note: I haven't played since last year so some of these suggestions may no longer apply... Bolded the meat of most suggestions and colored my favorites for the TL/DR crowd.

1) I remember Vaion scribbling out some code to try and implement the 85/15 rule that's present in live for raid flags. I propose a step further! Allow guild alliances! Every now and then we all need a helping hand. A little boost to get past that final raid mob in the tier. Place in THF a vendor that sells a Token of Alliance for x amount of plat. The leader of both guilds must purchase said token and hand them back in to the vendor. Then, for the following week, both guilds will share the same raid instances. This is especially for those people who seem to just box their own guild (which from what I recall was well over half the population) but are stuck at certain points and need a hand getting through a choke point.

2) Drastically reduce the casting time on the lower tier gather mana items. Or at least retune the items to be class based. Asking a wizard to stop DPS for 15 seconds is one thing, asking a cleric to stop healing for 15 seconds during a raid fight is another. This can also be used for class balance. Say, give druids/shamen a mana gather that takes 5 seconds to cast, clerics a 7 second, wizards 10, etc. This can be paired with a slight increase in recast time.

3)Please adjust the way lifetap aggro works At the moment I left, the heal portion from actual lifetap spells generated *zero* aggro. But the other "dd+heal" procs generated enormous aggro. This left my shadowknight to *constantly* having to spam aggro spells to try and hold aggro from basic melee classes who were gaining aggro just from heal procs. Tuning lifetaps so that the heal portion of the tap also generates aggro would fix this. SK's get a good deal of AAs to improve lifetap spells/procs, but mine always had to remove said procs from my weapon to replace with crappier "dd+heal" procs just to try and manage aggro, and I think I would only cast 1-2 lifetaps a week while tanking for this very reason. The casting time of a lifetap meant I'd get 1-2 less heal procs which even further reduced my aggro which meant they weren't worth it (and I have donor weapon+donor tank aug, with all these aggro issues.)

4) Increase the AC/HP/Mana on T5+ augs by 50%. Most of these augs are quested off trash NPCs so they won't be too difficult to farm, and it allows a sense of progression similar to how ToV used to be (farm trash/lower dragons in tier for a while before attempting harder bosses). Note: this would likely mean tuning some raid encounters back to near their original difficulty. Also, 90% of the augs that drop in pofear are also pretty useless as their stats are terribly small. Scaling them to be similar to VP augs would be great.

5) Add effects similar to the donor BP's to "the" BP of each zone t5+, but obviously make them less powerful. +aggro mod/mitigation for tanks, +triple/quad special attack chance for rogue/monk/zerk, etc. Tune them way down so that the donor BP is still far better than t9 and scale each tier appropriately. The mere chance of these kinds of attacks would be a sign of progress. I know the donor effects are supposed to be unique, but they are absurdly powerful, so any addition to regular raid BPs would have to not stack with the donors or else they become even more absurdly powerful.

6) I was going to suggest a way to increase monk DPS via the death strikes and scaling it with skill level, but I think a more innovative tactic could be to turn them into the light tanks that they are on live. Add in a new avoidance AA similar to Staff block (or a HP return off melee, say 5-10%?) and give them a new AA/disc line designed to incite aggro. They obviously wouldn't be tanking raid targets, but they'd be able to comfortably tank all group zones and perhaps raid trash.

7) Increase mana regen on wizard self buffs/familiars/whathaveyou and add in new self buffs (or activated AAs) similar to Silent Casting that will increase the frequency of their ability to unload damage. Wizard aggro was obscene when I left, adding in more Silent Casting abilities will add some nice complexity to their play style.

8) Separate the T8 beast pets into 3 ranks, similar to mage/necro. Beastlords avoided the t8 pet nerf entirely due to this, so the premise behind the nerf is completely moot if beasts don't get the same treatment. Also, add in short duration ferocity type group buffs that stack and add % melee damage with a moderate cooldown (say, 1 minute duration with 5 minute CD).

9)Druids. Making their pets useful would be awesome. Keep their atk pitifully low (as they currently are), but add a proc to their melee that buffs the group for a small time (say 15s?) The proc could do anything, like boost DPS, boost melee mitigation, boost spell shield, mana regen, a large group heal, or all of the above by giving them a choice in what it procs. Similar to how mages/necros choose their pet, add in choices for the druid. Cast #1: beetle that procs melee mitigation on group, #2: panther that procs hundred hands haste (an often overlook form of haste that stacks on top of normal+overhaste), #3: treant that procs a mana heal, #4: bear that procs a large rune, etc etc. EDIT: Another idea would be to give them a low HP familiar. If the familiar lives for say, 15 seconds then it will cast one of these buffs/heals on the group and then it dies, allowing the druid to cast another familiar and wait for it to tic off. Gives druids some complexity in keeping it alive during encounters with large AEs.

10) Shaman. Can do the same with their pets as with druids. Or flip the script, make a variety of pets proc debuffs on target. Malo/cripple/small slow/dot/increase fire-cold-magic damage by 5%, or perhaps just a medium nuke so that shamans can add in some mild DPS while spamming their mild heals.

11) Give enchanters more DPS throughout the tiers. At the moment they just debuff the target and basically AFK for the remainder of the fight (outside a very select few fights where mez is 100% needed). If uncomfortable with giving any more DPS to what is probably the highest DPS class (when factoring in all the damage that that one debuff nets a raid), retune the debuff. Change their cripple so that it only lasts 60 seconds and give it a 140 second recast. Coupling this with an increase in either DOT/pet/nuke damage make the enchanter a much more active class while also requiring raids to bring more than 1 enchanter along. You can also change one of the donor foci to reduce the recast on the debuffs.

12) Rangers. Their DPS is kinda low, so adding some utility to the class would be great. I'm proposing a new self-buff that adds an AoE that procs around the target when it's struck by the bower. Obviously there are limited buff slots, so making it an insta-effect would be ideal. Like "Soothing Arrows", an AoE heal or mana heal, or (if the code is implemented on emu) a large targets target heal. It would also be awesome if you could remove the min-range for bow attacks so that they could bow from melee range. This doesn't have to be a buff either, perhaps it can be applied as a proc to the arrow that is already scaled to each tier (sleeper, fear, etc.) Can get even more creative and remove these existing arrows from the loot tables and replace them with a tradeskill drop, making you fletch raided materials into the scaled proc/damage arrow where the materials added to the combine determine what it procs! (I love tradeskills! )

13) Necromancers. Somewhat similar to ranger, tweak a couple new dots so that each tic fires off an AoE around the target that has an instant effect (either heal, mana regen, etc). Again, buff slots are always a precious commodity so adding in new things to take slots would be kinda silly.

14) Mages. Adding new swarm pets to their repertoire would be nice. They don't necessarily have to do much DPS, make each pet last just 10s or so and when they die/depop have them heal the target's target (if implemented) or fire off another one of those aoe's listed in previous suggestions.

15) Paladins. Add a self-buff that's sorta similar to slay undead. Sort of a reverse-bane, if you will, that improves their mitigation by a set percent against undead/vampires or other types of evil critters. To help balance this, the buff can also add in a damage reduction. Say an extra 8% mitigation vs vamps, but a 25% dps outgoing reduction to vamps.

16) Berserkers. I'm not versed in the class, but a special frenzy type disc that boosts DPS while siphoning your own HP would be awesome. Increases your damage by say 15% but it will tic off 20% of your HP while active. Truly turns them into a reckless carnage machine.

All in all, have fun you Foresters!

Edit: on a final note, I may not be remembering this correctly, but endurance doesn't really play a huge role in a lot of classes. Tinkering with discs to increase their end consumption while adding group endurance heals to certain classes may add another dynamic in balance between casters-melee! Wizards/mages/etc can run OOM pretty quickly when burning, monks/rogs/zerks/etc should be equally consumptive! (perhaps add end regen to enc/sham buffs) Of course, I may be completely wrong on my remembering that I just don't ever think I watched my endurance bar on any of my toons.

Edit edit (I swear this is my final edit! ): A supremely difficult ldon-type mission designed for 1 group would be amazing T9 difficulty (though scaled for 1 group), huge cooldown on request timer (say 1 week, no matter if success or fail), and have the loot drops be very close to VT quality except attuneable. Makes these drops rare and highly sought after, you'd have several people from a guild just playing 1-2 characters to maximize efficiency, and stimulates the economy for them to be traded! You'd have to have the lockout timer applied guild-wide though, else there would be a lot of mixing/matching going on to get several runs done in a week.

[Rude]

I swore that last edit would be my last, so I had to make a new post to maintain my integrity

Another idea: raid currency (similar to live). Add all loots from that tier onto a vendor near the entrance. Each time you kill a raid boss, everyone in raid gets x amount of currency for that tier (or make the currency a drop from said boss, so as to prevent people inflating raids with large amounts of bots who just sit in zone doing nothing to farm additional $$$). Make the price for said loots be expensive so that you need to kill bosses in said raid zone ~10 or so times to afford an item, and make the rare items (like coth orb, t7 gargoyle ring, etc.) more expensive. This removes having to sacrifice a virgin to RNGesus in order to get that rare item you want. Can even make the currency tradeable in order to lend platinum more value (would be a hot commodity if you could buy currency from a tier to buy that class ring!)

[burzum]

Some good ideas here:
Guild alliance token ++
T8 T9 LDON events ++

[antihero]

I swore that last edit would be my last, so I had to make a new post to maintain my integrity

Another idea: raid currency (similar to live). Add all loots from that tier onto a vendor near the entrance. Each time you kill a raid boss, everyone in raid gets x amount of currency for that tier (or make the currency a drop from said boss, so as to prevent people inflating raids with large amounts of bots who just sit in zone doing nothing to farm additional $$$). Make the price for said loots be expensive so that you need to kill bosses in said raid zone ~10 or so times to afford an item, and make the rare items (like coth orb, t7 gargoyle ring, etc.) more expensive. This removes having to sacrifice a virgin to RNGesus in order to get that rare item you want. Can even make the currency tradeable in order to lend platinum more value (would be a hot commodity if you could buy currency from a tier to buy that class ring!)

Sounds a lot like the old DKP system.

[Rude]

I swore that last edit would be my last, so I had to make a new post to maintain my integrity

Another idea: raid currency (similar to live). Add all loots from that tier onto a vendor near the entrance. Each time you kill a raid boss, everyone in raid gets x amount of currency for that tier (or make the currency a drop from said boss, so as to prevent people inflating raids with large amounts of bots who just sit in zone doing nothing to farm additional $$$). Make the price for said loots be expensive so that you need to kill bosses in said raid zone ~10 or so times to afford an item, and make the rare items (like coth orb, t7 gargoyle ring, etc.) more expensive. This removes having to sacrifice a virgin to RNGesus in order to get that rare item you want. Can even make the currency tradeable in order to lend platinum more value (would be a hot commodity if you could buy currency from a tier to buy that class ring!)

Sounds a lot like the old DKP system.

Kind of, except it's managed by the server. Server awards players in the raid special currency after each boss/raid, killing said boss unlocks that bosses loots on merchant (in addition to boss' drops), currency accumulates until eventually you can afford to buy one of the drops off vendor that has been eluding you. Takes some of the RNG out the equation, that fickle God we've all prayed to.