From the heart(about HoH)

[Droonkan]

I for one am very thankful for group content post T7. I'm looking forward to having long term goals to work any and every time I play, no matter who else is online.

[Firenze]

I was so happy when the double exp weekend ended !
even if I have been afk a lot , spending the whole weekend at the same place , killing the same mobs over and over was more frustrating then rewarding! :p


HoH is designed for farmer , atleast for the evolvin items.
I'm a part of the "I hate doing the same thing over and over" comunity, but I understand how this zone was designed and respect all the time and effort Vaion put in this zone.

if there is really a problem with people losing interest because of the time it takes to evolve weapon, maybe you can up a lil the % rate of symbol of gods. won't change a lot afterall but maybe it can help.


firenze


PS: non instanced zone ftw. interact with other, fight for named spawn, that the way eq was designed, it just rock. I hate instanced zone

[Shaitan]

Nicole, my wife, told me that I was talking in my sleep the other night. She said "geeks weekend" was in full force. Aparently I was mad at Carbo & Harney for not killing the Armors fast enough.

That said, I would like to point out that the same people upset or conserned with how the zone is set up are the ones that were there for four days pounding away like madmen. Why? My guess would be the new gear and the chance to hang out with folks from other guilds. The "grind" didnt seem to deter many folks from digging in. Yall can tell me it wasnt fun. As for it clearing out after the event was over, well simply put we all had several new items to get auged up. Some folks had several toons worth of new gear augs to farm.

Ps. Carbo... Harney... Neck on... GOGOGOGO!

[Motoko]

So I read through the thread. I'll expand on some recurring issues...

It is an enormous grind, and it ticks a lot of people off. This much is indisputable. The psychology of the zone is pretty daunting because...

A) Some (many, most) EQ players are completionist
B) The zone takes basically an infinite amount of time to complete
C) EQ players do not want to spend infinite time grinding annoying trash in one zone

So I can see why this zone causes so much anxiety and frustration. Its the inability to "let go" and simply let the best gear pass.

And when it's all said and done? What kind of reward do you get out of finishing all your HOH gear? "Yeah man, I ground out 50,000 trash mob kills. I feel so good about that". Or... more realistically "Yeah I basically just logged in every morning before work, got a raid invite, and went AFK and when I got back I had another 1000 pts to spend".

People have expressed that they want to feel like they've passed a test of skill, not endurance.

The arguments in favor of this infinity-grind are mostly just that "its better than the alternative, which is no content". This is a pretty lousy argument. It's not like we've all beaten the Nadox bosses. We're not flying through WITHOUT the HOH grind.

Rather, at best, HOH is something for end-game people to do when they're not raiding. Except its kind of mandatory because the gear doesn't overlap too much between the trash and bosses.

So a good alternative would solve the grind problem, but still be a significant time sink. It would also be nice if the "AFK lol" problem were solved.

Off the top of my head, move all the loot tables to group instances that take about 90-120 minutes a piece. They could be very challenging and have mini bosses. Even if it was just a straight dungeon crawl this would be WAY better than killing 50,000 yard trash mobs.

If you have 10-12 of these instances in T8, and have say 2 out of 10 loot pieces drop each time, then you have a massive time sink that is also a test of skill and avoids the free-loader problem. You could also put 24 hour lockouts on all the instances to extend it and have people logging in every day for attempts.

I don't know why we all have to be in the same zone (crashing it!) pursuing mindless trivial group content in parallel. Group content is inherently decoupled, but if you really really want to make it competitive, have tokens drop off minibosses in some open zone that are used to start the instances.

Inb4 "if u don't like it, you can leave". Thanks. My existential freedom is obvious to me. That's why I can type this post.

[Lillu]

You kinda necroed a 3 months old thread here and I doubt anything is valid from the above arguments anymore. Since the first post was made, point value were highered (1.5x), we released new mini nameds in HoH, new quests there, a brand new zone were released where bosses grant godly points, there's an item clicky to grant double godly points, we had/will have several events to get 2x godly points and so on.

[Motoko]

Yeah I was just lurking.

I'm in contemporary HOH and I feel like the previous comments still apply. Infinity/2 is still infinity. I'm sure everyone would agree that the changes have made HOH more bearable than before, but the concept of the content is still very much the same.

In fact, one major complaint was that people want to be rewarded for skill. Making the mobs easier to kill just exacerbates that even if it makes the grind a little better.

And I've never seen the issue of AFKing players addressed anywhere. You can get T8 geared doing literally nothing. Kind of takes away the sense of accomplishment.

[Lillu]

And I've never seen the issue of AFKing players addressed anywhere. You can get T8 geared doing literally nothing. Kind of takes away the sense of accomplishment.

You are right about this. So, to be clear, are you calling for a nerf to godly points gained from raids? :p

[Motoko]

No. Nerfing raid xp is <a> solution. The pros may be outweighed by the cons.

I personally like the idea of group instances like Enomouth or the Hivequeen. If they're on a 24 hour lockout then it will still take months to complete the content but you won't have to sit at your computer 15 hours a day to do it.

[Vaion]

I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that T8 (HoH) is a raid zone. I made the trash in the zone solo/groupable to give players something to do in their downtime between raids. The bosses of HoH, Nadox, and the soon to be release T8c ( ) all award points towards the evolving items and other perks of T8. The zone was not designed for players to sit in 24/7 farming points. Can it be done that way, sure, but as most people realize, it's not that much fun.

If you want to progress faster in the zone, kill the raid targets. They award 200-400 points per person a kill as well as 300-500 points worth of tokens per kill. While there is only one raid target available in HoH right now (the others are coming I promise!) Nadox has 6 fully scripted and availble targets for guilds to tackle. Are they difficult, yes, its meant to be the highest raid zone in the game right now. There are guilds who have been throwing themselves at a single event for over 3 weeks now trying to figure out the strategy to it.

I made the trash easier, because I realized that farming the points in that method was drastically dull and boring. But farming the points does not have to be done in that manner at all, get the guild together and begin throwing yourselves at the raid targets. You will probably find them to be a lot more fun and exciting than killing the same Wrulan 10,000 times over.

[Motoko]

The trash is still the overwhelming default for most guilds. The kind of raid force you need to take down the bosses is significant enough that most guilds can't do them every day. Only 4 HOHb bosses have been killed this year.

We *definitely* appreciate the difficulty of the raid encounters, but everyone is stuck with the ultragrind content 90% of the time, and at least a few people feel the experience would be improved if it were more skill oriented and less time intensive.