pets

[Gnomeland]

No, they obsoleted nothing. Each pet affected by a focus needs a new template for each focus. If they made EM 1-13 work, that's 14 pet templates for the air pet alone! That's 5 mage pets*14 = 70 pets to build and tune for mages. Then there are beast and necro pets. They have to draw the line somewhere. Since 4-6 were made available to groupers in UF, they are just keeping the transition going. They did have EM 5 as the lowest but changed it so the groupers could have some overlap. So they "obsoleted" one less than they originally planned.

Umm, what? You must have a different definition of obsolete than I do. They obsoleted every pet foci in SoD except for the raid ones. I can understand not wanting to make that many pet templates (though it could have been generated automatically, I can assure you), but that's no excuse for saying that they didn't obsolete anything.

Not sure why you are upset. Back at the end of SoF/beginning of SoD they added in that guy in the Ladies of Light tower that allowed you to do separate quests to get the pet focus if you couldn't group the named. Then, SoD put them on the defiant gear sold by the defiant vendors and then you could buy them for outrageous pp. Loyalty crowns are given for free each week whether you want them or not and you don't do anything (no quests or plat farming). If anything, they are just handing the damned focus to you where before you had to work for it. So, you are bitching about a handout?

Also, an EM 4 pet in a full group should do just fine in the first tier of HoT. I wouldn't expect to see them as MT's very often but they should do fine. The level req for Feerrott is 83+ and it should pick up where SoD left off. With more aa's, my pet is actually tanking the trash in Feerrott 2.0 better than he tanked trash in Korafax or Bloodfields. The hp's are higher so it takes longer to kill but he's holding his own better in Feer than Kora.

I oppose the loyalty mechanic they're adding on principle: it's a stupid way of giving away "base" equipment. You don't work for it. You CAN'T work for it. Instead you pay them $$$ for a year continuously and that's what amounts to a "quest" in EQ these days. It is a pathetic scheme and my opposition to it is, as I said, general, though the mage issue is specific since they decided to put the base 86 focus ON the loyalty vendor, meaning that their expectations for class balance at that level are based on the idea that you are a "loyal" user, which is even worse.

As far as handouts go, it's a handout only if they balanced the pet correctly such that EM 4 is a bonus as opposed to a requirement. So, do you really think the base 86 pet without any focus is capable of tanking in Feerott or UF? Heh.

Regarding your other point - unless I'm understanding you WRONG, all that shows is that Feerott 2.0 is easier than Korafax or Bloodfields. I don't see any cause for celebration, especially since you're using a raid focus. Feerott should be trivial for you, as should Bloodfields.

For the purpose of analogies, consider this: at the start of SoF, the 76 pet allowed mages to solo in Loping Plains with the base focus (and if you didn't have any focus you could still do the minos in DSH, IIRC, which were not "weak" mobs). With some work in groups, whereby you get your hand on a Servitor of Scale focus or something similar, you can easily work your way to Gyrospire Beza and beyond. Since UF + HoT can be considered the "same" extended expansion, the equivalent would be if the EM 4 focus allowed you to solo in Tier 1 HoT/UF, and with EM 6-7, you could do Tier 2. With EM 8, then, you should be feeling the challenge in Tier 3, and incapable of taking on Tier 4.

That's how the scaling should've went given that we're talking about a level increase expansion. Not "I have EM 8 and Feerott is easier than Korafax." Of course, you could make the argument that "these last two expansions are all designed so that no one should expect to solo in them" (false), but that still does not change the fact that the pet scaling is worse than it should have been by a large margin. Remember, the original purpose of giving the pets hp & defense at all is so that your average mage can solo AA with them on dark blues. At level 90 your dark blues will consist of mobs in Bloodfields and Korafax. So the base, unfocused pet, or at least the EM 4 pet, should make such mobs relatively trivial (as in, they should not require you to pop cooldowns in order to take down).

Possessing a clear mind about what we want and what we need as a whole (as opposed to individually), and keeping the devs honest with constant reminders, is very important, especially if you aspire to the position of CL. Otherwise, in no time mages will be back right where we started before SoF: worthless, and this board can return to moaning day in and day out about how many years before the next light at the end of the tunnel.

[Failcon]

It is mages like you Gnomeland that make me sick to my stomach. You whine just because you can. I seriously doubt you have done much in this expansion yet, cause you obviously have not gone to the new zones and used the 86 pet. I have the EM 8 so yeah it is easier for me but I am also pet tanking the named mobs which all con yellow at 86. I can tank doubles and in groups am holding more than just my own ( btw with other raid geared players). So stop your complaining it is old and childish.

As for the loyalty vendor to bad, it is a bonus to those of us who have constantly paid the bills. You don't have to pay a year at a time, you can use game cards. It only is based on having your account active w/o breaks. Big deal, no different than vet AAs, bet you whine about those also.

[Gnomeland]

No offense Failcon, but the only thing you've done since you came recently was to state that mages are fine and must be punished for having strong pets based on a plethora of bad logic and crappy ideas about game balance, including that mages aren't supposed to have great DPS because you're supposed to use pets to tank on raids. In this thread and that other thread all you've done is whine about whiners even though everyone here have legitimate complaints. Perhaps you don't main a mage but play one as a alt and that's why you think the way you do. Maybe you are eccentric and just have opinions contrary to most people on this board. Or possibly being raid geared for the entirety of your existence made your view of the game lopsided, which I admit is possible since you're talking as if ripping through group content with a raid geared group has anything to do with balance. Either way, I don't think you are in a position to say that I am whining for the sake of whining when almost every mage believes that there is a serious issue with HOT balance and you haven't yet shown that you have a clue about game balance.

Btw, your understanding of how the loyalty system works is also wrong.

[svenalo]

No, they obsoleted nothing. Each pet affected by a focus needs a new template for each focus. If they made EM 1-13 work, that's 14 pet templates for the air pet alone! That's 5 mage pets*14 = 70 pets to build and tune for mages. Then there are beast and necro pets. They have to draw the line somewhere. Since 4-6 were made available to groupers in UF, they are just keeping the transition going. They did have EM 5 as the lowest but changed it so the groupers could have some overlap. So they "obsoleted" one less than they originally planned.

Umm, what? You must have a different definition of obsolete than I do. They obsoleted every pet foci in SoD except for the raid ones. I can understand not wanting to make that many pet templates (though it could have been generated automatically, I can assure you), but that's no excuse for saying that they didn't obsolete anything.

Actually, the pet focuses introduced with SOF are still valid - just check the Lucy stats. And everything added above it in SoD is valid, as are the UF ones obviously. That is every pet focus from EM4 on up the food chain. That is 4 expansions of pet focuses that are going to work on the current pets. Pet focuses get added at the top - the raid game - and then trickle down over time to the group game. It's worked this way for as long as there has been pet focuses... And EM4, at least, has been group attainable for a LONG time. So complaining about that being the base and stuff be made obselete is just so much hot air.

[Merlaina]

i just thought the loyalty vendor idea was odd and probably pretty ineffective. For me it's just a plat dispenser. And before this there was a very easy method for getting EM4, at least for a while, which was to get taskadded to the last anniversary task (which 6 people could do and TA another 6 people, allowing 12 at once to get the credit/reward for it). I know there are mages out there who play this mostly as a single player game, soloing or grouping with a small group of casual friends, so for them even that might have been a challenge. The way I see it putting EM 4 on a loyalty vendor helped them out, but drew the line at just handing EM 4 out to absolutely everyone. At least this way you must have been an active player (or at least subscriber) for a while.

I don't really like meta-game mechanics like this either, especially the station store, but honestly if they can help keep the game going and profitable I don't mind so much. Yes, it's easy to say "they should just improve the game and make it so awesome no one would want to quit and everyone would come back over from WoW!" but really that's hard to do. I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, but if they had an easy way to do it it would have been done by now. I read a while back that people very very rarely give MMOs a second chance. Look at SWG. People played it, didn't like it, and so they made some major overhauls to try to say "look! we've changed for the better!" to get people to give it a second try. All that happened was the players who were happy and comfortable with the old system got pissed and left. I understand EQ2 has been evolving and is a much better game now than when it launched, but I wouldn't know because I didn't give it a second chance.

Their best hope lies in keeping their current subscribers, and if that's by giving them bags of plat and shiny upgrades to stay veiled behind a "loyalty vendor" mechanic so be it.

[Tacoma2586]

gnome relax man its a game. have fun playing. dont need to get upset 1 zone is easy for raid mage - ferrott etc its a game bro.

[Gnomeland]

No, they obsoleted nothing. Each pet affected by a focus needs a new template for each focus. If they made EM 1-13 work, that's 14 pet templates for the air pet alone! That's 5 mage pets*14 = 70 pets to build and tune for mages. Then there are beast and necro pets. They have to draw the line somewhere. Since 4-6 were made available to groupers in UF, they are just keeping the transition going. They did have EM 5 as the lowest but changed it so the groupers could have some overlap. So they "obsoleted" one less than they originally planned.

Umm, what? You must have a different definition of obsolete than I do. They obsoleted every pet foci in SoD except for the raid ones. I can understand not wanting to make that many pet templates (though it could have been generated automatically, I can assure you), but that's no excuse for saying that they didn't obsolete anything.

Actually, the pet focuses introduced with SOF are still valid - just check the Lucy stats. And everything added above it in SoD is valid, as are the UF ones obviously. That is every pet focus from EM4 on up the food chain. That is 4 expansions of pet focuses that are going to work on the current pets. Pet focuses get added at the top - the raid game - and then trickle down over time to the group game. It's worked this way for as long as there has been pet focuses... And EM4, at least, has been group attainable for a LONG time. So complaining about that being the base and stuff be made obselete is just so much hot air.

I think you missed the "raid part." Every EM below EM 4 has been obsoleted. The only EM in SoD that is >= EM 4 are raid EM. Group EM stops at EM 3 which is what you get for completing all the themes.

So essentially what they did, was to make it such that every expansion below UF (which is effectively the same difficulty as HOT), no longer produce an EM that can focus the 86 pet. Ofc if you raid it is different because raid balance has always been different, though in this case with so few guilds having actually progressed through UF most people - as you see here - are still running around with EM 8 as opposed to EM 9, 10, or 11.

From this we can see, quite easily, that the addition of EM 4 on the loyalty vendor was a master stroke. They know most people are still on the lookout for a base focus, because they know most people haven't completed UF due to how ridiculously hard it was (the second coming of GoD and all). The worst part is, they would've made it even worse for HoT if not for all the beta whining about HoT being too hard. That's right, the devs think that an expansion that most people did not progress through should be followed up by another expansion that most people would not be able to progress through, raid-wise and group-wise.

If they are not intentionally trying to kill the game they are certainly doing a very good job at it. UF zones are about as empty as they come, with most people still spending their time in SoD. And they were going to make another UF? No wonder they've had to do server merge after server merge in recent years.

I digress, but the point of raising the level cap to 90 is to give players more base power. This supposedly should make UF and HoT both easier to progress through. As mages what we should be demanding is that this power increase is level appropriate - that is, that at level 90 we don't lose power against level appropriate mobs vs. at level 85. This requires the pet to be scaled according to the content that is available at level 90, and it requires this to happen unconditionally and without the expectation that you've progressed through the whole of UF, considering that UF is actually harder than HoT in many respects.

Given that they've obsoleted all pet focus items from SoD (non-raid), then, it is obvious that every non-raiding mage's "slate" has been wiped clean in terms of pet foci - EM 4 is beyond anything that you can get from the group stages of SoD. If this is true then the 86 pet should be adequately balanced to tank UF and HOT Tier 1 content effectively without any focus items, and EM 4 should be a bonus beyond that. If this is not true then I'd argue the pets are badly tuned and that it will lead to a serious stagnation of pet power at least among group mages, though the effects won't be felt at the upper levels of raiding for some time due to the EM inflation there.

[Gnomeland]

gnome relax man its a game. have fun playing. dont need to get upset 1 zone is easy for raid mage - ferrott etc its a game bro.

I'm not upset. If you want to see real upsetness, go to the SoE boards. There are some really upset people there, especially mages.

I didn't buy HoT. Don't intend to either, unless something changes. What I've done is analyze the state of the game on the eve of HoT release, and based on past experience, I'm telling you all that you need to wake up and realize what's happening. The community has been lacking in direction and organization and this was apparent during the HoT beta. This hurt the class greatly, and it is time people realized why you should care.

SoF was four expansions ago. The SoF devs have been rotated out of EQ. This new balance is a whole new ball game, and people need to stop acting like this is still the SoF/SoD Lala-land. The new devs are going through the motions but they don't strike me as having an in-depth understanding of what to do. If they did we should not have seen last minute across-the-board nerfs to HoT mobs. That was a clutch effort to salvage what was to be another game-killing expansion ala UF. It demonstrates exactly what we're dealing with in terms of the content balance team.

[micker]

The problem is that there are too many dam pet focus items. Back in the day you had one pet focus for each pet. Once they started the stupid EM focus line, it got out of hand.

If they were to allow pet focus items below EM4 to focus the pet, there would have to be a very small increase in each foci level. If there was a big difference, say 10% stronger per level, then at EM 13, the pet would be way way overpowered. So now EM4 is the base focus and they can scale the focus items like they have been. It sucks, because EM 4 went from being a really good focus item to newbie focus in basically one expansion. I wonder if EM 4 focused pets still have the same Mod2 cloak aka. is their shielding etc. still the same??

I'm sure they will have some easy to get EM5/6 focus items in HoT, if they are basically giving away an EM4 one. Really they should have the last expansions Raid level focus as this expansions group level ones. So group mages could get up to say EM9 or EM10. If EM13 is the top raid focus then the group focus should be at least EM9.

[Gnomeland]

You basically do, except it's slightly under two expansions instead of one. The highest tier of group EM in UF is 6. The highest tier of raid EM in SOF was 5. UF is two expansions (SOF ->SOD -> UF) ahead of SOF. The highest tier of raid EM in SOD was 8. So you're two EMs behind the top raiding focus of the previous expansion. Not too bad.

The problem is the BASE pet keeps getting shafted. The 86 BASE pet, without any focus items, is worse than the 81 pet focused with EM 3. So you have a situation in which it is a DOWNGRADE to get the new pet unless you have EM 4+. This is due to the way pet focus items work in EQ, which hasn't be changed in ages and is creating all sorts of problems.

Couple this with the fact that almost no one actually finished UF and you have a further issue of whether UF should've been treated like a real expansion as opposed to something extra added for the HARDCORE. Had they based HoT off of the assumption that the previous expansion was SoD, we would have no problem because the SoD pet focus items are actually relatively easy to obtain at least up to EM 1. So you would have a good base focus going into HoT assuming UF never existed.

These are all issues that should've been dealt with during the Beta phase of HoT.

But because of the loyalty fiasco, which gave the devs an answer to fallback on: "you have EM 4 from loyalty, so STFU," and people like Failcon are screaming at the top of their lungs "it's fine it's fine it's fine I have EM 8 it's fine it's fine it's fine," all of these issues were completely ignored, to the point where if you don't have EM 4+, either from loyalty or UF or /taskadd, your 86 pet is worse than your 81 pet.