Underfoot Spells

[Baramos]

That's the thing, Wire. We don't even know if the devs are listening to us because no CL is communicating with us about it. They could have been furiously doing back and forth PM's with Koz and we would never know. It isn't about being right or wrong; it's about communicating. You are, Koz isn't. Nor is Mendrix. We are asking for an active mage CL who will talk to the devs and us. Most of us probably won't even care if we disagree with you 50% of the time as many did with Koz.

Yeah.

Precisely.

Bara

[Darkenr]

Sorry, i'm jumping in here really late. RL has taken to kicking me in the ass lately so I've hardly had any time to even look at anything beta related or even the mage tower for a little while now. But yea, in general I was one of the ones fighting pretty hard early on in the beta, and I must say, we have made "some" progress on the whole spell issues, but we still have so far to go. I wish I had more time to contribute, but I'm not quite as concerned as I would have been because of Wire's contribution into helping our spells become useful. He's caused some good changes to come in to the spells after they were butchered, and hopefully we as a community (and with Wire's very well put together suggestions) can still get some solid last minute changes in.

Wire, thanks for all you've done in beta, and keep it up. I really hope we can get some of the suggested last minute changes in soon before the expansion actually goes live, because right now our spells won't even be memed.

[Zacatac]

Well I'm not privy to what's been going on in Beta, or with Koz, but it does disturb me a little when I go to the SoE boards and see he has posted ONCE in the public forum since October 1st. According to the search, his last post was on 10/15. So even after the NDA was up, there hasn't been any word. There are a lot of non-Beta mages wondering what's been happening for the last couple months.

[Calebe]

Koz made a comment on the mage section of the EQlive boards that he may visit this board, but won't be active or be a member. That told me all I needed to know. he doesn't post and he goes with his own agenda, but says it is for the mage community. How is beyond me if he is not posting and taking suggestions.

He and I rarely saw eye to eye, but when he said that pet hold was never suppose to work the way it always did and was a known bug convinced me at that point, Koz looked out for his interests and would rewrite history if needed or blatantly make it up to fit his agenda. Saying pet hold not working thorugh zoning was a top 10 item for mages was never true, just a minor annoyance, and the fix was to rewrite the way it worked to make it more raid friendly and useless to groupers was not the way to go, yet it was how he pursed it. Just one example but one of the last ones on the old mage board. I hope they recruit Wire or if Koz reads this to make an account and post here and be accountable to the mage community message board.

Calebe

[Jaytee]

Thanks for your hard work mages. I know it's not much but we do appreciate it =)

[qibrme]

Another vote for Wire.

While i do recognize the contributions has Koz made over the years he has been CC, as with anything else IMO it looks like he has lost the passion for communicating with us as a community.

Not posting on this board, which is much easier navigate than the SoE boards for mage class specific info, is not understandable.

I got into BETA at the very end, last 5 days, and as such had the benifit of at least being able to read the post on the BETA boards, therefore I can echo the many other post supporting Wire for the next CC or whatever name they want to give the position now-a-days.

Great job both in BETA as well as your post here on these boards for Wire. They have definately helped me increase my DPS as well as other areas of play.


Sued...

[Mindrix]

Don't worry, everyone's spells pretty well suck, which was a trend going into this one.

Koz and I haven't really posted much on the Beta forums. Not sure why on Kozvar, but for me, I've just been exceptionally busy for the last two months and Guild stuff ate up what other time I had. I kept a decently close eye on Beta, but for the most part, it was a disaster going in and it's a near disaster going out.

Also, part of my inactivity on the forums was just that Elidroth isn't a big forum guy and Raramor isn't much better. You have to do the stuff in direct channels. It's not Nodyin & Prathun running things anymore. Those two were forum hounds, especially Nodyin. (Heck, he still drops in every now and then, and he doesn't work on EQ anymore)

So, yes, nearly everything has been done behind the scenes. Like the reason AAs are mostly decent. That was a lot of direct talking with him (I let Kozvar do most of that, just to save issues and let's me make sure I can work on Raid stuff). So, yes, we haven't been terribly public about a lot of stuff, but that's more a function of energy expenditure right now.

Let me give you an example of how this beta started out. We'd been chatting with Raramor about mana regen. I spent a while talking in tells with him, about our Mana regen. I spent about an hour that night, after I should have been in bed already, and gave him numbers back through lvl 75 for fixing Elemental Symbiosis. Took about an hour and I had fixed pretty well everything. Raramor spent the entire day doing the spell Thaumatize and has spent ages tweaking it as a result, because it really is pretty useless right now. 1 hour of really good work to fix a problem back through several levels and he could have done in probably 2-3 hours and not had to worry about our Mana regen, compare that to: 1 full day of Design time to make something that's not going to be used much at all, at least until we brow beat them into making it useful. That's the way Beta was going.

Oh, and don't forget, before Beta started, there was a really, really serious question if the expansion was going to get canceled. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Pre-Beta stuff was a complete mess. For example, it took 2 weeks of brow beating for them to even get Raid stuff setup to tune and to actually go about opening Beta. So if you're desperate for communication, there it is. There's a very good chance (at least 50/50) this is the last EQ expansion.

That being said, it doesn't seem like it'll suck like SoD did. But spells suck across the board and all of them will have to be fixed. We didn't get an Orb or "self-Rod" because they didn't have enough time to make the summoned items. It's not for a lack of trying, a lot of this stuff doesn't work well or usefully and it seems that's intended.

[Zacatac]

There's a very good chance (at least 50/50) this is the last EQ expansion.

There is a 50/50 chance it's the last one I'll buy, no matter what. From what I've been hearing (as I wasn't in beta) this expansion won't be too "casual-friendly".
I don't live online like some people. I log in at designated raid times, raid, log back off. I rarely have time to find a group, unless it's a prearranged time already set up with friends beforehand (which is how I got most of Void E flagging done).

Fact: There are no pickup groups on my server. You won't find more than 5 people in the LFG window 99% of the time.

Fact: While UF sounds like a great challenge to all the end game raiding guilds, it won't be touched by those of us still struggling with SoD and not even close to Tower.

Assumption: If the group content is as hard as I'm hearing, it also won't be of much use to me. I might play in UF 1 night a week for 3 hours if I'm lucky. I can't just grab a couple friends + 3 mercs to make a group. I'll need a real tank (not my pet or a merc), a real puller/cc, and probably a good healer and not just the cleric merc.

Conclusion: I'll never finish UF group content, nor will I touch UF raid content. Other than AA's and tradeskills, I'm not really excited about much of this expansion.

I just got my last T5 essence last week to "finish" my SoD visable armor. I still have several T4 non-visable slots. So in a way, there are still quite a few SoD T5 missions and items I could upgrade with. Does that sound like someone who is going to fly though UF?

I hope I'm wrong, I'll find out soon enough.

One other issue, even to this day we have peole who are not Void E flagged. Just like we had people who weren't Crystallos flagged. We try and try and run guild nights to do nothing but work on flagging, and we still have some who don't ever get done no matter how many times we run it. They log in to get a group, find out they can't enter the zone to join us, log back out.

I say this because while having ONE zone locked off to people wasn't too much, this expansion has multiple zones and tiers of zones locked off to people who haven't done the earlier content yet.

I predict there will be a huge number of those who fall behind the curve, aren't flagged, and will have an even harder time finding groups because those who are flagged will be busy doing T8/T9 zones. The playerbase will become divided. Much like PoP where the people would go xp in PoFire who could, while most couldn't enter the zone.

[wire]

People are vastly overstating the difficulty of the group content. As a Mage, it will be more or less the same as SoD, at least it was not hard from what I tested after the mob difficulty revamp. And that was in all tower gear, which will be the new group gear. As long as you actually do the progression and gear up at each tier of content, even group Mages should be very good in Underfoot. From what I could tell, the majority of tuning was done around mob density and respawn, so as long as you can single pull, there should be several doable camps.

[Voragath]

That's interesting Mindrix (or is it really Mendrix, I'm so confused because you have it spelled two different ways: one on your toon, another on your handle lol) giving I just read Koz's post on evil gamer. Quickly, before any jumps on Koz for posting over there, I checked his post history and he hasn't posted, until now, since last year--he was just really responding to some things in that thread in much the way...well, here, just read it for yourself. Koz made 3 posts if you wanna check them out but this is the important one:

Originally Posted by Kelefane:
Well, I just keep seeing too many things pointed in the wrong direction during the past 2-3 expansions. As if the devs themselves have no clear-cut direction that they wanna take the game and its content etc. They jump all over the place with the difficulty, often times going from one extreme to the next. I just dont feel any consistency or substance behind any of it. I think UF is one huge pile of overcompensation due to what SoD was.

Posted by Koz:
For what it's worth...it's not like they *intended* to make SoD as easy as it was. There were several issues that came into play there that can be used to try to explain what happened- for instance, during Beta none of the events had any sort of mana restoration effects in place (I distinctly remember telling Ngreth during SoD Beta that Tower 3 would need a mana restoration effect because of its length- casters were running out of mana before the third wave of spawns and no one finished that event during Beta without any help- but the event was never tested with mana restoration effects during Beta, they were added after the fact at a rate far greater than necessary; as a result, on Live we beat it on our first attempt).

There has also been a long-standing theory that, for some unknown reason, characters on Beta are NOT as powerful as their identical counterparts on Live. Is that true? I have no idea, but I can say that doing events on Beta is always more difficult than doing them on Live, and it's not due to new gear (remember, we beat Tower less than two months after the expansion launched, and several weeks of that time was spent being cockblocked on event six- there wasn't much time for gearing up there). I don't know why it's easier on Live, though- it just is.

Then there's the fact that they used some new guilds in SoD Beta that had never tested raids before and weren't even finished with SoF at the time they tested the new content. And the fact that tuning on Beta is more about testing bugs and making sure the events work than tuning difficulty. And the fact that they reduced the global recast but some raids were tested before that change took place. And there were claims that they took our test data and basically went back to the drawing board and did a blanket increase of +15% difficulty to every raid, but it actually seemed like they *decreased* the difficulty of every raid by -15% instead. *shrugs* And...the list goes on. There were other things going on that I won't get into (if he really wants to, I'm sure Brael will elaborate)...but the fact remains, we were the last guild to see all of the events in Tower before SoD launched and they were all easier on Live than they were the last time we saw them on Beta, so something happened there.

Of course, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what will happen with Underfoot...yes, Underfoot BETA is quite difficult, but Underfoot LIVE is all that really matters, and if there really is some weird disconnect between Beta and Live that makes things a lot easier on Live, or something changes after Beta testing is finalized but before the expansion launches, then all the testing in the world isn't going to matter and Underfoot may end up being unexpectedly easy just like SoD was. But that's another matter that's better suited for Kelefane to pounce on- I'm not in the habit of worrying about things I can't control.

I have nothing to say about the matter but how remarkably similar these two posts are. It's not just those two either because Brael is similarly miffed and made a recent post alot like these two. Ok, so if you still don't see the similarity, you are looking too closely. Step back, look at the "general idea" of what's being said. Koz is saying that there were issues in beta SoD that apparently are going to happen in UF [possibly] because they make lots of last minute changes or barely even listen to the suggestions. Mendrix is saying they were kinda listening (starting to see it now?) and really only half-assed what was requested. The devs are just not working that hard at eq for whatever reason but some are still fighting the good fight. Ngreth has made HUGE changes to TS over the years (almost all of them at requests and suggestions from players) and was recently put in charge of items (my guess is due to the cheers from TS'ers) and quickly made some much needed changes. Ngreth is also the most communicative dev and really does listen. He listens so well, his boss often tells him no on ideas so he goes and finds a workaround. I wonder how things would be if Raramor and Elidroth were like Ngreth? It's also obvious something is taking the attention of the devs elsewhere...now what could that be....?

As for Koz's absence, it is not excused. There is ZERO reason to not communicate to us. In fact, he coulda done 100x the work of Wire but, because he was silent, it's biting him in the ass. CC's are the players' direct link to getting the ears of the devs and we couldn't do that this time around. Dropping a line now and again to show he is making a bona fide effort on our behalf could have made a huge difference. And no one has been on you Mindrix, yet , because you are new and haven't really worked with you as a CC.

BTW, thanks for the info, Mend; it, paired with Koz's and Brael's comments, paints a really big picture for folks who don't speak to the devs and get a few behind the scenes information. I and a few others also were wondering if UF was really going to happen. I was even predicting a February release if they released it before next year. That shows that the playerbase is picking up on the problems Sony is having with EQ. I was pretty dismayed to see that had put a lot of work in before beta started, of course, but that it seemed like they really didn't put real effort into it until beta actually started which is poor performance imo.