Underfoot Spells

[Mindrix]

Last time I was out testing the content, it was supremely brutal. But it supposedly has gotten tuned down a whole lot. I'll attempt some soloing (and some final testing) over the weekend and report if I can at least Merc some stuff with the Air pet.

They screwed up SoD pretty badly, though. The major mistake was rendering 40% of the content, Oceangreen & Bloody Kithicor, completely useless for anyone over lvl 80 (and crappy exp for anyone else). When all of the people buying the expansion have to start in FoS, it's a bad sign.

I don't think Underfoot will be that way, but they've had so little time and done so much so quickly, there's no clue what's going to happen, to be honest.

[Mindrix]

maelin.Mendix is my character; Mindrix is my handle everywhere else. Mendrix is a ranger on the server, oddly enough.

I'll get back to this in a little bit.

[Voragath]

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.

Bolded by me. Yes, if you have a [competent] puller for singles, then the group difficulty becomes overstated. Unless I'm on my bard alt, I rarely have a group with a puller. Sure, I have a ranger friend but HA can only get you so far and it's risky. Perhaps other classes who have some pulling ability will get some new tools in UF to make that better. When I look at difficulty, I imagine a non-optimal group because most people are like Zac and about 90% of them replace his "raid" with "group." In Zac's situation, I have no doubt that UF is as hard as he's heard; in my situation, I just won't be able to get away with my pet doing most of the work; and in an optimal group, they'll have a blast because they'll hit that sweet spot of difficulty v. group ability. Also, only raiders will start out in tower gear. The groupers in Tier 5 will be far behind that trying to fight through those zones for upgrades so they'll have quite a bit more work until they start getting outfitted with new Tier 6 group gear. They'll be in my situation at the beginning of SoD where it was just my GF and I from our guild in FoS (everyone else was still goofing off in SoF). We got a little over halfway geared up before the nerf came in and we had to stop. I used my pet to tank (I was missing alot of my pet discs like FBO and Fortify) while she did mad dps. That nerf came in and we were forced to find groups. It took use a few months to finally drag out enough enough people to make a group to farm the gear. We first entered FoS 3 weeks before the nerf. We didn't make it back until February and weren't able to get Tier 3 and 4 until April then joined a raid guild in May and had almost all of our Tier 5 finished up with our raid guild. That's likely to be the casuals' position except their nerf is coming in before the expansion launches. They won't have a few friends already geared up with the new gear to pull them through this time.

Besides, at this point, I'd rather have the difficulty overstated and have word of mouth or experience prove it's overstated than the other way around. If we take Wire's stance and it turns out to be hard, then those changes will take precedence over the other issues that are really much more important such as the poor/unusable spells; as we all know, overly difficult will turn into a bitchfest on the eqforums (as usual, groupers saying too hard and raiders saying too easy ).

Not saying Wire is wrong. I'm saying the conclusion from his perspective is right but I don't think that conclusion is true of other perspectives.

[Redius]

stuff

in my opinion, this expac really won't be any different from previous expansions; i.e. you get in what you put in, in in terms of effort. I started SoD as a group mage; and was done with armor by christmas, augs by mid-january, and factioning by Februrary 1rst. I did it all with a necro duo partner, with the occasional druid third and 2 mercs. I heard of folks having trouble with SoD, but frankly couldn't understand it. If you leveled up, got the aa's, and simply went about it in a logical fashion, it was easy. Do I play more than Zac does? Probably. But again, it goes into finding a balance to keep the majority of the playerbase occupied for the lifecycle of an expansion.

I've played around in beta with the copy of my raid toon. While that is comparing apples to oranges, my mage is certainly able to solo (not molo) UF content as it stood a week ago. I don't believe that a full group will be needed to do the UF tasks/farming etc. Will it be helpful? You betcha; but i'll wager that hardcore duos and more casual trios, in group gear, with merc backups will be more than sufficient to grind through UF. Personally, I hope this expac is tough. I'd like to see a return to the LFG window to get groups of strangers together in pursuit of a common goal, because that will be what perpetuates this game of EverQuest. I for one, am not ready to see it end, and i'm hoping this expansion will bring that sense of community back to the game.

Just my 2 bits, take it as you will.

*edit* Zac, we're on the same server; anytime you need a partner to run in UF with for progression or just fun, feel free to look me up. I'm usually playing Redius, but if not, look for me on my bard Wisskerz. I'd be happy to help out in any way I can.

[Mindrix]

Was going to post something about a lot of what happened, but I realized again, I put my account (and my guild and my name) at serious risk just going around the edges. So a more condensed version:

3 coders + Nodyin were on EQ from January through late April. Full staff wasn't on until late May. Zones are done normally 8+ months early from an expansion, for various reasons. So design time was way, way too small. Then new AA and Spell Devs.

Devs went silent on multiple occasions and the CLs could not get any responses. New Devs are far harder to get things fixed with than the old ones, but that's mostly from not having Nodyin around. Dev staff is at least 3-4 ppl lower than it was during SoD, probably more (they move people from other games to help for a while). UF is on a shoestring budget.

The Beta vs Live issues that Kozvar talked about are mostly from Level expansion problems. We did see Tower last. And I sent the Devs 2000 words on fixes and tuning issues. About 2 things were fixed on Live when we got there 2 months later. Player power was a whole lot higher than they expected or designed for. (They also forgot a very important trick on Beta: for high-end content, tune it beatable, then tune it up 10-15%, then it's really hard on Live; Beta raiding just isn't raiding on Live)

There's been a pretty big falling out among the CLs and the Design staff. That's been pretty evident for a while this beta. Things got messy after the expansion was pushed back. Granted, the CLs were ringing every bell possible before it was. UF looked like it wasn't going to happen there for a few weeks, honest. What happened behind that scenes around the push back, I don't know, and I'm pretty sure no one else does, or at least not the whole story. I imagine it was very, very messy. It also happened at the same time as they announced layoffs. Yeah, was a really wonderful time to try to get anything fixed when most of the Devs were probably concerned for their jobs.

SOE has 3 games launching in 2010. The important dates are somewhere in the March/April range when the final content goes out. If there's any design staff around after that (or just before it), it's a sign EQ has life. The big, big date is going to be Fan Faire. If we get an expansion announcement, then EQ is going to live for a bit longer. If it doesn't, then the expansion content is over at that point, and the game is officially in "sustain" mode like they do to all of their games that they stop adding new content for. They'd probably merge servers right after that, with 1 coder and maybe 1-2 Devs on the project for a while to clean up loose ends.

Losing the Compendium took a huge wind out of the sails for a lot of us. I've been checking in every now and then here, but until about 2 weeks ago, this place was pretty dead. It's gotten more lively, but it's still pretty slow. Kozvar isn't the only CL and the CLs aren't by class anymore. There's been myself, Kozvar, Andorra and Rasper all in there for a bit. However, Andorra just quit EQ, so that's 1 less Magician there.

Oh, and on spells. They wanted to give Magicians something new and interesting (think the 5-month off-cycle expansion spells from years back). But, as my fiancee would put it, they went for "shiny" but we'd have taken something that "worked well" any day of the week. Most Magicians don't realize that the class needs a massive amounts of work just to keep it competitive. There's very few ways for them to break or mistune anything that'll make us really overpowered. The Split-3-ways-for-DPS setup makes keeping the DPS there very hard. That's why we work around the edges. We've done that for years and it's worked well. (That, and they've never been willing to give us massive upgrades like we need, except the occasional set of pet stuff) Elidroth gave us a nice gift with the RmS effects, but that was from asking lots of questions and offering suggestions for a long time. AAs were completely "blah" at the start, but they're workable now. Lots of sausage to make and it's never pretty, but this time a lot more of it was done almost all behind closed doors. I did a lot of my work through proxies because of a seriously bad time to have a Beta (2 months earlier and I'd have been more than fine), but I didn't have the time due to outside effects, so I just kept tabs as best I could.

Lot of strung together and odd thoughts, but I'm tired and I have to tread very carefully what I talk about. Wire being CL wouldn't change much of anything, really. Devs would just ignore him, like the rest of the CLs. The Beta forum posting is a reflection of someone investing the time to post. It used to get results. This year, it really didn't, but talking and explaining to the Devs problems hasn't been getting much of any results, period, for many months now. It's left a lot of bad blood around and I don't forsee it getting much better, not with how badly some of the stuff is going to Live right now. I imagine they'll fix a bunch of the stuff before the launch of the 15th (compared to the early Launch), but UF development was a mess and a lot of people aren't happy. Add in being ignored on really, really serious issues (Rallos Returns, anyone?) for many months, and you start to get the picture that while some Devs might care, SOE really doesn't. When you've been playing a game on & off for 10 years, you get a bit defensive about it being killed by neglect more than anything else. When SOE can't even maintain their games for profit-motive reasons, it's pretty sad.

I'll be back to this post later in the day, I'm sure.

[Glaven]

Thanks for the updates Mend. Looks like we may be truly seeing the beginning of the end. It's a shame after many of us have spent so many years in Norrath, but I guess it has to happen sometime. Have the subscription rates really dropped off so much since they did the last server merge?

[Sunlace]

When you've been playing a game on & off for 10 years, you get a bit defensive about it being killed by neglect more than anything else. When SOE can't even maintain their games for profit-motive reasons, it's pretty sad.

My thoughts exactly.

Thanks for the update, Mindrix.

[Voragath]

stuff

Personally, I hope this expac is tough. I'd like to see a return to the LFG window to get groups of strangers together in pursuit of a common goal, because that will be what perpetuates this game of EverQuest. I for one, am not ready to see it end, and i'm hoping this expansion will bring that sense of community back to the game.

Precisely my thoughts. I signed on in DoN and it was in constant use. I got all my groups for a year that way. On my server, it was a dead utility by the time TSS came out. That is why I don't care about the difficulty and don't mind it being so hard that you can't solo effectively or need a RL group of players. It's obvious everyone has a different opinion on difficulty, as evidence by the difficulty thread on beta, so we will only find out at Live. Personally, I'll be quite a bit upset if they make it easier because that'll be flirting with SoD's issues all over again. That LFG tool got me all the way up to level 60 and that was back when hell levels existed, before aa's were based on con color, before our pets were made useful, etc. If difficulty forces that LFG utility to be used, we'll start to see a happier player base and less bitching about not finding groups.

Thanks for your post Mend. I could see where you are reluctant to post that stuff and the stuff you cut out was obviously a very wise choice lol Is andorra "crovak"? I saw Crovak quit before thanksgiving. I was wondering why the CL's all of a sudden weren't the champions of eq like they were and your post explains a lot.

[Malleria]

Is andorra "crovak"? I saw Crovak quit before thanksgiving. I was wondering why the CL's all of a sudden weren't the champions of eq like they were and your post explains a lot.

They're two different people, just happened to quit EQ about the same time.

[Mindrix]

I started noting about 6 months ago that Devs listened more and actually gave out more information before I signed the NDA than after it. The CL program is probably actively detrimental than helpful at times. Zatozia being the one running it doesn't help. She's on like 3-4 games, so she's never around to adjust things. I think half the people in the CL program aren't currently playing on a normal server, but they still have access.