Absor smash!!

[Bastler]

Well its not really class balance but item balancing. Seems Absor is back to EQ.

I know there has been a lot of debate, often heated, on the subject of the rewards for the new classic monster missions. I'm not really going to touch on those discussions right now, except to say that the massive threads on the topic were certainly successful in bringing the issue to my attention. In this post, I just want to talk about game design and the serious issues these items cause and the steps that we need to take quickly to correct them.



The issue facing us as game designers about this gear is pretty simple. The gear is better than most items we plan to give to groupers at the top end of Underfoot. With some of those items it's possible that a group player may never see an item that good again in standard content.



Like it or not, a lot of folks are driven to do content to gain better gear. So players tend to move to where the best gear is that they can get. Once they get enough gear to go to the next better gear drop, they move there.



Simply put, if this gear remains as it is, non-raiders will have little motivation to do any of the content in Underfoot. They probably won't be motivated to do the next several expansions. If the best gear comes from the classic mission, that's where folks will go to advance.



The high reward versus risk in the monster missions encourages players to focus heavily on a shallow slice of what EverQuest has to offer. If grinding a monster mission for gear is the most efficient means of advancement, there will be less of a reason to explore and experience the world. Obviously, we would like players to see as much of the game as possible. It’s important to design to ensure all of our content has a niche.



So, we have no real choice but to make a change.



Unfortunately it will be a big change. All of the "raid" gear will be getting nerfed. I'll let one of the items guys explain in more detail. All I can tell you is that the gear will be very good group gear. It will not be raid-equivalent gear. This will be a change to the existing gear, so the items you already have will change.



Also, we'll be tweaking (lowering) the by-back prices on the items, and we'll be changing the raids to require at least 12 characters in the zone. The chests in the raids will not open unless you have 12 people in the zone. That means that 12 people will be getting the lockouts when they get their loot.



There really isn't a way that I can apologize enough for this. We obviously didn't do our homework on this one, and I'm sorry about that. But we just can't leave things as they are or the health of the game will suffer greatly.



We expect the changes to be in place for our next update in October. If you'd like to check out the changes to the gear, it should be on the Test server in a few days.





Alan "Absor" VanCouvering

Assistant Lead Designer - EverQuest