Trade skills and the next expansion

[Dhomal the Scavenger]

Hello-

Thanks for the heads up about the text boxes that pop up! - Someone earlier in the thread wanted chests to bash open - and now you have them! Plus - if it is just in the new zones - then you prop will not need to worry about faction hits - although possibly....

Someone else mention that this expansion was being called a 'guild-buster' by some. Well - I can see that - and appreciate the worry. However, I beleive that this comment is only for the truly Uber guilds. My guild is not capable to most of the Uberness in the world yet - and we are fewer in number than many. This expansion sounds like it could be great for us! keep in mind that in retrospect some might call the PoP expansion only For guilds, and the Uber ones at that. Many, Many of us may not ever see the wonders of Time, or even the Elemental planes.

Aslo as someone else mentioned - not ALL zones will necessarilly be for single groups. I can see there being some common thread to ALL the new zones - which takes you to a last zone for an uber fight, but one possibly tailored to your level also.

All in all - I like the sounds of this expansion. As always - there will be some last-minute patches and whatnot - but all in all - I think I will enjoy it! I just hope work does not have me traveling out of town around that time!

Dhomal the Scavenger
Officer - Brellian Defenders

"Aye - its a dark hole in the side of a mountain. No, I don't really know whats inside. Yes, we certainly could perish inside. What are we waiting for?!!"

[Psychosis]

And I am a druid under level 58, so no group in a 7 zone radius wants me.
-Lilosh

Dam bro send me a tell some time. You know I will group with you.

/thump

[Reflan]

Sounds like the best expansion ever to me.

Dungeons that take only an hour? Sheesh, what could be more perfect? It may be hard sometimes to get people together for a 3 or 4 or 8 hour event...but for 45 mins to an hour? Come on now ... if you can't get people together for that long, you're beyond the help of medical science.

And it sounds like there's at least a chance at loot too.

Let me see..you need only ONE group, and in an hour or less you get a chance at both experience, a chance at "unspecified further rewards" or something(I'm very curious on that), and loot also? Sheesh what could possibly be any better? How many of us(all, I assume) have been on raids that last hours and hours and result in little or no loot? And the loot that drops has to go around to perhaps a huge number of people. In most guilds, it will, as someone noted, go to guild leaders and officers first, their friends and relatives and whoever they are screwing or who is hinting might screw them, and finally to e-bay or the bazaar as first priorities?

It sounds like if you beat the mini-dungeons here, you have every chance of getting the loot, dividing/randoming it or whatever amongst a smallish group of people(giving you one HECK of a good chance at it compared to getting raid loot), and generally having a VERY fast-paced adventure as opposed to the endless gathering and buffing stragglers and latecomers that goes on with regular raids, and slowly working your way through tedious dungeons.

And...then you can do it again!

The chance to get a piece of loot or some unspecified progress toward something or other, even at the rate of one improvement per hour per six-person group, is an extraordinarily huge change.

The only negative I can see is that if the loot is worth anything at all, it will likely completely destroy GM-level tradeskill items as marketable commodities or even commodities worth making or skilling up to make.

Ornate molds are already dropping like rain in Sol Ro towers due to the recent patch. Seriously--at an unbelievable rate. It's incredible. How can my ogre cultural or tae ew armor possibly hope to compete except among the poorest of the poor as ornate begins to flood the market. Prices are already plunging in the last few days.

If SOE doesn't get serious about making tradeskilled items more than a pathetically weak sister to dropped items, everything a tradeskiller can make will be obsolete very shortly, and the release of a new expansion with the (inevitably) even better items, obtainable in as little as a single hour, will truly make maxing tradeskills its own reward, as there will be nothing sellable you can make.

I sure hope the expansion will have fantastic tradeskilled items -- and not from fantastically rare components, rendering their, uh, fantastic-ness purely academic for most everyone. Otherwise, combined with ornate dropping like crazy, tradeskills are simply over as far as armor is concerned.

[Cigarskunk]

GameSpy: Are you looking at optimizing the graphics engine to make it more friendly to lower-powered PCs?
Shawn Lord: EverQuest currently supports a wider range of PCs, especially on the lower end, than many other MMORPGs on the market. We've put a lot of effort into supporting those customers with machines that are near, and even below, the minimum specifications for the game.

Perhaps I'm a bit paranoid and mistrusting of indirect answers due to a heavy involvment in politics, but does Shawn's answer sound like a corporate version of "no" to anyone else?

[Lilosh]

GameSpy: Are you looking at optimizing the graphics engine to make it more friendly to lower-powered PCs?
Shawn Lord: EverQuest currently supports a wider range of PCs, especially on the lower end, than many other MMORPGs on the market. We've put a lot of effort into supporting those customers with machines that are near, and even below, the minimum specifications for the game.

Perhaps I'm a bit paranoid and mistrusting of indirect answers due to a heavy involvment in politics, but does Shawn's answer sound like a corporate version of "no" to anyone else?

Ayup, That sure sounds like a no to me. "We already did, no bugger off..."

I love public relations people and spokespeople. I shed a tear yesterday when Ari Fleischer(Spelling?) stepped down. I love people who WHATEVER they have to say sound good.

-Lilosh


-Lilosh

[Thicket Tundrabog]

From my past experience playing The Realm, I think instanced dungeons are a good idea. Heck, I still play The Realm.

Every dungeon crawl has a reasonable completion time.

No one can KS you.

There is no camping. You progress through the dungeon until completion.

Someone said instanced dungeons are a rip-off of Anarchy On-line. /e shakes his head. Instanced dungeons have been around much longer than that.

Thicket

[summerseyes]

Newbie armor

Has anyone figure out the name of the newbie armor npc in erudin for clerics?? I cann't find him or her.