Why GoD is the worst expansion yet

[Poohjure]

borblefoot writes

Sorry I compeletely disagree. GOD is the second best expansion to date. Only LDON IMO is better.

Now LDoN is not what I would call the best expansion to date. I mean come on. Yeah it added diversity and devs thought that they were going to encourage people to pull out old equipment and aug it to make it worth while when to be honest, it is still not as good as what you have.

Also, talk about a MAJOR time sink. As if EQ wasnt bad enough of stealing 250 days of my life (=p) now i have to dungeon crawl in zones that gives 1% aa per kill and waste 60 minutes outta my game time for only of portion of the points needed to the actual useful augs.

Personally the only augs i would use is the Anger3 and hp augs and at 1150 adv points it is just kinda sad the amount of time that it takes to "Earn" one of these.

The math:
1150 / 50 = 23 adventures
23 adventures * 60 minutes = 23 in game hours
and no matter how much i try to justify it, 40hp is NOT worth 23 hours of dungeon crawling.

--Pooh

PS, btw, best expansion is Luclin by far, was the first instance of true high level zones for the elite guilds. Ssra and VT are still great raiding zones for accessory slot upgrades.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

heh, I'm find Velious and LDoN to be by far the best expansions for me. The rest are kind of a big pile of "blah".

Why? Because I have used and continue to use the actual *content* of those two expansions. I spend significant time in those zones, work through aspects of their content.

The rest of the expansions, I get the tradeskill recipes, the spells, and the gimmicks. After spells are acquired, no real time is spent in anything expansion-specific. Sure, I spend time in PoK which is part of PoP, and I've done the Dwarven Ale turnins in Katta. But those things don't feel much part of the expansion - there's no real difference between tradeskilling in Kaladim or PoK, except that PoK has newer generations of items and is more complete - it doesn't have any PoP-style mobs or encounters, or connection to PoP-based progression. Farming tradeskill supplies in Luclin accounts for virtually all my time in SoL's combat zones.

I've spent a lot of time xping, questing, exploring, and/or raiding in SoV and LDoN, and really enjoyed them. I feel like I've actually started to work at the "meat" of these two expansions, whereas with the rest I've just chowed down on the appetizers and side dishes.

------------

I do find time calculations for LDoN curious. Like the above points out, you could say LDoN "prices" 40hp at 23 hours of dungeon crawling. Since everyone gets the same points, you have 6 people investing 23 hours each for 6 40hp augs. So 138 player-hours to produce 6 40hp loots.

What would you consider the time costs for typical raiding, or a raiding evening? The number of hours to organize, set up, clear, and get to the targets, multiplied by the number of people involved can get rather high. And for how much loot? 3-10 worthwhile drops or so? I'd be curious what the player-hours to loot-value ratio winds up being for mid and high level raiding guilds. LDoN's numbers game might start looking a bit better

[xaanru]

The math:
1150 / 50 = 23 adventures
23 adventures * 60 minutes = 23 in game hours
and no matter how much i try to justify it, 40hp is NOT worth 23 hours of dungeon crawling.

This WOULD be true, IF you had to farm greens, with no other loot, for 23 hours, to get the points.

The me, LDoN is nice because:
1) tradeskill items drop there, and are foraged.
2) AAexp at 65 is decent, and on hard adv, is really great.
3) named mobs drop so-so to really nice loot, and are fairly common.
4) Plat drops CAN be pretty nice (seems to have been nerfed with GoD release, or I've had bad luck lately).

I sort of think of the AP system as BONUS points. Kind of like the stats the adventure stone adds. Every 10 adventures, in addition to exp, loot, drops, and some fun crawls, I get a small bump in stats, and ALSO some adventure points. Not bad at all

[Elyssanda]

To date Ldon is my favorite expansion.. why? I love dungeon crawls. I like pulling a group of people together and going in.. kicking butt, and finishing in a reasonable time. Some groups I've been in do 2 an hour... some take the whole 90 minutes.. whatever.. we're having fun. And unlike places such as GE these adv. don't require a raid force, and give better XP than a raid.
It's a game.. and due to its very nature people are able to play it successfully in a variety of ways and be perfectly happy with their chosen way.
And I really like my new BP from Tak.

[kiztent]

Originally posted by Dunthor Warsmith
What would you consider the time costs for typical raiding, or a raiding evening? The number of hours to organize, set up, clear, and get to the targets, multiplied by the number of people involved can get rather high. And for how much loot? 3-10 worthwhile drops or so? I'd be curious what the player-hours to loot-value ratio winds up being for mid and high level raiding guilds. LDoN's numbers game might start looking a bit better

The problem is that raid content takes fewer people less time as it becomes more trivial (e.g. "farm status").

So an intial Vex Thal run might take 70 people 12 hours and yield 20 or so drops, but that same run later would take 50 people 4 hours with the same drop yield.

LDoNs don't become trivial (well, sort of) since they scale up and require about the same amount of time to complete.

[Daikoku Ashikaga]

2) AAexp at 65 is decent, and on hard adv, is really great.

Actually the XP in LDoNs is pretty sad, normals especially, low-mid 50's it can't compare to PoJ even, and PoJ is not good. At 65, on a normal, I can get an aa in 75-90 mins of adventuring (3 of them in total) however with the delay timer, which does allow for the usual traveling, remaking of groups in that window, is 45 mins from the start of one adventure to the start of another, so it takes a minimun of 135mins per aa.

Alot of it sitting around doing nothing. I can get an AA in 45mins in a PoE group a PoFire courtyard group group can get one every 1/2 hour easy, I can do better in potactics even.

Dai

[xaanru]

Well, yeah, LDON normal exp is sad for someone who's elemental flagged

[borblefoot furtoe]

And I would make a small guess here that most people are not e-planes flagged.

And for those of us who prefer fun. LDON exp is perfectly acceptable. Because LDON experience is good Its not E-planes fabulous, but I don't expect it to be either.

I get so much more out of an LDON session, primarily fun, than an equal amount of time spent in the e-planes.


Borblefoot Futoe
Storm Warden
Resolution
Firiona Vie Server

[Mileron]

Abysmal sea is great but why did they have to make that the zone that you have to wait on a boat to get to

Because it's such a great quest place. Because you can get all of your tradeskills to what, mid 50s? with quests? for free?

My poor berserker died four times trying to get onto the boat from Natimbi before someone nicely told me that there was a boat that went from Nedaria directly to Abysmal.

There's still content I haven't experienced in Kunark, Velious, PoP, LoY. I'm not able to sit at my desk for 90 minutes at a shot to do repeated LDoNs most of the time due to family. And I am just not interested in going to GoD yet for hunting.

I like the berserker class; I think it'll evolve quite a bit over the next few months, same as Beastlords did.

[Furyrpied]

Re: Expansions

So far with Gates (I am starting to agree, GoD just doesn't sound right when talking about a game hehe) I'm split...

Trade skill stuffs, oh yes.... love it...
Hunting content, ugggggggg

Reason? I'm a druid, this brings back all the nastyness of PoP.

/ooc lvl 63 druid lfg
L33tgamah shouts "go solo somewhere, your class is teh suxxor"
/sigh

I guess it all depends on what class you are as to how much you enjoy the new expansion.

But that's just the opinion of a halfling

[Aethia]

Yes Gates hunting requires you to be able to handle the level of hard LDON with respawn. I am not elementally geared, not VT geared and not part of the Holy Trio (aka necro). I don't do CRs in Gates unless it's my group. If I'm good enough for Summoning Corpses I'm good enough to hunt there. Having said that, I do get an occasional group there.

But Gates is a good expansion. Now many people will argue is was advertised as 50+. And it is ... to an extent. Yes, the mobs are HUGE undercons, but then again, this is a game that will be 5 years old. How many people have 'won' the game and killed Quarm? They want to be entertained just as much as the level 1 new toon made on Christmas Day.

How does SOE get new players? Mostly through word of mouth. By the player that has been playing probably since beta. And I remember the day my neighbor showed me her druid, level 40 something, kill stuff in Eastern Wastes. I was impressed and went out that night to buy EQ and install it.

For me Velious sucks (I hate the snow) <g>, Kunark I don't care for (too many sarnak and I don't like lizards or spiders (LOIO) <giggles>. I love Luclin because of the variety and I don't lag there. I love LDON because of instanced content. I love LOY for more bank space. But I also buy every expansion regardless because it gives me more choices on where to hunt, which means more friends, more new experiences and that for me is more fun.

Now if only my critical dot affliction was what I had hoped for..... (but pet flurry rocks).

[FeroceFV]

My personal review:

Original game: Once they got the bugs out, it's pretty graphically simplistic, but a neat game.

Kunark: Many will disagree, but I think Kunark was the best expansion to date. Beautiful zones, a semi-coherent theme (critters with scales, old ruins, dragons here and there), armor that really adds to your class with nifty clickies (I'm 65 and I still use 3 pieces regularly), good zones to xp in, some really neat dungeons, and, of course EPIC WEAPONS (which I would pay good money to have a series of upgrade quests for). Iksar make for an interesting species to play. 10 more levels. Kunark took the EQ world and blew it up.

Velious: Pretty neat. Nice loot, some of which is still good several years later. Good quested armor that requires teamwork to get. Shawl quests. Ring quests. Some nice dungeons. More dragons. The Sleeper and his tomb. Neat factions and stories to work with... dwarf vs giant vs dragon. Raid mobs tend to AE, so you need good resists. Really cool zones. I'd like to see more racial faction modifiers. Oh well.

Luclin. Graphically amazing, set a new standard. Mobs cast unresistable AE's, and there come to be certain "tricks" that you need to beat the higher-end encounters. Takes a well-disciplined force to win, not just a massed zerg charge. VT keys are a royal PITA. VT itself has amazing loot, but the zone is pretty uninspired. Hollowshade is nice, now that it works. The story of the moon is crazy complicated, most people gave up trying to understand it after the first couple of weeks and just focused on killing the stuff that drove the story. Beastlords are still considered a bit overpowered, but are cool enough I don't really care (I'm a bard). Furry boobies. Cats eat too much, but are kinda nifty. Horses would be cool, but the whole invisible horse exploit is just stupid. The bazaar is a game unto itself.

PoP. Books make travel too easy. PoK is kinda neat. Planar progression is a hassle, but reinforces the pecking order. Lots of good raiding content, yay. Nice xp zones, good quests, you get to kill gods. Neat new armor, you get 5 more levels.

LoY. Neat pirate ship zone. Revemped dungeons are kinda nice. Armor dyes are good, except for the occasional **** hippy who thinks tie-dyed plate mail is cool. Yay, more bank space. Frogs are weird, but I guess I can stomach them.

LDoN: Forced people to learn to work and fight indoor crawls, which most people had just avoided till then. That's good. Emphasizes movement vs camping. That's good. Raids are a big feature that most will never see, since you have to be an elemental-calibre guild to have a shot at winning. Farstone transport I like more than the books, for some reason.

GoD: Seems kinda ho-hum. No big new features. No new class or species. Focussed heavily on the top-tier, largely ignores others. boat city is pretty. You can make money fishing, just watch out for trades. More progression, this time it takes a group.

My order of merit:
1. Kunark. It made every part of EQ better. Set the standard.
2. PoP. People still define their guilds as elemental or time flagged. The game revolves around PoK and the bazaar.
3. Luclin. For its time, a hugely ambitious expansion, pushed the game in new ways. Huge technical issues upon release marred it a bit, but it's still a bloody fantastic expansion.
4. LDoN. Not so ambitious, but the new reinforcement of grouping, and the scaled content, made for a good way to train people to work together to accomplish goals nicely.
5. Velious. Essentially, it was mudflation++ when it came out. Some neat ideas and pretty zones, but other than a few quests, it's just not as useful anymore. It's due for some revamping.
6. LoY. This was an expansion? Mostly a set of features they were planning on introducing anyway, but they bundled them up with a few new zones and slapped a 20-buck price tag on it. Nice dungeons, but overall, I'm not impressed, playable frogs nonwithstanding.
7. GoD. Jury's still out on this one, but it just seems like there's nothing all that new in it. Mudflation+++++++, a pretty boat city, a few new zones.

[Kahmon]

Re: My personal review:

GoD: Seems kinda ho-hum. No big new features. No new class or species.

Umm...Berserkers?

[Fin]

LoY... don't forget the LFG tool, the maps, journals, etc.

... charm slot, and shared banks, and extra 8 bank slots....

... and dyes!!!

How can you not love LoY?

-Fin

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Originally posted by Fin
LoY... don't for get the LFG tool, the maps, journals, etc.

... charm slot, and shared banks, and extra 8 bank slots....

How can you not love LoY?

I think that's actually why a lot of people don't like LoY - it was an expansion mostly of gimmicks & features, with very little content and loot. Its a unique expansion in that regard, and change from tradition inevitably generates hostility.