Cultural Nerfage? (unsubstantiated rumour)

[Bedavir]

The AC has been unchanged since DoD...if you thought it was too much AC then the time to have changed it would have been 4 expansions ago.

And it sat overpowered yet unchanged until this expansion when we saw a 300ac jump from elaborate to elegant for plate archetypes.

h t t p: / / www .darkstorm.co.uk/eq/eq-warrior-armour.php

This chart sums it all up nicely. NGreth was it your intention to make Bazus (CoA level mobs) superior to TSS raid armor in hps/ac/mod2s? Was it your intention to make Last bloods (DPoB level) superior to Solteris? The only problem with the new cultural armor is that it had what I consider a loophole'd flaw which allowed it to be combined with 5-expansion old raid content to create gear better than from the zone that most engame raiders were still trying to beat at SoF's release. We're less than 3 weeks out and there are people on every server with full sets.

This new armor did less to close the gap btw non-raiders and raiders and more to close the gap between low-end raiders and highend raiders. There needs to be some discrepancy in the ac between bloods and sunshards. If that means nerfing the Last bloods a bit to make up for the 20+ ac per slot gain we saw with elegant then so be it. The hp/mana differences are already shamefully meager

[Aaneras]

And it sat overpowered yet unchanged until this expansion when we saw a 300ac jump from elaborate to elegant for plate archetypes.

h t t p: / / www .darkstorm.co.uk/eq/eq-warrior-armour.php

This chart sums it all up nicely. NGreth was it your intention to make Bazus (CoA level mobs) superior to TSS raid armor in hps/ac/mod2s? Was it your intention to make Last bloods (DPoB level) superior to Solteris? The only problem with the new cultural armor is that it had what I consider a loophole'd flaw which allowed it to be combined with 5-expansion old raid content to create gear better than from the zone that most engame raiders were still trying to beat at SoF's release. We're less than 3 weeks out and there are people on every server with full sets.

This new armor did less to close the gap btw non-raiders and raiders and more to close the gap between low-end raiders and highend raiders. There needs to be some discrepancy in the ac between bloods and sunshards. If that means nerfing the Last bloods a bit to make up for the 20+ ac per slot gain we saw with elegant then so be it. The hp/mana differences are already shamefully meager

I'll ask you a question that no Solteris raider has yet had an answer for.
What is the upgrade path for the majority of raiders who are currently in stable, long term, raid forces and are also in Demiplane?

Without something like cultural the raid drop that they can get to are unconditionally inferior to groupable and bazaar sellable gear from tier 2 in SoF. This absolutely destroys the incentive to hold a raid force together.
High end raiders like you get upgrades; groupers get upgrades. What about the other 80% of so of the raiders not in TSS or TBS before the expansion?

[Woland]

Aaneras,

Just like different raiders, groupers are not all doing same content. There are plenty outthere who are dressed in DoDH task rewards, TSS armor and so on. Those who are fully TBS geared may look for upgrades in SoF but thats the high end groupers.

Guild raiding Demi should be compared to groupers getting gear out of DoDH tasks and not to groupers getting SoF gear.

[Gaell Stormracer]

Guild raiding Demi should be compared to groupers getting gear out of DoDH tasks and not to groupers getting SoF gear.

Sorry, that's just plain stupid. DoD group rewards do NOT equip you to raid Demi-plane - heck, it won't even equip you to beat the hard versions of the same DoD tasks.

I'd support a shuffle of the stats from the Sublime augs to the Elegant armour, because at this point only the Tank classes actually see any significant advantage to upgrading to Elegant. Better stats on the armour will make it easier to sell as an upgrade - non-tanks mostly won't pay 5-10x as much for Elegant as for Elaborate despite the rarity and difficulty of making them.

However, I suspect that today's patch message about the drop rates of the "finishing" components being reduced is a way of keeping the Solteris+ raid complainers at bay.

[Woland]

Sorry, that's just plain stupid. DoD group rewards do NOT equip you to raid Demi-plane - heck, it won't even equip you to beat the hard versions of the same DoD tasks.

Who said anything about getting equiped to raid DPoB? I am talking about group content progression relative to raid prograssion.

SoF groupable gear is meant for TBS geared groupers. Developers clearly stated that they balanced group game in SoF that way. Though Tier 1 raid content was balanced to compare to TSS raid content it in no way means that a DPoB raiders should be able to beat these events.

[Aaneras]

Aaneras,

Just like different raiders, groupers are not all doing same content. There are plenty outthere who are dressed in DoDH task rewards, TSS armor and so on. Those who are fully TBS geared may look for upgrades in SoF but thats the high end groupers.

Guild raiding Demi should be compared to groupers getting gear out of DoDH tasks and not to groupers getting SoF gear.

To clarify: I have no problem with the SoF group gear rewards; they're overdue and a shot in the arm for an important group of players. Even having them as a possibility would be handy - and they are the logical followup to Katta gear. However, I can't see why you'd group in Demi - TSS/TBS group gear is better. At this point grinding TBS faction in open zones and selling tradeskill components for the plat to get orum is a completely viable way to get your visible gear to Katta ally - at which point you can fill in the nonvisible slots with named open zone drops in TSS/TBS and be well past DoDH in group gear quality. By contrast, typical completion times for current Demiplane raid forces are of order a full year stem to stern. They are very different situations.

I'm saying that you have to work your way through the entire jigsaw puzzle - when you have active toons in a diversity of content you need to think about what your changes will do to all of them.

[Woland]

Aaneras,

You suggest that as a grouper there is no point in doing DoDH content yet you say that raiding DoDH content is somehow still viable and drops in such raids should be better than SoF group content?

As a raider can't you just move to TSS/TBS or even better SoF content. Why do DPoB for inferior drops? After all this is what you asked:

"I'll ask you a question that no Solteris raider has yet had an answer for.
What is the upgrade path for the majority of raiders who are currently in stable, long term, raid forces and are also in Demiplane?"

[Bedavir]

I'll ask you a question that no Solteris raider has yet had an answer for.
What is the upgrade path for the majority of raiders who are currently in stable, long term, raid forces and are also in Demiplane?

A Demiplane geared guild at level 80 should be able to easily punch straight through Vergalid/Odeen with minimal effort (once you get your strats right) and roll into the glorious candyland of TSS. Deathknell was a fluffer expansion ... entirely bypassable with no weapon drops and unneccessary gear.

It's the same upgrade path that DPoB guilds are going to need now, because you won't get far into Solteris or SoF raids without TSS+ weaponry and the dps boosts that come with it. The only difference is that now they gave you an easy button to the top in the 8 most powerful slots a person can wear. Maybe your neighborhood cleric/wizard still needs that focus, but the only people that are truely and sincerely gear dependant (in the up-to-date sense) for guild progress are your tanks. For them, this gear is solid gold with imbedded diamonds. They'd have to be mildly crazy to consider replacing Last bloods with Solteris plate.

Without something like cultural the raid drop that they can get to are unconditionally inferior to groupable and bazaar sellable gear from tier 2 in SoF.

So the answer is to allow their raid drop to be unconditionally superior to the armor that raiders 1-2 years in front of them are still working hard to unlock? Last I checked, from a tanking standpoint (balanced ac/hp) the original Elaborate + Eminient + last blood was better than several of the TSS raid armors. It was stacked and packed with a level of ac you won't find on any of the SoF groupable gear.

[Aaneras]

A Demiplane geared guild at level 80 should be able to easily punch straight through Vergalid/Odeen with minimal effort (once you get your strats right) and roll into the glorious candyland of TSS. Deathknell was a fluffer expansion ... entirely bypassable with no weapon drops and unneccessary gear.

It's the same upgrade path that DPoB guilds are going to need now, because you won't get far into Solteris or SoF raids without TSS+ weaponry and the dps boosts that come with it. The only difference is that now they gave you an easy button to the top in the 8 most powerful slots a person can wear. Maybe your neighborhood cleric/wizard still needs that focus, but the only people that are truely and sincerely gear dependant (in the up-to-date sense) for guild progress are your tanks. For them, this gear is solid gold with imbedded diamonds. They'd have to be mildly crazy to consider replacing Last bloods with Solteris plate.



So the answer is to allow their raid drop to be unconditionally superior to the armor that raiders 1-2 years in front of them are still working hard to unlock? Last I checked, from a tanking standpoint (balanced ac/hp) the original Elaborate + Eminient + last blood was better than several of the TSS raid armors. It was stacked and packed with a level of ac you won't find on any of the SoF groupable gear.

In other words, you have no answer - other than stating that a demiplane guild should continue to raid demiplane, even though without cultural there is nothing there that can't be achieved with grouping in SoF. And they should go through all of that lovely TSS factioning...to get drops that are comparable to tier 3 group drops in SoF. Gear resets obsolete older content and change upgrade paths.
You appear interested only in comparing Solteris vs. cultural visible armor, with no reference to the upgrades in group gear - or the upgrades in SoF raid gear.

You can get better gear in Solteris, unconditonally, than you can in Demiplane (including cultural, for heavens sake). You get 20 slots of gadgets to use; cultural fills at most 8. You are also far likely to be able to exp in zones where you can get the drops for the high-end cultural - e.g. you're much likelier than a Demiplane raider to be able to get the high end cultural armor in the first place.

The "worst" case is that the Demiplane-tier raiders make up some ground on the Solteris raiders in a differential sense. Do you think that this is a bad outcome? I think it's an absolutely essential thing for the developers to do if they want to maintain a viable population base.

[Wyvernwill]

His problem is his ego. His problem is that cultural is "attunable" which means that those without skill can just zone into the bazaar after buying plat online and deck themselves out in full cultural + last bloods.

His arguments are heavily flawed because they focus on nothing but pure egotistical senses.

The ironic part is that I agree that the gear is extremely strong, possibly stronger than it should be, but given that people can't look at anything other than just the cultural (ignoring the 400+hp/mana items with insane mod2s, heroic stats and etc available in Tier 3+ of SoF that's groupable), I will not agree with Bedavir or anyone who even mentions leaderboards, raid gear progression, and the likes.

Raiding should not be nearly as linear as it is, it takes a lot of the RPG aspect out of the game, removes the feeling of exploring at your own pace, and just puts you on a one way track to the end game. There should be turns, weaves, short cuts, delays, and variences to the same means. Unfortunately, since this game's raiding has been majorly designed to only serve the top 1-5% of EQ's population for so long, end game raiders have been use to getting their way.

Quite frankly, it sickens me that content is designed so that only 8 guilds server wide have beaten it currently. That is disgusting waste of content/time as most don't see it until well after a year later. And people consider that RIGHT!?

[KyrosKrane]

Folks, one warning, and only one warning. Please keep the discussion focused on the items and the logic, not on the people. Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

I do consider this a valid topic for discussion, and I'd like to keep it open. But if folks can't restrain themselves, we'll have to close it down.

[Bedavir]

Wyvern, I'm not going to bother replying to you.

In other words, you have no answer - other than stating that a demiplane guild should continue to raid demiplane, even though without cultural there is nothing there that can't be achieved with grouping in SoF. And they should go through all of that lovely TSS factioning...to get drops that are comparable to tier 3 group drops in SoF. Gear resets obsolete older content and change upgrade paths.

You're not reading in places where it's inconvenient for you to read. I gave you both the answer and the rationale behind it. Where I said you (you as in the the DPoB guild) are supposed to go is to use the new 5 levels and the dps jump to completely bypass all of DPoB and Deathknell and jump right into TSS. TSS is sadly going to prove unavoidable at this point. Even though the levels and tradeskilled gear can boost your stats up to the solteris level per toon, you won't make it far into Solteris or SoF raiding (I've done tiers 1, 2, and some 3 content at this point) with CoA, Vishimitar, and DPoB level weaponry. There are serious dps barriers intentionally put in place in these zones (at least Solteris).

The only problem is that now with the bloods + tradeskills there's no incentive to leave DPoB at all. You'll stay in the same zone even longer before spreading your wings and moving on to other content. The end result is you still having to faction/quest for TSS raiding so that you can faction and quest for Solteris raiding ... so that you can faction/quest for SoF raiding. Factioning and questing is now a part of all new raiding content it seems ... it's a pain that we all have to deal with.

Mudflation is the sad state of the game. I'm sorry that DPoB --> TSS level xp group drops threaten the integrity of your EQ experience. Mudflation does not fix mudflation though, and all this does is compound the existing problem to a higher degree.

You can get better gear in Solteris, unconditonally, than you can in Demiplane (including cultural, for heavens sake).

Not really ... not natural armor at least. There will always be the type 12 augs that drop in TSS and TBS, but even then you've effectively funneled players into one gear path if they want to maximize their potential: tradeskilled armor. Even so, there is no ac difference between Last bloods and sunshards ... and currently only 90hp bridges a gear gap which expands 4-5 expansions (blood to sunshard).

The system needs to be re-evaluated. The tradeskill armor + sublime seems to be right where it needed to be for SoF progression. The only problem comes with the fact that you can stick old raid content directly into it and rocket-propel your way to insane stats in the 8 most important gear slots (stat-wise) people wear.

[Aaneras]

Wyvern, I'm not going to bother replying to you.



You're not reading in places where it's inconvenient for you to read. I gave you both the answer and the rationale behind it. Where I said you (you as in the the DPoB guild) are supposed to go is to use the new 5 levels and the dps jump to completely bypass all of DPoB and Deathknell and jump right into TSS. TSS is sadly going to prove unavoidable at this point. Even though the levels and tradeskilled gear can boost your stats up to the solteris level per toon, you won't make it far into Solteris or SoF raiding (I've done tiers 1, 2, and some 3 content at this point) with CoA, Vishimitar, and DPoB level weaponry. There are serious dps barriers intentionally put in place in these zones (at least Solteris).

The only problem is that now with the bloods + tradeskills there's no incentive to leave DPoB at all. You'll stay in the same zone even longer before spreading your wings and moving on to other content. The end result is you still having to faction/quest for TSS raiding so that you can faction and quest for Solteris raiding ... so that you can faction/quest for SoF raiding. Factioning and questing is now a part of all new raiding content it seems ... it's a pain that we all have to deal with.

Mudflation is the sad state of the game. I'm sorry that DPoB --> TSS level xp group drops threaten the integrity of your EQ experience. Mudflation does not fix mudflation though, and all this does is compound the existing problem to a higher degree.

You have not acknowledged in any way, shape, or form how the path that you propose is impacted by the drastic improvement in group gear.

You also completely misunderstand how raid forces like mine work. We're not going to linger in Demiplane; we're sick to death of it. We're about to break into tier 2 (finally), we'll roll through it as fast as we can, and then we'll go through Deathknell because it is there. We probably won't spend much time there, instead then moving onto TSS, which will require a more sustained effort. Solteris is still a distant vision (although folks like me are flagged for it.) This is the same thing that we've done since PoP. The gear changes make it likely that we will be in Solteris a year from now as opposed to disintegrating in Demiplane this winter.

The cultural drops strengthen our tanks; they don't alter our trajectory. What they have done is to solve our #1 problem: attendance. People are jazzed about playing, they show up, and we get places. Our tanks do better, and we can try out more varied things. The cultural also lets our tanks explore group SoF content - which they would otherwise have trouble with. In short, it's opening a lot of doors and reversing a negative feedback loop. We're coming off eight blasted months in tier 1 Demiplane, unfortunately very much par for the course if you scan the Lavanet list. I'd estimate that a good 4 months of that time was spent barely exploring DP at all because our raid attendance was below critical mass.

I'm extremely annoying with the complaints from the Solteris gang because they appear to be utterly uninformed about what the changes in this expansion are doing for other people. It's a huge net plus for tradeskillers, groupers, and midtier raiders - all of whom have been stuck in increasingly depressing ruts recently. I honestly fail to see how what occurs in these communities has anything to do with the concerns of the tiny minority of the playerbase that has completed Solteris. To paraphrase Jefferson, it neither breaks your legs nor picks your pocket if it takes my raid force 3 months to reach TSS instead of a year or more.

[Wyvernwill]

heh... maximizing potential. Cute term.

Maximizing Potential would me that every single tank would have a set of Fallen Saints for certain effects, until they can down Snowtail/Ghost to get rid of the Fallen Saints in favor of Elaborate/Eminent/Last Blood. Regardless of assertations repeatedly by people that this "funnels" people into one gear choice... it doesn't.

Regardless of the power of cultural, it still stands the 1 single most painful fact of the path. It requires a lot of tradeskill work, a lot of platinum, or a lot of grouping on top of raiding to get the last bloods. This is something certain people have chosen to over look with the simple fact that one person "can" zone in and buy the armor in the bazaar or the drops and commission a tradeskiller to do the combines.

The fact remains that dispite that fact, not one single piece of Anguish or Demi visible gear has rotted despite having raided both zones now 3 times working on the fourth, since SoF went live. Not one single piece has gone to alts.

*ponder* Wait, doesn't that counterdict your entire statement that people have only 1 choice in gear, and that the Mid Tier raid forces are fully decked out in this gear and surpassing solteris raiders? Yes, there are some whom either had beta info and knew what to look for, or were high enough skilled at the expansion release to buy the books in pok and get the exact same information. They knew what to get from day 1, had the resources to do so, and did.

I have yet to see guilds with their entire raid force in Cultural/Last Blood and you never will.

As for farming Demi for far too long... that's amusing really. We've been farming tacvi, and going back again tonight, for two years + now and do it almost weekly. We'll also be doing anguish again tonight. We've been in anguish for almost two years. We've been in demi for almost a year now, and at the rate we're going we'll be farming Demi, Tacvi, and Anguish for a long time forward still.

Why do we do this? Let's see 1) Higher raid forces consistently snipe members through the lure of better gear. 2) End bosses generally drop hard to replace or very necessary things and they are a pain to get down on farm status as early as the majority of the zones.

Why do we farm Tacvi? Tunat Muram only for dmg augs. Why do we farm anguish? We've been aiming to start farming OMM for overhaste/acresist clickies as well as dmg augs and other mobs for AC clicks for tanks. On top of that, with Performer and Mayong now dead, we'll be farming 2.5 pages, and tier 2 bosses for dmg augs in demi as well as Mayong for Overhaste and similar things to OMM.

We don't farm because we enjoy it, we farm because up till the cultural made another path for some of our tanks to take, it was necessary to have such items for Solteris. Every single one we get improves our raid force moreso and makes us more effective at dealing with encounters.

No matter how good cultural armor is, even if it was more powerful, it does not mean that we would be skipping content. Our raid force has made a habit of over farming content for a very long time, and that will never change.

Amazingly, lvl 80 finally made it possible for us to beat Perf, Mayong, and Udengar. Three things we were not up to par to do pre SoF. That's without even having cultural on the relevant tanks to those encounters.

[Woland]

Things got away from my original point which was why would DPoB guild expect gear that is better than SoF group gear? Isn't that the point that was made when Ngreth said 80+80+TBS > Solteris is reasonable to expect.

Level 80 group gear should be better than DPoB in this context, will some guilds in DPoB fold due to this? Maybe but I think Devs are prepared to take that risk.

New cultural armor must be balanced in the same way, there is no reason for 80+80+LB to be better than tier 4 or even tier 3 gear. I have not seen groupable seals but following same logic I will be disapointed if they are not better than LB.