Incoming Nerf to Elegant and Last Blood?

[KyrosKrane]

And usually the difference is not just the %, but the LEVEL it goes up too.
There is a big difference between 50% to 70 focus and a 65% to 77 focus.

I recently picked up a tradeable neck item with 35% to 80 heal focus, which upgraded my 40% to 70 focus.

To illustrate this point, here's a list of all healing focus effects and how they degrade by level:
http://www.kyros.info/HealingFocus/

You can click the column headers to sort by that column. Sort it by the effect on level 80 spells and take a gander at the results.

The healing focus effect on a Last Blood of the Healer is Dragon Health, which is 50% max 70. This scales down to 25% for level 80 spells. You can get identical or better healing percents with many group focuses, such as Pelzia's Benevolence, 35% max 75, found on a ring that drops from Snapper, a single-group Ashengate mob. Or how about Heal 30, a focus that shows up on items as Prismatic Revival I, which is 30% max 80, and comes from items on a variety of group mobs in SoF tiers 1 and 2?

Group obtainable focuses are now superior to the raid focuses found on Last Bloods. The same pattern can be seen for pretty much all the focuses on Last Bloods. Anyone who argues that weaker focuses aren't a liability has apparently not played a caster for very long.

[solithan]

. . .
My comparison was intended to debunk that theory. It shows that sublime + elegant + last blood is only slightly overpowered, probably by about 40-50hp. Last bloods specifically are probably overpowered by perhaps 5-10AC, but the base armor is fine. Stats and mods are a wash across armors, so I think the Last Bloods can get away with their extra AC due to the seriously outdated focuses -- even group content has focuses that are two tiers above Last Bloods now. There's also the issue of class-specific focuses and click effects on dropped armors that cultural cannot have, not to mention the extra aug slots on dropped armors that can power it up even further.

I couldn't agree with you more.

[Anterouk]

Not sure if this has been suggested elsewhere, but given the way the jewellery now works with 100% of the stats for dwerium jewellery and other metals getting less, could the gm armours be done in the same way?

The sets being suggested early have the augs set at 100% and if you mix and match you only get a %age of the stats?

[Zolina]

Maybe instead of nerfing cultural + last blood, they could give TSS and Solteris raid armors a boost so they're better?

[hiyawathadan]

I think that is a better idea, rather then make 75% of the population angry by nerfing stuff that took a lot of time, effort and plat to do, give the small vocal minority who caused this mess some better stats so they will shut up. Problem solved.

[Kross]

Good point. If you can point me to a few chest items that drop from tier 1-2 raids, I'll happily add them to the comparison.

The reason I listed the past raid armors is that the dev comments have been fairly specific, about elegant + sublime + last blood invalidating most dropped armors from DoDh, TSS, and TBS. They state that elegant + sublime + faycite is balanced against appropriate SoF drops, and elaborate + eminent + last blood is balanced (sort of) against DoDh drops. The imbalance specifically happens when you combine the level 80 armors with level 70 raid drops to produce armors that are superior to pretty much everything else you can get in that level range for raiders.

My comparison was intended to debunk that theory. It shows that sublime + elegant + last blood is only slightly overpowered, probably by about 40-50hp. Last bloods specifically are probably overpowered by perhaps 5-10AC, but the base armor is fine. Stats and mods are a wash across armors, so I think the Last Bloods can get away with their extra AC due to the seriously outdated focuses -- even group content has focuses that are two tiers above Last Bloods now. There's also the issue of class-specific focuses and click effects on dropped armors that cultural cannot have, not to mention the extra aug slots on dropped armors that can power it up even further.

bloodmoon keep raid tasks, first one has chest drops here for ya.


http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/q...tml?quest=4370

much easier than farming beltron and lethar 2.0 btw, time wise.

[Telorea]

To illustrate this point, here's a list of all healing focus effects and how they degrade by level:
http://www.kyros.info/HealingFocus/

You can click the column headers to sort by that column. Sort it by the effect on level 80 spells and take a gander at the results.

The healing focus effect on a Last Blood of the Healer is Dragon Health, which is 50% max 70. This scales down to 25% for level 80 spells. You can get identical or better healing percents with many group focuses, such as Pelzia's Benevolence, 35% max 75, found on a ring that drops from Snapper, a single-group Ashengate mob. Or how about Heal 30, a focus that shows up on items as Prismatic Revival I, which is 30% max 80, and comes from items on a variety of group mobs in SoF tiers 1 and 2?

Group obtainable focuses are now superior to the raid focuses found on Last Bloods. The same pattern can be seen for pretty much all the focuses on Last Bloods. Anyone who argues that weaker focuses aren't a liability has apparently not played a caster for very long.

This is one of the key issues.

To do the higher raid content (mostly talking about higher-TSS, Soltaris and SoF Raids here) you need to have a certain level of gear. Now in the past people geared up raiding DPoB and DK in order to break into TSS/TBS/etc - but now that is not really practical or attractive to mid-teir raiders because they look at DPoB loot, compare it to SoF groupable gear, and except for some of the melee gear it sucks.

So now you are in the position where you need to get your raid tanks (primarily) and your raid melee (secondary) the higher-level melee foci that drop in DPoB but are not available on SoF Groupable gear (remember melee foci don't degrade like caster foci) but are needed to break into TSS/TBS/SoF raids. However, the other 80% of your raid force will mostly see diddly-sqwat in DPoB that they would consider worthwhile.

So now your guild is in a very difficult position. You need to raid DPoB/DK to get your tanks geared up to face TBS/TSS/SoF raids - but at the same time have to find some way to motivate the other 80% of your raid force to go through all that flagging and progression whilst they only see junk (to them) dropping.

In essence the 'bridge' to new raid content has been destroyed, so if your guild wasn't raiding higher-TSS or Soltaris when SoF came out - you are a bit stuck. Last Bloods in cultural did help (a little bit) to cover the destroyed bridge - because it meant that there were drops in DPoB/DK that were attractive to that 80% of your raid force and could be used to help keep them motivated. If Last Bloods get nerfed, then you are back to the destroyed bridge again.

Think of it this way. Would *you* (personally) like to go through 3 or 4 months of raiding where you (from your personal opinion) see nothing but junk drop in order to reach the higher-level raids. Would you stop raiding until the guild reached more interesting (to you) content, which they will not be able to reach if everyone in the same boat as you stops attending also. Or would you defect to another guild that is already in the higher content. This is what will kill the mid-level raiding guilds.

Yes I know that people could always jump to a guild in higher content before - but the key thing is that previously those people could stay with their old mid-level guild and be seeing upgrades dropping during raids.

[Wyvernwill]

If you look at the dkp spending in my guild pre SoF, most casters in my guild were already in that position of raiding Demi that find little to nothing they care about.

Ironically, as a tank, I have little to gain in TSS at all. There are some minor upgrades I will pick up just to get something new and shiny, but other than that, it's pointless. I still raid because I want to move on to SoF raids and I've always been willing to do what is necessary to reach that goal.

With the new group gear, casters in my alliance have been working towards obtaining the gear because it provides level 80 focus effects as well as is solid on Hps/Mana. IF I had not already obtained my last bloods, it would be the path that I would have gone as well as a Paladin.

Thing is, it makes farming and moving forward a lot faster. The biggest hold back for midtier guilds is raid leaders being afraid of moving forward or not certain on moving forward. Somedays, a raid leader just has to say "This is what we're going to attempt and judging by how it goes, we will figure out the plan from there."

[Roanne]

Or go on vacation for 2 weeks, dont say anything about what youre planning, sit back and wait for the chatter to die down, then suddenly announce the nerf again the day of or after the patch without any preview of the changes until they are in effect.

[Sorkin]

Hrmm, pre-SoF there were a ton of items from DPoB/DK that I was interested in. The jump in focii from Anguish to DPoB is very large. Now with SoF, it's not quite so interesting since even the DPoB focii will degrade to SoF group stuff by level 80.

[Zacatac]

Hrmm, pre-SoF there were a ton of items from DPoB/DK that I was interested in. The jump in focii from Anguish to DPoB is very large. Now with SoF, it's not quite so interesting since even the DPoB focii will degrade to SoF group stuff by level 80.

Same here. I already have a tradeable piece (arms) with 35% Fire DD focus to 80 now. I'm not even in DBoP yet, which is 50% to 70 Fire DD focus, and probably won't even bother getting it now.

[whyan]

Reading this thread makes me sad. All this going back and forth over stuff that i will never even see in the game. I play EQ, because i started in EQ back in 2000 and still play - a lot, because its habit more than anything i guess. But nothing in the game guides one in any of the content in discussion here. So here is a non-raider view i guess.
But some things seem obvious:

1. you shouldnt go back and nerf something 2 years old that was so costly to get (plat/DKP, etc), because a new item is out. And ironically the raiders want to nerf a Raid item, because it makes stats good. Geesh, what a weird thing to happen, a raid item makes good stats :-). (btw, i have none, and will probably never get one.)

2. Everyone who says how it twisted the leader boards is missing an important point: the leaderbaords were skewed because everyone could get the new culteral weeks before the expansion, and the expansion raid items takes months to get to.

3.) which leads to my complaint about the amazing number of drops prior to expansion, with no info on what it was. As always, only "in the know" folks skated with this expansion. I'm sure lots of players stocked up on good drops, no one else knew what they were. No info on EQTraders was allowed on new stuff, and yet all these posts in this thread about saving up the good stuff, how did they know what the good stuff was? Not all of them participated in the beta. I did beta once, but it required complete EQ.exe overwrites each switch (from beta to live), so it was like wasting 30 minutes to swap (and i have high speed internet with fast systems - i thought the beta could have a seperate root directory.)

4.) The one post about bringing up lower level chars to a reasonable level to participate in the new release is key. The recent expansions were all kinda locked, so there was no way to get upgrades from them (PoR was last expansion regular player could participate in.) Even with the new boosts, i wont try the new expansion until probably for another year. To much fighting over pull locations, etc to have any fun in new expansion. Are there any instance zones so that you dont need to get slamed for making a pull, even though you were there way before other guy, who shows up and thinks everything is his.

I did hear about the big-toe instance zone from the EQ posted notice that they got best expansion. PC-Gamer only had a note over WoW hitting a subscription milestone (i think SoE was already there, but it made it out like WOW is the first to get there.) SoE is so secret, secret, cant even let the public know the game still exists.

5.) And the last, how does one find out about this stuff? I hear about uber stuff, but have no idea how/where to proceed for it. Main point: Its all like the POP progression, no info on a char to indicate progress status and with 6 chars (on 6 accounts) i have no idea which char needs what to proceed (oops, char 2 didnt /h NPC boomba!) The only way to find out status, is to start the quest over (why i wont do the charm of lore, but i think it would be fun, if the game let me know what the game knows about my current status, then i could build up, rather than restart.) And that PoP progression, it would be kinda fun to do now, except EQ needs an in-game quest like status indicator for it - [well it would be nice, and a lot of folks would do it if the status was in game.] In fact a lot of progression tasks would be fun from older expansions, if the game would let the character know where in the progression he is. Hiding a characters current status from the character is so unlike the fun nature of DnD'ing origins. EQ is all about web serfing and note taking. Where is the in-game play progression information that the Dungeon Master provided? (the window for small quests is nice, but the big picture tasks are missing, like the Epic arcs, or access quests.)

[Bobaten]

2. Everyone who says how it twisted the leader boards is missing an important point: the leaderbaords were skewed because everyone could get the new culteral weeks before the expansion, and the expansion raid items takes months to get to.

While Alkalai Loam and Flawless Spinneret Fluid did drop before the expansion launch, neither of those are used to make the level 80 armor.

3.) which leads to my complaint about the amazing number of drops prior to expansion, with no info on what it was. As always, only "in the know" folks skated with this expansion. I'm sure lots of players stocked up on good drops, no one else knew what they were. No info on EQTraders was allowed on new stuff, and yet all these posts in this thread about saving up the good stuff, how did they know what the good stuff was? Not all of them participated in the beta.

1. It was pretty obvious what the drops were for. The naming convention of Flawless being one step higher than Superb has been in EQ since Luclin. In addition, the level of material corresponds to the level of mob it comes from. Since these drops were coming from level 75 mobs, they were very likely to be used in level 75 combines.
2. Armed with that knowledge, people asked on this board if that was what they were for, and Ngreth responded with "oops, somehow the level 75 drops went live". There wasn't anything secretive about their intended use.
3. The devs have stated before that prerelease info on drops and recipes is one of the carrots to persuade people to participate in betas.

I did beta once, but it required complete EQ.exe overwrites each switch (from beta to live), so it was like wasting 30 minutes to swap (and i have high speed internet with fast systems - i thought the beta could have a seperate root directory.)

I highly recommend making a copy of your EQ directory and running the Beta patcher from there.