Here we go again EQ2 NGE...

Shadrak

LINK

Yeebo

Actually it looks like a good change to me.  And they are at least trying to be up front about what they are doing and why...as opposed to "OH yeah, and by the way we're setting the entire game on fire next week and bringing you a new one using the same graphic engine.  Hope you guys like it . . ." in another SOE game I'm sure we're all thinking of.

Moirae

There's always someone who complains. I like what I see in that link. 

Shadrak

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Originally posted by Moirae
There's always someone who complains. I like what I see in that link. 

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I dont think what they've shown us is bad. BUT  when has SOE ever done anything purely positive. Im waiting for the other show to drop. There has to be a negative aspect we  havent been told about.
 

Moirae

It's a company. Since when do companies do things that are completely good in every respect?

scaramoosh

Have to say they havn't made a bad change in my eyes

lomiller

These changes are an outstanding answer to some of the looming issues in the game.  It’s nice to see a dev team proactively heading off problems in a well thought out way for a change.  There is always going to be a certain crowd that says “they changes something!  See I told you they were EVIL!”  the fact is, though, this is a great change.

*ANY* game that has a mechanic where defense, and mitigation are based on percentage mitigated/avoided will ultimately have serious balance issues when they scale up.  Even though the numbers and bonuses go up linearly the effectiveness of defense goes up exponentially.

In PvP this heavily weights towards defensive classes and in PvP it means that mobs have to be able to on hit anyone else but the tank if they are to do enough damage to actually threaten the tank.  The quick fix is caps, but that gets boring pretty fast because gear no longer matters, only getting to the cap. 

What also ends up happening is that people starting from a low base see no meaningful improvement for adding something while people with a lot of that thing already see massive improvements from adding just a little more.  Diminishing returns are the ideal answer to this problem because they allow the effectiveness of improvements to scale more or less linearly whereas without it.  This is a change I’ve advocated in a number of games over the years and it’s great to see a dev team finally deal with this issue properly.  

shae

Good tweaks all around really. No real big deals though, it's not going to make the combat any more engaging though, which is really where I see the issue with the system as it. Either way, good on them for being pro-active and paying attention to the community, lots of games could use more then that.

Aedosen

I like those changes as they will address one of the main reasons I left EQ2. I was in a raid guild and it really sucked that many of my stats were over the caps before I had single t7 fabled item just from my old items and self/group buffs. In other words items were almost meaningless to me as I was capped in power regen, major stats, skills. etc. Will be fun being able to benefit from the bonuses items give now and actually be able to progress your character this way  

Anyway thanks to these changes at least I will probably resub when they release EoF.

Celestian

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Originally posted by Shadrak

Originally posted by Moirae
There's always someone who complains. I like what I see in that link. 

I dont think what they've shown us is bad. BUT  when has SOE ever done anything purely positive. Im waiting for the other show to drop. There has to be a negative aspect we  havent been told about.
 

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The CU#13 was the best thing that happened to EQ2 so that blows your theory out of the water. It took them a bit to push all the changes out to the mobs as well but it was for the better and these new set of changes improve upon that.

Name one person who likes being one/two shot in a raid because the mobs have to hit so hard to cope with the insane mitigation of a MT. With the new changes the MT will still be able to take but the over all damage output of the mobs will not be as crazy because their mitigation (and the mobs) won't be so high anymore.

This ain't SWG so get over it.

RJO_

Honestly SOE has done right patch after patch with EQ2... I don't expect this to be any different.  The post they made about these changes was great... It laid out some very specific problems with the game and gave some very specific fixes (down to the dirty details) for what they are going to do about it... I think we are looking at a very positive change coming our way here...

lillin

I personally enjoy eq2 patches like these.  It is fun to watch the kiss ups praise soe's glory for this great game change .............. then it goes live .............

OMG you killed crafting.

OMG you made my class gimp.

OMG you upped the drop rate and now my uber loot isnt worth as much.

ima stop here

Basically soe has the same problem as many of its praisers, they look at the new shiny and say eww aww!  They seem to fail to really examine the what if's very well of thier game altering patches.  One thing i am noticing with every patch though, each class is getting less unique ................... but hey if your fans love ya for it .......... keep on patching ..

lomiller

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Originally posted by lillin

I personally enjoy eq2 patches like these.  It is fun to watch the kiss ups praise soe's glory for this great game change .............. then it goes live .............
OMG you killed crafting.
OMG you made my class gimp.
OMG you upped the drop rate and now my uber loot isnt worth as much.
ima stop here
Basically soe has the same problem as many of its praisers, they look at the new shiny and say eww aww!  They seem to fail to really examine the what if's very well of thier game altering patches.  One thing i am noticing with every patch though, each class is getting less unique ................... but hey if your fans love ya for it .......... keep on patching ..

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The one I get a kick out of are the people like you who complain no matter what happens.  Sorry if some people out there are are mathematically challenged and can’t see why this is a great decision, but your not understanding the math doesn’t make this some evil plot. 

Now I’ll let you get back to your regular tinfoil hat routine of “They changed something!  See I told you thy are EVIL”  “They didn’t change something!  See I told you they ware EVIL!” 

lillin

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Originally posted by lomiller

The one I get a kick out of are the people like you who complain no matter what happens.  Sorry if some people out there are are mathematically challenged and can’t see why this is a great decision, but your not understanding the math doesn’t make this some evil plot. 

Now I’ll let you get back to your regular tinfoil hat routine of “They changed something!  See I told you thy are EVIL”  “They didn’t change something!  See I told you they ware EVIL!” 

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No we who are " bad at math " just look for the simple things that are plain to see.  One day when you and a few others get your head out of SOE's rear maybe you too will see what is going on. 

Its easy to say something negative we have all heard, its even easier though to just nod your head in agreement with everything someone does. 

The " tinfoil hat " comment is a slam against me, same mr kendricke liked to use, i can easily tell what train of thought you follow and why you wish to bash rather then actually debate.  Your reality does not exist but only in a hollowed sales pitch ........... like i told you before, go work for soe, they love to hire people full of themselves as well as clueless of what mmo community wants = to needs.

hercules

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Originally posted by Shadrak
LINK

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explain to us whats bad about this changes?Or are you using the simple minded troll formula- me think swg bad,me no like SoE,me think eq2 musta be bad too.me go now.

brostyn

This is clearly a huge nerf. No one likes to be one shot, but that hardly means you should ruin the game by making it exponentially harder to improve yourself. It means they need to find another method instead of nerfing character progression.

Why would I strive for anything better when at some point your going to be seeing little to no return? That's what diminishing returns means. How can this possibly be a good thing?

swiftflow

SOE just wants to make the game more Iconic and Everquesty

Red_Rider

  Do you even know what NGE is ?  They completely raped the game without testing or letting the players have any information.   For some reason people love to blame SOE for the NGE, strange, they really can't do much in SWG without Lucasarts blessing.  A Star Wars franchise should of had WoW like numbers,  instead from the start it has been a dud and even with such a prestegious gameworld has NOT lived up to potential and became a niche game instead of a mainstream one.  So everyone has been in a panic and some very bad moves were made. 

RIP SWG...

  As for EQ2, the game is getting better and better, unfortunately at release the game was not great,  not enough solo content, very slow leveling, harsh death penalty, corpse runs (you had to go pray at the spot you died to get some of the xp back), ridiculous amount of zoning to do newbie quests, slow mouvement speed, too many layers in crafting etc etc.  A bad release affects the whole life of a MMORPG, and I doubt that EQ2 will ever get the members it should, because new players will go to number one or choose a new game and even if 2006 was a slow year for quality MMO's, 2007 looks very interesting.

Shadrak

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Originally posted by Recant
Agreed - the game needs a new graphics engine - doesn't need to be technicaly superior to the current one, just different. There's a lot of wonderful art in that game, shame that all the player models look plastic.

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I can agree with this. Although the SOGA character models are 200% better than the original.

lomiller

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Originally posted by lillin
No we who are " bad at math " just look for the simple things that are plain to see.  One day when you and a few others get your head out of SOE's rear maybe you too will see what is going on. 

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Perhaps if you would get your head out of your own rear you would see what’s going on.

Which do you think is “simpler”, a system where adding defense make almost no difference initially then reaches a point were adding only a tiny bit more makes a massive difference or a system where adding defense makes about the same difference no matter how much you already had?  

Under the current system, adding 1000 mitigation to someone who only had 1000 makes almost no difference in the effectiveness of their overall defense.  Adding 1000 mitigation to someone who already had 4000 makes a massive difference in their overall defense.  In what universe is that simple or easy to understand?  In what universe does that not create the potential for massive unfixable imbalances?  

Bakgrind

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Originally posted by Shadrak

Originally posted by Recant
Agreed - the game needs a new graphics engine - doesn't need to be technicaly superior to the current one, just different. There's a lot of wonderful art in that game, shame that all the player models look plastic.

I can agree with this. Although the SOGA character models are 200% better than the original.

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I wouldnt say that the SOGA models were superior to the orginal models. Asian model textures really arent my thing which is why I disabled mine. But to each his/her own ya know

lomiller

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Originally posted by brostyn
This is clearly a huge nerf. No one likes to be one shot, but that hardly means you should ruin the game by making it exponentially harder to improve yourself. It means they need to find another method instead of nerfing character progression.

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This change doesn’t make it exponentially harder to improve your character, it offsets the fact some classes grow exponentialy in power as they gain equipment.  Currently, going from 70% mitigation to 80% mitigation makes as much difference as going from 40% to 60% so if you have top gear it's only half as difficult to improve your char as it is for middle of the road characters.

For example, if a mob has a 10 000 damage attack

10% mitigation takes 9000 damage 4.5X what someone at the cap takes

30% mitigation takes 7000 damage 3.5X what someone at the cap takes

40% mitigation takes 6000 damage 3.0X what someone at the cap takes

60% mitigation takes 4000 damage 2.0X what someone at the cap takes

70% mitigation takes 3000 damage 1.5X what someone at the cap takes

80% mitigation takes 2000 damage 1.0X what someone at the cap takes

So, for an attack to be noticed by a plate tank it has to be doing 6K  or more damage to most other classes *including avoidance tanks*.

Now lets say you have 20 attacks each doing 1000 points of damage, on average a plate tank with 60% avoidance and 80% mitigation takes only 1600 points of damage and isn’t even going to need  a heal.  

A mage with 10% mitigation and 30% avoidance 12600 points of damage, almost 10X as much and is beyond the point where healing makes any difference.  With the hit point difference this makes tanks roughly 20 times harder to kill then lightly armored classes.

Not only does this huge discrepancy make designing solo content very difficult it makes group content difficult as well.  There is almost no middle ground, mage crowd control tools and tank aggro management tools need to either be prefect or they do nothing.  It also means that there is no class variety because either a class can hit the cap or it’s gimped therefore every playable class becomes identical.

In PvP it’s even worse if that can be imagined.  If it takes 20 times as much damage to kill a defensive class as it does an offensive class to balance things out you need to give the offensive class 20 times the damage output, but then the defensive class is going to complain about having almost zero damage output.  

All this change does is smooth out these curves so that an increase in defense or mitigation gives you the same practical benefits no matter how much you already have rather then being exponentially better for people who already have more.

This is actually a problem a lot of games have built into their mechanics.  CoH/CoV for example has the exact same issue to a much larger degree because they have higher caps.  There, a properly built defensive class could withstand over 100 000 times as much damage as an offensive class and could aggro entire zones then go AFK without needing a heal and without fear of death.  Instead of fixing the issue properly, however, they put a soft cap on what the melee types could do without external buffs and then placed target and aggro limits.  It’s still pretty easy to buff some classes to the point where they don’t have to worry about dieing.   

Rayx0r

please, dont make less of what the NGE was.  nothing can compare to those changes.

this isnt even in the same realm

anyway, i guess I must havnt read the bad parts of these changes.  is your point that they are developing the game and not letting it stay static?  I guess i missed your point also