From Gninja:

While I can’t really address everything being said in this post right now I can say we have been taking a look and we have a plan on how to make mercs not quite as overpowered in PVP combat as they are currently. Once we get the fix in place and we can accurately test it I can lay out the plan for you guys.

If you die to a merc you should not take damage to your gear. This will be addressed asap and we should be getting some power tweaks for them out to you as we can.

The announced removal of Critical Mitigation will coincide with the conversion of Yellow and Red Crit Mit adornments into Health adornments. So why will the replacement adornments have less Health (less than 250 points each) than White health adornments? According to Omougi, it’s because the EQ2 team thinks we should have other viable choices, like DPS. Adornments should be about choice!

From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums:

Our goal with these adornment and spell conversions is to give you guys something in the place of nothing essentially. Before, you were playing a zero-sum game if you had enough crit mit. If you didn’t have enough crit mit, you couldn’t do the encounters — period. All these adornments and spells did is bring you up to a threshold. If you were past that threshold, it does nothing for you.

Now, [while] these adornments and spells actually do increase your survivability at all times – equating the amount of crit mit lost to an equivalent form of HP doesn’t really work out, because any amount of HP is infinitely better than a threshold stat with no use. If you were slotting your adornments for survivability before, you are still slotting them for survivability with HP – the only change is the adornments have been made more powerful in their actual effectiveness with crit mit out of the picture.

This change equates to a free survivability gain across the board, and we need to be very careful with numbers at first to ensure things do not get drastically easier. Changing the difficulty of content is not the goal here – changing the accessibility of content is.

A point which has been made by several raiders on the official forums as well as Flames is that the top end guilds already have more than enough Crit Mit on all their characters to meet the requirements of the zones they’re doing. These changes only affect up-and-coming guilds which are trying to do harder content, but can’t because they haven’t spent months farming obsolete gear whose only saving grace is Crit Mitt.

An oft-seen comment is “The EQ2 team will just replace needing 290 Crit Mit with needing 100k health to survive.” Omougi has a great response to this:

A few more HP is possibly the difference between an AE one-shotting and being survivable. We really don’t want guilds to “force” their members into slotting for survivability if they are trying to push progression. If the HP difference on the adornments was significantly higher, people would feel the need to stack up on HP adorns, similar to how they feel the need to stack up on crit mit adorns now.

We are trying to make customizing your gear with adornments a viable option while progressing through content. If we make an adornment choice too powerful, then there really isn’t much choice there…especially if what you are “forced” into adorning isn’t what your class is about. Many mages and scouts would really prefer to slot more adornments to increase their DPS, but they are forced into critmit adorns in order to not hinder their guild’s chance of progress. We really don’t want to replace crit mit adorns with hp adorns and have essentially the same problem.

and some great news about the relatively limited choice of adornments we have now:

Now, our available choices need some work, specifically with mage options. We are trying to alleviate the problem by allowing more adornments to go in more slots (critbonus, potency, etc), so that scouts do not get more benefit from this change than mages. Adding more adornment choices in the future is definitely something we want to do.

Just a friendly reminder of our friendly reminder, the Goddess Risen event ends next Monday, February 6th to make way for the upcoming Erollisi Day 2012 event.

A Letter from Smokejumper

Hi there, Norrathians!

As many of you know, I’m the Executive Producer in charge of the entire EverQuest franchise, including EQ, EQII, and the upcoming (and very different) “EverQuest Next.” For the last two years, I’ve also been the Producer for your EverQuest II world, and it’s been absolutely a blast working with the team, the game, its features, and most of all, its players.

However, our company’s visions for the EQ Franchise are bigger in scope than what I can coordinate alone on EQII while also overseeing the rest of the franchise.

Therefore, we’ve brought Holly Longdale back to SOE to take over the Producer position for EQII. In fact, she’s been working with the EQII team since last December. (We delayed announcing her presence so she got a chance to come up to speed for a few weeks before needing to answer a thousand questions.) But, the honeymoon is over and it’s time for her to “take the con.”

Holly and I are still working closely together. There is no loss of knowledge in this transition because we still meet and discuss the game’s directions and tactics on a daily basis. Holly will be getting a huge amount of support from the team, myself, and the rest of the company. You still have an excited and motivated dev team, a quality Producer, and a great game.

So please, take a moment and welcome your new Producer to the fold. You’ll still see Smokejumper posts occasionally, but you’ll see a lot more Windstalker posts as well.

~ Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale:

A Letter from Windstalker

Greetings Norrathians,

I feel like I’ve come home!

Since starting on the team, I’ve been watching, absorbing, and reading everything I can before officially taking the reins. The opportunity to be a producer on this team is surreal and certainly perfect. And honestly, I am one of you. I’ve been playing EQ2 on the xxxxx server since launch on my main and have several beloved alts. (Editor’s Note: Sanitized for her protection!) EverQuest as a franchise has had a place in my life for well over a decade now. It’s rooted in my history and a source of deep and seeded pride.

A bit about me – I played EQ at launch and had the blessing to change careers to become a Designer on EQ at the time EQ2 was in development. SOE as a whole was as passionate and as close a family then as now. And the players, now as much as ever, are part of that family and great passion. Believe me when I say we hear you. And as gamers, we understand. And as creators, we want to be the best. And we are.

The content and quality of this game is always growing. The advances and features since launch are really staggering. The most recent expansion is really something to be proud of – not just as a team here, but as players. The time and effort put into Dungeon Maker by a lot of careful decorators and designers is beyond impressive. There’s a wealth of creativity and ingenuity being expressed that is second to none in this genre. And we will continue to look ahead to more avenues for your virtual self-expression that makes you real contributors to this fantasy world your avatar, and you, live in. It’s the best MMO around soup to nuts. And I’m here to continue and build on its success.

Under SmokeJumper’s (Dave Georgeson’s) leadership and vision – which I strongly believe in – this team is hard at work creating even more amazing game content for the upcoming Game Update. We have big plans for this game and your experience in it, I promise you. And at the same time, to support the game, we are looking for new and better ways to build fun.

I can’t tell you what a joy it is to be back at SOE. And as much as it feels like home, I’m still absorbing the details, but you will hear from me again soon.

~ Holly “Windstalker” Longdale

Massively first broke the story.

Just to clarify some confusion.

• Crit mit as a mechanic is being removed.
• NPC crit bonus was countered by crit mit and we are reducing crit bonus to 0 across the board.
• Critical avoidance is staying around. Critical avoidance is an NPCs way of contesting your chance to critically hit them.
• Replacing the adornments with HP is not to compensate for anything. Since the critical mitgiation stat is no longer useful we are converting to a stat that benefits all players.
• The goal is for this change to not change the difficulty of the encounters. This is why we ask that you all take some time to log on to test once we push it there. We plan on having this on test by the weekend.

Note: NPC crit bonus may be used in the future on a case by case bases and will be considered in the balance of the encounter so that crit mit is not required.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to PM me.

For many years in EQ2, I was a casual raider.  What I mean by that is, I would primarily run group zones with guild mates but from time to time I would join a pickup raid or tag along when another guild needed to fill some raid slots.  Several times, when filling those empty raid slots for other guilds, myself and some of my guild mates were asked if we would be interested in coming along on a regular basis.  In one of those cases, I even worked my way up to being one of the raid leaders even though I was in a different guild.

The reason myself and some of my guild mates were able to do this is because we like being good at our characters.  We try to get whichever upgrades we can from instances, quests, faction merchants, etc.  We make sure all our spells/CAs are Expert or above.  We make sure our items are adorned.  We try to come up with the best AA spec we can and consult with each other to try and be as good a player as possible.

When we were asked along on raids, quite often we would out-parse a lot of the regular raiders.  Back when I was playing my Assassin, I had two other raiding assassins sending me in-game mail messages asking for advice on how to up their DPS since I had soundly trounced them on the parse from group 4 (traditionally the “leftover” group).

Then came Sentinel’s Fate and Critical Mitigation.  With the introduction of Crit Mit, a barrier was put in place for raiding.  Now, in front of every raid zone, there was a sign that said “You must have at least this much Crit Mit to ride this ride.”   I tagged along on a  raid or two a few months before Destiny of Velious came out.  If I didn’t get hit, I was either first or second on the parse.  But because I didn’t have the right Crit Mit, if I *did* get hit, I was pretty much one-shotted.  Not fun.

With Destiny of Velious, they made it even worse.  Not only do you have to have the right Crit Mit to keep from dying, you also had to have the right Crit Chance to make sure you can live up to your full potential.

It used to be that the reason you didn’t take a non-raider along on a raid was because they didn’t know what they were doing, couldn’t play their class well, or couldn’t do the DPS or healing job that a raider could.  Now, those things don’t matter if you don’t have the Crit Mit or Crit Chance for the zone.  It doesn’t matter how good you are at your class, if you don’t have the Crit Mit or Crit Chance, you’re useless.

Lets take two assassins.

The first one, an average player in raid gear.  The second one, an exceptional player in instance gear.  Take them both and put them up against a training dummy and the second one beats the first one on the parse.  Take them both and put them in certain raid zones and the first one will wipe the walls with the second one.  Why?  The second one is the better player.

On an equal playing field, the second one can out DPS the first one even though they are wearing worse gear.  But move them into a raid zone and those two little stats, crit mit and crit chance, will take that exceptional player and make them look like an amateur.  Why?  What did this add to the game?  Nothing.  Some unimaginative developer/designer a few years ago decided that further segregating the raiders from the rest was a good idea for some reason.  Either that or they didn’t even consider the implications on non-raiders which is even worse.

Before Sentinel’s Fate, you would see people looking in channels for certain classes when they needed to fill empty slots in their raids.  Now, those same messages come with a crit mit requirement that few instance runners can meet.  It really is a shame.

A funny thing happened when I was chatting with some folks about today’s news of Critical Mitigation being completely removed from EQ2. A few of them were surprised when I reminded them that Crit Mit has been part of EQ2 for over 3 years.

Critical Mitigation was introduced in November 2008 with The Shadow Odyssey expansion. At first, it played no part in solo quests or group zones, thus many people weren’t even aware of it at the time. But anyone who was into raiding x4 (24 person) zones, and later, Ward of Elements x2 raids, has been collecting this stat for a while.

The Shadow Odyssey was fairly gradual with the amount of Crit Mit required. At the time, exceptional healers could keep an undergeared character alive long enough to get necessary gear upgrades.

Sentinel’s Fate cranked things up a bit, requiring at least 1-2 Crit Mit adornments to do the harder content and making it a bit harder for healers to “cover” for a player who a few points short.

But Destiny of Velious went completely bananas, initially requiring Crit Mit to do all raid, group AND solo content. Many of us fondly remember getting one-shotted by badgers and sea urchins during the Velious Beta.

Everywhere Crit Mit

At the launch of Velious, each group zone had a progression of gear, and that progression HAD to be followed to get enough Crit Mit to even consider moving into the next set of group zones. And unlike the somewhat forgiving Crit Mit mechanic of past expansions, Velious made Crit Mit a “do or die” stat. Being a few points short became a death sentence.

Although the requirement of Crit Mit was eventually dropped for solo content, and more recently for all group content except Drunder, the requirements for raiding have remained incredibly steep.

As a result, Velious has attracted parallels to the merciless “back-flagging” that made the original EverQuest’s Planes of Power expansion so maddening. Every new applicant to a raiding guild has needed remedial trips to raid zones and targets which the guild has moved on from (typically EM or non-Challenge zones), just to get the right gear pieces to have enough Critical Mitigation to even dream of resuming work on their usual targets.

Ironically, it was into this climate of challenging progression that EQ2’s well-intentioned Dungeon Finder service blundered into and promptly collapsed. A system that randomizes player styles and skill levels into a random selection of zones only works if the content is interchangeable. Dungeon Finder would have been a fantastic introduction in Kunark or The Shadow Odyssey, but with Velious tiered content, it never had a chance.

If I recall correctly, Critical Mitigation was introduced as a way to mitigate the need for bi-annual level cap raises which tend to be a tremendous drain on development resources for content which, quite frankly, most people burn through in a week or two.

Ending the Crit Mit Rat Race

Before today’s news, I had been advocating a 20-30% across-the-board reduction in Critical Mitigation requirements. This would be a big enough change that raiders wouldn’t need to walk down memory lane quite so often, and players would have the option of equipping adornments other than Crit Mit.

You may recall that the mechanics changes in Velious (stripping cool effects/procs off most items and moving them to Adornments) were sold to players with the lofty idea that it would usher in an era of freedom of choice.

Yet acquiring new gear has been the definition of mixed emotions, as a a steady stream of Primal Velium Shards has been needed to re-purchase Crit Mit adornments for each new slightly upgraded piece of gear just to stay in the Crit Mit rat race.

The reality was, anyone serious about progressing through the harder group zones, into x2 raids, and finally into x4 raids had only one choice of adornment — Crit Mit. An EQ2 developer famously stated that any EQ2 player interested in progression should exclusively be using Critical Mitigation adornments.

A New Progression?

Love or hate Crit Mit, it has marked the progression of gear beyond level 90 for two going on three expansions. Short of raising the level cap, which seems unlikely based on past development comments, what will be the next “progression” stat?

The ugly truth is, every MMO is a treadmill. The art of MMO design is concealing that reality and doing so tastefully.

In what may go down as the best decision in EQ2 history, or a total overreaction to a problem that could have been solved with a 15-20% reduction across the board, Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has announced that in the very near future, the Critical Mitigation stat will be COMPLETELY GOING AWAY.

First introduced in The Shadow Odyssey, greatly expanded in Sentinel’s Fate, and then becoming the most important stat within Destiny of Velious as an alternative form of progression to raising the level cap (which is technologically challenging), here’s the announcement of this revelation from the EQ2 Forums:

We’ve listened to all of your conversations since Critical Mitigation was originally introduced. The dev team has extensively debated about it internally. (Very extensively.) But ultimately, we decided that the right move for EQII is to remove Critical Mitigation entirely from the game.

Critical Mitigation initially seemed to do what it was designed for, but it has always suffered from a complete lack of intuitiveness for players, and it’s not a forward-extensible system. Ultimately, it doesn’t add any fun factor to the game.
So we’ve decided that a complete removal of it is by far the best solution for all concerned.

Here are the details:

• Critical Mitigation (the stat) has been removed from the game.
• Critical Mitigation no longer displays on the Character pane (for obvious reasons, since it’s no longer in the game).
• NPCs no longer use Critical Bonus to add to critical damage.
• Buffs and debuffs that have Critical Mitigation elements to them will have those elements replaced with other elements instead, so that those buffs/debuffs do not lose effectiveness.
• Critical Mitigation values on adornments will be replaced with hit point values instead.

This change will be coming to Test soon and then to the regular servers soon thereafter.

NOTE: This change has no effect on PvP game play. The “PvP Critical Mitigation” stat is still useful for game balance in PvP play and is not being changed.

Trust me when I say that I checked the calendar more than once when reading this announcement. The only proximate holiday is represented above.

What Do You Think?

• So do you think this is a good move?
• A total overreaction?
• How is SOE going to provide progression without raising the level cap?
• Is there any reason to run Heroic content anymore (outside of Drunder) now that armor is essentially free and shards are no longer needed for Critical Mitigation adornments?

A new website from the makers of EQ2Wire is almost here…

A selection of Velious raid mobs have been doubling up on Area-of-Effect attacks since the expansion’s launch nearly one year ago. Atan (of Unrest) summed up the issues:

Condition 1: Modifieable timers line up such that a mob casts 2 different abilities simultaneously.

Condition 2: Ability that normally comes ever 40 seconds comes twice in a row with no delay.

Seems they are both bugs to me, but condition 1 is probably just a result of your design.

Maevianiu is getting serious about addressing the AoE double-casting by raid mobs in Velious raid zones and had these responses:

I cannot speak on Condition 1, I’ll leave that to the designers.

However, Condition 2 is definately a bug, and I’ve been chasing it for a while now and frankly. I cannot make it happen.

So I’m adding in some extra logging to try to pickup on when you guys make it happen and see if I can track it down from there. I’ll post in this thread later today with the zone(s) the logging has been activated in and you guys and post when it happens in those zones and hopefully we can find the cause and get it fixed.

And, if you guys can find a way to make it happen please post it here it will go a long way to getting this fixed.

and:

The logging is now active for any instances started after the time of this posting on the “Throne of Storms: Hall of Legends [Challenge]” zone.

Update:

Logging is also enabled in Foundations of Stone [Challenge]