Feldon If I had to summarize Fan Faire in one statement, one consolidated takeaway thought, it would be: We’re gamers too. If we can, let’s give the players what they want.
Giving players options and trying new things were the prominent themes throughout Fan Faire’s EQ2 panels. SmokeJumper in particular seemed eager to break away from tradition if it could lead to better gameplay. “Because we’ve always done it that way” must undoubtedly be one of his pet peeves in EQ2 meetings. Yet, it’s been barely three weeks since Fan Faire, and the glossy slides and upbeat pronouncements of flexibility have given way to many perplexing aspects of Game Update 61 which recently appeared on Test.
In between Double XP and Tinkerfest, the buzz this weekend was the upcoming Game Update 61.
So let’s take a look at the upcoming changes to how Alternate Advancement (AA) points can be spent. From the GU61 Update Notes currently on Test:
- The Subclass Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 30.
- The Shadows Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 50.
- The Sentinel’s Fate Alternate Advancements now unlock at level 80.
- The Heroic Alternate Advancement tab now unlocks at level 80.
UPDATE: What’s important to note, and what was not clear in the original version of this article, is that these changes DO NOT raise any of the individual limits on the trees. As a result, players who at level 10-29 can currently spend 160 AA points, will now only be able to spend 50 points. At level 30-49, you can now only spend 100 points.
UPDATE #2: As of August 8, 2011, the Subclass tree now unlocks at level 10 again.
UPDATE #3: The Health, Power, and Runspeed abilities of the Shadows tree have moved to the new Tradeskill AA tab.
An Appealing Chart
When I was preparing the charts for this article, I immediately saw the visual appeal of the “GU61” version below. It sure looks more streamlined, simple-to-understand, and less complicated. If someone approached EverQuest II for the first time and saw the chart immediately below, they might even point out the “flaw” that players don’t have any growth in AA point spending between levels 10 and 70.
| Current Alternate Advancements Progression | ||||||
| Level | Class | Subclass | Shadows | Sentinel’s Fate | Heroic | Total |
| 10 | 50 | 50 | 60 | – | – | 160 |
| 30 | 50 | 50 | 60 | – | – | 160 |
| 50 | 50 | 50 | 60 | – | – | 160 |
| 70 | 70 | 70 | 60 | – | – | 200 |
| 81 | 100 | 100 | 70 | Yes (variable) | – | 300 |
| 85 | 100 | 100 | 70 | Yes (variable) | 50 | 300 |
However foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and while the chart below does at first glance seems to offer a smoother progression, opening up a new tree every 20 levels, it ignores an undeniable reality: Players now have even less incentive to group at lower levels.
With changes to gear, and the “end gameitus” that all MMOs suffer, the only purpose to grouping at low levels has been earning AA points. This change just further rewards those players who powerlevel to 90, chronomentor down, and one-shot entire roomfuls of mobs to gain AAs by the handful. This change will reinforce this extremely disruptive behavior and further discourage those niche players who enjoy doing the lower level dungeons at the level they were originally designed for.
| Alternate Advancements Progression After GU61 | ||||||
| Level | Class | Subclass | Shadows | Sentinel’s Fate | Heroic | Total |
| 10 | 50 | – | – | – | – | 50 |
| 30 | 50 | 50 | – | – | – | 100 |
| 50 | 50 | 50 | 60 | – | – | 160 |
| 70 | 70 | 70 | 60 | – | – | 200 |
| 80 | 100 | 100 | 70 | Yes (variable) | 50 | 300 |
Players have been able to largely overlook the glaring oversights and omissions in the Class (Kingdom of Sky) tree for years, because we’ve always been able to just shift points over to the Subclass (Echoes of Faydwer) tree. These days, many classes don’t even touch the Class tree until they’ve spent 30 or more points in the Subclass or Shadows trees. Players have grown accustomed to being able to toss a few points into the Shadows (The Shadow Odyssey) tree to gain bonuses to Health, Power, and Run speed. With these changes, most of those options will now be deferred until level 50.
Who’s negatively affected?
Crafters. More than a few high level crafters have yet to spend significant time adventuring and, so far, they haven’t been penalized for that choice. Crafters of at least 10 adventure levels have been able to pick up Health, Power, and Runspeed from the Shadows tree since 2008. With this change, crafters will have to reach adventure level 50 to even touch those Shadows AAs.
Level Lockers. Some players choose to experience the game at their own pace, rather than racing to level 50 and beyond. After GU61, level 10-29 players will only have one option — the antiquated Class tree. The Subclass tree will now remain locked away until level 30, with the Shadows tree becoming a level 50 perk.
In past years, we have been encouraged to gain AAs at low levels by game mechanics (AAs are much more easily earned at low levels), and by the player favorite “AA Slider” feature which has allowed us to gain AA points at low levels. In fact, the advice I have given to players for years is, gain as many AAs as you can at lower and middle levels, cause you don’t want to reach 90 with a 200 AA deficit to make up.
If you want to see how passionate players are about Level Locking and earning AAs at low levels, read the 49 page thread Use the slider at 100%, love it; was Turning off combat and quest! xp, love it
Certain Classes. Again, some classes don’t have great choices in the Class tree. Shadowknights usually start with Reaver, Necromancers have been quick to pick up Tainted Heals, and battle-specced druids (who are you really healing at low levels besides yourself?) have always spent the first 24 AA points in their Subclass tree. As a Ranger, the first thing I specced was the kiting (sorry, Trapping) line in Subclass. There are numerous examples.
Tier 4 Battlegrounds. It’s no secret that some players have chosen to level lock at 39 with lots of AAs for maximum Battlegrounds pwnage. With this change, they will lose an entire tree.
There has been speculation that these changes are rooted in this Tier 4 Battlegrounds disparity.
Does anyone benefit?
When we first heard about these changes, we got the impression that players would be able to freely spend points in the Class and Subclass trees. Being able to spend up to 100 points in each tree would have taken some of the sting out of these changes. But actually, no one is a benefactor to these changes, except level 80 players who will now have the run of the entire AA window, where they previously had to wait until levels 81 and 85.
There’s no way to spin this change except as a massive nerf to player options and a style of gameplay which has become increasingly popular, without the destructiveness of mentored level 90 characters slaughtering entire dungeons in minutes.
What’s The Alternative?
What if I had to redesign AA progression? How about this:
| Feldon’s Alternate Advancements Progression | ||||||
| Level | Class | Subclass | Shadows | Sentinel’s Fate | Heroic | Total |
| 10 | 50 | 50 | 10 | – | – | 110 |
| 30 | 70 | 70 | 40 | – | – | 210 |
| 50 | 100 | 100 | 70 | – | – | 270 |
| 80 | 100 | 100 | 70 | Yes (variable) | 50 | 300 |
This setup would provide a point progression where every 20 levels, we’d be able to spend more points. Yet it would take very little away from players who already use the various trees.
If you’d like to post your own comments on these changes, the Low Level AA Lockout thread on the EQ2 Forums has reached 11 pages and counting. And if you’d like to read some additional commentary about how AAs have developed over the years, click Page 2.
In closing, I want to say, I feel lied to. I find it really dishonest for the EQ2 team to have withheld this unpopular but crucial information from the presentations at Fan Faire. It could have been discussed and argued over, with some meaningful conversation coming out of it.
PVP drives many improvements to games — likely this is one of the main reasons for this change was to eliminate the super twinks at T4, something that drove more players AWAY from Battlegrounds then into them. The old system artificially created characters that was far more powerful then intended at that level in both PvE and PvP. Overall, these are great changes, and in the end, the only upset people will be a very vocal yet super small minority of the game.
Does this mean toons that are locked at lvl 39 get a total of 200 AA points instead of the current 160? Just no access to Shadow line?
I don’t care about battlegrounds. I don’t care about PVP.
But, as Feldon points out, this impacts more than just battlegrounds. It’s a real issue for a number of classes that rely upon getting aas in the subclass trees early (sks, necros, and all melee priests), and a real issue for crafters that have been able to previously buy the first row of the shadow aas to help in their harvesting and questing.
Didn’t they announce at FF that they were going to split off the crafting AA’s to a separate crafting tab? Perhaps that part of the overhaul isn’t done yet? This would solve the problem for crafters.
That said, I generally take run (or mount) speed and double harvests over 2.5% HP/power for most of my leveling characters in any case. If these things are going away from the general tier of the shadows AA tab, that is going to make those first 10 required points in that tree much less interesting.
To me this is just another point of the devs saying this is how you are supposed to play our game. They still miss the point that it is the players who make there game in the first place.
@Green Armadillo, they did split off the crafting-specific aas to another tab.
The problem is, as Feldon points out in his article: “More than a few high level crafters have yet to spend significant time adventuring and, so far, they haven’t been penalized for that choice. Crafters of at least 10 adventure levels has been able to pick up Health, Power, and Runspeed from the Shadows tree since 2008. With this change, crafters will have to reach adventure level 50 to even touch those Shadows AAs.”
So, while things like swift creation and bountiful harvest will be on their own crafter tab, ancillary aas that have made their harvesting/questing easier will not be accessible anymore.
I have just logged in my lvl 10 crafter on test and she can only spend 50 points in the KoS Tree not 100 as you have in your chart. In fact from my testing it looks like this:
level 10 = 50 points KoS
level 30 = 50 points KoS, 50 points EoF
level 50 = 50 points KoS, 50 points EoF, 60 points TSO
level 70 = 70 points KoS, 70 points EoF, 60 points TSO
level 80 = 100 points KoS, 100 points EoF, 100 points TSO, 50 DoV
Not sure where you got your information, perhaps it is something announced but yet to go live on test. Otherwise the only people to gain are the level 80-84 toons.
They may be gamers, but do they play any SOE games?
As someone who has two characters locked at lvl 32 and 52 atm, i’m not to sure how i feel about it. For my lvl 52 it only gets better as said.
But i’m unsure how i feel about the effects for my lvl 32, ok it’s nice i can spend 200 AA rather then 160, but i do lose the shadows tree where i went up to the third line. Personally i think i’ll come out better (inquisitor btw) as i can get more endlines in class and subclass tree.
I presumme though that we will have a forced AA reset … i’ll be maxing out my shadows tree on my lvl 32 to be sure and hope they aren’t forcing it lol 😀
@Al_Ghouti I guess it depends whether Feldon’s chart is accurate, or whether what Luminata reports as being on test (i.e. that there is no increase in the # of aas you can spend at lower levels) stays the case.
If it’s the latter, there is really no benefit at all for your sub-50 character (other than the fact that aas in the sub-class tree are unlinked)
Just noticed I said 100 points in TSO at 80, I obv meant 70 lol
Ouch if the newly formed table is correct then yes … this is a real big nerf :/
Although i also have to add that most people that level lock their characters do so do try and do as many quests as possible, grinding AA isnt the main reason. AA just made it easier to solo heroic zones, which will be harder now and make people do them while higher lvl… but eh still sucks lol
you realise all your gear is getting like 10x better?
AA has trivialised all content < 90
get over yourselves, if you want to level lock, do so but do it as the content was intended, not with an ability that can one shot mobs at 30… and it solves the 39 situation as well
A friend pointed out a pattern to me which I’m starting to see…
What if this is all part of a plan to make level 50+ cost extra in EQ2X?
I wouldnt be surprised to be honest, Smokejumper already commented that the live servers is mostly populated by lvl 90 characters. While EQ2X community is more active in the lower regions …
Still dunno how the gear will change, but i enjoyed the way AA at low lvl could really change the way your character plays. While at higher lvls its usually pretty straight forward in most cases.
Battlegrounds is as useless as the Arena in my book – 100% waste of time. I’d rather be (gasp!) tradeskilling. Don’t matter one bit if you have to be 80 before you get to spend any AA’s. Chrono if you really want to revisit zones. That’s what I do, and it works excellently.
@Feldon: They don’t think about Extended. Honestly. SmokeJumper is the only person on staff who is even aware we exist. A lot of things may seem like ploys to make more money off us, but actually they are just oversights because they didn’t consider the impact on Freeport when designing. (Funny how both thinking of Extended and not thinking of Extended have the same end result. :P)
The ridiculous power of a mentored character is one of the things that make leveling a joke–but only for people who have a high level friend. If the gear progression is smoothed out a bit so that 90s aren’t the only ones with crit bonus and potency, so much the better, in my opinion.
k one question..so its saying that at those lvls(10,30 etc) thats how many points u can spend…can u still build more than that and just not spend them till u hit set lvls?…if so to me idk cause i dont do battlegrounds…i just like to build them at low lvl cause its eiser
The current system super inflates characters FAR beyond the power they are intended to have 50+, this is, and has hurt the game, i dont blame SOe for trying ot fix these issues and welcome these changes with open arms
Could there be another/additional reason for this AA redesign?
Feldon says
Let me try some spinning. 🙂 They recently revamped the spells/CAs that you get at the lower levels to try and make the new player experience a bit less confusing. Could this be another thing designed to make it less confusing for new players? If you can only use one tree from level 10 to 30, then you don’t need to figure out the other trees until you ding level 31. Don’t need to bother with the next one until level 51, and the next two until 81. This eases you into the AAs a little at a time instead of at level 10 giving you access to three of the trees and asking you where in this sea of options you want to spend your AAs. It’s not uncommon for players to stack up bunches of unspent AAs at the lower levels simply because they haven’t had time to look through the available trees to figure out where they want to spend them. They come so fast at the lower levels due to the lower point requirements to obtain the early ones that you easily get them stacked up without a chance to spend them. If you’re only looking at one tree, the choice would be more simple.
Feldon said
What if it’s something completely different? What if SOE was actually gearing up to do something right? We’ve heard that the free trial for the Live servers is supposed to be coming back. What if when it comes back, instead of being a 14 day free trial, it’s a first 50 levels free trial? Do I think this is their plan? Probably not. But I can hope. 🙂
The cutoff at 50 is telling–that was the old cap at launch, no expansions. Having a rather basic selection of AAs rather mimics the state of things when the early expansions with AAs hit.
So…and I’m not exactly a fan of our devs, but…suppose, as Dethdlr suggests, they’ve actually decided to do something right? A more organic progression, more closely resembling what the long-term players went through? Perhaps, I don’t know, some learning curve that results in cap level players that actually have a clue how to handle their characters?
As to the gear, ever looked at the power curve in this game? Linear up to Kunark, then that sucker bucks up and doesn’t look back. (Yes, TSO and Velious, I’m looking right at you. No Velious, boring gear does not mitigate the offense!) Moving some of that kick back to 50 creates a smoother progression, even if the line does shift over time.
Besides, maybe that means that KoS gear won’t suck nearly as bad…nah, never happen… 😉
Minor correction. The KoS and EoF trees were separated by 9 months, not 2 years.
There’s another thread worth reading. If my post gets deleted, I can repost it here. 🙂
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=504230
“At level 30-49, you can now only spend 100 points.”
I think this is 125 points if you count the new Tradeskill AA line.
For all intents and purposes you can ignore the Tradeskill AA line. While it’s available at level 10, it does not affect adventuring in anyway.
WoW did it, EQ2 has to do it.
Here’s a few problems with the outrage:
-People who lock rage about how easy everything is. Congrats, it’s going to be harder now. This is what you wanted.
-People who don’t PL and/or don’t set the AA bar over 50% will be 50 in under 8 hours and none of this will matter.
-Mentored/Chrono’d 90s have always been disruptive to lower level content. This will never change until mentor/chrono is dramatically nerfed or completely removed.
-SOE cares more about not overwhelming new players than it does about the EXTREME minority of smell-the-roses progression types that, strangely, want massive amounts of power inappropriate to their level range (if we’re going by traditional progression).
-SOE wants you to get out of the terrible old content ASAP because it’s awful and they lose more members than they keep if people stray too far from the Golden Path. The community telling players to “stop and smell the roses” ends up with new ex-WoW players going to trash zones like Nek Forest and cancelling because the zone quality is so poor and hostile to players.
Face it, most of this rage stems from two massive groups and one teeny tiny one:
-T4 PvPers. You can’t get Battle Hardening anymore and be invulnerable to the vast majority of physical damage. Sowwy!
-High-level players that this change won’t affect in the least. However, people like to cry about any change, good or bad, whether it affects them or not. Since they “might want to lock in the future,” this is an outrage. Will any of them? This leads us to the group that has no influence in this argument…
-The people who actually level lock. These people are such a small population to be almost statistically insignificant.
It’s stupid politics. Rage about something that doesn’t affect me in the least because it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing.
Please. Grow up.
The real travesty in all this is that Tradeskill AA isn’t a separate pool. You’re telling me that if I want to craft AND adventure I have to waste 25 adventuring points? Pathetic.
And no, “Get an AA Mirror” doesn’t count. What if I have a Raid spec and a Solo spec? Where’s the room for a Crafting spec? Or for that matter, where’s the room for a Gathering Spec?
I know I can juggle multiple AA specs using multiple houses, but that’s just a godawful mess due to the stupid way mirrors work.
Bohoho, you can have up to 11 AA specs, now that you can have 10 houses each with their own mirror. Considering up to six of those houses have a weekly upkeep of 5sp a week, is it really that big of a hindrance?
It’s a hassle to swap AA specs–a hassle that didn’t exist before, since the crafting and harvesting AAs were in the first shadow line, where they weren’t taking away from anything significant. You have to drop 10 points in that line; the opportunity cost was very low. But now that they’re in their own tab, anything you spend comes right off the top of any adventuring AAs you want.
There are players who will now have to deal with the annoyance of juggling multiple mirrors who didn’t have to before, just to achieve the same functionality they had before the revamp. Surely we can all agree that added hassle is a negative thing, right?
Bohoho…you do realize that SmokeBlower wants to get away from the Golden Path, right? So, now that you have been enlightened maybe you can go back and rethink a point or two in your grown up rant about a video game.
Way to completely ignore the posts of people stating why this is a problem, (not to mention the article itself), Bohoho.
I really don’t understand the need for such sweeping changes. Did soe not learn from SWG that these kind of massive changes can have a very negative effect on the game base.
Honestly there’s no need to do this. Unless they want to chase folks off and into eq next.
Calling this a sweeping change is overreacting IMO.
Two questions:
1. Was the present system broken?
2. If not, why fix it?
Soe, you really need to take your customers’ reactions into consideration. This is the type of action that has ruined so many good games in the past. People no longer want to be led by the nose. They want to make their own decisions and want as many options for shaping their characters as they can get. You have a wonderful game with a fairly mature player-base. Allow them the options they are used to instead of making them feel like they are being pigeon-holed. If the major problem is with an ability in PvP, change that, don’t remove one of the things that many players treasure – the option to be different.
@Einina : so removing a whole array of possiblities (no solo heroic quests)and taking away 110AA points and two AA branches for player under 30 is not a sweeping change ?
What does it require for you to be considered a sweeping change ?
(damn cant find any good joke 🙁 )
i think i this change may have to do with the over haul of most 1-70 gear?
Being able to spend AA at low levels gives players choices.
If you’ve seen Destiny of Velious gear, you don’t really have a “choice”. There is one obvious set of stats that you will expect on each item you equip for your archetype. With the 20-80 revamp, you will no longer need to look at items and think about whether they’re appropriate for your class.