Feldon Today’s update removes the need for Critical Mitigation from Velious overland zones, as well as Kael Drakkel: Throne of Storms and the Temple of Rallos Zek (non-challenge). From the EQ2 Forums:
POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Sullon, Tallon and Vallon x4 raid zones (challenge versions)
- Many of the adds in the boss encounters now have reduced health.
Sullon, Tallon and Vallon x4 raid zones (non-challenge versions)
- In the non-challenge instances of these raid zones NPC bosses now have less health and do somewhat less damage with their melee attacks and spells.
Temple of Rallos Zek: Foundations of Stone [Challenge]
- The damage from the breath weapons that the Statue of Rallos Zek uses is easier to mitigate. The statue of Rallos zek will wait a couple of seconds after it says its text before casting retaliation of zek on itself.
Tallon’s Stronghold [Challenge]
- General Aakita and Utehk have less maximum health.
Great Divide and Eastern Wastes
- Critbonus has been removed from all overland mobs. Critical mitigation is no longer required to survive.
Kael Drakkel: Throne of Storms Heroic
- This zone no longer requires critical mitigation to survive.
Kael Drakkel: Temple of Rallos Zek Heroic (non-challenge)
- This zone no longer requires critical mitigation to survive.
ITEMS
- The chillborn katar is no longer lore.
- Fixed an issue with Visionary Mesmer’s Leggings.
QUESTS
- Fixed a bug with quests that have long expiration timers being removed from your quest journal too early.
I was thinking that perhaps I could own an MMO, and have it take daily downtime. That would be fun for the players, and for my technical and programming staff.
So it looks like the only plat in non raid original DoV that still requires critical mitigation is the Contested Kael Drakkel, interesting. If the drops where worth the time then i could see it….
Well I for one am glad to see it gone, the entire you have to have crit mit for a solo overland zone was nuts to begin with. I can see needing crit mit for a raid zone and I got 160 crit mit, but for solo overland zone really somebody did not understand their player base.
You still may need cure pots if you don’t kill very quickly.
I wish they could come up with semi interesting strats on solo mobs like they did with the cliffstriders.
i dont see why it was such a big deal. Every quest from the minute you got off that turtle gave gear with crit mit.
Agree with Zerigo. I guess they are trying to make the EQ2X players happy? They were the main ones whining about gear being inaccessible (for free), but who knows? It could just as easily be the exWoW players that are constantly in 80-89 talking about how impossibly hard EQ2 is and asking how to turn auto attack on.
Probably a dungeon-finder thing, actually, assuming DF doesn’t check your GearScore (err, crit mit) before assigning you to a group, they need to remove crit mit checks from all the zones DF could ship you to.
Or it could be SoE read one of my posts and thought it was a worthwhile idea… if raiding actually required different stats than heroic play–rather than just moar biggar numberz!–they could keep shoehorning new heroic zones between the current high-end heroic zone and entry-level raid zone without having to re-itemize the whole world each time.
So… at launch, you can get heroic gear (from, say, PQs or entry-level dungeons) with “500 awesomeness, 100 crit mit”, which is enough to start raiding. Further heroic dungeons might get you to “800 awesomeness, but still only 100 crit mit”, while raiding would get you to “900 awesomeness, 200 crit mit”. Now raiders can actually play heroic instances, since they won’t just faceroll heroic content with their much-greater-than-expected DPS and tankability and healing, and heroic-runners still can’t just jump into high-end raiding since they’d get slammed by the mobs.
And when SoE adds a new mini-expansion with another couple dungeons and another raid or two, they can just ramp it up to “1000 awesomeness, and still just 100 crit mit” for heroics and “1200 awesomeness, 300 crit mit” for raids. And so forth. (Or, if they want the “new” heroic zone to bypass the first raid zone and get you into the second one, up the crit mit a tiny bit as well.)
Something similar could be done for solo play with, say, crit chance and mob crit avoidance… more-than-100-crit-chance would only be needed for dungeons and raids, but not solo.
…hm, DF does look at crit mit, apparently. So amend that to “they need to remove crit mit checks so DF will have more choices for where to send you, rather than just 3 or 6 starter dungeons”.
It was supposed to check CM. If they descoped CM from DF then you’re probably right about it being the driver. I still expect it to flop unless they add a player rating system and filter so you have some control.
So you’re big idea is to make critmit the determining factor on what zones you can do? (Solo/heroic/hard heroic/raid)
Isn’t that pretty much the way it is now? Kinda reinventing the wheel imo.
Btw, what’s wrong with having more than one level of heroic? Why can’t there be a hard heroic (halfway between regular heroic and raid)?
Seemed to me that was the idea between the kael/drunder zones.
And you don’t need crit mit for any of the solo zones. I did it all in last teirs heroic/solo gear no prob.
The only stat they need to add in is +cry. “OMG, I can’t do it…its too harrrrrrrd!” ‘You have gotten better at CRY!’
Don’t mean to be critical, but the cold hard truth is this. If NOBODY can do it, then it might be scaled too hard. If only some can’t do it, then its just challenging….which is a GOOD thing.
“If NOBODY can do it, then it might be scaled too hard. If only some can’t do it, then its just challenging”
And if only raiders can do it, it’s a raid zone in disguise.
Let’s be honest, they screwed up progression. They botched it with gear and with Heroic instance difficulty. (I won’t speak to Drunder raids, as my experience peters out to nothing in that respect.) Now they’re scrambling to try to undo some of what they did, which would be wholly unnecessary had they paid attention during beta/test cycles to begin with.
Difficult is good. Stupid, which is what we actually have in too many cases, is not.
@Anaogi Agreed. I am raid geared, on multiple toons. That being said I dislike running the new zones b/c they are so hard. I get enough of that raiding, and I believe a heroic zone, except in special instance, should never require a raid geared toon. I miss heroic zones of old when they were hard but fun, and could be done in legendary gear. Now you have zones when ran, that offer gear that is almost worthless, to those who can run the zone.
SOE is slowly strangling the fun out of the game (on the heroic side. the raid side is allot more fun this expansion, then the last.).
The problem with using crit mit for *every* zone from Great Divide to EOWx4 hardmode is that the high-end players brought out their +cry items… With the EoW patch, some heroic zones were dropping items that were all-around better than old raid gear, and that was apparently not-at-all acceptable.
If:
a) you have an expansion with Heroic1-9 and Raid1-4, and then patch in Heroic10-11 and Raid5 a few months later, and patch again and add Heroic12-13 and Raid6 a few months after that, and:
b) Gear from Heroic9 is good enough for Raid1, and:
c) Players think gear from Heroic13 should still be weaker than raid gear
…then your system is broken by design. There’s no “space” to put gear between H9 and R1. Either you buff every raid piece every time you add zones (and buff all the raid mobs to match), or you nerf every heroic piece (and nerf all the heroic mobs to match), or you realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner and change things around so raiders need some other stat that heroic players don’t. (That’s what “crit mit” was when it was first added to the game, so that was my example stat… only raid gear had it and only raiders needed it.)
Or you do what SoE is currently doing, and flail around removing some crit mit requirements, and buffing/nerfing gear seemingly at random, and letting risk/reward in gear-quality/mob-difficulty run all over the place, so some easy mobs (the new rare spawns in the old zones) drop gear way past what’s needed, and other stuff (high-end heroic zones) drop gear that’s worse than what you need to step in the door, and basically leave all players at all levels hanging out to dry.
Heroic Zones being hard is what end game players are looking when they arent raiding and trying to split zones with the sense of “casual players” and “raid players” would create an even bigger gap between the 2. If you cant survive in drunder SS, ToT, and Spire or EoW, then it can be the group set up vs the group gear. But making everything easier to obtain isnt leading anywhere. I like what we have right now it suits having skilled ppl to complete a challenging zone. And yes theres raid geared people who have no idea how to played their characters (goes both ways to casual players as well). I like how we are 🙂