Feldon Now it’s time for the EverQuest II Systems panel. Akil “Lyndro” Hooper, Kyle “Kander” Vallee, Michael “Xelgad” Ganz, Robert “Caith” Fouts, Dave “Maevianiu” Kish, and Douglas “Endymion” VanDerveer are presenting. We’re liveblogging this panel as well as recording a video of this panel in 720p HD.
Liveblog begins at 1:00pm PDT and ends at 2:00pm PDT on Saturday August 16th.
Fix for Stealth and AE Abilities
New Spell Qualities
- All spells go to Grandmaster
- Certain spells go to Ancient
Battleground 6v6 Balance of Theer
- Deathmatch
- Penalty for dying
- Tiles to stand on and get buffs/debuffs
Level Agnostic Dungeons
- Added to Dungeon Finder
- 20-89 can group together
- New itemization for all levels
- Classic zones
- No lockouts
- Zone out in cities
- 10 dungeons in the first wave
Altar of Malice
- Adventure, Tradeskill, Guild Levels increase to 100
- New Prestige abilities
- New TS Prestige
- New type of Critical Hits
- Continuing Choice-based Itemization
- More Stat Laytouts for Raid Armor
- New Poisons which are stat-scaling
- PvP it3emization changes
- New type of Armor Runes
Level Increase
- 25 new prestige points
- new prestige tab
Showing some new abilities.
Tradeskills
- Prestige – same layout as Adventure
- Allows gathering of special resources
- New uses for lower level resources — every single harvest in the game from lower tiers will be useful for current content. Lots of fish (chuckle!)
- Apply to all play styles in Altar of Malice
- Some of the best-in-slot raid items will be made by tradeskillers
- Enhancements to Refining and Salvaging – These are in-game but not used all that much, In Altar of Malice they will be used more
Backend Systems Adjustments
- Spell Mitigation
- Mobs over 103 will require increased amounts of resists. Like back in Sentinel’s Fate.
- Might be able to succeed with more healers, but gear will be the best approach to survive.
- Recommended values will be displayed via a rogue or predator ability.
- Jewelry will increase resists noticably between qualities
- Old style resist curve — not a hard limit
- Mitigation and Avoidance
- Protection on shields will provide avoidance based on the wearer’s level
- Mitigation number cap increase so higher mitigation values can be used. Has to be balanced around all classes ie. brawlers
- New Critical System
- Going forward, no more Critical Avoidance!
- Scales beyond 4,000% Crit Chance
- Three New Types of Critical Hits
- Subject to change, but:
- Legendary – 25% increase
- Fabled – 100% increase
- Mythical – 200% increase
- Text is much larger, text has colored borders.
- You will not be able to get to 100% of any of these.
- Beastlord Adjustments
- Evaluating damage vs utility
- Master of Beasts will increase the damage of Beastlord abilities
- Itemization
- Continuing ToV itemization. No item revamp.
- Armor “Upgrade Gems”
- Continuing Ethereal events
- Armor and Accessory DChoices
- Cyan Adorn slot for Weapons
- More Raid Armor Stat Layouts
- Increaseing the number of options for raid armor to match heroic and solo.
- This excludes “no Stamina” gear
- Stat-Scaling Poisons
- Usesw the same formula as normal abilities.
- Poisons will take your Crit Bonus, Potency, and Agility into effect.
- Poisons will still not crit.
- New Armor Runes
- You have equipped 2 of 7 items from Sigil of Power and receive a new bonus.
- Purple adorns that make up a set.
- Have to make good choices — could Min/Max 3 of one, 4 of another.
- Removing purple adornments will be easier.
- Player vs Player
- New Blue Armor adornments
- Moving Toughness/Lethality from armor to adornments
- Recommended Stats on Raids
- Predator/Rogue ability – Observe Enemy – see required stats on an enemy
Questions & Answers (selected ones that have straightforward answers)
- Priest and Bard resist abilities and songs will be upgraded after level 96 to equal.
- Level Agnostic Dungeons wouldn’t work on level 90+ right now due to power increase. We’ll look into it.
- Negatives on priest Cyan adornments might go away. Originally, they wanted to increase weapon damage rating on weapons, but that wouldn’t work so they came up with cyan adorns.
- Will look into Healer mercs.
- Need to confirm this, but Ancient spells are with the expansion, and for All Access only.
- Critical Avoidance stat being removed.
- If, as a raider, you want the best items in the game, you should become a max level tradeskiller and get the Experimentation ability.
- Several questions about Ancient spells
- If you demote your account from All Access to F2P, you will be demoted back from Ancient to the last version you had, ie. Master, Adept, etc. If you upgrade again, you can use Ancient again.
- The game will never be balanced around Ancient spells.
- Rare Drops only. Not researchable.
- Q: If I cast Temporal Mimicry on a Necro and he casts Lifeburn, do I die too?
- A: You are not the one actually casting the spell. Xelgad wanted it to be you, but it’s actually a hidden pet.
- Q: Will NPCs do legendary/fabled crits?
- A: Mobs don’t crit. We don’t like mobs that surprise kill everyone.
- Question about which chat window/category the Observe Enemy ability info will go into.
- This ability will work in PvP, but it’s a hostile ability.
The slides for this panel are now available for viewing here:
So the whole resists recommended value sounds like scouts will actually be able to scout creatures and give information, that sounds pretty cool. Even useful to RPer’s (don’t judge me :P)
Thank you Feldon!
Thanks Feldon! This is great.
Questions:
1. Can you expand on the new critical system?
2. How will lower lvl resources be useful in the new exp.?
3. What are these “special resources”?
What would you like to know about it?
can you also expand on the stealth/ AoE abilities
So mobs are AoEing so often that scouts cannot stay in stealth long enough to use their stealthed combat arts. My speculation is, they could make some AoEs not break stealth.
Looks like they’re putting some good thought into the new stuff. Now I just need to level the rest of my tradeskillers to max, which takes forever for someone who hates standing and doing writs.
I really wish they would put in more tradeskill quests spread throughout the level range so that I could quest my way to max tradeskill.
can you expand on stealth and ae changes more as well
Thank you Feldon for this awesome transcript! I got a question regarding the Grandmaster and Ancient spell version: will they evolve visually speaking since they get a better rank?
EQII is now pay to win. We’ve reached direct correlation between combat stats and dollars.
I don’t see how this is fundamentally any different than it was when they first introduced different membership tiers. If you had gold membership, you could have master spells, legendary gear, etc. If you stopped paying your membership, you couldn’t equip your legendary gear any more unless you bought unlockers or resubbed to gold. That was a direct correlation between combat stats and dollars. If you want to call EQ2 pay-to-win, in my opinion you could make a (very) weak argument based on that, but I don’t see how this suddenly crosses the line since it’s fundamentally the same as it has been. And we don’t even know how many spells will have ancient versions and how rare they will be yet, could be they will be so rare that most people will only have one in any.
It is fundamentally different. Assuming a player raided four days a week, and obtained a new item every day, at 50 cents/unlock they would still pay only $8.00/month. Even at this (quick) rate, $10.00 is enough to pay for a fully geared character (until next expansion/zone).
This is roughly half of a month’s subscription. Assuming one~two expansions a year, it is now a $180 vs. $10~20 comparison. That is a very valid, and powerful, argument – and a play style that supported many high end guild’s player bases (i.e. log in, raid, log out).
I’d expect the spells to drop at a rate higher than ethereals (i.e. easy to obtain if you actually want them).
Those of us who dutifully paid a monthly subscription for years were annoyed at SOE’s implementation of Free-to-Play . It always seemed to suggest that one day we might be forced to pay StationCash to buy fabled or mythical items.
Now we’ve come full circle and Subscriptions are awesome again. Meanwhile Free-to-Play is what it always should have been — a FREE TRIAL with limitations — and someone’s playing the “pay to win” card?
The irony.
Hold up. My argument is not that “F2P should be a free trial with limitations” rather I disagree with power being behind a dollar gateway.
I do think subscriptions should matter. I just don’t think they should matter with correlation between subscription status and combat stats. The reasoning here is that it ‘forces’ a subscription in order to compete for “best in class” and that is not a welcome feeling.
A similar comparison would be a consumable item that increased the drop rate of bosses sold from the SC store. Completely by existing, it ‘forces’ guilds to run this item during raids in order to remain competitive. Here, subscription doesn’t matter, but the same ‘must pay in order to compete’ is present.
Subscription still has to be viewed as the normal mode of operations and free is just a tone-down version with detrimental limitations. This has always been the case and is not “pay to win” where you could win by buying additional items with cash.
Considering that: F2P originated as EQ2X where subs/non subs functioned identically with unlocks, all servers later adopted and expanded upon this business model, and the precedent of ‘permanently unlocking what you need’ or ‘free to play your way’ (encompassing classes, races, and even expansion content) has been the basis for the past four years, I think it is shortsighted to claim that sub-only benefits are the normal mode of operations. Controversially, the earliest precedent for sub-only gated content are the draconic buff scrolls.
That said, this again, is not my argument. My argument is introducing content that is permanently behind a paywall is bad . As you may have guessed, I also disliked the draconic scrolls being behind a paywall.
Free to Play was introduced with the intent of people having to pay SOMETHING to play fully even if it was just for a couple of unlocks with the idea that some people, even if they were not subbing would end up paying more and some people who wouldn’t otherwise play or pay anything will because they can play at least some without cost.
When SOE began removing all the need for unlocks (races, classes, coin, inventory, gear) they severely tanked the value of people actually paying for a sub. This year or so they’ve been in the process of actually adding value back to a paid subscription (and generally doing a good job I think).
I kind of feel they went too far with the 2-week lockout of new content for non-subs and I feel that everyone should be able to purchase from the broker even if they are not subbed. However, I do not see a problem with ancient spells being locked. Of course I also didn’t have a problem with free/silver having to unlock gear nor do I have a problem with the fact that the AOD features didn’t get rolled into the expansion bundle when the last ones came out.
Even with the newest additions to subscription benefits (keep in mind nothing at all was removed from free subscriptions, just things added to make a sub more attractive), EQ2 has one of the better F2Ps out there in my personal opinion.
Eq2x and the initial form of f2p was dumb and returning players hated it.
That is not a similar comparison for the reasons already mentioned. If Ancient spells were an a la carte purchase, then I might see your point, but it’s going to be part of the monthly fixed price sub.
No no, do not mistake my argument as a “sub vs. non-sub argument!”. It isn’t, it is a “power behind reoccurring paywall” argument! For this reason, it is a similar comparison.
We could reword the circumstances in a number of ways, e.g. “if everyone in the raid is of sub-status, the raid boss uses a different loot table,” and “if the raid leader is of sub+ status, … different loot table,” are both identical to “if consumable item X is active, … different loot table” in practice in that power is gated behind a reoccurring paywall.
But it’s not exclusive to a paywall. Players can still get access to them Via Kronos. One can argue that Kronos are a paywall of sorts, but the point being is, you can get access to them without paying a single penny of real world money.
IMHO the “Pay to Win” card is played way too much and doesn’t really apply to this situation for two reasons. One is the already mentioned Kronos, the second is that paying does not get you the upgraded spell. It gives you the ability to use it IF you get it. Pay to win would only apply if you had to buy the upgraded spell and that was the only way to get it. This isn’t the case in either way.
This is why I will no longer be playing EQ2.
I believe what Koko is referring to is the lack of a spell unlocker to unlock the Ancient so that, given enough F2P options used, one could be on equal footing with a subscribed user.
However, they have not in all honesty mentioned the existence of a spell locker for these or the lack their of. So, the while there is a valid concern, the cheesy “eq2 is pay to win” comment was a little “the sky is falling”.. And I’ll rag on you about it in Skype in the morning 😈
If I could login, pay some money and obtain the spells/powerful items needed to beat the content then it would be pay to win.
But this is just pay to play, the best items can drop for you, but unless you pay to attune them you cannot use them, that is no change from the current plan.
No amount of money will get you that item or spell, so its a pure gameplay model in that manner, well apart from mounts. I guess I would like to see the minor stats removed off the mounts and added to a mount buff slot next with maybe some mounts dropping in game with that slot pre-filled, but that’s nit picking.
And on the content, I’m really liking what I see, especially if it sounds like they have found a fix for the whole crit thing, the expansion definitely sounds good stuff to me.
There is a clear difference between paying a one time unlock fee versus having to pay continuously. Even if we disregard cost, there is still a dramatic change from the current plan; for example, non-subscribers kept spell upgrades after unsubscribing. Furthermore, SOE added spell unlockers to allow non-subscribers to unlock spells without even needing to subscribe. It’s pointless to argue that a system that prohibits non-subscribers from obtaining the highest tier spells is not a change from the current plan.
Pay to win is exactly as Murfalad described. The status quo in MMORPGs is a paid subscription to play the game. After all, they need their money somehow. In EQ and most MMOs, while this is currently changing, that status quo was subs. Subs = unlimited access, you can play free from restrictions. NOW. Pay to win, is where someone can go above and beyond the status quo, take shortcuts, purchase loot, mounts with benefits, pretty much anything that gives them an advantage FOR CASH.
F2P was originally implemented to give people the option to play the game but with restrictions (obviously why the hell should you get what everyone else gets, when they are paying and you are not.
IF ANYTHING, the model you describe Avasha, is pay to win. You are recommending a system, where the status quo is free to play, and you can purchase additional features. Naturally that’s assuming a F2P system is the status quo, with microtransactions being the sole income. But that is not the case thank god.
At the end of the day, Free to play was a gift from players perspective, and a wise business choice from sony’s, as it brought in more population and perhaps kept some subbers here, or got f2ps to sub. But you are not, and never will be on the same playing field as a subber. That would be completely and utterly illogically from both a consumers perspective, and as a business decision on behalf of a corporation.
However, I will concede one thing. You are right, there is a drastic difference between paying a flat line price and having to pay continuously for something. Man, they sure were awesome letting you have those extra features for a while. Sucks they’re leaving, but doesn’t change the fact you can’t pay additional USD beyond the status quo for an advantage.
I’ll expand upon my initial comment, I may have a different definition of “pay to win” than most which may have been confusing. I define ‘pay to win’ as “ability to gain a relevant combat advantage that is locked behind a recursive* pay wall”
In TOV-Wing 3, all fights are “dps checks”. Sometimes you’re racing the script (dps it before time runs out), and sometimes you’re racing your guild (dps it before someone screws up), either way – the more dps the better. For many ‘first kills’ on many of these encounters many guilds ‘barely made it’ (fail condition triggered, equilibrium & verdict carried). A 5~10% less damage and it is a guaranteed failure, 5~10% more and it is a cakewalk. For reference, the difference between spell tiers is about a 10~15% increase.
It is now mandatory for a competitive guild to maintain subscriber status for 24+ players ($360/month). If they don’t, first kills, bonus loot, and fame will go to their competition who will. In other words, “subscribe or quit being competitive”
I’ve been on the receiving end before (on another game) and maintained a guild upkeep of several thousand dollars/month. Usually a large portion of this was mitigated by selling things on the “broker” and buying “SC items” from other players. Sometimes the market sucked and this wasn’t reasonable, and we paid out of pocket to make ends meet. In both cases, the ‘arms race’ lifestyle wasn’t fun and I don’t wish it on anyone. I’m aware that $360 is not thousands, but it certainly is a big step in that direction (and a huge leap from the previous value of $0).
To hold off the “screw you freeloader” comments, at the time of writing, I have approximately 60 kronos, 10+ LoN mounts, 50k+ SC amongst my personal assets. I’ve been ‘around’ for awhile, rejoined during the EQIIX beta and a sweet appearance weapon to show for it. I’m a quester and proudly wear my respective cloak and hat. However, primarily and I’m an analyst and primary editor of the EQII combat calculator and consider myself a competitive player.
I’m not a freeloader. This isn’t a sub vs. non sub class war. This is a well founded observation from a veteran player about the future direction of the game, and how he dislikes the addition of recursive paywalls to the competitive scene.
Thanks for this Feldon. Everything from Fan Fair this year sounds very exciting. Looking forward to the new expansion.
Did the video for this ever get put up?
Working on it.
thank you for posting the info Feldon, sounds like this will be fun. Other than I strongly object to being forced to craft for a raid item. Other than that sounds great.
I am on a break from the game. I have taken several over the years but have always returned. Am I correct in thinking that I’d have to level crafting to 90/100 whatever to come back and raid effectively? Umm if that is true there is no way I’d come back. I have always disliked leveling a crafter and my best is only like 42 after over 10 years on the books.
Am I reading that right? gah!
No you wouldn’t need to create a crafter. What they are saying is that crafters can make some of the best raid slot items, though how many slots would have the possibility of crafter made items we don’t know yet. Even then you wouldn’t need to be a crafter as you can commission it from a crafter if you want it.
Stuff like this is always able to be commissioned.
I believe the question was if Experimentation could be made possible with commissioning, and the response was no, if someone wants access to every possible piece of gear, they need to level a crafter and thus be able to Experiment. But I could be misremembering. Will be posting the video soon!
It would be possible to “commission” experimentation if the Heirloom tag were removed from the gear. I don’t think this will happen because of the cranial implosions from being able to buy best-in-slot on the broker but it is at least an option. Maybe they could actually make experimentation commissionable. It’s not like they don’t have the technology, and far be it from them to require the high-end raiders to level a crafter to compete. Frankly, if I have the mats to create a piece of best-in-slot gear it would scare the hell out of me to experiment on it. I’d much rather give someone else about 1k to do it for me so that if something goes wrong I don’t have to be mad at myself. That fifth level of experimentation was nerve-wracking to say the least. Either way, there are always options.
This may be overly simplistic and could possibly even come off as a bit arrogant, but I don’t want an F2P player to be able to do everything I do. I pay a monthly subscription faithfully and I expect certain perks to come along with it. You want to log in for free and dominate content the way that I do? If a brigand ever shows up on one of my raid teams dropping 8-digit parses and I find out they are on a free account, I will immediately let my raid leadership know that either the free player stays or I do, not both. How long would any MMO last if they hooked everyone who logged in up with end-game dominance without the incentive to spend something? Even the Facebook games would be gone in a matter of weeks with that business model. Free-to-play pwnage. You find that game please post here and let me know what it is.