Big changes coming!

[Freakbabydoll]

Greetings all. Over the years, EverQuest has gone through many changes. Sometimes, these changes have had long-reaching effects the original designers could have never imagined. One of the biggest changes recently has been he dramatic scaling of NPC damage. In order to keep content challenging for raiders, the damage dished out by NPCs has increased to the point we're at today where only the mightiest of tanks can stand up to a difficult target for more than one round. Gone are the days when a caster who accidentally drew the attention of the enemy might have a chance to survive long enough for an experienced tank, or off-tank to draw agro and save the fleeing finger waggler. In our opinion, this has lessened the enjoyment of the game sufficiently that change is needed. Badly.



What kind of change you ask?

We will reduce NPC melee damage across the board. Primarily this would be raid NPCs, but there will be some group changes as well. In short, we want to return EQ to the days when a tank change didn't just mean how many people have to die before a tank can step in; when a caster drawing agro didn't just explode in a single hit. In short, making the game more survivable, more fun, and less punitive for even the smallest mistakes.



Along with the NPC dps reduction, the damage mitigation such as defensive, final stand, knights' mantle and carapace abilities would be overhauled so you still have some emergency situation abilities, but these would last for 18 seconds instead of the three minutes they do now. Warriors would retain their innate mitigation bonus over knights, and would receive a five percent mitigation advantage at 45% damage reduction, as well as an increase to agro generation while this ability is active. Knights will receive a flat 40% reduction ability with no damage caps, with added flavor of SK's adding a lifetap, while Paladins would receive an increase to their healing.



So what does this all mean to you?

Hopefully, more fun in the game again. We also NEED your help in testing the changes. This is obviously no small task. The changes will be pushed out to the test server for a couple months before being implemented on live servers. I can't stress enough how important this time will be for you to help us find any major problems. While we can account for most of the major changes, there is always a chance something will get missed.



Please note, the changes listed above are the MAJOR bullet points. I'm sure there will be more points of discussion and I'm absolutely open to talk about them. Most importantly, this path has NOT been set in stone. It is something we are discussing, but something I feel is very important to the game's health. We are VERY aware this is a big change, and we welcome your opinions on the matter.

Elidroth Renato
-----------------------------
Doug Cronkhite
Game Designer
Sony Online Entertainment, LLC

[anaskesia]

It will be interesting to see where those changes lead. I posted my thoughts on the thread there. I think they should either leave things as they are, or they should make it so that the mob gets a short debuff to its dps-output when it actually kills someone so that casters or DPS have a few seconds to lose agro, start healing someone else, or whatever.

[Luthair]

Personally I'm extremely skeptical, both in the concept, and the dev team's ability to execute on it.

The most problematic part of the intended changes is testing. The Test server hasn't had a force raiding current content in years, meaning the developers need to recruit guilds from live servers (a mish-mash of people isn't sufficient as they can't be expected to function as a group). Its a hard sell to get guilds from a live server, they're investing time that could be spent getting loot, keys, AAs or progressing; essentially the only guilds who will copy are the handful who have Thule on lockout. These guilds are not the ones needed to test a fundamental change to every encounter in Everquest, they are far too well geared to serve as a reasonable baseline for re-balancing virtually every raid.

As the change is only intended to impact the raid game, we aren't going to see a large scale revamp of overall healing (though paladins were mentioned), this is a problem. While I don't watch their bars specifically, I rarely notice our healers low on mana except when they've recently died. The difficulty here is, if they tone down mobs such that any class will survive several rounds, as such any melee class will be able to tank raid mobs. This allows top tier guilds to significantly trim their tank roster which will indirectly impact us in the future as encounters are tuned around their ever increasing DPS advantage.

[Luthair]

And Elidroth came to see the light: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts ... 2&#2637245