EQ2's new release.

[kaharthemad]

According to Press release yesterday the new EQ2 expansion is set to go into store by Labor Day. A possible hold on the release might extend it till the 15th of Sept. Included in this expansion is a combat upgrade that is supposed to 'allow player enjoyment that we here at SOE are very excited about"

I have a friend in the Sands of Fire beta. The words from him is that the patch is straight ass and holding for the 15th of Sept 2006 instead of 2005 might be a little better. The game flaws in game are atrocious, the combat ability is gonna cut xp off at the knees. If this hunk of shit goes live it is gonna make the CU patch for SWG look like a hotfix. Basically enjoy EQ2 while you can.

Im asking him to email info about it today...i.e. more decriptive info. If I get it you guys will be the first to know. There is some new buzzing around quarter to three concerning a interview on penny arcade or some such.

[Markarado]

I'm pretty sure it's called Desert of Flames.

A lot of people aren't looking forward to the combat revamp. It's not because it doesn't work though. People don't like it because it's changing or nerfing classes so much. As far as all the problems your friend mentioned they don't exist. I know several people in beta and it's running fine.

[Naginataka]

I am in beta and it is nearly ready. The combat upgrade is not part of the expansion, it is hitting everyone regardless of what expansions etc they own. They are just releasing them the same day.

The combat upgrade is a major fix, the only classes that should be upset about it are illusionists, coercers, and troubadours. There are still quite a few bugs but thats to be expected.

The main complaints for the other classes are things like-

Guardians "we can no longer get 100% mitigation and 100% avoidance while outdamaging most scouts and mages!!!!"
Healers "All our heals now give us aggro rather than add aggro to the tank!!! How can I play if I build up any hate?"
Wizzie "You took away my debuffs and gave me better nukes? WAHHHHH!!!!"
Etc.

And why would you read an EQ2 interview on Penny Arcade? A website whose owners been employed by Blizzard to do art and adverts since beta and who have proclaimed that EQ2 is worse than eq1 which they hated.

[Martrae]

What did they do to the troubs?

[kaharthemad]

I'm pretty sure it's called Desert of Flames.

A lot of people aren't looking forward to the combat revamp. It's not because it doesn't work though. People don't like it because it's changing or nerfing classes so much. As far as all the problems your friend mentioned they don't exist. I know several people in beta and it's running fine.

According to your post Nerfs and changes constitute a major reason why people are pissed. I take it you were not apart of SWG combat revamp...it was gonna be as smooth as glass turns out it is as smooth as ass. Lets check and see how many bugs 'are not in it' when it is released. If you think for a moment SOE is gonna release a flawless product..or even a half done product your sniffing some good shit up that beak of yours. Do you want to go itno the bugs they had in GOD expansion? how about LDON? How about all the screwed up stuff inside initial EQ2 release? SWG Rage of the Cookies? How about Planetside? Check out the forums sometime, and see how many non bugs were released with the last few expansions they did. Faace SOE has a history of screwing up on upgrades and releases.

Sands of Fire was the initial Beta name. Desert of Flames was the announced release...or vice versa. Either way it boils down to one thing. its gonna suck monkey nuts.


Ok here is a point they chose to agree to a interview with PA it was not forced on it. As for Quarter to three, yeah all those gamers are bought out by Blizzard. QT3 has already had Raph on there this week toting the SOE line about SWG. he lost his ass on that open forum debate. I dont think SOE is gonna be stupid to allow QT3 a open forum interview on this release.

[kaharthemad]

See i have quite a few people in Beta as well most of them game reviers and testers cores are toast, and they are gonna lose people over this revamp mark my words.

Last I checked SWG lost 50 percent of thier population with thier 'flawless' upgrade.

[Naginataka]

Last time I made up numbers SWG gained 2000% population from their revamp! Also who told you SOE called the CU in SWG flawless? Where have you seen a SOE rep post that there will be no bugs? Where have you seen anyone in game programing other than Peter Molyneaux make claims like that?

Go ahead and quote the guy from MMOchart who makes up most of his numbers and honestly claims that only 27000 Korean accounts of guildwars were sold because he doesn't understand liscencing.

Are these imaginary high up reviewer etc friends of yours reviewing the expansion or the revamp? Do they have any real points or like you do they just make vague statements about how SOE has never released a bug free game or expansion (unlike all the other games being released).

Oh and how about some links of where Raph was owned, where this PA interview info is, who these reviewers are etc.

[Phlegm]

What did they do to the troubs?

Most of the high end mobs now have earplugs so most of the songs are useless now.

[Naginataka]

What did they do to the troubs?

Fucked them up royally. They are massively overpowered in live so they went the opposite way in the revamp.

Troubs are now Mage and Priest buffers remember those great stat buffs and skill buffs troubs used to have? They now can only buff 2 stats with no stacking, also the only skills they can buff are spell skills and all those do are reduce fizzle rates and for red cons will reduce resist rates. They don't raise the damage at all.

They did make it so their charm takes 1 conc instead of 5. But the charm breaks if the pet does anythign other than follow you (per spell description).

They also made the mez take no conc, but it has a 10 second duration, 2 second cast time and 10 second recharge.

They gave dirges all the troub's old melee buffs and just made up a completely new role for troubs.

There was some excitement over the new lvl 50 spell released. It adds extra damage to any nukes. But it lasts 12 seconds, can be cast once every 60 seconds, roots the bard, and the bard cannot fight for those 12 seconds. It makes the nukers happy but unless your group of 6 casts an average of about 18 nukes in those 12 seconds the bard melee DPS is better.

Dirges are awesome now though. Illusionists and Coercers were changed as well and there is quite a bit of mixed feeling there. They have less utility and more DPS now.

The rest of the classes are looking pretty good. Quite a few people are complaining about warlocks since they are now AE masters like thier class description says as opposed to being the best AEs and the best single target nukes. You can beta buff to lvl 50 and I have played around with most of them. Pet users got some very nice fixes. In fact I think Summoners came out on top of the revamp.

[Martrae]

Damn, I really liked my troub.

[mofish]

How about the fighter archetype Naginataka?

[Naginataka]

Depends on which one. Guardians are no longer invulnerable and are no longer the end all be all of tanking.

All of thier damage has gotten lowered. Because of the way haste worked and the auto attack high level tanks were easily putting out more damage than most of the DPS classes.

Zerkers are still good DPS but only if they are tanking apparently since being hit triggers (I have really only tested Pally of the tanks much). Not sure about bruisers and monks, there have been about a million Dev posts in a bruiser thread over the last couple days and I haven't been keeping up on the leather daddies.

Avoidance and mitigation are now hard capped at 70% for an even level con. The cap goes up as the target's level goes down relative to yours. But higher level enemies your mit and avoid will always be below 70%. Now the healers have to do more than a few touch up heals.

All combat strikes are instant now. No more cast times except for spells. So your auto attack means even more than before.

Taunt works now, which is good because they fixed the healer aggro bugs. Wards take into account mitigation now which means shammies can now be the group healer for any of the tanks.

However, I wouldn't play a tank if I were you unless you really wanted to. All the servers have a massive tank glut because they were so stupidly broken for the last 9 months. My server is almost 40% fighter ATs. Its very hard to get into a raid guild as a tank since they really only need a couple out of the 24 in a raid group and the supply is so huge.

[mofish]

Hmm, have been attracted to fighters since EQ2 was released, before any of the imbalance stuff was known. Maybe Ill go with necro, what I played in EQ1. Or maybe lots of whiner tanks will quit or reroll once they figure out theyve been nerfed. Havent logged in much at all the past few months cause Ive been waiting for this revamp. Maybe its time to start anew!

[Markarado]

Mention all the bugs you want to from SoE products. EQ2 ran damn well when it first came out.

Just compare the bugs of EQ2 compared to WoW. Enough said..

[Naginataka]

They are all buggy. Its part of MMOs now. Vanguard, the oh so godly savior of MMOs that everyone is jerking to wil be buggy.

[kaharthemad]

Last time I made up numbers SWG gained 2000% population from their revamp! Also who told you SOE called the CU in SWG flawless?

Show up on Wanderhome the towns are ghost towns. You checked with whom? SOE?

[Zanchief]

Fucked them up royally. They are massively overpowered in live so they went the opposite way in the revamp.

Glad to see nothing ever changes at SoE.

[kaharthemad]

itstead of sucking off the producers at SOE why not take alook at your last posts. You mention they are fucking half the classes. you post that they have cut the troubs off at the knees...and amazingingly you post bullshit such as "last time I checked after revamp 2000percent pop increase."

Wanderhome before revamp...alway high pop...after revamp...always low pop,

The problems with Soe are numerous. I seem to recall things working fine till they decided to help the people by a increase in drop rates on certain objects. Result server crash 72 hours down and a 4 day old roll back.

Since you mentioned WoW I dont tote Wow's party line on it. I went to the game albiet even as buggy as it is because SOE is about as useless as henshit on a hand pump when it comes to treating thier customers with anything but contempt.

Against the wishes of almost all of the SWG people then went live on a CU that they knew was buggy as hell. They cut the armourcrafters throats in the revamp,screwed them up so their main source of armour income(factional armour) could be made just fine but could not be sold. took them 45 days since the live patch to fix it. They double the amount of materials needed to produce a piece of armour and then hose up the production and kill the market. Creature Handlers had to wait till 2 weeks ago for a fix on xp for thier pets. They nerfed the scout tree so you cant accumulate any traping epxerience to level your character up the trapping line to go at ranger if you are full specc'd. Nothing has been done. They notify us that there will be changes to the system, and in doing so turn all doctor buffs and medicines after CU into 5cred bacta jabbers. real nice. They turn 60mil credits worth of Bounty Hunter Armour into armour that cant be turned into Mandalor Armour and people Like me are out of a full set of Mando armour since they had promised us changes to the Mando armour after revamp. They changed it alright. they nerfed the shit out of it.

They screw over the community by posting veterans rewards for alot of nice items, such as underground houses, AT-ST's 1 week before hand they tell us "Yes we will be implementing the vet rewards dicussed in earlier threads." The day of release they announce 2year vet rewards are in not a word of what they are, and it turns out to be a fucking holo of the Deathstar. The effects were piss poor ad it looked more like a Basketball then a Deathstar holo. I mean im not a fan of basketball but perhaps they are gonna alow us to stencil names in it. Hell I got a friend thats a Celtics fan. Enough with the fucking holos noone likes them and my house looks like a 60's bar with blue light. All I need is a damn Bulky merchant vendor in there too look like a jukebok and im set. Atleast let me turn the Deathstar Upside down and mount it on my cieling. I could turn my house into a cantina and get some musicians...oh wait they nerfed them too. Took away their ability to heal combat fatigue. left them with a 10percent xp bonus dance...and striped thier mind buffs away completely. It is more work to goto a mian city to find a dancer/musician to get a shitty buff that lasts 3 hours then it is worth. The population of dancers and such have tanked to nothing. Jedi got increase to xp so now instead of Cnet it is Jedi World and they crawl out of the fucking woodwork like cockroaches. EST server population of jedi will be at 50 percent by January. They make it so Bounty Hunters cant hunt specific level Jedi and instead they get a random jedi on the term. You dont know if he is full spec or anything. Once you get within 500m of him you get his name...I could really see Boba Fett's response to something like this...
Informant:"We dont know the guys name yet but once you get within 500 meters of him we will send it to you."
Boba:"any info about the guy?"
informant:"nope"
Boba:"how about if you pay me not to kill you for being a fucking idiot"

SOE time and time again have shown they more often use the masses as a test subject. The test? See how mamy inches a customer will take till the die.

[Naginataka]

Last time I made up numbers SWG gained 2000% population from their revamp! Also who told you SOE called the CU in SWG flawless?

Show up on Wanderhome the towns are ghost towns. You checked with whom? SOE?

Well there we go. You are right since you logged into one server and saw few people in town.

[kaharthemad]

I frequent SWG you gimp. and yeah the three servers I run on are non exsistant. the towns a ghost towns. dont hand me your retarded comments about 2000% pop increase. it does not exsist. Actually I would LOVE to see how you substantiate your 2000 Percent increase, since frankly I play fairly regular and I dont see it. Where are these great unwashed masses located at? On what server? The ones on the select screen are all low pop and the main players= hubs outside of CNET are empty on three different servers. When you can quit lying and quit being a TOOL for SOE then maybe you might have something valid to say.

As for EQ2, lets see how many people stick around after this glorious revamp you hype then whine about 2 posts later. Should be quite interesting. Maybe you can actually come back here and brag about a 30k Percent increase or something.

[Naginataka]

itstead of sucking off the producers at SOE why not take alook at your last posts. You mention they are fucking half the classes. you post that they have cut the troubs off at the knees...and amazingingly you post bullshit such as "last time I checked after revamp 2000percent pop increase."

To quote Kevin Spacey in Swimming with the sharks while talking to his mongloid assistant.

You have no brain.

Always nice to make a random claim of fanboyism and then pretending something else was said rather than actually addressing what was said. I wasn't aware that troubs and enchanters were half the classes. As for the bullshit, I saw you post your 50% reduction bullshit and just figured we were making up numbers.

Wanderhome before revamp...alway high pop...after revamp...always low pop,

Numbers please. And do you mean population or server load?

The problems with Soe are numerous. I seem to recall things working fine till they decided to help the people by a increase in drop rates on certain objects. Result server crash 72 hours down and a 4 day old roll back.

Not sure what your point is here. They messed up and you are bitter? Or is there something more?

Since you mentioned WoW I dont tote Wow's party line on it. I went to the game albiet even as buggy as it is because SOE is about as useless as henshit on a hand pump when it comes to treating thier customers with anything but contempt.

Markado mentioned WoW, but personally I will side with SOE business practices and CS over Blizzard/Vivendi any day of the week. Does that mean SOE has awesome CS? Nope. It means they are less bad. Not sure where you get the idea that WoW CS is great and SOE is horrible. ANother case of bitterness?

Against the wishes of almost all of the SWG people then went live on a CU that they knew was buggy as hell.

No, against the wishes of 60% of the FORUM POSTERS of SWG. They represent something along the lines of 5% of the game population iirc. As has been pointed out by SOE, Cryptic, and NCSoft. BBS posters are not representative of the whole game base. In fact, I met very few SWG players who would ever even consider looking on the forums for info much less post.

They cut the armourcrafters throats in the revamp,screwed them up so their main source of armour income(factional armour) could be made just fine but could not be sold. took them 45 days since the live patch to fix it. They double the amount of materials needed to produce a piece of armour and then hose up the production and kill the market. Creature Handlers had to wait till 2 weeks ago for a fix on xp for thier pets. They nerfed the scout tree so you cant accumulate any traping epxerience to level your character up the trapping line to go at ranger if you are full specc'd. Nothing has been done. They notify us that there will be changes to the system, and in doing so turn all doctor buffs and medicines after CU into 5cred bacta jabbers. real nice. They turn 60mil credits worth of Bounty Hunter Armour into armour that cant be turned into Mandalor Armour and people Like me are out of a full set of Mando armour since they had promised us changes to the Mando armour after revamp. They changed it alright. they nerfed the shit out of it.

Ahh. I think we found the problem. You were one of the people who liked playing god mode SWG and big bad SOE messed up your wank ground. Its a game, get over it. the game is immensely better now. Are there bugs? Yep. Are some really bad? Yep. Hell, have they even fixed commando AEs yet? Whine all you want, the game is much better and the majority of people who vanished after the CU were the assholes and botters.

They screw over the community by posting veterans rewards for alot of nice items, such as underground houses, AT-ST's 1 week before hand they tell us "Yes we will be implementing the vet rewards dicussed in earlier threads." The day of release they announce 2year vet rewards are in not a word of what they are, and it turns out to be a fucking holo of the Deathstar. The effects were piss poor ad it looked more like a Basketball then a Deathstar holo. I mean im not a fan of basketball but perhaps they are gonna alow us to stencil names in it. Hell I got a friend thats a Celtics fan. Enough with the fucking holos noone likes them and my house looks like a 60's bar with blue light. All I need is a damn Bulky merchant vendor in there too look like a jukebok and im set. Atleast let me turn the Deathstar Upside down and mount it on my cieling. I could turn my house into a cantina and get some musicians...oh wait they nerfed them too.

Wow. You are mad because they gave you a free decoration and you don't like it? Now I am sure that the devs said they would be giving you the rewards suggested by players.

Took away their ability to heal combat fatigue. left them with a 10percent xp bonus dance...and striped thier mind buffs away completely. It is more work to goto a mian city to find a dancer/musician to get a shitty buff that lasts 3 hours then it is worth. The population of dancers and such have tanked to nothing.

No, the dancer bots are gone. The actual people playing dancers seems about the same. But now it isn't super easy to make a fully automated cash cow buff bot. Cry me a river.

Jedi got increase to xp so now instead of Cnet it is Jedi World and they crawl out of the fucking woodwork like cockroaches. EST server population of jedi will be at 50 percent by January. They make it so Bounty Hunters cant hunt specific level Jedi and instead they get a random jedi on the term. You dont know if he is full spec or anything. Once you get within 500m of him you get his name...I could really see Boba Fett's response to something like this...
Informant:"We dont know the guys name yet but once you get within 500 meters of him we will send it to you."
Boba:"any info about the guy?"
informant:"nope"
Boba:"how about if you pay me not to kill you for being a fucking idiot"

The game is getting old, everyone is grinding Jedi. Do you play one? I have since they were permadeath. After the CU ttheir exp was broken because of the way CL gave exp. Now they can kill things and not earn 1 xp per kill.

Are you complaining about roleplaying for BHs? AHAHAHHAHAHHA!!!

As for the BH thing, got a better solution? The changes in that system have been so frequent since introduced because of rampant abuse and greifing on both sides.

SOE time and time again have shown they more often use the masses as a test subject. The test? See how mamy inches a customer will take till the die.

Yep, they are trying to see how low they can get their customer base by making an unfun game. See the Kevin Spacey quote above.

If you hate SOE so much why play their games? Why post on boards about their games? Why show your stunted emotional development over a VIDEO GAME for the world to see?

[Naginataka]

I frequent SWG you gimp. and yeah the three servers I run on are non exsistant. the towns a ghost towns. dont hand me your retarded comments about 2000% pop increase. it does not exsist. Actually I would LOVE to see how you substantiate your 2000 Percent increase, since frankly I play fairly regular and I dont see it.

I made the number up just like you did. I know it was too subtle for you, I am sorry. No more sarcasm.

As for EQ2, lets see how many people stick around after this glorious revamp you hype then whine about 2 posts later. Should be quite interesting. Maybe you can actually come back here and brag about a 30k Percent increase or something.

Nope, I won't do that even if you make up numbers again. I would hate for you to get all confused and irate.

[mofish]

This really means nothing, but I have a good friend that loves SWG, and likes the new version Talking to him the revamp was successful

[Scorpaena]

Bottom line is they knocked all classes and mobs down one full tier and then gave us back some of our power with the lv51-60 spells. Kinda like in EQ1 when they nerfed many classes and made them buy back some of their power with AA's.

[kaharthemad]

I made the number up just like you did. I know it was too subtle for you, I am sorry. No more sarcasm.

Amazingly enough everyone that played the game knew it was a lie and everyone here more than likely pegged you as a flaming idiot right after. Fact is when I called you on it was when your "uhhhh.....I made it up to fuck with you" idea sprung from that 4 year old mind of yours. Its been pulled here before, your not the first and most people here consider it an amazing feat of stupidity.

Nag Im not Irrate with you im just showing you that you are about useless to gleam any information on. As for 'Swimming with Sharks' I have never seen the movie nor do I intend to.


For your comment about me running 'god mode' I was not. I was a MBH/MCarb with 4 in CM for stuns and roots. Had I been 'god' I would have been a TKN/CM.
Now for your schooling on economics on a game that you do not play.

Lets take goto Wanderhome and Take a Look at Mesric. Befomre CU we were mainly a Resource/Medical Facility Based on Tat. Most of our money came from selling resources, medical stims and buff packs for docs, and armour and weapon Mainly we sold the stims and buffs though. Alot of the medical stims ran over approx 6k a piece which for the quality of stims we produced was quite low since Mesric stims and buffs had one of the highest quality ratings in game. We had 3 large houses stocked completely full of stims, buffs and resources for manufacturing these items. The total could have counted in about the 160-170million creds. Alot of people had spent the last year and a half since the release building and harvesting the items needed to keep these stores active. We had a thriving metropolis and we pulled in fair amount of money most went to keeping up the inventory and helping newer members get up thier crafting.

After CU 2 houses worth of highlevel stims and buffs were turned into useless Bacta Jabbers(sell on market for 5creds per piece), the map for manufacturing Armour had changed and alot of our materials were useless. So when complaints and bug reports were sent we recieved a statement 'working as intended'.
When alot of us after the patch could not move because we had 'damaged skill sets' we had to scrap our exsisting skill sets for a different one. After the CU our armour was not able to be worn we had to revamp to a poorer quality set of armour. The bounty hunter armour we had collected for our Mandolorian armour quests had been rendered useless and again, comments were posted 'working as intended' since you are not aware of the time involved or money involved on this armour let me explain. The Blacksums spawn in a remote region of Yavin. It usually takes a traker to find them and for the matter 1 out of every 80 drop a piece. They are a random pop on the planet no set spawn point. All in all I had about 80 to 90 hours finding these things for my set, alot of others had about the same amount of time if not more involved in thiers. On the market a piece of BH armour sells for about 10mil cred. So all in all the 4 sets of armour we had set aside for our quests were wasted and the armour would have been about anohter 200-300mil we lost due to poor planning on SOE's part.


Jedi: Sicne the CU the Jedi population has become like cockroaches crossed with rabbits. They are reproducing at such an alarming rate and unchecked because Bounty Hunters cannot hunt them effectively. Where before Jedi's were few and far between 1 in every 200 or so they have been booted to 1 in every 20. If you goto CNET you will see 10 or so Jedi fighting in open daylight. this is because SOE has given them a open planet where we cannot track them to AFK grind in instance zones. Because of the patch alot of bounty hunters can not study the mark ahead of time, we have to guess at the power and level of said jedi. Nor do we even get a name. They also made it so multiple BH's could not assist each other in killing the Jedi. Nor could others share in the kill of a NPC bounty. As it stand bounty hunters cannot fight against a full specced Jedi Knight anymore. So in remocving the BH grouping the Jedi can now roam free in the game.

I guess this was instituted because the change in MBH became a easy grind for most people. Instead of haveing to master the Marksman tree then grind all the way up the BH tree using 3 different weapons they made it so only one line on Marksmen and one line in scout had to be ground out, in doing so reduced the grinding of the BH's master tree as well. Bounty hunter was a very elite class that took long hours of dedication to get, it now became nothing more than a 2 day grind for most people.


Population was something I brought up with you after you lied about the 2000percent. Now, for the population so the posting base=5percent of the users playing as you surmise. I will concede that, as a matter of course I would say more like 15percent but meh...we cant produce those numbers for sure. What I can tell you is from personal experience, so here we go.

CNET: outside of CNET on any server is Usually a thriving city, I runs butted up against the city and most people consider this area as 'prime real estate' most lots sell for over 80mil creds upto 300 if someone is to sell. The town is almost completely gone. The sotres there are almost completely dried up only about 50 remain on the east side of the once 100 to 200 stores. Most player towns have become defunct and quite often you see towns where if you goto a place to browse you find a sign 'closed by imperial order for back taxes' or merchants left empty.

Tattooine: This planet was basically the second largest player base planet on our server. Since the patch alot of cities have vanished and gone dormant. before the patch 50 percent of the cities were again trade and nedicals and were hurt the wirst. Alot of people decided to move on from SWG. Most of the towns now do not house any industry albeit fror the JTL sales that is still prevalent in the game...mainly cause they did not fuck with it at all.

I understand that you love EQ2, but to say they have a flawless record or near flawless record is a insult to anyone with inteligence. Your own words prove that your leary about this upcoming patch. The main point I am getting at is this...the people I have talked with in bveta all say the same thing...code wise it is not ready to go live for quite sometime. I get you jumping back and whinning about being in beta as weel at it works with np, then you come back in a post after it and talk about all the fucked up nerfs they are doing. As it stands alot of people here are jaded about the underhandedness of the SOE treatment in the past, hell im one of them. I used SWG as an example to you of a poorly planned patch. I produced enough information in my posts pointing out the flaws from a seasoned player. Most people left the game of the old vet players. Perhaps after a while the core will be reproduced with new teenagers, we were looking for a revamp that fixed the' I win' button but not a revamp that damaged the enjoyability and the work put into the game by alot of people. I left SWG and EQ2, and EQ, and went to WOW cause I had enough. Yes the game is buggy yes there are server problems...but you know what? I think they have a long way to go before they are even close to the cost of damages done by SOE in their patches.