Returning to EQ

[hawthorne]

Hey guys,

So, it's been a while but I am returning to EQ and am pretty out of it as far as the current state of the game. It's been about 5 years since I have seriously played, although I have logged in from time to time since then. Does anyone have, or know where I might find, a decent list of things that have changed since roughly House of Thule/early VoA?

I'll be playing on Live, not the TLP servers in any form, so I don't really need info on those.

Will be reading through threads to see what has happened around here as well, so hope you all are well.

hawthorne

 

[flatlined785]

.. you ... you mean the patch notes ?

One big recent change is that all the clicky buffs (well most), now when you click, you gain a permanent AA effect. You don't actually need the buff icon, it does nothing, although folks on raids might like them for buff removal reasons (AE cancel magic etc).

 

[hawthorne]

5 years of patch notes is a bit much.. more looking for highlights.

Is that the Shadow of thing I see in my buff slots? Was wondering what those were. So I don't need to keep clickies up anymore? If it has one of those? I don't suppose there is a list around somewhere, eqresources or something?

 

[aspire2008]

The way task adds works changed and the way experience and chest reward is granted in task, although I can't remember the exact details.

Besides that, the only 2 major ones I can think of at the moment, was pet power and swarm kiting and riposte killing that I can think off.

 

[hawthorne]

Yeah I found that out last night with my SK. Not good times. Oh well, it was fun when it lasted.
So MC and the epic have a limited number of procs now. Did they do something else to riposte in general?

Haven't done any missions with taskadds yet so will be interesting to see how that is different. Going to be taking a group of heroics through the HoT tasks to get their mercs and augs, so I imagine it will show up there, or is it strictly in the newer expansions?

Hmm, I need to get Fry his 50 dollars to get my yellow status back.

 

[flatlined785]

the shadow buffs have no real purpose on your buff list, aye.

I don't know a list, myself, but all armor sets since HoT have these type of buffs in the certain slots. Ear, finger, etc.

r-click all the items you are wearing. Any with clicky-buffs have been ... ratified .. into buff lines. EG. "Soothing Breath" I, II, IV, X, etc.
Sometimes older items have been ratified into those lines as lesser versions. They might have different names. "Something old of the blah blah".
When you click a higher level version of that buff line, the AA entry is upgraded through the whole line, to the version you have.

So .. with soothing breath IV, and I click an item with soothing breath X, I get a spam update of something like :
learned Soothing breath V
learned soothing breath VI
etc.
learned soothing breath X.

And in my AA window, in the general tab, I see or get :

Item: Soothing Breath X

among others.
Also I can see that soothing breath x is no. 17 out of 27 possible increases/versions.
The AA window entry tells me exactly what soothing breath 10 does (adds mana of X or whatever). That's a permanent change to my toon.

If I want, I can click off the buff icon. If I want I can re-click the item, to again get the buff item.
The only reason I can see for this is raid mobs that strip enchantment, so you might fill up with junk buffs. I don't know if modern mobs do this, but old dragons used to for sure. ToV, VP, etc.

----

CoTF and TDS were both kinda formulaic xpacks, same style as RoF. You get a set of zones, with probably 3 tiers of group armor and I dunno, 2 or 3 tiers of raid gear. Each zone has a solo quest line, a group quest or 2, a HA or 2, etc. The alla pages for the xpacks are very clear, group progress etc.
Most classes got standard level increase spells, and in the non-level xpack, a spell or 2 that are alternate/situational. AAs the same, some new bits here and there, mostly increase of existing lines.
Gear is all spreadsheet, each xpack has usually T1 visible being tradable, and each uses an item container to make the class armor from the tradable, and/or no-drop item. Tier non-vis come from named group mobs, each class has items targeted for them. All the named mobs are listed in hunter achievements.
Each xpack has currency, let's you buy some of the gear. Usually they miss random items for each class, so maybe you can't buy Group T1 ears for Necro. You have to get that from named or whatever. But you might be able to buy T2 ear for necro, if that's on the T2 group vendor and you have enough currency.


Actually the best advice I think might be to go look at the alla pages for each xpack, they will tell you roughly what things are needed.

 

[flatlined785]

Merc J5 you can just do
No Heroism Without Fear :: Quests :: EverQuest :: ZAM instead of the old quest chain... I think that's what you were referring to about mercs.
But you might want aug rewards for those heroics.

 

[hawthorne]

Thanks flatlined.

Would you suggest going through each expansion for the gear or is it not that important to getting to the next expansion? Like, should I just level to 105 and focus on TDS and TBM, ignoring anything before it, or is it worth it to go through VoA and RoF?

Yeah that was the task I was going to do for their mercs. And I have heard the other partisan tasks give heroic augs, or something like that.

Thanks for the clicky info. Sounds like there's only a few clickies that need to be kept around. My haste clicky doesn't have an AA so that one is staying, for instance.

 

[flatlined785]

I came back about 24 months ago, had to make a whole new crew.
I played for about 6 months, then stopped, and came back again just recently, because they made TDS free, now TBM is out.

So, I had to level a team from scratch. I levelled the team up to SoD stage, and did the first 3 themes, all quests, which gave my guys a full set of (decent) gear from the achieves and quest rewards.
Then I levelled up, and was able to buy the armor sets on the way. To level up, I did open zone grinding and as soon as I could, I did Dead Hills "gribble" HA, Into the hills. It took me out of open zones into an instance that scaled with my group. It's simple, low risk, easy to grind on. It got me xpack currency too.

At 85 you can get Reis armor, or rustic .. rustic is from VoA.
at 92, fear touched ... RoF.
at 100, latent or now castaway. Castaway is slightly better.

So I got to 100, with latent (at the time, castaway is TDS). Then I played all the CotF quests, HAs, content. I did a little back-content. Then I stopped playing.

Now TDS is out, I levelled to 105, and did all the TDS content, and upgraded to castaway, and then to more based on drops and almost a full baseline set of gear, via xpack currency.

I'm considering RoF and prior content, but drop wise there is no point, it's purely for my "want to do it" or not. It's faster to do, but no gear...

So .. it depends what you want to do in game. My goal was to do COTF, and levelling worked ok for that, but it seems less likely I will go back and do that "missing" content. Maybe for the zones I like the look of.
You will replace all gear, with the set of gear from your level range. If you level up, you'll not care about the old gear. All the effects and so on tend to stay in the same slot and move with you.
Augments might be the only thing you hold on to. I have not farmed any of the instances/quests/named for aug drops, and so my guys have a variety of augs we got along the way. Of course, tank needs the decent AC stuff. And there's Tavron's for 4 slots per toon too.

---

In other advances, PeteSampras made a plugin version of his macro bot. MQ2Bot. It's very easy to use, and very good at playing all classes for the group game. You can literally just set group tank, and group assist, /bot on, on any (all) toon, and it will play them well enough that you can do 99.99% of the group content with no problems. Very very cool. Zero configuration required, although it can be configured further once you get to the point you need to. It stops all the messing about with setting spell sets up in ini files that the previous macros required.
There were other alternatives, but the bot really sets a high bar, and it's included with MMOBugs build (I think only, not anywhere else).
/plugin mq2bot
/bot on

 

[hawthorne]

That helps a bunch. Going to put together a plan of attack for how I want to handle it. I have my old toons but also a bunch of heroics that were made when they gave out the free ones. Made and ignored since then. So definitely have some options. So the expansions that aren't available for free are CotF, TDS and TBM? Is that right? My server select says 19 of 22 right now so it makes it sound like there are 3.

Heroic adventures sound interesting. Are they scalable things like LDoNs then?

 

[flatlined785]

I'm not sure what's avail free on live, I play on test. On test all are free apart from the current one. A year or 18m ago, all including current were free, but when they released TDS they did not make it free. Lots of people stopped playing (prolly cos they were done with COTF anyhow). Then when TBM came out, TDS became free, so I assume Test will follow current-1 = free.

HAs are scaling instances like LDON yes, but they tend to be actual quest storylines in them. In COTF the HAs all advance the story and each theme/zone has them in sets of 3, usually 1 set of 3 but sometimes more.

When you get one you get a (group) shared quest, and then can zone in to the instance. At a certain point in the HA the quest locks, and after that you cannot alter the group makeup. People often ask if folks want 1/2 spaces add in to a HA at the point just before the lock. Folks can get flags for completion, and/or xp + currency.

They are supposedly tuned to 3 real players with 3 mercs.

They down-scale to about 85 I think. I don't think they upscale, they're designed at a "higher" level and downscale with named and loot.

There has been a "big problem" really since they added them, folks just grind them over and over and don't do anything else, so they level in "gribbles" from 85, with little risk, no variety. When TDS came out with a level bump to 105, they tried to nerf the xp in them to stop folks just sitting in them to get 105 and AAs maxed.

TDS has very locked progression, you have to do the right quest chains and missions in both T1 to get to T2, and then again in T2 for T3, so on. Only the first 2 zones were open. But now they opened T2 also.
All in all though there was at release very little game area for folks to grind in, or level in, or even do the progression quests in. At T2 there is one grind zone and 2 groups could keep most of the spawns clear. At T3 there is another, although more space.
It's not a well thought out expansion to my mind.

 

[hawthorne]

When people refer to a game shrinking it's not usually the zones that shrink. Hopefully they reverse this trend.

Been going through all my accounts making sure they don't have Shadowrest corpses and it's been reminding me of where they all are. I have more characters than I remembered.

Thanks for all the info, flatlined!

 

[Artemus]

The game has shrunk considerably in recent months due to a massive nerf in CotF HAs that pissed off everyone. Those HAs were the main means of grinding for people and Daybreak went and nerfed the hell out of them while at the same time releasing the most broken expansion ever. Worse than GoD.

The busted expac and all the emphasis on TLP servers pissed people off in a big way. I saw the reports on the DBG boards. Casual guilds went from 40 people online in prime time to 15. Many could not field raiding crews. DBG drove a ton of people away, me included. I've been playing WoW for 3 months and enjoying it, except the player base are still dicks like they always were. Worst thing about WoW: its players.

 

[aspire2008]

The game on live servers has definitely shrunk considerably. I'm not sure if its because of the recent TLP server binge people are on, and will migrate back to live, or people are just smartening up and realizing the quality of expansions Daybreak has released in the past 5 years or so has degraded substantially with The Broken Mirror being the one that caused a small exodus with the empty promises they made about it back when they formed Daybreak in February of last year.

Its probably a mix of both, and players finally realized they didn't want to spend money on a mediocre product became smart and became aware after 10 years of how the company is being run, even with new company title. Just because the name of the company changed doesn't mean they've changed as a development team.