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Level cap increase - what have you heard?

Discussion in 'EverQuest II General Discussion' started by Shmogre, Apr 17, 2017.

  1. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    Saw someone talking with great certainty about the next expansion (November) bringing a level cap increase to 105...tried searching Discord but nothing obvious jumped out. Anyone seen anything to corroborate?
     
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  2. Nommi

    Nommi Member

    IMO raising level cap is a pointless grind for 30 seconds of gratification when you level up. Just what we all need - another 5 levels of spells to upgrade without adequate game resources with the general expectation that we are all willing or financially able to P2W buying spell upgrades.
     
  3. Caam

    Caam Member

    When the game first came out, the devs were saying that the game could scale up to level 150 without too much pain. I remember a conversation/discussion several years ago talking about the underlying game mechanics and how they overestimated the scaling and that level 100 was essentially the level cap.

    If you look at the numbers, every 10 level tier brings an increase in scale of about 15% overall. Those differences get bigger and bigger each tier. When you figure out how to deal with the scaling, it's not just the spells and abilities that have to be looked at. It's the other side of things, the MOB damage and defense numbers that have to be looked at. That's where I think the real challenge with scaling comes in.

    If you look at the gear progression at level 100 in the last few years, you'll see that there is very little scaling of the defense numbers. Quite simply, a lot of care was put in to make sure that tanks could not get their defensive stats real high with a smaller number of pieces of gear. Every piece of gear that a tank can swap from defensive stats (mit/block) to offensive stats gives them that much more power to use DPS to hold aggro and give the DPS more room to DPS. On top of that, as the mobs get to levels 110+, their damage output starts scaling to the next tier and the defensive numbers have to scale with it. Simply put, defending a level 110 MOB in level 100 gear is a lot harder than defending a level 100 MOB in level 90 gear.

    The next major challenge in raising the level cap is filling in the gap. You would expect that there would be sets of gear to fill the entire level gap. You certainly can't expect everyone to wear their level 100 gear until they get to level 105 and suddenly have a whole new tier of gear to wear. You have to make gear at levels in-between. That takes time/effort. Not just to create it but to make sure it fits in the upward scale.

    In my mind, unless they've figured out how to address the defense issues and have already started designing 5 new levels worth of everything, we won't be seeing a level increase with the next expansion. And with those challenges in mind, unless someone decides to invest a lot more time and effort back into the game I doubt we will ever see a level increase. "I could be wrong."
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  4. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    I remember being excited at breaking 100k raidwide DPS in our little guild at level 80. Now we're at what? 3 billion ignoring Combat Mit? That's a 30,000x growth in player power from level 80 to 100. There's no mechanic or game design characteristic that I'm aware of which is forcing these unfathomable leaps in player power. It is just what the current design team continues to be doing. With as fast as power is growing though, the stratification at level 100 is pretty insane and they probably have no choice since two pieces of level 100 gear can the old equivalent of 40 levels apart. So I guess we can look forward to a rumored level 110 (and Ascension level 15).

    I'm generally against level cap raises because they eat up 6 months of dev time, robbing the team of dungeon and raid design time, for content that a first wave of people blow through in 2-3 hours until devs come in and nerf the hell out of everything in some misguided belief that slow leveling speed = great gameplay. But what the hell do I know? I don't even play this game.

    As for the oft repeated idea that they can't raise the level cap over 100, that was never the issue. There was a mechanic where enemies could not be set to over 100. This was fixed in like 2011.
     
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  5. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    Yup. That's why I'm asking if anyone has anything to corroborate the rumors and guesses. The person I mentioned was dead certain about a raise to 105 coming with the next expac, though I wasn't able to find anything in Discord (the source of all info for "highly engaged" players, it seems).

    I was hoping someone had some concrete info or screenshots, something other than one person's "It's true!" and a lot of speculation.
     
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  6. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    Concrete info or screenshots would get devs fired.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  7. Canth

    Canth New Member

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  8. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    Heh, was just going to post a link to Kander's post. One line, but it gives the info I was looking for:

    "In the next expansion, we will be raising the level cap this year to level 110."
     
    • Like Like x 1
  9. Nommi

    Nommi Member

    Yep....DB already seeing $$ signs ... cha-ching cha-ching....you can bet they are already seeing/banking on all those who will pay cash for spell upgrades. 10 levels of spells....I have 28 spells between 91-100... that is 28 spells in addition to all the ascension spells. More P2W and the rest of us will be left in the dust by those who will shell out the cash so they do not have to face ridiculous long research times and lack of adequate spell drops in game along with insane broker prices for anything that will drop. Already dreading this xpac. :-(
     
  10. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    Raising the max level has been happening throughout the history of the game, so I don't see it as a pure "pay to win" move. At least this time they are doing a full 10 levels, and not the weird five-level bump we got before (when we went to 95, with the odd item and harvest levels that and the subsequent raise to 100 caused).
     
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  11. Caam

    Caam Member

    "I could be wrong."

    Saying that they're going to raise the level cap doesn't mean the challenges I stated disappear. In fact, going to level 110 means that they're going to need enough content to fill 10 levels of progression. They did those types of expansions with 2-3x the people they have now. Either the content is going to be real light or they're going to rehash something and save a whole bunch of design time. Neither of those seem too palatable to me.

    "Raising the max level has been happening throughout the history of the game..." They haven't done a 10 level increase since Sentinel's Fate 7 years ago. I have no idea how many of the current devs have been around since then. I'm concerned that they've bitten off a lot more than they can chew. I hope that's not the case.
     
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  12. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    Oof, I feel old...didn't realize it had been that long since the last full +10. To be fair to myself (and make myself feel a little less ancient), I didn't mean specifically 10 level increases; I was including AA/Prestige increases,the two 5-level bumps, and Ascension type additions in my assessment. I see new releases including level increases and/or new gear/skills as a core part of games like this, so I'm less likely to view it as a pay-to-win style tactic.

    I share your concern about what the smaller team has taken on. The new expansion, the level increases, the rumored Ascension increase, new TLE server, new contest/competition zones...it all sounds like a lot. Crossing fingers for us, for them, and for the game...
     
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  13. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    Remember when every spell upgrade either dropped in the world or could be crafted from non-stupidly rare materials? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
     
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  14. Uyaem

    Uyaem Member

    Hoping that the ascension system gets no new levels and dies a fast death.
     
  15. Dizzy

    Dizzy Active Member

    Lets hope the additional 10 levels and new areas of the expansion bring in lots of new players which the game really needs. Maybe Feldon will even come back and play :).
     
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  16. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    They've announced a level cap raise, a new system (Familiars) and it's P2W. Three things that EQ2 doesn't need.
     
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  17. Caam

    Caam Member

    So what are the alternatives if we don't have these things?

    1. Level cap raise: We continue on the stat-flation path with a resolve number of 30-60 and potency of 300-1500 per item. We will have players approaching 50k potency and see raid fights are 40-80 billion DPS. The opportunity to balance classes becomes a lot more difficult because there is no new spells or abilities. All they can do is improve or nerf the existing spells. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

    And then what happens a year later when the same question comes up? Do we just plan on staying at 100 forever with everyone eventually getting all their abilities grandmastered with nothing more to look forward to? It's got to happen sometime. Or maybe you're expecting the game to be shut down before then?

    2. Familiars: This is just another form of AA with a different presentation and path to gaining the abilities. I don't think it matters one way or the other, everyone would be expecting some form of new abilities. If not this, what's the "shiny new" feature? Another AA tree with 100 more points? Or do they just skip it altogether?

    I'd rather have this than 10 more spells to add to my already over-filled hotbars.

    3. Pay-to-win has been around since "SmokeBlower" days. Yes, I'm disappointed that they forced it on the ascension system with the impossible-to-obtain spell tiers. But that train left the station a long time ago. Would you prefer that they eliminate all of the station-cash paths to progression and make people wait 8 years to research their entire relevant spell collection? Considering a grandmaster at level 110 requires almost 2 months of research and most people will have 50 abilities between new spells and 4 types of ascension, I'm not really exaggerating. There's really no room to compress the research time either, without making the lowest tiers minutes instead of hours. That is unless you want to make everyone farm extremely rare items instead.

    I think they made a mistake leaving the level cap at 100 for 3 years. It forced them to add resolve and uncap potency; which to me are the real issues right now. Adding a new tier allows them to do a "reset" and try to get things straightened out. I'm sure there will be some very disappointed people. But considering the alternatives, I would call their decisions the lessers of evils.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  18. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    1. Stop growing player power by 250x in 12 months. We shouldn't be going from items with 80% Potency to 150% to 390% to 600% in 15 months.

    i_have_no_idea_dog.jpg

    2. We don't need more systems. We already have Deity Buffs, Tithe, Infusing, Reforging, Ascension, 5 colors of Adornments (some of which come from ill-attended PQs), etc. Fix the existing AAs. We have 20 stats, most of which don't do anything anymore. Stop adding more complexity. If they announced they were going to REDUCE the complexity of the game, I would come back. I'm sure there is a small dedicated rabid fanbase who who wants the game to be brutally EVE-like with its complexity. But I'm not one of them. Everyone else paying the bills is decorating.

    3. Before the last two years, the Marketplace was limited to "lazy" items. XP potions and Vitality restorers. These are things that shave off a few minutes when gaining levels. Now, however, the Marketplace means the difference between waiting 2 months to kill a raid target or killing it today. Not sure why people keep putting this false equivalency between a little bit of an XP shortcut and nukes that unlock raid progression. I don't think I'm splitting hairs here.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
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  19. Shmogre

    Shmogre Active Member

    And this is where they lost me.

    I defended the cash stuff for years, giving SOE and Daybreak crediting for walking the fine line between "pay to win" and "pay to speed up". While buying the research on those end-game spells is technically speeding it up, they gamed it by making the drops to upgrade on your own painfully, ridiculously rare (and even non-existent for a while, as evidenced by one of the latest patches adding them into the Expert zones). When they locked a mob behind a spell that required a high level, it truly crossed that line (they ended up changing that, but it took a lot of outrage to get there).

    I know we no longer have a gaming company at the helm, so things have to change. But pushing real money transactions doesn't do any good if they end up losing paying customers overall.
     
  20. Bergex

    Bergex New Member

    I just shake my head and laugh now, I cancelled my sub last month and couldn't be happier. After watching what the devs were doing and not addressing the problems, or they were addressing them but months later I had enough of giving them my money. And now looking at what they are doing with this new expansion pack, I mean class balances now you got to be kidding me haha.
     

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