Producer's Letter: Expansion 17, Beta and Preorders!

Reason why it HAD to be? Almost certainly not.
Reason why it WAS.... well, all we can do is speculate because they were certainly never tell us.

 

Laziness.

 

I sorta suspect they didn't want to be accused of manufacturing yet another stat. Naturally, an excellent solution is to create the new stat, but disguise it as an old stat, because...

This got me to thinking, would people really care if combat was reduced to a handful of offensive and defensive values?

Get rid of multi attack, flurry, fervor, resolve, ability mod, double cast, pierce, effectiveness, potency, etc. Do the same thing with defensive stats, and get rid of all the stupid adornments.

Just boil everything down to base values, keep crit, and squish mob hit points down to non-ridiculous levels.

Seems to me, the fun is found by defeating challenging encounters, and one doesn't need 75 stats and a new one plopped on to the pile every 2-3 years to have fun.

Just seems like it would be better to declutter the game, and get back to story telling, puzzles, and interesting encounters.

 

Fuli, you're dead on. Stat proliferation is one of the things that eventually drove me out of the game. No telling how many others are in the same boat, but I suspect it's pretty significant.

 

Well I pretty much gave up back when adornments first showed up and I found myself needing a spreadsheet just to keep track of my gear. And they've added a shedload of junk since then so I'd expect that they dropped a bunch of players with each new convoluted mechanic they introduced.

 

I think stat and number bloat is the biggest issue plaguing the game right now aside from the pay to win nonsense. I really dislike not being able to just glance at gear and tell whether it's an upgrade or not. There are like, what, 20+ stats in the game now? It's ridiculous.

And that's not even considering other stuff like adornments, reforging, and infusion which all make a difference on whether a piece of gear is an upgrade or not.

 

I hate the stat bloat. To me it's immersion-breaking which is a big deal in a fantasy-based online world. I mean I just can't understand how a random grimling underboss on Luclin is literally 1,000,000 times more powerful than Vox and Nagafen. Maybe it's a silly way of looking at things but it's always bothered me. Plus the way the system has evolved just shows a complete lack of a coherent development plan. "Just increase every stat and cap by 30%" It's all we seen for years.

 

The continual piling on of stats and their related mechanics is (imo) a lackluster attempt to compensate for an utter absence of creativity.

 

I know this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison because training dummies don't have combat mitigation and all that, but I am messing around on beta and with a full set of refined mastercrafted gear I was parsing 180 billion DPS on a training dummy. That is, my toon was doing 180,519,939,879 damage every second for 90 seconds. It's honestly incomprehensible.

Edit - this amount of damage in one second is probably enough to kill every single enemy, combined and at once, up through Terrors of Thalumbra.

 

Adding a new stat or increasing X by Y% via variable script parameters is a very poor substitute for real content. Almost as bad as Overseers ...

 

I wouldn't disagree with you. I finally levelled my main to 100 recently and was gobsmacked at the ridiculous power increase that that magic number provides. She can pretty much one shot any solo content below that level - if her merc doesn't get to it first to do likewise. And between them I'm pretty sure the heroic content is going to go down just as fast if I could be bothered to do it.

I've been running Vigilent: Rescue to farm the house items and Evania clears the first 3 rooms before I can move my hands from movement keys to combat keys. In contrast I was doing the same thing on a level 95-99 with Kenny and I still had to pay attention. Then they hit 100 too ... and I haven't even gone to pick up the panda gear yet!

 

It's certainly one of the factors that led to me quitting Live during AoM. Reforging meant getting any upgrades was a pain in the butt since unless it exactly matched the stat profile of what it was replacing, I'd have to reset everything and juggle around all the stats again. God forbid you might want/need to carry extra gear to swap out for certain situations. I can't even imagine how much worse it got with things like infusing and ascension.

 

Per DW on the official forums, the new expansion goes live in two weeks.

 

Well, they're going to be neck deep in it then with EQ1 in a week and 2 in two weeks.

 

from Caith on the EQ2 Forums:

Itemization
Going into Reign of Shadows we’ve refactored the item stat layouts to balance the stats granted by each tier of equipment to get to the appropriate levels of those stats that the content is balanced around. For some stats such as DPS and Flurry which are on opposing specs of the same item slots, that means you will need to make a decision of which stat you will go after by choosing one piece of gear or the other. For stats such as Casting Speed, Reuse, and Haste, where we want you to be able to get to 100%, you will still need to pick the correct specific pieces of gear to meet those values from itemization alone. For some other stats such as Accuracy and Strikethrough, you will not find them on gear as they have been reserved for Adornments.

Code:

Slot         Spec
Chest        cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Modifier
Chest        melee  DPS            Weapon Damage
Chest        mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase
Legs         cast   Casting Speed  Reuse Speed
Legs         melee  Haste          Weapon Damage
Legs         mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase
Feet         cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
Feet         melee  Haste          Multi Attack
Feet         mit    AE Autoattack  Block
Forearms     cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Modifier
Forearms     melee  DPS            Multi Attack
Forearms     mit    Block          Mitigation Increase
Hands        cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
Hands        melee  DPS            AE Autoattack
Hands        mit    Multi Attack   Block
Head         cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Doubleattack
Head         melee  DPS            Flurry
Head         mit    AE Autoattack  Block
Shoulders    cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
Shoulders    melee  Haste          Weapon Damage
Shoulders    mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase

1H Primary   cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
1H Primary   melee  DPS            Haste        
1H Primary   mit    Block          Mitigation Increase
Secondary    cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
Secondary    melee  Multi Attack   Weapon Damage
Secondary    mit    Max Health     Reuse Speed
Towershield  cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
Towershield  melee  Multi Attack   Weapon Damage
Towershield  mit    Max Health     Block
Ranged       cast   Casting Speed  Reuse Speed
Ranged       melee  AE Autoattack  DPS        
Ranged       mit    Weapon Damage  Max Health  
2H Primary   cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier
2H Primary   melee  DPS            Haste        
2H Primary   mit    Multi Attack   Max Health  

Charm        cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance
Charm        melee  Haste          Flurry                Crit Chance
Charm        mit    Multi Attack   Block                 Crit Chance
Ear          cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Modifier      Resistances  Skills
Ear          melee  AE Autoattack  Haste                 Resistances  Skills
Ear          mit    Multi Attack   Mitigation Increase   Resistances  Skills
Finger       cast   Casting Speed  Reuse Speed           Resistances  Skills
Finger       melee  Haste          Weapon Damage         Resistances  Skills
Finger       mit    Max Health     Block                 Resistances  Skills
Wrist        cast   Casting Speed  Ability Modifier      Resistances  Skills
Wrist        melee  DPS            Multi Attack          Resistances  Skills
Wrist        mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase   Resistances  Skills
Cloak        cast   Ab Modifier    Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Skills
Cloak        melee  Weapon Damage  Flurry                Crit Chance  Skills
Cloak        mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Skills
Neck         cast   Casting Speed  Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Skills
Neck         melee  AE Autoattack  Flurry                Crit Chance  Skills
Neck         mit    Ab Modifier    Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Skills
Waist        cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Skills
Waist        melee  AE Autoattack  Flurry                Crit Chance  Skills
Waist        mit    Casting Speed  Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Skills
Accolade 1   cast   Ab Modifier    Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 1   melee  Weapon Damage  Flurry                Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 1   mit    Max Health     Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 2   cast   Casting Speed  Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 2   melee  AE Autoattack  Flurry                Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 2   mit    Ab Modifier    Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 3   cast   Reuse Speed    Ability Doubleattack  Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 3   melee  Haste          Flurry                Crit Chance  Resistances
Accolade 3   mit    Casting Speed  Mitigation Increase   Crit Chance  Resistances

Reforging

The reason for the changes to itemization layouts are essentially the same for the update to reforging. Being able to cap any stat simply by adding it to any item at will completely invalidates the need to make choices. It also leads to systematic issues where the balance for a stat is based around it being available at a certain amount. The intention of reforging is to give some use to a stat on an item that you otherwise would not have any use for, and thus it can be used to convert an unwanted stat into one of the universal stats of Ability Modifier, Crit Bonus, and Potency.

DPS Lerp

The DPS stat curve was last updated in 2013 with a flat damage multiplier at values above 2300 DPS. While this was functional when auto-attack was a marginal overall damage output, once auto-attack was re-factored into a much larger percentage of overall fight damage this curve needed to be updated to take higher stat levels into account.

 

First i thought it is a joke. 2 weeks before expansion start, and we have like 10 classes more or less working.

Tanks: Guardians/Zerks/Monks, Chanter: Illy, Priests: Inqui/Fury, DDs: Assassin, Wizzy, Warlock (despite the nerf) and partly Necros and Bards.

Considering Caith hasn't changed /updated anything AA or class balance related in the first 3 weeks of Beta, that's going to be tough.

Massively reported Daybreak being sold to EG7 or so.