Adding the Planes of Power in to the original trilogy

[guineapig]

Originally Posted by Harm [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I strongly dislike increasing the level cap to 65. If this was done it needs to be done in a way that keeps the old dungeons relevant and not trivialized like they will be at level 65. I would suggest rebalancing the PoP encounters to level 60. Every time people leveled up in EQ1, old dungeons got left behind. Every time they didn't increase levels for a new expansion, the old dungeons were kept in use as a gearing tool for the new ones, which is a good thing. The additional AAs and gear will bring with it plenty of new power to the players as it is.

This is fairly sound logic. There is also a school of thought however, that having a nice spread of dungeon levels means that you can level up inside one without having to deal with higher level players ganging every mob from you, but then again by the end of Velious there will already be plenty of dungeons to choose from. for 50-60.

I guess my main issue with not increasing the level cap to 65 in this little theoretical discussion is the shear amount of coding work that would have to be involved with completely changing every single PoP zone, every AA ability, every piece of gear, etc. We're talking about a bit of cuting and pasting of zonelines and moving some NPCs out of PoK. What you're talking about is a complete overhaul of all PoP items and mechanics (since the expansion took the level cap increase in to account for nearly everything). That could take a very long time to basically customize an entire expansion. The play-testing and tuning alone could take many months and tons of man hours.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand what you're saying and agree with you to a certain extent.