So what's there to do in Velious anyway?

[RevengeofGio]

Luclin just felt weird to play.... like they were stretching to find something useful for us to do so we'd keep playing/paying.

That being said AA's were a mixed bag. It fixed some classes and broke others.

[heartbrand]

Luclin wasn't perfect but it was the lead up to my favorite MMORPG expac of all time PoP.

[Wotsirb401]

Velious adds Arch Lich! My Necro can sit around EC like a BAMF

[freakyuno]

Originally Posted by t0lkien [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm not aware of pulling being a design mandate of the Bard class from Verant's point of view (though I'd be happy to see links disproving me).

Verant actually never intended people to "pull" at all, and "split pulling" ended up being a function of a broken internal system to reset mobs on player death. Over the evolution of the game it became a valid strategy and they endorsed it and started to design around it, but "pulling" was never part of the original design or the intent of any class to perform.

[Tecmos Deception]

After reading what HB had to say about Luclin, I actually have decided that I would probably love it ON P99. I hated it on live. It was what made me quit for the first time, and what started the trend that kept pushing me to quit until I gave up on live for good.

As a casual player on live, I wasn't max level when luclin hit, I had crappy gear, I hadn't explored all of classic/kunark or much of velious. But suddenly the zones that I loved and wanted to keep spending time in were emptying out, and the places I knew to get gear/money weren't worth it anymore, etc.

Here I've already worn out the current content in just about every way imaginable though, and if we spend a year or more in Velious I'm sure I'll feel the same way about it. Not sure about the rest of p99's population though /shrug

[Tecmos Deception]

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

Verant actually never intended people to "pull" at all, and "split pulling" ended up being a function of a broken internal system to reset mobs on player death. Over the evolution of the game it became a valid strategy and they endorsed it and started to design around it, but "pulling" was never part of the original design or the intent of any class to perform.

Hence EQ2 mobs being tied together and being unkiteable and crap?

Why the hell did they create the lull spells if they never intended people to pull/split though? Harmony, lull, etc. Just to pass by mobs without the use of invis/ivu? That seems unlikely.

[heartbrand]

I don't play on blue, but on red we have lots of people max level who only log on for raids / occasional pvp skirmishes, there's just no other reason to be online there's nothing else to do. This makes it a ghost town for new players who come, no groups, empty zones, etc. If there were AA's suddenly everyone's online again grinding out AA's, groups are plentiful, newbs don't feel like everything is a ghost town, there's more PVP since there's more people online, higher pop begets even higher pop, etc.

I am very much in the camp that Velious doesn't give much to the non-raider to do camp, since unlike on Live where many of us weren't even level 50 when Velious came out, the majority of the playerbase here is already capped out, instantly making irrelevant / obsolete a great portion of Velious. What do VP / Planar / Kunark geared chars need with most of the stuff from CC / Velk / ToFS, etc.? Even a lot of the skyshrine / kael armor are only slight upgrades over end game Kunark gear, and a lot of NToV shit is garbage. Maybe I'm completely off base, but I foresee NToV being full cleared week one, if not day one, and everything being farm status rather quickly. This is not the case in Luclin where the difficulty gap is much greater, you have the grind of bane weapons for Seru / Emp, and the key grind to VT, etc, and completely not the case in PoP where there's a meaningful progression from PoD / PoJ to PoV / PoS on to HoH / BoT / RZ to Sol Ro Tower to Plane of Fire to other Elemental planes to PoT, and then you have GoD that also has a deep and difficult, meaningful progression. I really think Velious is going to be on farm mode day one here with the exception of ST which obviously requires keys, but the difficulty of ST from what I vaguely recall is below that of NToV anyway. You have AoW in Velious but if you guys can straight up tank the Bee queen who currently puts out more DPS than the AoW, than you can do AoW as well.

[Wotsirb401]

It would take more than a year to be tired of Velious gear, unless you play way too much

[fastboy21]

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

Hence EQ2 mobs being tied together and being unkiteable and crap?

Why the hell did they create the lull spells if they never intended people to pull/split though? Harmony, lull, etc. Just to pass by mobs without the use of invis/ivu? That seems unlikely.

You have to remember that EQ was very very new when it came out. It wasn't like the difference between WoW and Rift.

The way players used their abilities wasn't pre-defined by roles they were expecting to have from other games they had previously played. The sand-box mentality of the designers (though they weren't using the term sand-box yet) gave players the opportunity to individually and as a community define how they were "supposed" to be playing and what their abilities were "supposed" to do.

The above poster is right that they realized what the lull line could be used for single pulls, but I don't think they knew all the implications of the effect yet on game play when they put it in.

[fadetree]

I liked luclin, if for nothing else than finally some ranger love. SSRA was a very cool zone as well...lots of good stuff in luclin. PoP was a great expansion, but I don't want P99 to go there...it just really finalized the end of the game I knew for me. After PoP, it was a different game. Still pretty good, but not the same.