Luclin

[pasi]

Originally Posted by Splorf22 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm told most people either think Velious or PoP was the high point of EQ. I'm curious why people hated whatever expac came after PoP (I quite on Live just after Kunark, so all these expacs are new to me)

The first expansion after PoP was a cash grab for armor dye, charms, and bank slots.
The next expansion after PoP was predominately a grouping expansion that was incredibly casual friendly. The raids for it were ridiculously difficult for the rewards though.

The first 'true expansion' after PoP was Gates of Discord which most people attribute to the death of the game. Gates of Discord was intended for and tuned for level 70 characters, but the level cap was still 65. IMO, it was the first time in EQ that the game was actually difficult (and by difficult, I don't just mean very punishing for stupid mistakes like EQ up to then was).

Gates had awesome encounter design, but the content was completely overtuned and I think the expansion had only 6 or 7 different NPC models. Every zone also looked the same.

To give you a rough idea of how difficult the expansion was at release - take Uqua 1.0. For starters, the entire zone had an unresistable permanent AOE that reduced your base stats to 100ish. This was only blockable by archetype-equippable items that dropped 1 per trash mob. Each trash mob quadded for 3000 (what 72man raid bosses in the previous expansion hit for. This was in an era where top end warriors were 10k HP with the zone debuff. Every death in the zone spawned another trash mob that quadded for 3k. Now, you could single pull trash, but pulling was complicated in that mobs were spawned off traps rather than static spawns. The entire zone had a timer so you had to move at a certain pace. As time went on, NPCs got more ATK, HP, Armor, Resists, etc. And that's all before the first bosses of the zone.

Now, I'm sure people who never experienced it like the increased difficulty, but the game was bleeding subs and WoW was in beta at this time. The majority of the playerbase was basically confined to a few really shitty instances simply because they didn't have the gear to progress. If you look back at this time, you'll see most of the 'old uber' guilds died off around this time and there was a changing of the guard of top dog guilds.

Kinda sucked that Omens of War was such a great expansion since the damage from Gates had already been done.