Life after Velious... we can make it better!

[Kika Maslyaka]

My take on Luclin:

I think that after giving people 2 expansions, each of which added a new continent, the game creators decided to do something new (the lore about chunk of Odus blown up to the moon have allready existed since time of classic, they just finally decided to put it into the use), plsu players have been begging Brad to make Kerras playable for a longest time.

IMHO, adding the moon as playable area wasn't the best idea, but as I said, they devs wanted something new, and not just another discovered continent. What I would have done is to create a Shadow World (like in DnD lore), which exists in parallel dimension with Norath, but differs a lot. And instead of 1 side light and 1 side dark setting, it would permanent state of twilight, with some areas darker than the others. But we have what we have.

-Overall the moon itself wasn't so bad, but they really should have omitted the obvious sci-fi elements from it: the boglings and the netherians were just screaming sci-fi aliens out loud. The rest f new models were actually pretty nice.

-Overall low-mid end content was decent, but the Paludal ZEM was insane corporate greed idea to get people to buy the expansion. They also added a lot of mid areas that were poorly thought out and were empty 99% of the time - Tenebrous, Grimlign Forest etc.

-The high end was great on some parts - like Ssra, and horrible on other - liek VT. While VT itself is a beautiful zone and I absolutely love Akhevan npc models, the raid quality was essentially tank and spank for all the bosses there who had zillions of hps, and even to get to them you had to go through hundreds of trash mobs with thousands of hps each who kept spawning adds on death. All that was sugar coated with the uber loot, but raiding VT wasn't really the joy like you got out of raiding Ssra, which featured some of the first scripted encounters in EQ history.

-The new graphics is a controversial issue. I welcomed the new engine improvements, and mostly I was pretty happy with improved models for most of the races (specialy the elves and ogres). At the same time some races ended up being worse - like all the shorties in the new graphics are complete look alike, I can barely tell them apart. They should have put more work into those.

-New gear effects - like spell focuses - were great addition to the game - they finally gave casters a reason to get something else out of the gear other than mana.

-I like the idea of mounts overall, it was a great cash sink for the economy.

Overall, the sci-fi elements mentioned above, and poor work on the VT (+the insane key grind) are the 2 significant downside feature of the expansion for me, but otherwise it was acceptable.

[Nirgon]

If you didn't know how to boss hop in VT, you need to talk to Rogean..

[Rogean]

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

If you didn't know how to boss hop in VT, you need to talk to Rogean..

wut?

[Kika Maslyaka]

well if you mean mage planting by the switch on the 2nd floor - yeah we did that.
It was the only reasonable way to do VT in 2 days, 4 hours each, without turning it into 8 hours raid if you wanted to get to Aten Ha Ra.

[ArumTP]

Luclin is good for the much need class improvements, AA, horses and ports. The rest the server doesn't need.

[Hailto]

I don't get the irrational hate of Vah'Shir, we already have lizard people, how is cat people any more goofy? Its a fantasy game.

[Rogean]

My general opinion of Luclin as an expansion is that it will be skipped content wise. I'd rather not take any of the content that it introduced. Won't be using models, no horses.

How do people think of augments? Not exactly the same way that they were introduced with loy, but custom slots and different ways to get them.

We'll probably never have instancing, I destroyed that code a while ago.

Something I could see us doing is finding ways to improve epic weapons, sort of like how 2.5's worked.

[Purdee]

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

My general opinion of Luclin as an expansion is that it will be skipped content wise. I'd rather not take any of the content that it introduced. Won't be using models, no horses.

How do people think of augments? Not exactly the same way that they were introduced with loy, but custom slots and different ways to get them.

We'll probably never have instancing, I destroyed that code a while ago.

Something I could see us doing is finding ways to improve epic weapons, sort of like how 2.5's worked.

definitely cool brainstorming the future of the server openly

[Reiker000]

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

My general opinion of Luclin as an expansion is that it will be skipped content wise. I'd rather not take any of the content that it introduced. Won't be using models, no horses.

How do people think of augments? Not exactly the same way that they were introduced with loy, but custom slots and different ways to get them.

We'll probably never have instancing, I destroyed that code a while ago.

Something I could see us doing is finding ways to improve epic weapons, sort of like how 2.5's worked.

Ssra was one of the best raid zones in the game, no denying that fact really. Nothing else really remarkable about Luclin though, except AAs were a good addition and the Nexus port system wasn't very overpowered (and it was becoming necessary, as people became more and more spread out it became increasingly difficult to find a port).

LDON was kinda similar... awful expansion, but augments were a good addition. It was kinda dumb at first, but that was mainly because all the best augs (hp, aggro proc) were mostly at one camp (Miragul).

Augs are cool because... well say you put in all kinds of time to get your epic. A lot of them become replaced by Velious. So, you put in all this effort to get this bad ass weapon that's supposed to be a token of your class, only to kill some random mob in Velious and upgrade it. If augs were around, they could have put in a mini "1.5" quest to get an aug that would fit in the epic to upgrade it, keeping them relevant.

And then you have things like BiC... which was kind of a love it or hate it thing. It was a quest introduced in GoD that took an enormous amount of time to achieve (made epics look like hand outs) and rewarded an augment so powerful people were still using it and doing the quest many years later. To me, this quest was one of the only good parts of GoD, only tainted by the fact that well, the entire quest takes place in GoD.

Quest: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/sear...+communication

Augment: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=36269 (archetype dependent)

[Kika Maslyaka]

Originally Posted by Reiker000 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Augs are cool because... well say you put in all kinds of time to get your epic. A lot of them become replaced by Velious. So, you put in all this effort to get this bad ass weapon that's supposed to be a token of your class, only to kill some random mob in Velious and upgrade it. If augs were around, they could have put in a mini "1.5" quest to get an aug that would fit in the epic to upgrade it, keeping them relevant.

Its an inherit problem with any sort of epic weapon and any future content.
You essentially only have 2 options:
a) Your epic will become obsolete. period. Which will undermine entire gigantic quest that will take 6-12 month to complete.
or
b) if your epic can be continuously upgraded with each new expansion - then all new weapon drops are useless. Why have them when your epic will always be better?
Even if you approach this with "epics are for hard core raiders while dropped weapons are for casuals", it still sucks to be permanently locked into using the same weapon over and over again - all the other weapons and weapon types and weapon skills - they all become meaningless.

IMHO, while cool in concept, epic quests for epic weapons are BAD for an MMO that looks to add more content beyond the expansion in which epics were introduced.

Otherwise this will happen over and over again:

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