The "Tuning" of the Game [EQ]Follow

It's rather ironic that in a game called EverQUEST quests are really not all that important. It's fully possible to max out a toon, including levels, AAs and gear, without ever doing even ONE quest.

I enjoy doing quests, especially ones that do NOT involve the classic WoW style "Kill 10 of this beast, 20 of that one and then return to the quest-giver for your prize" since those aren't really "quests" in the form traditional to fantasy fiction and RP games. I like those that involve solving riddles, travelling the world, sneaking into forbidden dungeons and jungles and killing only when all else fails. It's just that I'm inherently goal-driven and I find it hard to justify spending hours on a quest if the reward isn't significant. That's MY failing, since the "end" should be the fun, the challenge and the sense of accomplishment in completion. But this is why I search out fun quests with at least passable rewards. Like recently I started doing the epic ornament quest for those of my toons with their epics, under the apprehension that an epic ornamentation converts any weapon to "class only" which then contributes to strengthening a charm whose power increases the more class-specific "gear" is worn by the bearer. Well, this was a MIS-apprehension since it doesn't seem to work that way but I didn't realize it until I obtained my first epic ornament.

I may still do this quest for all my epic-bearer alts, since it's kinda cool to disguise a current level weapon with the appearance of a Kunark-era epic weapon. I've had more than one noobie ask my druid why at level 100 he's still using his leafblower. LOL. To me, this is all that's required to make quests much more enticing: SOME kind of reward that justifies the investment of time and effort. It doesn't have to be an awesome piece of gear, but something not as trivial as 10pp.

I would also love to see more involved and challenging quests (kinda like the epics when they first came out, altho maybe NOT requiring raids or access to locked zones) with substantial rewards unobtainable any other way, such as spells, ornaments, maybe even mounts altho there are already a ridiculous variety of "things" to ride and those don't motivate me at all anymore.

Somehow it would be nice if the name of the game was better representative of how the game is meant to be played! Agree or disagree?

Oh, to avoid being accused or derailing (LOL) let me respond briefly to the original message of this thread:

1. I disagree that it's hard to level in the current incarnation of EQ, at ANY level. Sure, it takes longer to go from 60-100 than from 1-60 but who could reasonably expect otherwise? The most common gripe I hear about WoW is that it's TOO easy to max out a toon. If you prefer solo play and you can't tank there are TONS of XP-rich mobs that do NOT summon. My main is a druid and those are my "bread and butter" mobs.

Summoning is a rather lame "workaround" fix for the problem of kiting class players being able to engage high-level mobs at no risk to themselves by outrunning them, snaring them, rooting them, nuking them, dotting them, etc. They could remove summoning from the game. The solution would be to make mobs run faster, make them immune or, better, highly resistant, to snare, root and damage, especially if the level difference between player and mob is high. I prefer "highly resistant" over "immune" because it gives the persistent patient player a shot and to me spell-immunity is as lame a workaround technique as summoning. The only mobs who I think should be able to summon are the rare "perma-rooted" mobs and only then in the rare case that the lore makes sense that such mobs would be perma-rooted: like plants, mushrooms, etc.

/rant off

I think the original message of the thread was "I understand your frustration but it isn't hard to solo progress in this game, but it comes down to what you do and how you go about it"

However, a new account (veteran rewards, loyalty points and /claim that has lots of items can be huge) that doesn't use any of the advantages (without purposely handicapping themselves) will find some of the grind tedious if they insist on soloing non-ideal solo classes.

Play a warrior without a merc solo... you will take a while to do 60-85 and pile on basic AA. I'm not saying it would be hard.. but it might be boring and repetetive for many play sessions.


I agree completely on the quest comment. I don't mind hard quests at all, but I want the reward to be something I will equip or at least carry around (or want to put on a house wall if I was into that). My old chanter equipped Epic 1.0 for a few years after I had access to better, because I earned it and it was cooler than the "better" weapons.

So, why not simply remove summoning from these run-of-the-mill mobs? (Of course, most high-level bosses should still be able to summon.) I don't see why it's a problem for certain classes to gain experience faster. Let the kiters kite. Let them skip through the levels if they want. The non-kiting classes would still be in demand for group content and raids. If a lot of people stopped playing warriors or clerics because they can't level as fast as necros and mages, that would just make warriors and clerics all the more desirable and in-demand.

Secondly, I do wish the game developers would ensure the game is enjoyable at every level. I also wish they should add more and better quests, with useful and level-appropriate rewards. Furthermore, I wish quests required real cleverness and thought to solve. It seems that 99% of quests just require players to get strong enough to kill a particular mob or mobs. If you boil down most quest dialog, it's just "Go kill this guy." Where's the thought? The challenge?

Moving forward - is there a way we can deliver our suggestions to the game developers?

It's understandable that players focus on their main and want to keep improving its gear and levels/AAs. I think it would be cool if the game had lower level quests which could be completed by a lower-level alt and produce a reward that could be applied to a main. For example, let's say they made a complicated quest involving more than one low-level dungeon whose completion could ONLY be accomplished by a group of players ONLY (no mercs) who would have to be of a level appropriate to earn XP in those dungeons. The reward would be say an augment ONLY wearable at 90+. To avoid pharming it could be marked NO-DROP and HEIRLOOM so you'd have to quest it with an alt on the same account as your main.

If there's concern that some players would use higher-level alts to support the low-level group then make the quest using instanced dungeons and restrict access by level.

THIS would revive the lower-level game, for sure. Sony can use my idea, no problem and I don't even want a royalty. But just call it "Sippin's Dungeon Adventures"! ;)

hmm. Quest NPC that gave out a quest for characters under a certain level (not shrouded), that gave a lore heirloom reward. Suppose that reward per task was 25AA points upon consumption. They could do this similar to the heroes journey thing (so you don't repeat the tasks), and weave the quests through some cool old content (keep it tight though, such as all Kunark/Luclin). So a person redoing the level 1-65 journey on the new character would have 3k worth of AA to disperse as they wish (but would have to be burning them as they went) via the quest reward, from ONE character's cycle of the questline.

To make the questline viable for the person not wanting to skim AA up to another character, just have option A be a mad amount of XP for the low level character.


The above mutated from Sippin's brilliant idea...

Not to step on your whole trademarked idea or anything, but I'm not sure what the real gain is there. I suspect that what will happen is that either the time/effort to use lower level alts to boost higher level characters will not be worth it and it'll be ignored, or it'll be worth it and abused to hell and back. It also provides no advantage for folks still working up their first "high level" character.

You'd also have to be careful with the rewards. If you released something like a series of instanced tasks that provided rewards scaled for levels 90-100, that's great right now when 90-100 is the "end game" level range. But once the level max raises to say 110, or 120, that content you spent the time developing will go the same way as all the other outdated content. So ultimately, you'd need something that will continue to scale with the game as the game continues to grow. I'm not sure how you might accomplish that (although the AA idea might work), but I think one of the big problems with most of the "fixes" proposed out there is that they focus on the game as it is right now, and not how the game will change in the future.


That's how we got into this mess in the first place, right?

Agreed. They've come up with much much better standards in terms of expansion progression and tuning and it shows. Previous stuff was literally all over the place in terms of balancing.

The one area I'm still kinda annoyed by is the unwillingness of the devs to open up quests/tasks in terms of numbers of participants. I get that this can be a resource issue, but a ton of games out there allow for solo instanced content and they don't have problems with it. Also, this prevents content from being so horribly outdated (and thus ignored). Ironically, this is one of the flaws of the newer progression path methodology. There's often a lot of content that is locked as group/raid content. But once that expansion is no longer near the end game, no one's going to be able to gather the numbers needed anymore.


I'm firmly of the opinion that anyone should be able to request any task (assuming previous tasks in the progression are done) regardless of the numbers involved. If current content is tough enough that folks will need a group or raid to complete it, then allowing an individual to request it (and presumably fail) isn't really going to hurt anything. But that arbitrary requirement will ensure the content will die once it ceases to be current. I guess my point is that a task/mission/whatever is as hard as it is. Let the actual difficulty of the content determine who can succeed or fail. There's no real need to place arbitrary number restrictions on things.

There's a whole bunch of SoF and SoD progression stuff that I'd love to do with my Paladin. But unless I can talk some of my friends into more or less wasting a bunch of their time coming with, I can't do it even if the content itself is trivial to me. And let's not get me started on DoN progression.

Everything goes out of date as stat inflation progresses with increase in the level cap. The REAL problem is Sony ABANDONS content as they add expansions and new levels/AA/spells etc. Many existing quests would be attractive if they only scaled up the rewards as xpacs are released. I think my idea remains viable but the concept requires MAINTENANCE as time passes, to avoid either becoming outdated and obsolete or being exploitable.

I think as with a lot of software older quests and content become "orphaned" when the original devs leave Sony, or move on to other projects, and no new dev wants to be bothered updating such old content since for the same amount of time and effort they can design something new and leave their own "mark" on the game. Plus EQ can hype "new" content so much more readily than hyping "updates to old content."

So true! Spaghetti code can be a nightmare to navigate (Not to say early EQ code is spaghetti). Sometimes it takes longer to decipher original code than to simply scrap it and begin anew.

To be fair though, there's a lot of orphaned content in "newer" expansions (newer defined as anything after they standardized progression/tasks, so somewhere between TSS and SoF). I totally get that no one wants to touch the really really old stuff with a 10 foot pole, but I think the desire to just toss "new stuff" out there rather than building on the existing stuff isn't just about the code being too old and fugly.