Takes long? Good!

I miss the days when a dungeon crawl was that… a crawl, not a lame little 20min jobber with 3 rooms.

For the open zones, if the names dropped better armor then the instances, people would do it more. IF there were quest in each of thous zones that reward good reward, people would do it as well.

I fear the same thing you do, and i can see the dungeons that have few names, or take to long being the ones no one goes to. If SoE is plans the dungeons right so they all take about the same amount of time to finish, and have the similar number of names. With the harder ones giving better reward then the easier ones. Then i don’t think we’ll see what we see now.. I don’t know what there going to do.

Kingdom of Sky was total win for me. I dunno. Different experiences, I guess.

I have no idea if EQ2 would be more popular if it were more solo friendly. RoK was pretty much a solo expansion and while it was busy when people were leveling, nowadays it’s dead and I have heard more stories of people who just can’t make it through the solo grind from 70-80. Now, if the xp was better so the pain didn’t last as long, maybe… I found it nearly impossible to solo effectively in RoK. Either I had to kite, which took a very long time per mob, or I tried toe-to-toe, which meant I had to rest and heal after each battle, also taking a long time. But the xp was so bad I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to help, unless they happened to be on the same quests. Those happy chances were my only groups while leveling, but mostly it was just me.

I was forced to move my cleric to a separate account and two box through RoK. I wasn’t happy about it, but I did it.

But all that time, I wasn’t wishing that soloing could be made easier. I was wishing that GROUPING could be made more rewarding, because World of Warcraft bored me to TEARS. I simply found myself logging in and just standing around because I couldn’t bear to go out there and grind mobs for faction any more. I just couldn’t.

Never played WoW since that day. Don’t want to play EQ2 if it decides it needs to be WoW. RoK was EQ2′s last chance. I love the game, but if it pulls that solo-only crap one more time, I’ll go play a single player game.

1) Add persistence to all dungeons — have them all be open dungeons? Not sure what you mean here. The instances persist for up to 18 hours.

2) Up loot from trash mobs. More loot is good, but I’d be happy if no named mob in an instance could drop wooden or adept chests. Also, more masters.

3) I like THIS idea a lot. Warhammer could use an idea like this as well.

4) Meh, not sure that’s right for EQ2. WoW and Warhammer do things like this.

5) Would make Seb, KC and Chardok even MORE of a ghost town.

6) It’d be nice if I could get my mythical epic without having to pay 350 plat. But 10 mans in WoW turned out to be guild killers; the 10 uber people would go, everyone else would be left out. With EQ2′s 24 classes, what are the odds SOE could even BUILD a 10 (well, 12) man that would be balanced for the different permutations of classes? Nice idea, but…

7) Before AA mirrors, I’d have said Amen to this. But now you can switch between group, raid and solo specs so easy… my inquisitor soloes WAY better than my troub. Not even close. I think the real problem with tanks and healers, though, is pressure. Everything that goes wrong in a group is Your Fault. Another reason I had to quit WoW. The pressure as a priest was just too great, and every act of idiocy on someone else’s part, like running ahead of the group and AEing a random set of mobs in LBRS or Dire Maul, was directly blamed on me when it went all wrong. Couldn’t, wouldn’t take it. If tanks are uber, everything goes well, but if they have less than uber gear, everything goes south as well. Just too much pressure on those classes.

I’d just get rid of the concept of healers and tanks altogether. Give every class the ability to heal some and tank some. Wizard 101 has that, DC Universe Online has that, Guild Wars has that. The whole tank/healer/dps model is archaic and shouldn’t be a part of any modern MMO. It’s never caused anything but problems and I fail to see why, after it worked SO WELL for EQ, that any other game thought that was a valid class model.

Thanks for the ideas :) I think we both can agree that SOE had pretty do something pretty revolutionary for TSO.

“Desert of Flames, Kingdom of Sky — total success. You could go to any dungeon you wanted and get a group, no trouble. ”

Wow, with the exception of Sinking sands I consider those a huge failure. Mainly because in that level range there are only about 53 quests that are solo’able. That and the incredible shrink zones sizes force people into places like Sots

“thought that was a mistake from Day One, saw it coming, was totally vindicated. Nobody wants to be locked into ten levels of mandatory solo quest chains. That’s World of Warcraft’s gig, not EQ’s. EQ is about grouping with friends and crawling through dungeons.”

Quick name me a for-pay fantasy MMO thats has a larger playerbase than EQ2. Answer… nearly all of them. And it’s forced grouping that’s largely to blame. What’s the biggest feature Seeds of Destruction? Hireable mercenaries.

You want to improve EQ2. Here’s how:

1) Add persistence to all dungeons
2) Up the loot % of trash mobs in a dungeon so it’s not just ‘kill the boss’
3) Add a % boost based on dungeons & zones use. i.e. Less used areas get bigger % chance of drops.
4) Add a system where you can flag what quests or dungeons you want to do, then when you get invited you are automatically ported there.
5) Add an option on a dungeon door for sub-zones, so that if you have been flag for it, you can go right there.
6) Change raids from 4x to 2x. The playerbase can’t support it. There are few raid guilds, then the rest of the pb who have to hope to get a pug. “So at level 80, every major encounter and every big boss fight can be experienced with a group of 10.” — It’s be nice if EQ2 could say that
7) Add a XP bonus for pure healers and pure tanks. I’ve got 15 people at 80 and only 1 guardian and 1 templar. I can’t tell you how often I can’t get a guild only group together because I don’t have a healer or a tank.

LDoN’s were very popular on Tholuxe Paells when I played.

Even up until the day that I quit EQ1 just days before the Pirates of the Burning Norrathian Sea (or whatever it was called) was released, I was still getting daily invites to come pull missions in Darkhollow.

I do see multiple instances for Seb sometimes, but that’s when raids are gathering for Venril or Protector’s Realm. I do see groups there, but from listening to people trying to get groups there, they tend to be for epic quests.

I’m glad it’s doing better on Guk.

For LDoNs — seriously? They were HOPPING on EMarr. The onlly DoDh groups I ever saw were for the spell line quests. If it wasn’t required for a spell, it didn’t get done — EVEN though the loot was pretty good. A lot of them were just really hard. Still, when DoDh was new, I did a LOT of these missions, because I was a raid-geared cleric :) Then they all pretty much trailed off and it was back to Nest missions for AAs.

Over on Guk, Kunark is still packed with people. Kylong and Seb have two instances almost all the time. Chardok typically has 2 to 3 groups in there… mostly vying for the Queen rotation of course. Karnor’s, however, I completely agree with. Dead doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I haven’t been to Chelsith yet myself, but there is typically at least 1 group in my guild there most nights and it generally doesn’t take them more than an hour to run it. CoA, Vaults, and Maiden’s, of course, are all nightly favorites.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you on any point… although I still find the Kunark questing to be very enjoyable myself. I’m just saying that my experiences in both games have been drastically different from yours it seems.