Honestly, no. As mentioned, the stones do attempt to put you with an appropriate class mix. As I also mentioned, I rarely see people making the fine differentiations between who they will and won’t accept in the LFG channel. They are generally looking to fill a slot with DPS, tank, or healing. They end up having the same chance of getting some tool, and you end up getting the same chance of getting stuck with a crappy pickup group if you join up. But you have apparently had a different experience then I have.
Oh, I did not know that. That’s a decent point. That’s quite helpful, I was ignorant of that.
EDIT: Now that I’m in game, I can’t figure out how you do this. I’m sitting in the Searing Gorge, and it doesn’t seem to want to let me join IF’s LFG channel.
I played EQ2 since last year’s launch through to December of last year. I’ve been playing WOW for about a month now.
I will, eventually, go back to EQ2. The world is less clean, the design is more cluttered, but there’s an undeniable ‘deeper’ feel to the game and the related systems. WOW feels like a pretty toy. EQ2 feels like a mature game.
Anyone who has been avoiding EQ2 because of EQ1 fears and holdover angst should do themselves a favor and check out the new side of SOE. They have been consistently bending over backwards to reach out to the fan base-- their devs post constantly on the forums, for example. The technical stability is leagues beyond WOW (and I count server queues as technical instability).
The biggest plus is the EQ2 dev’s commitment to change. The EQ2 world has grown enormously since launch. Every update (up to 19 of them now) has provided significant new content and often a sharp refinement in basic systems. Does this mean that the original systems were not great? In some cases, yes-- but these systems have been overhauled, and even perfectly good systems have been made better. They have looked at their competition and adapted while continuing to improve their core.
Basically, WOW || EQ2 as Duplo || Lego. You can build big cool things pretty quick with Duplo, but to do detail work you need to go with Lego.
Three people out of my WoW guild of 160 players still plays EQ2. But not that much since they always attend our MC runs. Still I am sure there are a lot of EQII players to fill a smaller group of servers.
Yup our guild is facing the exact same issues. The problem is to raid MC/BWL and raid it well you have to get serious. A casual guild mentality will not help you beat Ragnaros or Nefarian or even an easy boss like Geddon. We’re currently in the process of setting up two raiding groups. One for MC and another for ZG/trash MC runs.
Damien is dead on with the meeting stones. It’s as if they were designed by someone who’d never played WoW before and didn’t understand what exactly was needed.
When I’m about to spend 2 hours doing an instance with a few other people, I’d like to have some control over who’s in that group. If I’m forming a group, I know exactly what classes I’m looking for – do the meeting stones know I’d prefer 2 warlocks for DM West? I also don’t want to get stuck with some schmuck who’s going to wipe us repeatedly on the early pulls.
The LFG system allows some flexibility in weeding out the good players from the bozos. It’s essentially a mini-interview. If I say I’m looking for a priest and get a tell saying “IM ONLY 57 BUT AM GOOD INVITE PLZ”, well, screw that. the meeting stones can’t do that.
Now, making the LFG channel shared among the major cities was a nice move. Players have more options to choose from, and groups LFM can advertise to a larger base.
The dream improvement would be a bulletin-board-type “help wanted” system – you could browse all the groups currently being formed, the players in each so far, and maybe notes about what they’re doing. “LBRS gem run,” “UBRS Rend runs” You could put your name up for several things, as if to say “I’m available for any of these,” including hard-to-find groups for the Razelikh quest, etc.
And then, when you get your group, you get teleported to the meeting stone. THAT would make them useful. :)
The first time you get into an instance with some jackhole who can’t speak english and wipes you on the first three groups of mobs in Dire Maul, is exactly when you swear off the Meeting Stone system forever. It’s WoW’s equivalent of Russian Roulette. I’d bet the number I represent is closer to 90/100.
Are you doing any good content? Because as I mentioned, we discovered that you are basically killing green heroic mobs that are (by being green) far below your level, or getting slaughtered by things at your level.
Or you can go kill antelope.
Maybe we missed something. Even the people in the guild admitted it is hard to duo. I do not fully understand the supposed new ability to solo either really, since most of the solo instances I’ve seen seem to be long tunnels with a few weak mobs in them (for example, some of the Thundering Steppes instances). What have you found that is different?
Well, what can I say? We’ve duoed many quests, taking down blue and white and yellow mobs in droves (Conjurors, though, are AOE specialists) and doing well against blue heroics, certainly, and with the tank pet up single white heroics fairly often. Toss in a third and you can pull multiple mobs above your level. A lot of it, though, is class choice. If you don’t have a healer, dps, and tanking (which a duo of a Conjuror + healer type gives you) you can be in for long fights and yeah, you’ll find it tough going without a bigger group.
PvP won’t affect EQ2 at all really, because it’ll only be on five servers to start, two US (one an Exchange server), one English Euro, and two non-English Euro servers IIRC. There are not plans that I know of to retrofit it to any existing servers.
Ohh, this has been one of my ideas from a long time :)
“Physical” boards in the game like the Auction House, where you can post all sort of adds. With Trade and LFG “tabs”.
Where you can use default searchable tags (one for each dungeon, for example) and then post and write your own add with a compilation of both default tags and custom text.
For example you could post an add like “UBRS raid on Saturday at 7PM”. It helps a lot that the server time=real time. Then other players could sign up to the raid.
I even created a complete crafting system around a similar idea (with the “buyers” posting orders that the crafters can tap and use).
My two younger sons and I started playing EQ2 this Christmas. We have pretty much the trio described: Conjuter (tank +AE), fury (healing) and a troubador (DPS and buffs). The only “instances” we’ve hit have been miniatures, but we’ve done fine in the non-instanced dungeons that are full of heroics (Crypt of Betryal, Storhmold, and more recently Ruins of Varsoon.)
So yes we feel like we can “get stuff done” in 2 hours, and that we dont have to limit ourselves to easy fights -we can do a few blue heroics at a time, but I dont think we can do mulitple white (even-level) heroics. To me this is “good content” though none of it is as hard or as satisfying as a 2-3 hour WoW instance (which was my favorite part of WoW, especially the ones closer to 2 hours.)
The incoming changes to crafting and character development will make it even more like WoW. I guess I’d have to say I think WoW is better, but this is a nice change, and there haven’t been any queues or weekend outages.
W played a lot of WoW pre-release, hit level 60 last March and started playing less. quit in the summer; we went on one MC raid, and made it through the “jail break” part of the Onxyia series. I doubt we’ll make it to the cap in EQ2 but it was a fun diversion over the winter holiday and I think we’ll keep on for a while longer.
Just being able to ignore people who introduce themselves with “invite, nigga” is invaluable. (Okay, I’ve never gotten literally that. But I’ve seen close.)
With meeting stones, you get the known loot ninjas, the guy who clicked on the stone two hours ago and is about to log, the people who can’t or won’t speak the King’s English, etc.
And, yes, every group I’ve been in has cared about composition. Less so if you’re doing a 10-man raid of a 5-man zone…but then, you can’t do that with meeting stones. If I’m going to Scholo in a 5-man pickup group, though, I want a priest for crowd control. If I’m going to Dire Maul for hunter loot, I don’t want three more hunters in the party to fight over it. If I’m going to Stratholm, I want a mage or lock for AoE. And so on.
I don’t want my only healer to be a feral druid or a tanking paladin. I don’t want my main tank in Strat to be a paladin.
And–one big point–I want people who are going to the same part of the instance that I am. Take Dire Maul: The place is huge. There are three big wings to it, and you almost never want to do all three at once. Where’s the good in getting into a group with one person that want to do DM west, one that wants to do north, one that wants to do east, one that wants to do a tribute run, and one just wants to get into the library and log for the night?
EDIT: Now that I’m in game, I can’t figure out how you do this. I’m sitting in the Searing Gorge, and it doesn’t seem to want to let me join IF’s LFG channel.
Hrm. Let’s see if I remember.
I think “/join <channel>” will do it, where <channel> is exactly what you see when you autojoin the channel upon running into IF. If that doesn’t work, try right clicking a chat tab, selecting “join channel”, and typing in that channel name.
I think there is a big differentiation between you and more casual players (not that this is a bad thing). You’re winning me over with your argument at least with respect to the higher level instances, however, where the more casual players probably tend to dabble yet.
P.S. I have also learned from you that my traditional LFG request of, “Invitz Biyatch,” is not acceptable. :)
Well, we went with mystic and paladin, so we would have the classic tank/healer set up. We could kill plenty of things as well, but my point was that we either seemed to slaughter a bunch of crap that is, quite frankly, boring to kill (i.e. generic Thundering Steppes mobs) or got beat down by stuff that was cool, but was way too strong for our duo, often even when green.
As mentioned, we had a hard time finding the cool “non-generic” content. The Thundering Steppes “scalable” instances, for example (like the Open Grave, if I recall correctly), all seemed to basically be one long tunnel with some down arrow (or up arrow heroics, if you took the heroic option) mobs.
I have been waiting for Vanguard: SoH and I don’t want to go back to WoW. I bought EQ2 and played around on the island, ended up stopping because it felt empty.
Any gathering of people on a server? I read those changes and might try it again, I don’t want to get caught by a WoW guildy and dragged back into the new geargrind of the expansion.
Healer/Tank will keep you alive but you don’t have DPS so it’s gonna be sloooow. EQ2 adheres fairly strongly to the traditional role models so tanks just don’t do the damage that for instance a WoW Warrior can do. Berserker/Bruiser/Monk might be a better choice there, and a Fury or Warden as the healer, if you’re talking a pure duo, though a pet class is still really hot for duoing.
But your main point, that you couldn’t find interesting content to duo, is unfortunate. I guess it depends a lot on what you like. We found the combination of variety, exploration, and combat about perfect for us, even duoing, and especially good as a trio. We usually keep our quest logs full and work through as many as we can in one area, but we bounced around a lot too, through Blackburrow, Stormhold, Splitpaw, etc. as well. You can also boat over to Nektulos for some similar level but rather different encounters, plus some nifty instances that are duoable. My wife and I duoed the entire first three times through the D’Morte Crypt, for instance, which was a blast.
I really think that you’re experiencing one of the inherent drawbacks in this sort of game design, in that only certain class types are really good for solo/duo work. One good thing I’ve found, though, is that groups are relatively easy to get if you ask in /ooc, and the people have been generally really good in EQ2. Hook up for a Condemned Catacombs run, or a giant hunting expedition, or a Varsoon run and you can rack up exp and loot. At 35+ hit up Runnyeye with a group and you can watch your exp meter zoom.
Yes. There are definitely two things that bothered me. One you’ve pegged on - all character types are definitely not created equal for soloing/duoing. Which is not necessarily wrong in its own right, it just depends on what type of game you like. One of the things that really excited me about EQ2 was the wide variety of characters. Then I discovered that a bunch of them are deemed by the community to only really be useful when grouped.
The second thing that bothered me were the quests. Some were okay. Far too many were absolute trash (like the books you buy that tell you to kill ten of a certain monster type, about 12 different times). The biggest problem with quests though? After you go through all that pain, you get about a .5% XP bonus for it.
I discovered that people basically optimize the quests to only do those that offer certain forms of valuable loot, etc. This is something that I did not experience in WoW, where a quest with a truly terrible reward versus time spent is more a rarity in my opinion. Too much of the game then becomes things like giant hunting expeditions (which we did), which from our experience was just wandering around grinding the same mob over and over. Yes, the XP was nice, but the experience of play was fairly boring.
Anyway, I should stop responding to this thread, it’s making me want to try EQ2 again, and I’ve been like a ping pong ball on the games.
We’ve been through a bit of Nek and hadn’t seen this crypt so I just looked it up. O-gamer says its reccommended for level-30 characters, has great loot, but is only available if you have the Bloodline Chronicles adventure pack. Is that still the case? Anway, what other instances/dungeons would you recommend for a trio at level 31-32? We did some of Varsoon, and will go back, but in places we could have used an extra party member or two. luckily for us the death penalty is pretty mild :)
