Alternate Advancement: Good or Bad?

[Ropethunder]

Bad. AAs throw balance out the window and substitute skill with playing time.

[Senadin]

People keep saying skills but is skill really a misnomer? Are folks trying to say knowledge?


It takes skills to juggle, it takes knowledge to know when to cast, heal etc. MMO's arent rocket science! Hit a button or several buttons. Maybe bards require skills? I've never really played one further than 36 or so.

You posted twice and have yet to bring an argument against AA. Simply saying or rather implying that someone who has tons of times will be necesarily better than you because he has more AA's than you.

You mention balance! There's no real balance! If a caster can solo better than me, is it balance? I can only heal myself with bandages and mend. I am not balanced with a cleric and nor should i be.

Each class has it's purpose and that's fine... i dont see how the balance could be broken with AA's when it already is broken and that's the way it should be. Without that imbalance we might as well each play a single player game. When i quit i think i had 700 something AA, that didnt made me a caster or a healer. I could solo a bit more but still not as good as a caster. Which is the same situation now without AA's.

[Sparkin]

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

Bad. AAs throw balance out the window and substitute skill with playing time.

? Character power in all MMO's is based off playing time. Yes, there is hopefully a good measure of skill involved, but in the end most of a character's power is based off relative playing time. Even before AA's were introduced, power is based off playing time, only in the form of gear.

I'll take the AA's they gave us over none, but I agree with the folks saying they could have been better implemented. The OP suggests you had choices to make which direction you wanted to go with a char, but they were pretty short-term choices. In the end you were just going to get them all, which was pretty boring.

The biggest mistake they made with AA's though was always the ability for old / new players to catch up. There needed to be a system to help them do it a much faster manner. I guess maybe they did some things to help with that eventually? but only after it was too late. Or as suggested if there was some sort of AA cap where you had to make choices, it wouldn't have been an issue.

[Aeolwind]

Turned EQ into Pokemon: Gotta catch'em all. I hated AA's. I liked some of the abilities, but having to grind that much XP for marginal returns was hell. I -hate- xp'ing now because of AA.

[Ethanblack]

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

Turned EQ into Pokemon: Gotta catch'em all. I hated AA's. I liked some of the abilities, but having to grind that much XP for marginal returns was hell. I -hate- xp'ing now because of AA.

Well, to clarify, the point of this thread really is just to sort of seed the idea of new custom AAs with developers such as yourself.

The goal isn't to have Live AAs added, but instead to sort of encourage Devs to think long term abotu actually inventing their own sets of AAs that do what the old AA system didn't (that being encouraging specialisatio), whle avoiding the whole More AAs = Uber in every way' situation.

[garyogburn]

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

Turned EQ into Pokemon: Gotta catch'em all. I hated AA's. I liked some of the abilities, but having to grind that much XP for marginal returns was hell. I -hate- xp'ing now because of AA.

Isnt grinding for gear the same thing? Most gear doesnt give you new class dynamics, either.

AA's were simply one of the best things implemented in eq. I wouldnt want them implemented here unless luclin was released, however.

[Excision Rottun]

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

The biggest mistake they made with AA's though was always the ability for old / new players to catch up. There needed to be a system to help them do it a much faster manner. I guess maybe they did some things to help with that eventually? but only after it was too late.

On Live now it is either your first 700 or 1000 AA are on a curve with an XP multiplier.

Where at first they come super fast and by the time you hit 700 or 1000 (whatever it is), the modifier scales down to 1.0

[Branaddar]

It's a multi-step scale for the AAs. I think 250 then 500 then 1000 have varying degrees of speed.

Anyway, I tend to agree that the first few expansions of AAs were decent. But going back to EQLive recently and looking through the thousands upon thousands of AAs I "need" to be an efficient monk... no thanks.

It's part of the reason I just can't get into EQLive anymore. Knowing that even when I hit the next level cap, there's still 1000+ more AA I need to earn in order to be on par with the people that didn't quit playing.

I was glad to have CA/CS 8, now it goes up to 25 or something ridiculous.

I'm not sure I like the idea of having "specs" in EQ. A monk is a monk is a monk. I shouldn't have to "spec" to be a good raid puller at the cost of being shitty DPS.

It's going to cause issues if there's no ability to respend points. A lot of people are going to spend on whatever makes them get XP and loot faster primarily, and then they want to raid and either guilds will deny them for being the wrong spec, or they'll be crappy at raids because of their spec.

Obviously not an issue for healers or DPS classes necessarily, but any of the multi-function classes will suffer from a need to specialize in one function. Bards, monks and enchanters come heavily to mind as classes that would suffer from further specialization.

The more I think about it, the more I think AAs could really hurt this server. Yes, there is a need to "do something" when we're capped and there's no more raid content coming. But I don't think grinding 5000 AA is the answer.

I like EZServer's RoA/Prestige system, where after you cap you can reset to level 1 and each time you do, you get an upgrade to a ring. But I'm not sure that would work well here. Guilds will rely on their raid members, and having people leveling from scratch all the time would just kill the ability to perform at raids.

Perhaps XP gained after your cap goes towards... something. An evolving item of sorts, or some form of earned points to be spent on low- to mid-grade raid equipment for the people that don't want to raid here, or to avoid the need to farm Halls of Testing for a month just to get half your guild 2 pieces of gear each. I dunno, just throwing ideas around.

I'd like to see this server remain as classic as possible, but without growing stagnant at the same time.

[Taluvill]

The whole "what should we do after velious" question has ping ponged around the forums here more than anyone will ever know. Some have suggested aa's some have suggested custom content, some have even suggested a complete rollback.

I think it's only fair to give it a wait and see approach, tbh. Any solution that is discussed by anyone, with any developer input, will either lose or gain players by them knowing whats going to come at the end of the road.

[Uaellaen]

i loved some of the AAs ... especialy MGB!