Is there some package deal for all the expansions and little add ons?

Is soe still constantly nerfing every month without any real cause other then rerolling? You can disagree with me but ive seen it happen alot considering im an eq1 vet as well it was the same thing there.

Are there variety of skills like in eq1 or is it the same skills like fireball 1 2 and 3 in wow? I know wizards where like this but im not sure about other classes.

Is the community friendly/mature? Ive been a bit spoiled on coh community, eq1 was nice when I played it to.

And is the game group encouraged or solo quest mmo like wows system?

I appreciate any answers you have to provide and I also want to thank anyone taking there time to read my post.

1) Yes. Get the Rise of Kunark pack for about $30 or so from the Station Store. Direct download, all expansions.

2) That's a matter of opinion. But there wasn't any balance changes in the last GU - just prep for the next expansion.

3) Someone with more experience will have to answer that one.

4) The community is very mature, compared to WoW. I haven't seen any immature chatter.

5) You can usually find a group when needed. Right now I'm just soloing until I can get high enough to start instancing.

Originally posted by Angelbound

Is there some package deal for all the expansions and little add ons?

Answered above. The last expansion has ALL content for one price.

Is soe still constantly nerfing every month without any real cause other then rerolling? You can disagree with me but ive seen it happen alot considering im an eq1 vet as well it was the same thing there.

"Nerfing" is a catch-phrase used to elicit a negative response from a class/skill/loot change the devs use to balance content. There are always changes in classes, loot, or skills in order to balance, fix, or bring gameplay more in line. Powerful classes, loot, and skills are "nerfed", and undesirable classes, loot, and skills are bumped to always try to make the game equally enjoyable for all.

For instance: Melee hit rates on high level mobs was increased to be more in line with gameplay issues that resulted from skills not landing enough to make any difference on the encounter. As a result, melee classes got a bit of a jump in dps, not overpowering, but noticable. Spellcasters saw this as a NERF because now some melee classes do more damage than them in certain situations, and they're not "top dog" anymore on every encounter. While the change was a needed part of gameplay for various reasons, a certain segment of players see it as a NERF.

I have noticed though that SoE devs are VERY careful about making any sweeping changes to anything that would, or could, change combat a lot. Maybe the past CU has them gunshy at making any drastic changes before they know what effects it may have. Any changes to bugs, powers, or items that were broken are changed as quickly as possible. So that "nerf" to your sword of proc 1,000 times a swing is a bug fix.

With all that said, combat is pretty good, and there aren't any major problems that couldn't be solved without a few tweaks. Of course, if you play a class that needs a tweak, it is much more desparate and dire to you. :) All tanks can tank, all healers can heal, and dps can, well, dps, and the sub-classes are different enough to make you feel unique if you want to be.

Are there variety of skills like in eq1 or is it the same skills like fireball 1 2 and 3 in wow? I know wizards where like this but im not sure about other classes.

I think this is where EQ2 shines as there are a bountiful amount of skills and powers and spells that are different within the class and out of class. Some people never use all the skills they have, and some just use some things whether they needed to or not. Plus the fact you can upgrade the same skill/spell to make it more powerful within that tier. The best part of EQ2 combat is the myriad of skills/spells available to each sub-class. Some do repeat, of course, but just the number of different ones is staggering.

Is the community friendly/mature? Ive been a bit spoiled on coh community, eq1 was nice when I played it to.

The best community of all the games. It's the main reason I stay with this game. You can battle dragons in most MMO's nowadays, but these people are nearly my best friends. I played a lot of games, some good, some bad, but the feeling of friendship and family is best here.

And is the game group encouraged or solo quest mmo like wows system?

All three playstyles are WELL supported. The BEST rewards are from large groups though.

I appreciate any answers you have to provide and I also want to thank anyone taking there time to read my post.

Yea they do little nerfs here and there to make it look that way, I disagree with you though. There is always plenty of time to balance games before they come out and before they patch they just choose to do this, its the same thing in wow. Now if they would just admit it then it wouldnt be a big deal. I play cox right now and they dont constantly nerf and overpower things because the players whine.

Its a marketing strategy thats been done in more then just games, I do appreciate the information though thank you. I may reconsider this game but im not sure yet.

If you are worried about nerfing and the game ever changing, then I suggest you don't play it.

Unfortunately SoE doesn't limit their nerfing to some classes here and then, but they do it with the entire game.
The game is ok if you are not bothered about SoE radically changing the game when they like it, otherwise try something else.

I think your right thank you.

Originally posted by Angelbound

Yea they do little nerfs here and there to make it look that way, I disagree with you though. There is always plenty of time to balance games before they come out and before they patch they just choose to do this, its the same thing in wow. Now if they would just admit it then it wouldnt be a big deal. I play cox right now and they dont constantly nerf and overpower things because the players whine.

 

Its a marketing strategy thats been done in more then just games, I do appreciate the information though thank you. I may reconsider this game but im not sure yet.

There is "plenty of time to balance before it comes out"? How do you know? This is a completely naive statement. They test the game with a few people, then more, then more. But a game like WoW, there are 10.9 million people now. If there is a bug, exploit, overpowered feature, ANYTHING, one of those people is going to find it and they have to nerf and rebalance eventually.

Heck, look at life in general. You'd think evolution or God or whatever you believe would have balanced everything out by now and everyone would be happy and there would be no wars etc. Life, and games are a part of it, are constantly rebalancing to maintain an equal surface.

A marketing strategy...? Seriously? You really think that?

How do I know? Well for one reason is because I followed eq2 ever since I first heard its been in development, I can think of plenty of evidence that the game was rushed. For the longest time, and im not sure now eq2 has a memory leak, not antiscoptic or antialising filtering which deffinatly has an effect on the graphics if you look far away and etc. They had a bug with nvidia espically the 6800 gt for the longest as long as I played it and long before me, im not sure if its still going on though. The game does not perform as good as other games do with the same specs not even close, the models are good but do not look like they where full designed some of the animations even look rushed.

They had to change eq2 drasticly just to get more customers because the game was seriously unfinished it was not only to compete with wow, regardless of what you think there is plenty of evidence that this game was a rushed design in some areas.

I have played since eq1 and I know soe quite well, I also know how they treat customers, I also know some of the things they have done to peoples accounts for reporting certain issues with the game. I also know how rude they are on the phone with me and countless others because we have issues with there crappy graphics design.

Many companys do this, look at all the shovelware on consoles now days there are so many rushed products its truly a wonder why parents are still guiled into getting the cheapest games for there kids. I have enough experience to know the truth about how they handle there games.

Now thats not to say they might have started actually getting better with there customers lately, and eq2 is truly a great mmorpg, probably the best out right now with lord of the rings. But developers and the company itself is seen with skeptism not only from me but countless others.

I also find your example way off base, your comparing real life to a world online that does not even take half the time as it does for people to evolve. Maybe there balancing is alot better but yes I do believe that because I see it in many companys not just game companys, big money coorperations are like this and as far as I know, I have not seen one who isnt.

I also believe blizzard did the same thing with there expansion, I also know they had plenty of time to balance the classes better but like I said they change things up to add replayability so no one leaves the game.

Originally posted by Angelbound

How do I know? Well for one reason is because I followed eq2 ever since I first heard its been in development, I can think of plenty of evidence that the game was rushed. For the longest time, and im not sure now eq2 has a memory leak, not antiscoptic or antialising filtering which deffinatly has an effect on the graphics if you look far away and etc. They had a bug with nvidia espically the 6800 gt for the longest as long as I played it and long before me, im not sure if its still going on though. The game does not perform as good as other games do with the same specs not even close, the models are good but do not look like they where full designed some of the animations even look rushed.

many of the performance issues now are results of the design decission that they wanted to support gefoce 3 cards as minimum requirement. with that decission they had to build all shaders as SM1 so the game is basically a direct x8 game. if you look at any other direct x8 game it won't gain much additional performance from the most modern graphic cards, and all these don't profit from dualcores.

It was a big problem back then that even with geforce 3 support there was many people that didn't have graphic cards capable of running eq2 at launch, and now they are stuck with the old SM1 which is not really compatible to more modern shader models (HLSL was not introduced before shader model 2.0).  if eq2 had the population of wow i am sure that soe would allready have a seperate team working on a new engine to improve performance, but if you run a mmmo with more limited subscrinber numbers you have to keep the team that works on improving the mmo also smaller. this means that we get small improvements in performance over time but probably will never get a completely new engine (especially since soe decided to stop developing own engines for their newer projects and instead rely on unreal engine and other finished engines).

 

They had to change eq2 drasticly just to get more customers because the game was seriously unfinished it was not only to compete with wow, regardless of what you think there is plenty of evidence that this game was a rushed design in some areas.

the most drastic changes happened short before dof witht he big combat update, but overall these changes were percived rather positive since some things did not work out as good as planned (some classes very overpowered, tanks were able to get to a point where they were nearly invincible...). the problem with mmos is that even in betas you cannot find all these issues cause people will mabe get to max level but there is usually not that much raiding and min/maxing going on like later in hardcore guilds.

Its a lot easier to balance a single player game cause you don't have that many factors that come to gether giving you nearly infinite possiblilites to combine things if you take into account 24 characters of unknown classes with about 20 equipment slots and some thousend possible itmes for each slot.

i don't want to say that soe works perfect, they are making a lot mistakes. but i too work in software developement and i know how hard it is to make software that is tested for all eventualities. I also have had many points especially in the last expansion (rok) where i did not agree with the devs (itemisation, too much solo based leveling), but for now i am still having fun in the game, and the short excursions i made to other mmos in this year only got me back to eq2 again.

Finally i want to say that I personally like that mmos are evolving and as long as changes are reasonable and the devs communicate them good enough to the community i am in favor of needed "nerfs". if imbalances stay in game too long then the game is hurt much more than by a class that gets a bit less powerfull (and in the end most people getting hit by a nerf in any mmo that i plaied had to confess that things before the nerf were too overpowered, even if they did not want to say it out loud)

Well that deffinatly explains alot, but I still disagree that they dont have enough people to work on there engine, I just think there to cheap to do it, while they dont make as much money as blizzard right now im confident to say they probably still have quite a bit.

I will never trust soe, but what you said does justify some of what they have done, but I still think they are liars and thieves, because there is nothing to justify alot of what they have done in the past.

I also agree that balancing should be done, but what I cannot stand is nerfs for pvp when this game is meant for pve, it can truly ruin the pve for many and its simply not fair when people come into the game thinking its more for pve players when clearly soe is trying to appeal to all kinds of players.

But for pve I dont mind the nerfs as long as they make sense.

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Originally posted by Angelbound
Well that deffinatly explains alot, but I still disagree that they dont have enough people to work on there engine, I just think there to cheap to do it, while they dont make as much money as blizzard right now im confident to say they probably still have quite a bit.
I will never trust soe, but what you said does justify some of what they have done, but I still think they are liars and thieves, because there is nothing to justify alot of what they have done in the past.
 
I also agree that balancing should be done, but what I cannot stand is nerfs for pvp when this game is meant for pve, it can truly ruin the pve for many and its simply not fair when people come into the game thinking its more for pve players when clearly soe is trying to appeal to all kinds of players.
But for pve I dont mind the nerfs as long as they make sense.

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Seems like you only created the thread to whine about SOE.

Play the game or don't, but this purposeless whining and flaming of SOE doesn't help you or anyone else.

Yeah, it's useless to answer Angel. It is evident after my initial post it was just another ruse to bash SoE and the game, not really looking for answers.

Quaiky, I do want to answer your post as the devs have been working on the engine and the patch comes out this patch or next patch. They have optimized performance for multi-core pc's and are working on the graphics utilization next. For those with new pc's, you'll notice a big difference in performance and look.

Originally posted by Angelbound

Are there variety of skills like in eq1 or is it the same skills like fireball 1 2 and 3 in wow? I know wizards where like this but im not sure about other classes.

I think this is one of the best things about EQ2. With my fury, I never just spam one heal. I use my multiple group heals, direct heals, and hots. Unlinke in WoW, where my  paladin is forced to just spam Flash of Light throughout the whole raid. So, my raiding would consist of spamming the 2 key for FoL. Mindnumbingly boring.

I admit I might have been a little harsh but I think what your saying makes sense, but I still think soe holds back quite a bit and manipulates there customers.

Im speaking from experience its not to trash soe it was a logical question I wanted to know if there had been changes made, its your own fault for clicking the forum, I didnt waste your time or anyone elses that is your responsibility to be in these forums or not.

But that doesnt mean I wont play eq2, but I did need to know. Im sorry but just because you believe soe care about there customers does not mean your right, just because ive had bad experiences with them and know alot about the company does not mean I cannot express my knowledge towards how they treat there games customers.