Anniversary tower gear available at launch of teek/tormax? (2024)

Anyone else feel this is a little out of place for a server launching in Kunark to have 120+ hp/mana gear and FT5 worth of augs available for almost no real work outside of a few tasks? Kind of makes the normal classic/kunark drops feel pretty bad. Has anyone heard if this is actually going to be in on launch?

CdeezNotes said:

I hope so. Classic/Kunark gear is some of the worst designed gear ever devised.

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After thinking about this, I think classic/kunark gear was actually the best designed. Here me out.
The AMA mentioned the idea that early AAs (luclin/pop) gave away the entire design space. Same thing happened with gear. By partway through PoP, all your stats/saves are maxed and you literally stop caring about most numbers on the gear. This is unlike in classic where you choose gear to chase certain stats.

The early gear was designed to make it impossible to max all your stats/saves, so you had to make choices towards what you wanted. you couldn't be maxed in everything, which made things interesting and gear choices even slightly matter.

fransisco said:

The early gear was designed to make it impossible to max all your stats/saves, so you had to make choices towards what you wanted. you couldn't be maxed in everything, which made things interesting and gear choices even slightly matter.

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Except stat decisions basically don't matter. The difference between 20-30 points of an off stat is basically unparsable, and the stats that matter you need two or three tops and even there the term need is a stretch people just max some out of habit and because it feels right. 'Well designed' gear either has the stats you need or is just the garbage dex and int on druid pieces, or those sweet +13 charisma/agility boots. I've seen way more gearing decisions around heroic stats later in EQ than I've ever seen in the classic-luclin era where there's no choice because your options are either hot trash or the right stats. They could turn back on focus effects if they actually wanted some gearing variety, or at least another set of items that need to be fit in.

Waring_McMarrin said:

Didn't they design the year of darkpaw quests to be available on all servers? Currently you can access it on all TLP servers and I would guess that the new ones will be no different.

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I'm sure they will but only after certain expansions are unlocked, perhaps PoP?

SoandsoForumUser said:

Except stat decisions basically don't matter. The difference between 20-30 points of an off stat is basically unparsable, and the stats that matter you need two or three tops and even there the term need is a stretch people just max some out of habit and because it feels right. 'Well designed' gear either has the stats you need or is just the garbage dex and int on druid pieces, or those sweet +13 charisma/agility boots. I've seen way more gearing decisions around heroic stats later in EQ than I've ever seen in the classic-luclin era where there's no choice because your options are either hot trash or the right stats. They could turn back on focus effects if they actually wanted some gearing variety, or at least another set of items that need to be fit in.

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Yeah all melee characters it's heroic dex, int for casters and wis for priest. Wouldn't say that's very thought provoking on what gear to pick.

Ogamuk said:

Yeah all melee characters it's heroic dex, int for casters and wis for priest. Wouldn't say that's very thought provoking on what gear to pick.

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I mean EQs never been about difficult gearing decisions, but there is still more decision space around heroic stat choice than their is classic stat gearing.

You get a window of time around OoW where you're only going to be just getting to the useful breakpoints on a couple of hStats so doing your research and knowing where you can land like 13-15 hdex shoulders to get you a big chunk of the way to cap is important. Then later in the game tanks still have contention around hDex vs hAgi and then those balanced against hSta. Certain melee could hit 100% crit rate (anyone other than ber?) at which point spreading points into hStr after crit cap in hDex is a consideration.

Point being I at least thought about heroic stats on occasion in the rest of the game, classic gearing is so bad as to never be worth considering for anyone who's not a tank. Just grab your resist gear and make friends and hang out until you escape the vanilla->pop cycle.

Zansobar said:

I'm sure they will but only after certain expansions are unlocked, perhaps PoP?

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I don't think that is the case as all the content so far is in the original game and while it later includes RoK and SoV content given that the new TLP starts at Kunark and will have SoV unlocked by the time those zones are needed makes it seem like it will be.

There is a thread on some of spawns for one of the key quests that suggests it will be there at the start.

So, we will be doing 2 additional things in the April patch.
#1 the higher level spawners are tied to expansions. 50-75 is tied to Planes of Power, and 80-105 is tied to Veil of Alaris. (This applies more to other progression servers, but the VoA part to Agnarr as well)
#2 the Mobs will have their aggro adjusted. Current plan, they will be changed to "neutral" AND their call for help will be shrunk to hugging distance. (So another NPC has to be basically hugging them to assist) We might opt to keep them KOS but ALSO change the aggro range to hugging distance.

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https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...-skels-in-gfay-on-agnarr.296812/#post-4296700

At a minimum, that is suggesting that it will be there before PoP and I don't see why they won't have it on launch.

fransisco said:

After thinking about this, I think classic/kunark gear was actually the best designed. Here me out.

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Hear*

fransisco said:

The AMA mentioned the idea that early AAs (luclin/pop) gave away the entire design space. Same thing happened with gear. By partway through PoP, all your stats/saves are maxed and you literally stop caring about most numbers on the gear. This is unlike in classic where you choose gear to chase certain stats.

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Stats are so functionally trivial a naked character can kill things in early eras.

Of the stats that are actually helpful, you find the complete opposite ones on gear for classes. Int on warrior only items for example. It's laughably dumb. There's zero argument to be made that will convince me itemization was good. It objectively wasn't. Group gear in many cases being better than raid gear, stats on items which make no sense, stats which provide little to no parseable benefit to classes, items being reused on loot tables (hello OG and Kunark dragons), and many other shortcomings I won't list.

fransisco said:

The early gear was designed to make it impossible to max all your stats/saves, so you had to make choices towards what you wanted. you couldn't be maxed in everything, which made things interesting and gear choices even slightly matter.

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See above.

Names and item lore were some of the best things about earlier gear, which didn't make your character functionality better.

Ogamuk said:

Yeah all melee characters it's heroic dex, int for casters and wis for priest. Wouldn't say that's very thought provoking on what gear to pick.

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I mean necros and shams normally go hsta. As mana doesn't mean much, I'm shocked not more casters/priests go that route.

Tanks always seem to argue on favor of hagil hdex or hsta. I'm an hagil guy myself being a raider.

Warriors and berserkers are basically 100% crit rate so you'll probably see them going for other stats sooner or later. I know a few berserkers who have been putting more a focus on hstr since hdex is basically useless now.

Also, since heroics are now merged with the old mod2s, there are a lot of gear choices to make from pop to sof which is when you find no standardization of focus effects. It's not always so cut and dry. Thats a good 10ish expansions of itemization that still has pros and cons to it.

CdeezNotes said:

I mean necros and shams normally go hsta. As mana doesn't mean much, I'm shocked not more casters/priests go that route.

Tanks always seem to argue on favor of hagil hdex or hsta. I'm an hagil guy myself being a raider.

Warriors and berserkers are basically 100% crit rate so you'll probably see them going for other stats sooner or later. I know a few berserkers who have been putting more a focus on hstr since hdex is basically useless now.

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Both necromancers and shaman have tools that let them cast using hp instead of mana as well as other tools to convert hp to mana which makes a big difference.

Waring_McMarrin said:

Both necromancers and shaman have tools that let them cast using hp instead of mana as well as other tools to convert hp to mana which makes a big difference.

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Is your goal to constantly state the obvious? I have had a sham for decades. I know all about spiritual channeling.

There's also the rid of dark rites click for all classes which has a much worse penalty, making hsta useful (not to mention the amount of AEs in raids means it never hurts having more hp)

CdeezNotes said:

Is your goal to constantly state the obvious? I have had a sham for decades. I know all about spiritual channeling.

There's also the rid of dark rites click for all classes which has a much worse penalty, making hsta useful (not to mention the amount of AEs in raids means it never hurts having more hp)

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I don't think that everyone knows that they have those tools which is why I mentioned it. So it might be obvious to you not everyone knows all of the tools that every class has available.