All EQ vets will understand this topic. But I'm more interested in finding out the mindset the team has on an item such as the Fungi Tunic.
I'll briefly explain this item to anyone not familiar. The Fungi Tunic, or Fungus Covered Scale Tunic was an item that dropped deep in the dungeon Old Sebelis. This dungeon was one of the high end dungeons for level 60's in the Ruins of Kunark expansion(2nd expansion). It was not by any means an easy item to farm until later on. It was a dangerous part of a dangerous zone. Deep deep in the dungeon, close to one of the expansions premier bosses, Trakanon.
The item provided a very high level of regen on an item that made leveling quite a few classes much smoother. This items value held for as long as I played the game. I love the idea of items like this though. It's something we don't see these days. Items from previous expansions holding value through the leveling process and perhaps beyond.
This question has been sort of raised but I felt it was more targeted toward raid drops. I'm more curious about utility items, clickies, effects and if the team plans to make items such as these available.
I obviously cannot answer for VR but I agree that it would be very nice to have highly useful items drop in dungeons as distinct from raids.
Obviously items should also drop in raids but not all of us are raiders and its nice giving people an incentive to keep doing dungeons even after they start raiding.
I say if they do make any items like this is will be in a later expansion, and not to correct you but Kunark was the 1st expansion, since the original game is not considered an expansion lol. But i wouldn't mind items such as these but in expansions and not in the original game, i would like to feel the grind and challenge of the game before they start giving us items to make leveling easier for our alts.
I agree the fungi was a cornstone loot for its longevity, usefullness, desirability, and rarity.
Making items like it is risky for the devs and game balance, but can be a winner in the hearts of the players.
I look back fondly on the times I got to play with fungi's in EQ, and even the process it took to trade for them; they were never cheap.
It is no doubt a balance issue. As Lokispawn mentioned, these types of items are big hits in the hearts and minds of players. I have a vivid memory of getting me getting my first Fungi Tunic.
What other items like this come to mind? Manastone, the Bind item from Droga, these two are a little different since they were nerfed and not available to most.
I think it should be noted that the Fungi Tunic was never easy to get, it was a rare drop from a rare spawn. That aspect always has to be in place when discussing these types of items.
Imo, it only makes sense for the way the game is being designed to have valuable items like these in the game and drop from things other than raids.
From the FAQ: "We want you to collect your items and be able to remember their names. When you get that epic item or rare drop after an incredible dungeon crawl, we want you to be in awe of what you have accomplished and the reward that came from it. Items will be memorable, deserved, cherished, and desired."
http://pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1968/non-linear-gear-progression-please
http://pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5512/how-can-dungeons-still-matter-after-being-raidgeared/view/page/2
I agree with the style of game it appears they are making, that items that carry weight will be present. Meaningful content is an over arching idea we're seeing from them, which to me means it would be likely we see items that carry weight through the timeline of a game.
Afterall, meaningful gameplay and social interaction can only go so far if there isn't a reward that deems the investment.
They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
Amris said:They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
While what you said is totally true, I don't think the discussion is necessarily all about twinking either. It could just be that some items you receive in your 30's for example have unique special traits that remain situationally valuable all the way up to level 50 and beyond. Which of course has been stated many times to be a design goal: "Our desire to bring back the value and personality of items drives our item design. This means that the frequency of upgrades will be slower and when you do get a new piece of gear not only will the experience be memorable but so will the item." (FAQ 13.9)
Amris said:They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
Well, lets put fungi aside because I think the point the OP is making is that there were a lot of items that were rare drops from deep dungeons that held their value because of their unique effects long after their expansion passed. These items were popular in EQ, but definitely fell out of fashion in MMOs (besides a token few in Vanila WoW that were later removed) and frankly it is very sad to see because they gave a reason to go back to some of these dugeons even after content far passed that expansion.
To me, the key to items like this is not having massive mudflation from expansion to expansion, release to release. Items like the fungi etc, retained a lot of value in future expansions because even a couple of expansions later the stats had not inflated to the trivialization point, you couldn't just walk in solo and farm 20 of them yourself. Items like cloak of flames had 36% haste.. the cap for haste 2 expansions later was 41% so you still had a reason to go back and kill Naggy even in Velious, and you still needed a good crew to kill him (level lock aside).
Intertwined with itemization is obviously how they do later expansions and content additions. It is way too early to focus too much on this, but a major problem in current games is the ability-inflation often discussed in these forums.
If the first new zone down the road gives new gear that improves best-in-slot armor class from 50 to 52, and best-in-slot strength from 10 to 11, old items will stay relevant a whole lot longer than if "kill 6 rats" in the new zone gives the Awesome Tunic of the Cat with AC of 500 and strength of 95. They certainly don't plan on hyperinflation of gear and attributes let us all hope they are able to stick to that.
Amris said:They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
Could you provide a source for this?
The only place i remember hearing devs talk about twinking was brad in one of the streams. Here's the quote (minus a lot of umms and uhhs doubtless because brad was trying not to fall off a cliff at the time):
Edit: from the official youtube dec 2016 stream, mark 2:44:20
Cohcarnage "Are items going to have level requirements or stat requirements and what are you thinking about twinking? "
Brad "In general no. No hard level limits. If a low level player were to get ahold of a higher level item that item would scale down. So it only would be, you known it wouldnt be ludicrously powerful and he wouldn't be just slashing thru a dungeon like Sauron or something like that. But in general no restrictions there. But lots of reason to trade in your items or sacrifice your items at temples for long term buffs. Or like cory mentioned before like augmenting your items. So you wont, it often times won't make sense to, you know, just twink down your items to somebody else. Its going to benefit you more so to use it to advance. But we're not, you know theres no hard limit to that. Um, you could have your buddy come on and save some weapons for him. And like i said other than scaling them down um, ... and you know that will cause over time more powerful items to kind of trickle down and its just our responsibility to just release new content and better and better items and things that you can craft to stay ahead of that curve. It's more difficult but creates a much more vibrant and entertaining player driven economy. And so us being people who don't like to take the easy way out, we're keeping it all open."
All this to me suggest that while there may be scaling, they arent taking it to draconian levels and recognize the import of going that route. And intend to manage that effect thru new content for the higher level people while keeping some thought toward minimizing trvialized lower level content. They arent discouraging twinking so much as giving an alternate incentive to do otherwise.
Feyshtey said:Amris said:They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
Could you provide a source for this?
The only place i remember hearing devs talk about twinking was brad in one of the streams. Here's the quote (minus a lot of umms and uhhs doubtless because brad was trying not to fall off a cliff at the time):
Edit: from the official youtube dec 2016 stream, mark 2:44:20
Cohcarnage "Are items going to have level requirements or stat requirements and what are you thinking about twinking? "
Brad "In general no. No hard level limits. If a low level player were to get ahold of a higher level item that item would scale down. So it only would be, you known it wouldnt be ludicrously powerful and he wouldn't be just slashing thru a dungeon like Sauron or something like that. But in general no restrictions there. But lots of reason to trade in your items or sacrifice your items at temples for long term buffs. Or like cory mentioned before like augmenting your items. So you wont, it often times won't make sense to, you know, just twink down your items to somebody else. Its going to benefit you more so to use it to advance. But we're not, you know theres no hard limit to that. Um, you could have your buddy come on and save some weapons for him. And like i said other than scaling them down um, ... and you know that will cause over time more powerful items to kind of trickle down and its just our responsibility to just release new content and better and better items and things that you can craft to stay ahead of that curve. It's more difficult but creates a much more vibrant and entertaining player driven economy. And so us being people who don't like to take the easy way out, we're keeping it all open."
All this to me suggest that while there may be scaling, they arent taking it to draconian levels and recognize the import of going that route. And intend to manage that effect thru new content for the higher level people while keeping some thought toward minimizing trvialized lower level content. They arent discouraging twinking so much as giving an alternate incentive to do otherwise.
Yeah I think you pretty much nailed it. A more succinct answer from the FAQ: "In general, there will be no hard level limits. High-level items will scale down to prevent too much power in the hands of a low-level character. There will still be lots of reasons to trade in your items such as sacrificing them at temples for long term buffs, augmenting your items, etc. Over time, this will cause more powerful items to trickle down. It is, however, our responsibility to stay ahead of that curve by introducing new content with better items to drop and craft. It’s more difficult to design properly, but we feel it creates a much more vibrant and open player driven economy." (13.12)
So basically the first part of the statement: "They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ." is pretty accurate. But the second part "It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost." is not actually very accurate. Perhaps Amris' interpretation is influenced by personal bias.
Raign said:Well, lets put fungi aside because I think the point the OP is making is that there were a lot of items that were rare drops from deep dungeons that held their value because of their unique effects long after their expansion passed. These items were popular in EQ, but definitely fell out of fashion in MMOs (besides a token few in Vanila WoW that were later removed) and frankly it is very sad to see because they gave a reason to go back to some of these dugeons even after content far passed that expansion.
To me, the key to items like this is not having massive mudflation from expansion to expansion, release to release. Items like the fungi etc, retained a lot of value in future expansions because even a couple of expansions later the stats had not inflated to the trivialization point, you couldn't just walk in solo and farm 20 of them yourself. Items like cloak of flames had 36% haste.. the cap for haste 2 expansions later was 41% so you still had a reason to go back and kill Naggy even in Velious, and you still needed a good crew to kill him (level lock aside).
Mmm. I remember tthis time period, and it isn't really true that stats hadn't inflated making these items trivial. They did. The difference was that certain items, such as the Fungi tunic and the helmet you got from Avatar of War, were wearable at level 1. Lots of items in the upcoming expansions scaled and had minimum levels, but not these, these items retained their usefullness through late expansions because of the +100HP on the Helmet of Rallos Zek and the Regen effect on the Fungi. Downtime/Regen time was drastically lowered with the Fungi, and even allowed you to live long enough to solo mobs you normally needed a group for in that up to lvl 20-25 area.
As far as balancing issues, i mean.. This was clearly a blatant imbalance in content that having either one of these individual items trivialized lower levels. At the same time, do you remember how hard it was to get these items when they were relevant? Being able to go back and slot this on a twink was a freakin' reward and it felt that way. I never had any emotion but jealousy and awe when i saw a twink wearing these items, and it gave me something to aspire to, "I can't wait to get high enough to kill the mobs that drop those!!!!"
I don't know. I'm in the camp that items like these inspire more good than harm in the game world.
NEXTLEVL said:I would love to see ultra difficult to obtain items like this in Pantheon!
The Fungi Tunicv was no where near 'ultra difficult' to obtain. All it took was a solid group of well skilled and well geared players of which each server had hundreds of such players. And by 'well geared' I do not mean full Veeshan Peak gear but a group with a good number of items from various Kunark raid targets (dragons, VS, etc) could easily handle that section in Sebilis. Very quickly the only difficult part of obtaining a Fungi was beating the rare drop rate, nothing more.
Edit: I realized that Vandraad and I got off-topic from the original concept of the post and i don't like contributing to tangential conversations.
Vandraad said:NEXTLEVL said:I would love to see ultra difficult to obtain items like this in Pantheon!
The Fungi Tunicv was no where near 'ultra difficult' to obtain. All it took was a solid group of well skilled and well geared players of which each server had hundreds of such players. And by 'well geared' I do not mean full Veeshan Peak gear but a group with a good number of items from various Kunark raid targets (dragons, VS, etc) could easily handle that section in Sebilis. Very quickly the only difficult part of obtaining a Fungi was beating the rare drop rate, nothing more.
I think you are discounting the difficulty to obtain the Fungi Tunic. But it's not part of this argument persay, I think items that are difficult to obtain and hold value in group content is important. And I feel strongly that we will see items like this.
I realize this is slightly off topic, but part of the disagreement on rarity might stem from the fact that the fungi tunic was initially the common drop, not the rare. When it got changed to the rare drop -- as supply and demand are oft wont to do -- the prices subsequently went through the roof. On my own server, the asking amount jumped from 5kpp to 50kpp in a week.
Interesting little side note, the fungi tunic also used to not even be listed as a MAGIC item, which made it pickpocketable.
~Hiwin
Bazgrim said:Feyshtey said:Amris said:They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ.
It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost.
Could you provide a source for this?
The only place i remember hearing devs talk about twinking was brad in one of the streams. Here's the quote (minus a lot of umms and uhhs doubtless because brad was trying not to fall off a cliff at the time):
Edit: from the official youtube dec 2016 stream, mark 2:44:20
Cohcarnage "Are items going to have level requirements or stat requirements and what are you thinking about twinking? "
Brad "In general no. No hard level limits. If a low level player were to get ahold of a higher level item that item would scale down. So it only would be, you known it wouldnt be ludicrously powerful and he wouldn't be just slashing thru a dungeon like Sauron or something like that. But in general no restrictions there. But lots of reason to trade in your items or sacrifice your items at temples for long term buffs. Or like cory mentioned before like augmenting your items. So you wont, it often times won't make sense to, you know, just twink down your items to somebody else. Its going to benefit you more so to use it to advance. But we're not, you know theres no hard limit to that. Um, you could have your buddy come on and save some weapons for him. And like i said other than scaling them down um, ... and you know that will cause over time more powerful items to kind of trickle down and its just our responsibility to just release new content and better and better items and things that you can craft to stay ahead of that curve. It's more difficult but creates a much more vibrant and entertaining player driven economy. And so us being people who don't like to take the easy way out, we're keeping it all open."
All this to me suggest that while there may be scaling, they arent taking it to draconian levels and recognize the import of going that route. And intend to manage that effect thru new content for the higher level people while keeping some thought toward minimizing trvialized lower level content. They arent discouraging twinking so much as giving an alternate incentive to do otherwise.
Yeah I think you pretty much nailed it. A more succinct answer from the FAQ: "In general, there will be no hard level limits. High-level items will scale down to prevent too much power in the hands of a low-level character. There will still be lots of reasons to trade in your items such as sacrificing them at temples for long term buffs, augmenting your items, etc. Over time, this will cause more powerful items to trickle down. It is, however, our responsibility to stay ahead of that curve by introducing new content with better items to drop and craft. It’s more difficult to design properly, but we feel it creates a much more vibrant and open player driven economy." (13.12)
So basically the first part of the statement: "They have plainly stated that they will do their best to actively discourage what we'd refer to as twinking. Such items may be in the game, but they will scale such that you won't be leveling with one to any degree remotely like in EQ." is pretty accurate. But the second part "It won't be special like the fungi. No matter your experience or knowledge of the game, they fully intend to block power leveling or anything remotely like it, at any cost." is not actually very accurate. Perhaps Amris' interpretation is influenced by personal bias.
I took my bard at level 21 to get her lambent on her own. I only used my druid to pay for gems.
Why on Earth would I bother to do that if it scaled? Zero motivation. Why die multiple times in zones too high for me, daring and risking so much.... for something no better than what I can get in a regular old exp getting group?
Why take away the thrill and reward of going so far above and beyond? Oh, because twinks...
I get that no one else sees anything but "yay, no twinks" in all of this scaling excrement. I loathe it. It's baby with the bathwater, and I don't see it as reasonable. I barely even trunk any of my chars... but I love the thrill of taking them where they don't really belong and walking out feeling like what I just did was thrilling, exciting, and above all rewarding.
No, regular groups outside of raids don't give that feeling, and too often you get nothing at all from an individual raid, too. Questing for gear against all odds is it's own very special experience. One destroyed in a single stole by item scaling.
Min/maxers won't like this but, I think it would be nice if a clicky effect would only remain on while you are wearing the item. I think the point of an item is to wear it if you want it's effect. This would make strategizing about your gear step up a notch becuase you are now evaluating your item + buff compared to other options of equipment and also whether or not that spell stacks with other spells, and so on.
Even in a fantasy world, getting the effect of a magical item while that item is back in the bank just sounds silly.
@Amris, I actually completely agree with you. I'd much MUCH rather there be no scaling whatsoever. But I guess what I was getting at is there's room for compromise.
Take an item that's meant to be obtained at level 50.
Say there's no scaling at all until it's equipped by someone below level 40.
Further, say that a level 20 weilding that weapon would cause it to scale down, but only to a point that it would be equivalent to an item equivelant meant to be obtained at level 30.
Now this is not your ideal, or mine. But it's also not the extreme you're suggesting where you've assumed a level 21 obtaining a level 25-30 item would experience any scaling at all.
I really dont imagine that they'd scale to the point that the best items would scale down to be mundane average items for the character's current level. Much more likely the item would only scale down to at worst be at the top end of the power curve for items obtainable by that character. I would hope that's at the worst end of the compromise spectrum.
I believe you can compromise with an item like the “Shield of Striding”
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=10471
This drop was very rare (had to go through so many placeholders, then roll the dice on the 2% drop rate of the named), but was really worth it. It did not give you any crazy stats, but when someone saw you with it, it turned heads.
Items can be made to be very rare, but without game breaking abilities:
Sometimes it is just fun to have something that is hard to get.
Barnum
To be clear, I'm not advocated for the scaling down for items deemed to high for the character equipping it. I'm simply re-stating Brad's intentions. I totally understand what you're saying about wanting a thrill.
It is worth noting, though, that the scaling down won't make it so that the item is literally "no better" than what that character would normally be able to get. If that were the case, then there would be no reason to pass them items on to your friends or alts and you would always just sacrifice that item at an altar. It wouldn't even be a hard decision. Therefore, I would expect a scaled-down item to still be noticeably better than most gear of the recipient. It will just, if necessary, bring it down to a more reasonable ballpark so that newbies basically aren't one-hitting their way through dungeons.