Defiant ArmorFollow

I am a returning player who played waaaaaaayyyyy back in the day but not for all that long. Now I am back.
There is something really weird in Everquest beyond the ravamped zones (which I actually enjoy):
Defiant Armor
Is it just me or does this high-powered armor that drops off of everything from rats to decaying skeletons a bit much for newbies to be finding?
I remember back in the day when getting a dervish ring was a big deal for the stat modifiers. When we all were running around hunting wolves to make patchwork armor. When the newbie armor quests were released and they were pretty cool because you at least had to work for what you got and it didn't interfere with later content.
But this defiant armor stuff seems just a little over the top. It's like insta-twinking for everyone.
It takes some of the magic away from killing something big and getting a cool item. Why bother when you are getting awesome armor from decaying skellies? Whose idea was this anyway? Honestly. If I could. I would wipe Norrath clean of all of this stupid defiant armor, thus defying game conventions and making the armor live up to its name.
On another note: I also miss actually starting out in the starting cities, but that is another rant entirely and I will leave it alone for now. The defiant armor is a terrible game-opener and I would like to slap silly whoever got this game-wrecking crap passed through. Just one guy's opinion. Let me know what you think.

Blah. So basically what you are telling me is that EQ started to cater to the whims of mouth-frothing end-content power-levelers who don't really care about anything in the game remotely resembling a story. I am willing to bet that these types of decisions **** more people off than make happy. If people want to race to more recent content then let them find a generous benefactor who will twink them out.
I am enjoying the journey as I go along and selling every last piece of defiant armor that I come across to the nearest vendor. Norrath has a lot of interesting places that hold magnificent treasures and I don't want to be wearing a full set of handicap pity gear when I get there. It doesn't even feel like it came from the game. It feels like a cheat code.
So I guess what I am saying is that things like this make the game feel like a cheap imitation of its former self.
Isn't it fun to move up through the ranks of armor anymore? I still think so.
I wouldn't want to start out in Final Fantasy with a full set of crystal armor.

The problem with your point of view is, it doesn't mesh well with reality. The people on the EQLive team have to eat. They have families to feed. You can't buy much food (or pay mortgages or car notes or medical expenses or education debt) with ODaskar's $15 a month (assuming ODaskar is even around).

The EQ you remember was teeming with people in the lower levels, which made grouping and socialization easy. That is no longer the case and hasn't been for almost half a decade. Without groups, there's little this game has that makes it compelling over the other five dozen games competing against it. While you might be happy with a playerbase on par with A Tale in the Desert, this game isn't really fit for that (and I'm sure Andrew House wouldn't be happy with that either).

You are enjoying the journey and that's great. But realize that EQ, as a game, was built around forced socialization. Back in the day, we HAD to group to progress and thus, we HAD to socialize and from that grew bonds that endure to this day, many times. However, the times have changed and few people will sit through "the journey" for months on end, rarely getting the opportunity to socialize in the traditional fashion (grouping), until such time as they reach the point where "everyone" is. Defiant armor is just one of many changes that needed to be made to facilitate that. I don't know if you know this, but you no longer have to stare at your spellbook to meditate. They give you mounts which make meditation even easier. Experience rates have increased an order of magnitude (or more) since when you remember. Where is your rant about mercenaries? Where is your rant about Nexus spires or PoK books? Where were you when these things were being proposed and developed?

Sorry if I take offense at people who weren't present and had nothing invested in the game when it was falling from its perch as top MMO, returning and trying to cast aspersions on those of us who were here and saw the need for changes to stop the bleeding. Defiant armor was originally intended to help RETURNING PLAYERS ease their way back into the game after a long hiatus. While you might be okay with getting smashed by 'level appropriate' mobs because your raid gear from 2003 was made trash by mudflation, most people are not. So defiant armor is the 'good enough' stopgap until you could get into current, better, modern gear. This doesn't matter under 50 (nothing does because that content is trivial, even to people in that level range) but the deeper you get into the 50s and cross over into the 60s, the more apparent it becomes that your gear needs a tuneup if you want to move forward. The 'magnificant treasures' you believe exist in those 'interesting places' in Norrath are woefully outdated and near useless. Again, that's post-51, where gear really starts to matter. It's been mudflated into near-uselessness because of expansions that added content and gear that was better (which was required to do the content that gear was designed for). So go ahead and gear your warrior up in full Crafted. Then watch the same level Mage in defiant armor tank better than you, without his pet.

If you don't believe me, do a quick test. Go tank some aviaks in South Karana. Note what they hit for and what effects (if any) they have. Now, go to Blightfire Moors and do the same thing. Witchlamps snaring you (darkness) and then beating your head in is a far cry from even the "toughest" mobs in SK (say, Aviak Avocets).

Progress has a price. The next time you use your cellphone, think of that. How much privacy do you have when anyone with a cellphone can capture your actions and broadcast them to the entire world? Does that mean we destroy all cell phones and cell phone tech and go back to "the old days" of needing to carry change if you couldn't wait to get home to use the phone? Defiant armor, like mercs, like accelerated xp rates, like instanced content, like tasks vs quests, were a necessary evil to contribute to the game's ongoing existence. You don't like it, obviously. But by your own admission, you weren't here to see the need for these things so your perspective is kinda like a Model T owner decrying blindspot cameras or antilock brakes. If you think defiant armor is equivalent to crystal armor, that tells me you haven't gotten beyond level 70 (the armor available at 71 blows defiant out of the water and, due to the popularity of the (time limited) zones the turn-in items dropped in, it's not difficult to get via bazaar). If you haven't gotten beyond level 70, that tells me that you haven't seen anything past TSS. Take your 50ish toon to Griegs End. After the thought horrors at zone-in send you to your bind point in your "classic" gear, come back and tell me how defiant is handicap pity gear.

Started playing in 1999 but you'd hate me now.

I create a character, skip tutorial and PL with my 95 Mage in Crescent Reach > Blighfire Moors > Ruins of Old Paineel > Plane of Fire to level 65 then group with 95 Mage and PL to 80...all naked. No gear at all.

I then use Dream Motes and farmed House of Thule armor remnants to have 30k HP 30K mana right away.

Takes a few days to two weeks with 2 to 3 hours play sessions.

EQ has changed as have some of us players.

There are very good reasons for inclusion of defiant gear but I agree with the OP that it would be nice if its acquisition had been integrated into the lore even a wee bit. I mean it IS lame for a snake to drop a helmet or breastplate. Maybe they could have made it all questable in some fashion, even if the quests were much easier than some of the "original" armor quests. Those quests were often challenging and fun and required more than just "killing # rats", such as running around exploring Norrath, talking with various NPCs, etc.

What bothers me is that there are so many EXCELLENT zones in the game which now are utterly useless because nothing has been done to make them relevant to any degree. I visit such zones from time to time for nostalgia's sake and they're always empty. Even lower-levels and new players tend to stick in the "hot zones", understandably, so even they don't frequent some of the truly memorable lower level zones of the original game and early expansions. Supposedly this upcoming expansion will have some content requiring going back to older zones but I don't hold high hopes that it will accomplish what I'm talking about: making changes so players will have real reasons to visit more than about 20 zones out of the hundreds making up EQ.

I have no problem with defiant gear in the game (I've been playing since 2004). I think it was a nice addition. Besides, since we're getting level 100 with the next expansion... What about the rest of us who enjoy stopping and enjoying the roses, instead of rushing to 100? We're supposed to still be in sucky gear, while the rest of the population has uber gear?

Well said. In fact... I think you said it better than I did. I could even handle the defiant gear if it was worked in later in the game in order to serve it's real purpose. And I love the idea about defiant armor enlivening the old zones. Maybe they could have simply upped the stats on some of the gear that originally comes from the older zones?? (and of course anyone still possessing the old gear would also see the stat change)
Yes. I like this idea. And I am done slinging criticisms. It tends to just make whoever had the idea in the first place either feel bad or dig in deeper. Maybe someone higher up will see this idea of yours and take it the right way though. Hmmmmmmm.... maybe even stat changes for all the armor... How tough could it be? Just changing a few numbers and simultaneously reviving a lot of the game :)
Again: Very well said.

(And yes. I too agree that items should only drop off mobs that are appropriate. Having monsters drop completely inappropriate items to their bodily mechanics or where a person should find something does ***** with the believability of a game that many of us like to escape in.)

We agree to disagree. In my opinion (opinion being the key word here), the integration would have been worth it. I would like to see the old zones alive. (Thus my thread inquiry about the progression servers.)

Again, progress. We had many years where a new expansion's gear wasn't all that much better than the previous expansion's gear. So, the people outside the raiding guilds just refrained from buying the new expansion. Bad for business. So what SOE started doing is frontloading things like entry tier armor and weapons (hi Windblade, War Marshall's Bladed Staff, and the 2h axe that dropped like rain in PoJ. Weighty Polearm?). So people would run out and buy the expansion first thing in order to take advantage of the drop rates (and elevated XP rates too). After a while, the gear gap (between raiders and non-raiders) became a chasm so SOE felt a gear reset was in order. It makes sense when you consider trying to balance content for people with WIDELY disparate levels of capability (due mainly to gear quality). Of course, then things got crazy with HoT when the numbers basically doubled but I'm guessing that was necessary.



Kinda hard to explain this but, they did exactly what you suggest with regard to gear sets. The problem was, raid level gear was head and shoulders above group gear. So when you have groupers wearing items with 400 hp/mana/end and raiders with 750 hp/mana/end, how do you design group content? Anything that groupers can do would be steamrolled by raiders but anything that challenged raiders murder the groupers. I give you the Underfoot expansion as an example. Until that gap is closed, you cannot design content for both groups without segregating them. And if you do that, the raiders can monopolize the groupers' content because it's so easy to them.

Also, you don't realize it but what you are advocating is the death of this game. If they had "stuck to their guns" as their playerbase aged and no longer had 6 hrs a day to play (of which, 2 are spent LFG), it would have driven even the staunchest non-boxers right into the arms of the 18 or so other games that don't force people to place themselves at the mercy of people they don't really know. See, it's easy to say "they should have" when you've never actually seen what had happened to the game in the interim. Those of us who have are trying to tell you that your idealism would lead to shutdown due to low server populations unable to sustain the game financially. Yes, stick to your guns and lose your shirt rather than change to fit the times. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan.



No. And this is coming from a person with eight wizards and three druids. My first character way back in '99, was a druid. I know what those days were like. Do I want to be flagged down by people camping a druid ring for a port? No.



You think it's more fun that way and I wouldn't argue with you. But, as you're probably aware, Sony is a for-profit corporation. They don't care what you want if you're not paying them money. They want to get as many people as possible actively playing their games and if they have to "dumb down" the games to accomplish that, they will. The only people who have a voice are the people who are active, paying members of SOE's customer base. The status quo says it shouldn't take you a year to reach the level cap. The status quo says you shouldn't have to plan a play session specifically to get to where you want to hunt...for the next play session. So I would disagree with you. More people aren't drawn to a challenge, unless you think World of Warcraft (or Rift or The Old Republic or Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World) is challenging. By all accounts, those games all have more active players than this one (even after free to play). What people want is entertainment and they don't want to have to "work" (without gettin' paid) to get it. With the playerbase as overwhelmingly casual as it seems now, it stands to reason that EQ's old model was untenable.



How do you attract people to that new content? Rewards? Well now you have the new content being better than the old content and if everyone's crowding into the new content, guess what that makes the old content? That's right, you guessed it, obsolete. Perception is reality in these games. If one placed is perceived to be "better" than another, that place will lead to the other place being abandoned and ignored. Now, you might still like that old place but with rewards out of whack (with the new place outclassing the old place), you are making a conscious decision to forgo the greater rewards because you prefer the old content for whatever reason. Most people would not make that choice. "Progression" in most people's minds does not equate to 'staying in the same place cuz I like it'.



I'm not up in arms at all. It's just that I've dealt with many who feel as you do. When free to play was announced, I tried to get several friends/former guildies to return and they said the exact same things you did, while they run around Azeroth on their 14th level 70+ character. These games have to evolve or they die (or become footnotes, like Ultima Online).



Can you do that without involving EQ's gawd awful RNG?



Rain of Fear will do nothing to accomplish what you're talking about. Cut & paste + adjust mob levels for a handful of zones isn't going to cut it, really. Yes, you'll have level 100 players running about Kael Drakkal. But would it even come close to duplicating the sheer terror many felt when going there? You're 100, you've seen and done it all already. Your gods' smoldering corpse at your feet is still somewhat fresh in your mind. Going back to Kael? Where you've already ostensibly destroyed its king AND the avatar of its god?

Also, I wouldn't count on them reverting 4 years of what they consider progress. This is Pandora's Box.

Amen, first-time necro-poster! ;)

I don't have a problem with the concept of Defiant Armor. It's essentially SOE powerleveling you to the end game via equipment because that's where they're concentrating these days. You'll never see a real content addition for the lvl 30-40 game, for instance.

I do wish they updated the current drops that Defiant made obsolete in order to promote the use of older content. Recently, while camping a robe for the "Luclin only" guild, I threw away two Defiant robes that easily had 3x the stats. My own camping was for a fringe case scenario but why would any "normal" person take the time to hit my camp and waste hours trying to get a vastly inferior product?

Sometimes the devs overcompensate.

Defiant armor wasn't needed below level 75 because the TSS quest armor is really solid in the various tiers starting from the Cresecent Reach and Goru'kar Mesa chains. Maybe the stuff past mesa is a bit more timesink than worth... so fine, level 59+ defiant made sense because so much of the decent armor was locked behind tedious factioning npc in content and/or missions nobody really does. But they added it.. so be it.

They want a one-time programming easy fix. Readjusting loot tables across 10 expacs would have taken far more time than what they did. But, the obvious consequence is that almost no non-defiant armor is worth hunting below level 90? at this point. The weapons they didn't make good enough, so at least there is still that.

As an EQ community we want so many things that don't work together necessarily.

What I would have done (and others would hate): in this thread rather than completely derail an already necroposted topic.

0.o