How do you feel about the upcoming AA changes?Follow

If they decide to give us the auto-grant of AA's, I hope they at least allow the player to decide where to allocate the AA's. Mainly as some AA's are not desirable to max at 85 for some players of certain classes.

For instance, in the case of non raiding Necromancers, some may rather not max the Spell Casting Subtlety line of AA as they may not want pet aggro issues if they aggro kite a lot. Though it has many advantages if the Necromancer groups a lot for obvious reasons. I was one of the old school of thought until only recently when I maxed the line and found that my pet would take aggro on occasion despite sending in the pet after 4 dots have landed. But I found a workaround as I have access to a Mage for aggro reduction weapons to drop the pets agro... like having one (or two if necessary) aggro reducing Mage weapon on the pet. But some 100% solo Necromancer types may not want any ranks of the AA at all.

So I hope they allow the player to actually allocate or spend them as they see fit. This way a player rolling a new class (they never played before) actually has to read and learn what the AA is about when picking them.

Just my two cents.

Edited, Feb 5th 2014 4:31pm by hexeez

I for one don't have any issue with the incoming nerfs for beaming, etc., (though I scratch my head as to why they would nerf rogues and berserkers), but I have a large issue with the proposed plan to 'give away' free AA's.

The appeal and challenge of the game was always, still is, and always will be, the 'fun' of developing your character. Knowing that you *worked* to make your character better, made it so much more valuable. You truly create something to be proud of. If they give us literally thousands of AA points, the game takes a big step in the direction of WoW.

To put it more directly; Everquest is not about the destination, it's about the journey. Don't ruin our journey, SOE.

I understand you were doing a total "devil's advocate" type thing, but I know that post is way over the mark. They have posted their reasonings for all the changes they are making ( I refuse to call them "nerfs"), and they were fair, made sense, and were completely with good intentions. Rogues and ' zerkers needed those abilities toned down just as much as magician beams. They even acknowleged that they admired the creativity and cleverness it took on the players' part to come up with these mass killing methods. My enchanter ( which can seem overpowered himself with reverse charm methods at times) had no way to mass kill. When I started playing on a new server to follow some friends, I was broke. A friend of mine who played a rogue made me over 200k in a few hours letting me loot mobs he mass killed. I don't play a rogue and know nothing about them, but evry time his cooldowns were up on some discs, he would pull a massive train and wipe them out ridiculously easily. It involved a disc thst let him rioposte every attack for one, along with a couple more and relying on the assassination ability. And a beserker I know on my server makes stupid amounts of money (including real life money by accepting paypal payments) for using his abilities to powerlevel with amazing speed and efficiency. He seriously has over unbelieveable millions of platinum. Now while some of that is the fault of the players dumb enough to pay those amounts for services like that, it is bad for the game on so many levels and needs to be stopped. Incidentally, I thought it was extremely cool for the developers to publicly post their detailed reasons for the changes. Players are good at figuring out how to use new abilities in ways the developers and programer never foresaw or intended. That actually is the reason for most "nerfs". They are acknowleging they made mistakes and are correcting them. ( At least one developer said the exact words to the effect " we are fixing what we broke".) Sorry for the rant, and again I know you were just playing devil's advocate, but I cannot stand idle and mute anymore. Recently I have had to leave ventrilo and the general chat because I am sick and beyond tired of all the whining, complaining, and insults about the devs thrown about. I swear, if these vocal dissenters are that unhappy, they need to fricken leave me and the rest of the people who love and enjoy the game, and understand and respect that developers have the impossible job of trying to make everyone happy, free to play without everyone dampening the mood by complaining all night long. Ah....sorry, but it has gotten to me and I am ranting again. Typing on this tablet sucks, and I am up way past my bedtime (but nighttime reading of forums in bed struck a nerve) so frgive the typos and misspellings that I amnot going to bother to edit. I will hang my head and step off of my soapbox, hoping that in my zeal I remembered to make all my points and was rational. Oh, and as a post script, I will point out that my preferred class has been " nerfed" pretty strongly two times in not to distant history. Sure, part of me said " aw, shucks, there goes my money maker" but I just shrugged and relished in the fact that I had the challenge of figuring out how to play at top levels effrectively ahead of me. So much more I could say, but I have probably gone on for too long already. I just get so tired of the hostility and crying running rampant whenever change happens. Things change. Take off your rose colored glasses and stop looking back at the past. I love this game, and can honestly say I have loved it for DECADES. It will suck when the game is sunlighted and the servers go down for the last time. I'd like it to continue to grow, change and evolve. Perhaps even bring back past players and draw in new ones, and let them feel useful and relevant in their new character, without an impossibly high climb to get to end game levels and raid if they want to.

Also, Roxtam i have to agree wholeheartedly with. With my own bard, my favorite class, sure he can swarmkite a little bit, but it PALES in comparison to rangers/rogues/shadowknights/berserkers. Sometimes i think "why did i make a bard... i could have had a max-AA ranger by now with millions of plat." There's very little sense of class balance if half the classes have these abilities while the other half do not.

i like the fact that you an opt-out but i like the fact that you can auto them and then work on the ones you really need.
My only issue is i did suggest they auto-default them as value zero cost and that would leave the AA bonus in but i dont think they went that way. i dont care about the silver issue they can opt-out and due their 1k of needed ablities and opt-in when they go gold for an month.

I due like that fact that this will be yearly so so next expansion would default the next older AA's.
They are exculding some AA's peeps are complaing about like tradeskiling and they are not defaulting Event AA like DoN AA path.

I believe they removed the spell casting subtlety line from the auto grant, so you can choose whether to purchase them or not.

Just wonder if you buy Gold for a month will you lose these autogranted AA's when your gold is up?

I cound not find the post in the 179 pages but I thought I read you can keep all the AA you earn or default just like before once silver cant earn any new AA's unless under the 1K AA cap or bought the unlockers.

I was not going to due them on my main, but after getting a needed AC,HP boost on my SK who I am having trouble finding time to get better augs i went for it on all 3 of my chars I play daily.


Edited, Feb 20th 2014 10:44am by Larth

Edited, Feb 20th 2014 10:47am by Larth

I think thats secondary forte? and yes it is automatically activated..

Not in game so can't truly verify...

But secondary spec doesn't "set" until you cast in a spell school after having the aa. So anyone boosting AA might want to watch that close when the level comes around for it. This is assuming that the character getting the grant has all spell schools at the cap (remember the 1st one you break the cap is set as your specialization whether primary or secondary... if you let divination sit at 25 skill it won't be your secondary spec even if you cast invis 20 times after taking the AA secondary forte).

Heroic characters will most likely go the way Mayong characters did... those particular skills were set at the cap so you had to be mindful immediately of what you wanted as primary specialization. So I think this is as much of an issue in that situation (when it goes live).

Yeah. That's the one. Something to think about when folks who've just been autogranted the AA log in for the first time. Would totally suck, for example, if my wizard logged in and then cast say a conjuration spell as the first thing and oops! I've been holding off on that one precisely because I haven't been sure which school I want to use (I'm torn between alteration and abjuration, but I'm leaning towards alteration). Like I said, would suck to log in, and think "I should refresh my familiar" and not realize that this might be a disaster.

And heaven help me if I for some unknown reason decide to cast eye of tallon or whatever. God that would suck.


Oh. And in response to Snailish. I'm pretty sure my wizard is maxed out on all but one school (it's probably divination). I'd imagine classes with a wider variety of spells are likely to be maxed out in all of them, so basically the first spell you cast after receiving autogrant could very well determine the secondary forte, whether it's what you'd want it to be or not. This may or may not be a big deal. But I can absolutely see this causing some problems and cases for the GMs to deal with.

Edited, Feb 20th 2014 5:46pm by gbaji

Logged in 4 characters today to see how this looks in reality. Purposely chose a level spread:

Level 55 Druid, had 84 assigned AA, after grant had 290. Were nearly all in basic stats in the general tab.

Level 64 Enchanter, had 149 assigned, 593 after the autogrant. Level 55 spell spec AA were part of the 149... I did notice several of the 59 class AA (dire charm, gather mana) that I hadn't gotten to yet so some value there).

Level 67 Enchanter, had 80 assigned, 921 after the autogrant. Still seemed light in the archetype/class categories to me. Wearing defiant gear this character wouldn't get much use out of quite a pile of these AA statwise.

Level 77 necromancer, had 1498 assigned, 2332 after the autogrant. Only really noticed the "fun" aa like raise the dead that I hadn't ever got to.


So basically, you burn a fair chunk of the AAxp bonus curve on the basic stats/resists and tradeskill AAs that they didn't exclude (like new tanaan mastery). I wouldn't necessarily flag autogranting on a new character hitting the 51-59 stretch. At least not without banking 30AA at the fast acquire rate.

My limited sample also suggest that you could push hard to 70 with the autogrant on and still have a lot of the AAxp curve left to burn.

Yeah, I don't doubt it is significant. My 77 necro probably would have been a huge difference if I hadn't been so selectively choosing the 1400+ AA I already had on the character. That was the only character in my list of 4 that had a decent AA count though... any of the others, if I had pushed them to even 70 without doing more AA I think I would feel the same way you do about your warrior.