colonelfouts said:Keep them for a while and then nerf the spawn.
That in lies the problem, a disparity of players who have broken or overpowered items. Going by their position with Pantheon on retroactive fixes and how that applied when Jason "Ikik" Weimann talked about progression or classic servers for Pantheon, it appears they aren't in favor of having that broken or OP drop to continue through both in the current iteration and again when progressing through a classic or progression version of Pantheon.
I'd agree with you in that it's fine if OP items do drop. It will happen every once in a while as tuning is a trial issue. However the fix should above all else be retroactive in nature.
This is just my opinion, but i think "those OP items" really made allot of memories for allot of people yes, they were powerful, and everyone wanted them. But that also made it important to you.. its something you strived to obtain, and im sure there are 100's of people just on this forum that could tell you stories of how they finally got theirs and their trials in getting it. IMO these OP items made memories, because they were so good you WANTED to make sure you had it, whatever the cost. if there were not items like this people would just say oh... yea its ok but i dont need it, therefore passing up that content. IMO those werent "that" OP i recall eq1 and eq2 casters w/out mana stone still getting raid spots. bottom line the person makes the character, the equipment is earned and I honestly beleive if there arent "WOW I WANT THAT" items then your going to take the path of least resistance to get to endgame goals...
There were over 530 items off the top of my head up to Darkhollow expansion in the game that had right click effects. Easily over 330-360+ were very important and valuable but generally not overpowered. Most of those were heavily sought after. The issue isn't about being OP or not but that there was a cut off point and you had this massive disparity among players regarding those items. The reason people wanted those items so badly in progression servers or EQ EMUs was because they knew they were OP and gave them an itemization and wealth advantage. This normally isn't an issue if they allowed it to continue to drop as it is allowing others to obtain said item.
It also wasn't so much an issue of just disparity but also in how strong the effect is. Manastone for instance allowed the Clerics to have unlimited mana by sacrificing health for mana, then Complete Healing themselves. When they have health items, Symbol and Resolution, they can hit almost 2k health in Vanilla which allows for them to push 400-500 mana every 25-30 seconds. That's 80-100 mana a tick regen. This can also be done by the Cleric to boost another caster's mana in a similar fashion. This alone was a balance issue and like the attack slow spells such as Torgor's Insects and Shiftless Deeds as well as Complete Heal, they allowed for a power dynamic that was grossly mismatched with the content or intention of the product. While Slow and CH forced the developers to redesign raid content in Kunark and beyond to require those spells, the items described above had to be altered.
Now, I agree there are those who love rushing through a game to obtain as much as they can in hopes that said item will be nerfed leaving you for something to show off and make you feel as though your special or superior in some way. It also gives that player the ability to sell said item for an exhorbitant amount of money allowing them to become extremely wealthy. While I'm very much a capitalist at heart in reality, within a game however, where the dynamics are much more limited, rigid and dependent on a balanced structure, this is something that should not be allowed to happen for numerous reasons.
None of us really know though so this is mostly conjecture at this point and while they have hinted at their position numerous times in the past to include more recently, I personally hope this is an area they can maintain a continuity within the game for balancing reasons. Everquest was managed a bit poorly in this department not just with a few click items but more so, the structure of attack speed slows and complete heal.
colonelfouts said:If anyone has the foresight and knowledge to get them its us early supporters....at least that part of the reason I preordered.
I danced around the topic because I wanted to entertain the discussion but I'll be more clear. They have stated that this circumstance will not be happening in Pantheon six times since 2016. It was reiterated in July's roundtable as well. I was just trying to detail to those who may read it as to the issues it created in Everquest and why the model was generally changed in later MMORPGs where retroactive changes to include existing items or other things were initiated.
Oh boy.. I am all for clickies that provide some cosmetic or passive bonus (extended food or drink, etc). But nothing that is OP in my opinion.
I had collected many of the illusion clicky masks on my bard in EQ1. The only ones I didnt have were GM event exclusives that I did not get the chance to participate in. It was fun getting them!
In support of certain kinds of clickies:
In old EQ the plane of sky had bonus class quests, outside of the god-awful mage epic quest, but in the same hard to get to quest area where each class would quest for a very nifty item. Usually it was a one charge, and needed to be recharged with a mana battery at the first island in sky but it was another classes ability made possible for different class. I remember for mages it was a duodenian(sp?) shielding ring, which allowed a mage to cast the cleric invulnerability buff on themselves. What sandboxed out of that was, a mage could go to the hole, click on the ring and jump in the hole and survive the fall and then coth people down. Or run sacrifice distraction and pull a bunch of monsters away to then die, while others ran the other way to then allow a rogue to drag them back or a SK or necro to reanimate you. it was a very nifty, but not OP thing to have.
Shamans I think got a clicky feign death ring, which was big at the time when they didnt have that ability, so shamans had a monk ability. Not a game breaker due ot the limited use but again one of those certain situation things.
These were clickies that had one or two time use before they needed to be recharged - well the mage item did- but were kept even through higher levels because they were so handy to have even 10-20-30 levels later before they candied up everything and made everything potionable for everyone.
arazons said:Oh boy.. I am all for clickies that provide some cosmetic or passive bonus (extended food or drink, etc). But nothing that is OP in my opinion.
That's the problem though, isn't it? What might not be seen as OP when the item is initially release could very well become OP later on. So long as you (meaning everyone) accepts that things deemed OP (or otherwise adversely affects some game mechanic or fundamental game tenent) by the developers must be altered both retroactively and going forward then I'm all for having lots of clickies.
Vandraad said:arazons said:Oh boy.. I am all for clickies that provide some cosmetic or passive bonus (extended food or drink, etc). But nothing that is OP in my opinion.
That's the problem though, isn't it? What might not be seen as OP when the item is initially release could very well become OP later on. So long as you (meaning everyone) accepts that things deemed OP (or otherwise adversely affects some game mechanic or fundamental game tenent) by the developers must be altered both retroactively and going forward then I'm all for having lots of clickies.
Yes! It is impossible to go back though and retroactively remove whatever OP effect/ability that someone has gotten out of an item. That would involve rolling the character back to a point prior to them having said item. Because how do you go back and recalculate RNG rolls on dozens, hundreds or thousands of fights that person may have used said item on.
With that said, that pretty much only leaves something like an illusion, or special character effect, or something insignifigant like an extended food or drink duration.
Anything that does damage, or heals, or provides a buff.. is subject to personal opinions on it being "too powerful". Remove any doubt, by not adding any such items.
arazons said:Yes! It is impossible to go back though and retroactively remove whatever OP effect/ability that someone has gotten out of an item. That would involve rolling the character back to a point prior to them having said item. Because how do you go back and recalculate RNG rolls on dozens, hundreds or thousands of fights that person may have used said item on.
I should have been more clear in that the item, all existing items would be retroactively changed and all future drops would have the new stats. This does mean the players who had the inbalanced item benefited from it and that cannot be undone. This just puts much more emphasis on developers using actual player to thoroughly test new content to minimize such items ever making it into release. I have been amazed at times looking at some items across the games I've played and immediatley seeing how stupidly overpowered and unbalanced an item is and wondered how it ever get past QA. In EQ1 the Donal's Chestplate of Mourning...a right-click Complete Heal. Yes, it had a 30 second cast time and by itself it isn't overpowered. But when you have 10 clerics all with that BP, the combined mana-free complete heal every 3 seconds is just stupidly overpowered.