Sense Heading: Grinding XP in The Darkened Sea

[Tarvas]

Sense Heading: Grinding XP in The Darkened Sea

As we move into The Darkened Sea, we've made a few changes to ensure that adventuring in the newest content will be the best way to gain experience to advance their characters in both levels and AA points. Playing in the newest content should always be the most attractive, and demolishing content from several expansions ago should not be the fastest way to advance your character.

Once you hit level 101, content released prior to Call of the Forsaken will grant less experience. This includes tasks, rewards, and farming NPCs. If you’re currently planning on banking rewards and tasks from pre-Call of the Forsaken content to help level through The Darkened Sea, you will likely find the rewards to be less-than-awesome once you ding 101. We encourage you to participate in the newest content, and find places in The Darkened Sea to adventure with your friends.

Each Heroic Adventure Will Have a 6-Hour Lock Out

Heroic Adventures are great because they offer scaling content to players of a variety of levels. This content has a long shelf life for players since it can be accessed by players of a wide range of levels.

It’s not really a fun experience to sit in one Heroic Adventure for hours and days at a time, grinding experience to advance a character. Adventure is all about going out into the world of Norrath and doing things! To address this, once The Darkened Sea launches we have placed a lock out of 6-hours on each Heroic Adventure. Our goal is to reward players that explore more of the content, without punishing the players that prefer running a few Heroic Adventures a day with their friends.

We wanted to let you all know about this prior to the launch of The Darkened Sea, so you can start planning how to spend your time in this expansion. We’re excited about the 21st expansion to EverQuest launching on November 11th, 2014 and we hope you are too!

If you’re an All-Access member, you can purchase and play this expansion two weeks early (starting on Tuesday, October 28) and you can take 10% off your purchase of either the Standard or Collector’s Edition of The Darkened Sea!

[Caladain]

If they mean that there will be a six hour lockout on CoTF HAs too that is going to piss off a lot of people.
Almost can't wait to read the EQ forums. Yes, they have forums too! Sadly no apps to vote on though.

[Glauri]

Forums? We have a forum?? Amazing!

[Derdarr]

I believe yes its a six hour lockout on any heroic adventure, so you can't just pick one and repeat ad nauseum.

[Sharrien]

The xp change I can live with, although devaluing my banked task rewards pisses me off. But the lockout is really going to suck.

[Goofydoofy]

The XP change is bullshit if they don't provide new Hot Zones in the correct expansions without the experience decrease.

[Caladain]

The thread over there is getting quite entertaining.

SoE just farted in their space suit while pooping in the punch bowl.

[Glauri]

Banked rewards should be granted at the exp rate at which they were earned. Future rewards for these older missions, etc. could be at a reduced rate to encourage folks to explore the new expansion. Anything else isn't fair imo.

[Goofydoofy]

Yea, there is no need to mess with the exp. They must not have much to do. A new expansion doesn't warrant changing prior zone exp.

[Meso]

Every expansion has brought with it a nerf of exp in old content. Someone just noticing this?

[Glauri]

I don't mind older content being worth less exp. Not at all. But I do mind having banked rewards being worth less. Why permit banking of AA if their value degrades at each expansion?

Have adventures and missions worth less AA once they are no longer 'new', but to degrade what was already earned is totally unfair. Bad enough that, without having seen them, I can bet that any and all "new" AA will be more of the same, as will the spells for Level 101-105. Depressing.

[Meso]

the stored mission rewards with set AA reward values should be safe.

[Goofydoofy]

I never noticed. I don't go backwards much. But, if I had old shit to do, I'd still want the same exp for doing it.

[Caladain]

They said if you have anything stored from RoF or prior that it won't be worth as much once you hit 101.

[warador]

i still havent seen anything about preorders the 28th is only 6 days away did i overlook something

[Derdarr]

No preorder just buy it when its released.

[Rashod]

It seems like the easy thing to do would have been to make the new levels take proportionally more total exp to level and leave the rewards for older zones the same, but make the newer zones give more xp, gosh I thought that they would do this anyways. Hell they could have gotten away with not saying anything and I wouldn't have thought that the tasks/mobs were actually giving me less xp at 101 and would have just thought that 101-102 is more total xp than 100-101 was.

[Glauri]

OMG Rashod, that SO reminds me of hell levels! My warrior was level 30 at least half a dozen times! lol

[Caladain]

Did your warrior tank? I mean your shammy doesn't heal.

[Glauri]

My warrior was likely far better at playing her class than my shammy is, sad to say.

[Tarvas]

An update to this.

Hello all,

Thank you all for taking your time to share your thoughts with us on these changes. We hear you and based on your feedback we plan on making changes to how we're handling Heroic Adventures. We still want to make sure that the most difficult content is more rewarding and we want to incentivize variety. We also don't want Heroic Adventures to feel punishing.

We have some new changes in mind that are more about providing bonuses to players that seek out challenging content and choose to complete a variety of Heroic Adventures, and less about restrictions against players that choose not to. We'll be communicating these changes with you soon. They will not be ready by Tuesday for The Darkened Sea early access on October 28th.

Until these new updates are ready to announce, feel free to continue conversations about The Darkened Sea in other threads.