On the SK, I'm excited for... big HT lifetaps and a snare that don't suck gear options with focus effects weapon options with decent DPS On the cleric, Divine Arbitration Radiant Cure On the chanter, Total Domination, of course! dying hilariously to badass charmpets On the bard, Fading Memories! Boastful Bellow Psalm of Veeshan What about you? What fun or powerful PoP abilities are you excited about?
Druid: Flight of Eagles, Spirit of the Wood, and Radiant Cure SK: HT, DPS, Aura of Darkness resist debuff, not needing to carry a container around to summon a single corpse (can use tiny coffins now) What about our current snares suck? lol
Ooh yeah, summon corpse with tiny coffins will be nice. I dislike the cast time on Cascading Darkness. Festering Darkness will be nice in that respect, but hardly a game-changer.
Oh I never use that one, I use Dooming Darkness, it is always enough to stop mobs and is 4 seconds, a little less with hybrid haste.
I'm looking forward to shedding a single tear every time something with furious bash drops. I am also looking forward to accidentally 1 hit KOing some poor silk caster with divine arbitration.
I will shed a single tear that necromancers most high-profile AA is literally performance art Looking forward to suspend minion, lower resist check on the new darkness snare, and defensives.
Necro aas are pretty bad overall, suspend minion is good but nothing beats doing wake the dead on rallos Zek after your guilds first kill. Klage and I used to duel each other on ahr kills and both do it and have the ahrs beating on each other
One of the biggest things I’m looking forward to is a non-annoying bind point. For the past 3-4 years my characters have been bound at either the ToV spires in Western Wastes or on the hills near Vex Thal. It’s only lately now that Vex Thal is a 4-way rotation that I’ve started to cycle my bind point to a less annoying spot 75% of the time. I will greatly enjoy a casual bind spot in Plane of Tranquility where there is no death loop potential. Who knows though maybe I’ll spice it up and bind underwater to relive those dangerous bind spawn days. For abilities… Hand of Ro on druid for a mostly one stop shop resist Debuff. Ro’s Fierying Sundering no more! Flight of Eagles for convenience. Command of Tunare charming is always good fun. Spirit of the Wood to have a valuable MGB tool on raids. Too many nights MGB button goes unclicked in Luclin. Radiant Cure to casually clear Malo and Tash kind of debuffs. For itemization druids get a bunch of cool PoP toys. Ornate BP is group Regen, Elemental legs are group DS. Ornate legs are best root. LMM scimitar and TT orb are solid DoTs. PoWater D1 grouped hammer is a low resist 450 DD proc and TT hammer is a low resist 750 DD proc. I will enjoy the return of melee druid! For my other characters… Fade on bard, DArb on cleric, 7 second Divine Stun on Paladin, Command of Druzzil/Total Domination on Enchanter, pet weaponry summons on mage.
EXP tests on Dev have found AA per kill solo in T2/T3 zones around 3-10%. Assuming a group of 6 you’re more looking at 1-4% AA per kill. In elementals around 8-22% AA per kill. This is without PoFire so I expect the upper range to increase slightly when considering the C2/Tables camp. Assuming a group of 6 you’re looking at about 3-10% AA per kill I’m guessing. But the thing I’m finding is that if you’re entering PoP with most of the Luclin AAs you want, most classes only have about 50-100 good AAs. Not much grinding needed to do.
All my exping / grouping stopped after the Brutal Exp Nerfs of 2020, so there are alts with full VT gear and not even Baron titles. Think I have maybe five chars out of 20+ that are "done" with Luclin AAs (read: have the more useful ones done). Looking forward to hopefully having a reason to log in and socialize outside of raids again.
Really the AA nerfs of 2020 I’ve not found to be extremely terrible. Personally I only have 2 characters with enough AAs where if PoP launched tomorrow I’d feel like I got all the important ones. But my problem is less with the EXP rate and more with lack of things to aim for while EXPing. I’ve done 15 VT keys, 10+ VP keys, atleast one of every class epic, 3 Sigil Earrings, filled basically every classes spellbook except rare raid spells etc. I just don’t have the patience to sit in Ssra or some other exp camp and grind mobs for no purpose other than EXP. PoP however will have plenty of item/quest/spell objectives for me to aim for that will grant solid passive EXP. I will say I think it is silly level 66 mobs like some of the Concillium Report and some Kael giants provide less EXP than level 55 mobs due to being outside the +/- 5 level range rule. This is what Torven found in his logs/testing but it seems very stupid code for them to have implemented in the first place. Granted this issue disappears in PoP since there’s no level 71+ trash mobs that people kill for exp. But yea once PoP is out no one will basically ever visit non-PoP zones for EXP purposes.
In no particular order.... Nearly everything is an outdoor zone! Charming loroks. Divine arbitration. A much better spot heal. Radiant cure. Deeper in pop, FRENZIED INITIATE!!!11one
Great, I love outdoors! I always get lost in dungeons, so I typically avoid them lol Are there many more new zones? Are they big?
Most are quite large actually. I think most agree that play here that the PoP era was EQ's hayday and we are soon to be entering that. It really is such a great expansion. Everything from the music to the zone and raid design is pretty well done. I played on live for many years afterwards and while some other expansions were also great (SoF - a close second IMO, OoW, TBS, TSS, HoT actually too), i still feel that PoP was the best overall. Check out the maps at the bottom of this page to get an idea of the zone layout: http://www.allakabor.com/eqatlas/atlas.html
Shroud of Stealth is a great one! Such a class-defining ability. It's wild that rogues didn't get uberstealth til PoP. @Mokli, I'd love to play on a forever-GoD server. That expansion was so hard on release, lol. I think it'd keep raid guilds stretching for a long time.
I actually liked the raiding a lot. There was a raid or two where you needed a GM tailor, a raid where you had to use specific types of weapons, some clever raids.
No, that was OoW, which was the 2nd part of GoD that raised the level cap to what GoD should have had. I didn't enjoy GoD at 65, but it was much more fun at 70.
Best era is OoW era. Can stretch it to Depths of Darkhollow for the best raids, or Deserts of Ro for extra content in the lvl 70 range.
As others have mentioned above, the neutral, safe bind zone in PoT is going to be wonderful. Though I haven't had a severe level losing deathloop in Luclin, I have had a few minor ones while being bound at VT. People train garbage over there and before you know it, you're closing the client, /qing out, whatever in order to avoid the loop. Nowhere near as serious as the ones I had in Velious being bound at ToV, or in Kunark, being bound at Sebilis. AA For the Paladin Of course as Faults stated out, my initial AA spending will be going towards defensive AA's. Boring, but I would rather be boring in this case. Hand of Piety AA - An instant cast, mana free, group heal that heals 750hp to every group member. Each successive rank increases that healing ability to 250, to a max of 1250hp. I suspect this will be able to crit, but I don't know 100%. If it can crit, amazing. If not, the AA is still beyond useful. Only downside is a 36min cooldown. Fervent Blessing AA - Reduces the recast time on LoH, 12min by rank. The current unmodified LoH time is 72min. With the AA, 36min. This may not seem like a lot, but when tackling challenging content it means you get to LoH twice as often in the same time frame. This is of course after the AA in Luclin that provides a full heal, so it because an even more powerful utility. Situations unfold fast in high DPS situations, being able to get that LoH in there and save your shaman or something is always such a great feeling. Rush to Judgement AA - Reduces the recast time of Divine Stun, a new AA stun we got in Luclin. This AA reduces the time between Divine Stun recasts., 7 seconds per rank. Initially Divine Stun is 30sec cast time, so with the 21 second time reduction we end up with a 9sec recast time. Nice boost to aggro, mana free. These are all solid new abilities focused on more healing, more aggro, and more defensive. Considering the AoE heavy expansion, these new abilities and upgrades on old ones will be valued. Spells I won't go into the deep breakdown of all the new heal spells, but we get a 850hp 0.8sec heal used to quickly prop up a group member, another group heal, and a 1125hp heal, 5sec cast time general heal. This along with a ton of stun upgrades, self only armor buff with mana regen/hp/ac, a 20 poison/disease 5 curse counter cure spell. Gear Too much to go over here and still way too much for me to learn. Main weapon I know I want is the Hopebringer. It has a proc for a direct 150hp heal, no buff icon so it won't bounce due to full buff slots, and it of course has a chance to critical heal from the AA's. This is in comparison to the Sol Ro weapon off of Jiva which procs a group heal, but it's a HoT and takes up a buff slot. In general though, gear with focus effects will be appreciated as well. So tons of great things coming to this class come PoP. This is the payoff for maining one from Classic - Velious. Luclin to a lesser extent, though with Luclin AA there was a lot of improvement to the class.