Attempting to complete pre-nerf GoD with today's knowledge, organization, and class composition flexibility would be an interesting experiment. Also LDoN raids, I don't think I ever got to experience much of them.
There weren't many LDON raids, I just remember the one dragon that was a small instance. There was a good augment that dropped from it though. Raiding wasn't really LDON's selling point. It was fun for grouping though I thought. Hardcore players will get bored quickly though since a lot of the missions are just rehashes of the same zone with a slightly different layout (instances). Kinda looking forward to doing the Breakdown in Communication augment quest personally again from GoD. Its a weapon augment that you will never upgrade most likely and you'll probably carry it over to your Epic 2.0 in OoW. GoD has some raids that require tradeskills. While I'm sure there will be enough AG earred toons raiding, I do want to mention it incase anyone wants to finish off those trades. Still, a ways to go of course. A long ways off, but when it comes to any post-PoP TLP, I hope that TAKP characters and guilds will be imported over. Or at least the option will be there on a per character basis. I can't see myself going through gearing up my characters again.
I think it'd be a cool challenge (and save a fair amount of dev time) to skip LDoN and LoY and jump straight to hard-mode GoD with TAKP's mechanics. I only vaguely remember GoD, but its brutality at launch really stuck with me!
In the 5 LDoN themes (Everfrost, South Ro, North Ro, Butcherblock and Commonlands) there were 3 raids per theme. Usually 1 of them was lower tier, like Bertox/Saryrn tier loot or Elemental loot and then 2 of them were Time tier loot. Back in the day most guilds just ignored them or did them sparingly. On TLP servers with the more BiS focused raiding style, most guilds will ignore the lower tier raid and focus on the raids with the augments that have the longest staying power. The 25-35 AC Augs, 40% Spell Damage/Heal focus augs, and clickies like single target VoQ, group FoE. The AC augs last in some cases even til today in some niche cases, but in most cases another 6-7 expansions until they're fully replaced. Focus augs are obsoleted by GoD raid gear. Clicky buffs are obsoleted by OoW better buffs. LoY has almost no relevant raid content and would simply be some new spells like Pure Blood/Blood of Nadox for raiders, and cool stuff like baby Torpor for low level shamans etc. GoD with pre-nerf stats would be an absolutely incredible experience if another server came out with that as an option. Echoing Mokli I'd love to see an ability to copy over TAKP characters to keep this server as is with its expansion cap but allow you to carry forward your character. But I have no idea what crazy effort would be required to port over character data to I am assuming a new client.
Our current client couldn't handle past PoP i think, and certainly not without significant work. It would likely make more sense to use another client. As a faithful Mac player on TAKP I would absolutely set up a PC for a chance at continuation of our timeline. I've personally never seen anything past PoP and would love to move my PoP toons forward if possible.
Early Gates/OOW was a fantastic experience. Gates was... brutal. But had a nice mix of challenging content for groups as well as raids, which was nice.
Yea our item database limit alone doesn’t allow this client to add much more than LoY. LDoN and GoD items are beyond the 32600~ cap in out item database. Also if there is any grunt work a simple ogre with limited coding understanding could do to make such a server come to life let me know...
I like the idea of preserving TAKP mostly as-is, but allowing a /testcopy sort of deal to copy a version of a TAKP playerfile over to a spinoff server with additional content. You could even imagine unlocking that /testcopy through an achievement on TAKP, so you'd level to 65 and gear up a bit on TAKP, then fork your toon over to the spinoff server to play through LDoN etc... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, shows what I know! I just know that it was supposed to be 12 groups and figured that that would just get compounded in later expansions.
EQA apparently plans to go beyond PoP when it gets there. The plan is to use a newer client at that point. Maybe the LanternEQ client will be ready (and support TAKP based servers) by then which would likely support Mac too. Talking a couple of years likely at least. Otherwise, I believe the plan is to use one of the later official EQ clients.
This hypothetical server should follow the theme of EverQuest wizards and should be named The Miragul Project. And yea all raid instances from LDoN+ are capped at 54 or lower. In GoD and OoW specifically you are exclusively limited to 54 (9 groups). There are group instances that are 6 limited and theres one raid in an open world for the BiC that is limited to 18 characters. Though moving to a new client like Titanium, the raid window wouldn't have that group limit anyways. It would allow raid leaders to force move character between groups though (imagine...)
Wasn't a major reason GoD was initially so hard, that content was developed for Level 70, but the level cap wasn't raised with the release?
People have said that for years I am not sure I fully believe it. Or at least they did a huge rebalance of the content before it even launched. Because there is no where really you would be grinding 69-70 in GoD. In OoW there are 3-4 zones with level 68-72~ trash mobs for grinding in MPG, RCoD and RSS. But in GoD that isn't the case. Natimbi is 40-50. Qinimi/Barindu/Riwwi are 50-60. Ferubi is 60-65. Sewers/Tipt/Vxed are all 60-65. And that's it for unflagged zones. Then for the flagged zones Kod'Taz/Yxtta/Ikkinz/Qvic they are basically like PoFire/Water with 64-68~ mobs. Uqua/Inkt'uta/Txevu/Tacvi are mostly instanced raids only (Txevu technically is static but is solely for raids). It just seems off to me that there isn't anywhere you're fighting anything but blue cons in GoD when you are 69-70. I suppose this is what Kunark was but after PoP where you were constantly fighting mobs of your level, it seems a bit off. I think mostly it was just hard because a lot of it wasn't properly tested, and the high level community at the time had been complaining about how either easy the previous content was.
Even the trash mobs were tuned high though at first. I think they just added a percentage on top of PoP mobs for attack without testing properly against AC upgrades. I remember charm pets doing insane amounts of damage. They basically carried the group. It's like that in PoP too, just more in GoD. Also, on a side note where most will shame me for this but the armor dyes from LoY were a lot of fun and gave people some real options other than using the illusion trick all the time.
Did any of the expansions re-enable helm graphics. I feel like custom crowns in Velious were peak fashion.
These were implemented poorly and never worked correctly. By Luclin they abandoned them - the Luclin models don't use those custom helms. The invisible horse perk with old models was gone by LoY so using old models is limiting for anything newer than TAKP anyway.
There's a show helm option right in the client at some point after PoP. I imagine lots just turned off helms like me. Otherwise, I think a lot of helms actually didn't have graphics anymore anyway.
This is something I was also thinking about if there were a Miragul style server. Charm actually only worked in unflagged zones. Most notably on pooka (Mephits) in Vxed and Tipt the flag trials. But once you’re into the flagged zones all mobs were immune so for those top tier zones you weren’t able to rely on charmed pets anymore. Im not even sure what my three-box combination would look like for a non-charm zone. I’ve played a round with a few on TAKP but all in relatively easy camps like entrance Water/Fire. I’d be really curious what the top self sufficient 3-box is on GoD. I think some camps and especially the Ikkinz group missions would just outright not be 3-boxable. Would be very cool to have that difficult tier group content available.
When I did the Ikkinz group trials, with elemental and early Time geared characters, I believe we had to bring two clerics and a warrior. It was brutal, and unfair to certain classes, but fun with a capable enough group.
Non-charm GoD trophy trio? Probably WAR/CLR/X, with X depending on slowability, pull challenges, etc.
When do knights get pseudo-defensive discs, btw? Is that GoD-ish era, when warriors have incite too and the war/knight dichotomy sorta blurs?
It was GoD that brought berserker class along with the melee skill revamp. The yellow bar which is fatigue in our version was repurposed to be a new resource called endurance and many of the melee skills use that resource. Items have health, mana and endurance stats.
I think Dragons of Norrath is when knights got their first mini defensive discs (Guard of Righteousness for paladins, Soul Shield for shadowknights).
Sadly yea it took them a long time to flesh out knights. I think they really felt that the base AC returns/skill values and spells made them viable enough. But not having almost any timer based ability to use to mitigate incoming damage was a clear flaw in knight design. DoN introduced the first discipline that mitigated damage and even that was horrible. It was 25% damage mitigated up to 10k damage mitigated total with 15min reuse. Even against Quarm that would disappear in 20 seconds. That line of discs got minor upgrades in TBS / SoF but were still mostly trash. SoD (level 85) was when they really started transforming. Deflection Disc was added as a Fortitude equivalent at level 59, and knights got a small 2-hit rune ability they could spam every 15 seconds. Then finally the following expansion knight discs stopped being horrible. It went from previous expansion mitigating 30k damage to UF mitigating 350k. Deflection disc is one of those things they realized was needed way too late. I love that they only put it at level 59 requirement but it should’ve come in about 8 expansions earlier
Yeah, I can see the benefit for boxing more toons for exping, which can be difficult as other has said when that toon is rather weak. I 6 boxed on orginal al kabor, it was only really useful for doing pick up content or exping by myself. I would always allow others in the group but being able to really delver that extra power to help the group going was pretty fun and I enjoyed the ability make it happen for group members of different abilities.
