EverQuest 2 Week Part 4
Today marks the end of Epic Slant’s EverQuest 2 week and it has been quite exciting for me to talk about the game I so dearly love. I realize that some of the topics I covered weren’t exactly “current news” but they were of great interest to me. It also needs to be said that I’m really pleased with how the game has progressed while I’ve been gone and I’m stoked to see what is to come with the new expansion. To close out the week I think it is important to talk about the hottest topic around: loot.
Mudflation and Statistic Creep
It is inevitable in MMOs that you’ll start to see mudflation within an expansion or two. Developers will always need to find new rewards to excite players and that generally means greater and new statistics on items. It is in this regard that I am quite conservative. I don’t believe in squaring stats for an expansion. If five strength is good in expansion one I only want to see ten or so in the next one, not 25. Many MMOs out there abuse this rule and really inflate their games to a ridiculous degree. For the most part, however, EverQuest 2 has kept this down. Statistics now are quite obviously far higher than they were at release but my gear from three expansions ago is still average. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
EverQuest 2 does suffer from statistic creep, though. This is a term that essentially means adding new statistics to increase the power of classes when the basic ones aren’t enough. These would be things like critical chance, critical damage modifier, straight DPS increases and the like. SOE has added a whole lot of these new statistics into the game and made them readily available to everyone and overly abundant. To clarify my point I want to look at one example. The statistic that is abused the most in MMOs is critical chance. The whole notion of a critical chance is that it is a “rare” occurrence where you will do substantially more damage or healing. Traditionally, this was one of those great things that happened sometimes to turn a fight around. With statistic glut you get the exact opposite. Critical chance is so easy to collect in a lot of MMOs it becomes the norm. So instead of having a regular occurrence and a critical occurrence you essentially create a parallel set. If you critical that is a normal, expected result. If you don’t critical then that is a “sad hit.” Others might argue that I’m exaggerating but the raid game and high end group encounters are based around this principle. Critical chance should never become more likely to occur than regular chance.
I was also quite sad to see that EQ2 allowed for another kind of statistic creep. This one is more sinister and is the rage lately with developers. I call it gating by gear. Instead of making mobs difficult on their own merit and requiring skill, tactics and a certain general level of statistics, you simply create a new statistic that decides if you can win or not. In EQ2’s case you have critical mitigation. Regardless of your tank’s ability they will eventually need some level of this statistic to win. Everything else becomes less relevant. Warhammer Online did this with wards and LotRO did it with radiance. It is a system I’m not fond of and hopefully SOE won’t go as far with it as the previous two examples did.
Mythical Weapons
Some time ago I lamented the fact that MMOs just didn’t seem to put out epic weapons in the tradition of EverQuest. The developers at SOE took a cue from Norrath’s history and created a new set of class specific weapons in EQ2. These are more commonly known as the “mythicals.” I’m a huge fan of this sort of thing as long as all parties involved realize that an item of this magnitude directly affects class balance. If it affects class balance, you can bet your money that it will also affect raid and group balance. The item eventually stops being a loot item and becomes a “must have.” That is the case with the EQ2 mythicals.
The power difference between having your mythical and not is pretty astounding for some classes. As a templar I pretty much have to have mine to be competitive and to achieve high end success. Going forwards these items will need to be taken into account until such a time as they’re no longer relevant. This took a while in EQ and I can see it being the same for EQ2. The positive note behind this is that mythicals are not easy to get but they are not reserved only for the elite. A competent group of casual raiders can achieve success and gear their guild out. From what I’ve seen SOE did this by the book and met a lot of the needs I brought up in my article about epic weapons. I hope to have my own shortly!
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Tags: EverQuest II, Loot, MMO
