f13.net

This review seems to have become the authoritative one. 200 people viewing the thread when I was there this morning and 25K views in about a day. It's linked in damn near every MMORPG forum I know of.

EQ druids (http://eq2.forums.thedruidsgrove.org/showthread.php?t=7973)

And today's /GU for fun. The guy's perhaps overqualified for the post but he somehow became linked to the casual gamer in EQ.

/GU comic (http://www.gucomics.com/)

The fact that some wanker ran around posting a link to it everywhere, surely doesn't make it authoritative, does it?

Given that there's no absolute in terms of reviews, popularity and commonality tend to dominate. I've also noticed within communities that once a document acheives a certain level of critical mass it ceases to be questioned and becomes part of the foundation of future discussions. Especially in something so cross connected as the MMORPG community.

But yes, it was mostly tongue in cheek...

I thought Lark was pretty much spot-on. I too have been playing since early F&F, and also bought a 3 ghz system (Although mine has a 9800 pro) to play the game. My experience has been for the most part identical, although I have now set the game on the back burner.

I think she's spot on except when she thinks you need to have a punitive death system in place to have fun in the game. You don't. EQ2's death system is no worse than any others out there, other than that stupid shard recovery thing. I also never saw a waypoint to my corpses; but then, after level 6, I never saw another waypoint again, even when using the map's supposed waypoint feature.

Currently, EQ2's death system is identical to DAoC's except in DAoC you recover your gravestone instead of a shard and you don't take a hit to your stats either, just experience.

I have a question. How big is the stat hit that you take? Is it cumulative for multiple deaths? Is there a max % of stat loss you can take or can it just keep adding up until you're too gimp to do anything? Do your stats recover over time/exp gain? How quick is the regain? Is it like the AC Vitae system? Can you lose a level to death in EQ2?

You can't lose a level to death, because you never lose experience. You just acquire debt, and until that debt is paid, you earn half experience towards leveling, half towards your debt. The stat hit you take isn't really that big a deal, at least not that I've noticed, unless you attack something while under revive sickness (lasts about 2 minutes). It is cumulative, AFAIK. Your stats recover over time.

The worst impact death has had on me is the item decay. Your items take a fixed percentage of damage on death. If you don't repair them, when they reach 0%, they drop off of you into your inventory. If you don't have enough inventory space, they drop into "overflow" inventory. Yes, you are nekkid. They do not adequately explain this in any quest that I saw. I was just one day dead and nekkid. Luckily it didn't drop all my stuff on the ground, but it was still annoying. You go to a Mender merchant to either buy repair supplies (which I never used) or have the vendor repair your gear.

Ah, so it has the "gravestone" from DAoC, the experience debt of CoH, the Vitae system of AC, and the equipment degradation of SB for a death penalty. Interesting. I like them all except for the equipment degrading on death. They just couldn't make a game where you don't risk losing equipment in some way.

SOE: Hey players! You don't lose equipment on death anymore. Sure, it's totally trashed when you respawn, but hey... you still have it! Isn't that great?

But seriously, at least it can be repaired a la DAoC. Now, when you repair it, does it have a durability value that gets decremented so that eventually you will be unable to fully repair the armor? I can't see that you would need to be repairing equipment a lot at low levels, but at higher levels where the equipment has to last you for longer periods of time, I could see how a player might possibly get to a point where they need to replace the equipment due to decay and not to just out-leveling it. This can be good for crafters and that aspect of the economy. It could be bad for items that are uber and need to be farmed. Just some wonderings.

I have no idea if there is any kind of permanent decay, at which point an item is just not repairable. It hasn't happened to any of my gear yet, but the stuff I've had a long while has only been around for 5 levels or so.

There's a death FAQ here:

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=faq&message.id=7


Once you drop 5 (unrecovered) spirit shards you stop losing stats so that caps your loss.


After 3 days real time (in game or out) you automatically recover your spirit shard. Exp gain doesn't recover stats, from what I understand, only shard recovery.

Originally they said that after a certain point, repairing an item would become so expensive that it would basically be impossible to do so. They have since backed away from that and there's no mention of such a thing in the item FAQ.

3 days? Wow, that's rather long. Do you know what the stat loss is per death? Is it a decreasing % of a stat every death? Or is it more a 5% (for example) loss per death up to 5 deaths? Is that 3 day figure for maximum stat loss or just one death stat loss? Is there any other way to regain lost stats other than time or shard recovery? Haemish said the stat hit he took wasn't noticable so maybe it's trivial, but why even have it then? At some point it must hinder the player. I'd prefer that it didn't. I would rather see stats regen at something like 30 minutes to recover your stats from one death.

Soukyan, since EQ2 is so much like EQ1, I'd argue that the same hold true for stats for both games.  For the most part, stats are meaningless.  They have the slightest chance to affect certain calculations... you can get a 40 point strength buff, and it will only be noticable if you parse the logfile and see the slight increase to your average damage.  Certain stats affect your mana and hitpoint pools, but your level affects them more, and items that give direct bonuses to them are more effective until you are higher in level.

Example, for mana, stat/5*level gave you your base mana pool.  Base INT is 100, so even losing 5% of your stats on death would lose you 1 point of mana per level.  At level 10 with 100 int, you have 200 mana...  the loss of 10 max mana when you die shouldn't be a big deal.  If you die several times, yes, it'll add up...  but still not be catastrophic.  Stats don't matter enough in EQ for it to be.

If they've changed that in EQ2, then it might mean more, but I doubt they have.

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Alkiera

Cool. Thanks for the info, Alkiera.

My hear really had to sink with that review.  I have argued that while EQ2 was always intended to be EQ1 with a graphic upgrade that will cannabilize that market - that may not even happen - what a cluster fuck.

Great link - my thanks.

About the only thing EQ2 can rest its hat on is the graphics - and this compare contrast posting of screen shots illustrating how graphics have been recently tuned down - is extremely damaging:

http://eq2.forums.thedruidsgrove.org/showthread.php?t=7973&page=11&pp=15