Scott was so good. His willingness and push to have people communicating with the community really did a lot of great shit.Echoes of Faydwer improved the quality aspect. By The Shadow Odyssey, it was perfected.
Sentinel's Fate was awesome! But its followup, Destiny of Velious, took a giant nosedive in quality for zone / quest layout.
Dave Georgeson pushed a lot of that executively; I can hardly fault the team from that era. He killed morale of both teams and took valued talent and put them on EQNext, which effectively was a death march. I only have a few second-hand accounts about that fiasco, namely from Dave Mark of Intrinsics AI, and Shawn Lord's various interviews where no one wanted to touch on the subject.
Scott Hartsman, being a technical person and designer himself, can be attributed to TSO era EQ2's highest quality expansions. Rift's launch was a testament to that ability.
Echoes of Faydwer improved the quality aspect. By The Shadow Odyssey, it was perfected.
Sentinel's Fate was awesome! But its followup, Destiny of Velious, took a giant nosedive in quality for zone / quest layout.
Dave Georgeson pushed a lot of that executively; I can hardly fault the team from that era. He killed morale of both teams and took valued talent and put them on EQNext, which effectively was a death march. I only have a few second-hand accounts about that fiasco, namely from Dave Mark of Intrinsics AI, and Shawn Lord's various interviews where no one wanted to touch on the subject.
Scott Hartsman, being a technical person and designer himself, can be attributed to TSO era EQ2's highest quality expansions. Rift's launch was a testament to that ability.
Scott was so good. His willingness and push to have people communicating with the community really did a lot of great shit.
I tried it out again about 5 years ago and quickly realised that just by lvl 20 I was starting to stack things high. WoW understood this with their periodical purges of abilities. 10 buttons to push in combat - including situational ones - is probably more than enough to keep things good, and if you want some complexity, just add some form of combos, not just a shit ton of different abilities each with 10 levels you can spam...I've tried to come back to EQ2 a few times, and it's always the same. I install the game, log in my character, see my hotbars with like 70 abilities, log off and uninstall.
You can put a bunch of the abilities in macros in whatever order you want. You can condense down the 30 or so abilities into 5-8 macros.I tried it out again about 5 years ago and quickly realised that just by lvl 20 I was starting to stack things high. WoW understood this with their periodical purges of abilities. 10 buttons to push in combat - including situational ones - is probably more than enough to keep things good, and if you want some complexity, just add some form of combos, not just a shit ton of different abilities each with 10 levels you can spam...
One thing though... I have been looking at some streams of EQ2 after this thread flared up again. Did they redo the UI at some point? Seems different.
Heroic opportunities yes although it doesn't require specific classes I don't think, just specific roles (tank, healer etc)Didn’t eq2 have cross class group skill combos? Like “please take the SK in the group you can do this!”
If I recall you could sort of game the system and make it more likely to get certain ones you want as long as the team was doing things the right way, right? I feel like there was a heal or mana regen that was always super useful. For a three or four person group it was pretty handy.
I think it was Mage starter, Scout enhancer to get a chance at the most common group power regen. Each tree has three or four different outcomes of varying probability. There are some absolutely busted ones if you can do the full Scout -> Priest -> Mage -> Fighter combo, but it typically requires coordination and people to hold their CDs.