Andro

I'm new here but not new with Everquest. Started playing EQ1 in Oct. 1999 and when AAs were added I thought they were an awesome idea and most of them were useful.

Started playing EQ2 upon release (no AAs at the time) and moved over to WoW with my friends. I'm sure most of you are familiar with WoW's talent system which is somewhat similiar to AAs and the fact they are painstakingly tweaked and balanced to be appropiate to that class. Love or hate WoW, their talent system is extremely well done and polished.

Now I return to EQ2 after a few years and I'm thinking what mentally retarded monkey comes up with some of this horseshit?? Requiring Wizards or Conjurors to go down a strength line to get certain abilities? Not to mention the plethora of outright useless shit that no idiot would bother using. Either they are downright lazy and don't give a damn about the playerbase or both.

Sylvanking

The ultimate goal is to re-work them and re-sell them to us via $tation Ca$h

Just think the money that could be made with a "LOL buy a class change" potion offered up on SC after the AA's have been re-worked!

Sadari

You can always use the AA's to identify the idiots from the people with half a clue.

And while most classes have at least one AA line/branch that's not very useful, several classes have multiple useful AA specs depending on what they're doing (solo vs. group vs. raid).

Sadari
80 Illusionist

Prucop

almost every single AA line, an end line, involves putting AA points in something thats useless and has either no or barely mediocre use, it's not about X class going down X line that doesn't give any benefits it's about putting 4 points in "increases the damage by 2" style abilities

mafoe

What the fuck are you talking about? What is so bad about "going down the STR line on a mage"? If you had half a clue, you'd know that the line has barely anything to do with the associated attribute.

Better go back to WoW if all you can do is babble stuff like that. There are dozens of choices in each class's AA trees, and you know what? It's easier to balance 3 trees for 6 classes, like in WoW, than 60 trees like in EQ2.

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Dranikdoomwarder

qfe. also probably why the average age for eq2 isn't 12 years old like wow

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Dranikdoomwarder

also this is just plain hypocritical since you needed to do general AAs before anything else. what does run speed have to do with triple backstab?!!?! oh wait.. you spend points in one in order to unlock others. derp derp derp

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Mr-Furious

Insult WoW all you want but the OP has a point that talent points there are very well done, where as here.. much like everything else, it's 100% half assed.

Yeah strength line is good for chanters for example, but if Assilik had a fucking clue, they'd fix all the other bullshit waste in the enchanter tree.. starting with that amazing! wisdom line. just sayin.

Insult WoW all you want, but the simple true.. they're doing way more right than SOE and it's quest to place the whole game on Station Cash/LON

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Mr-Furious

To the OP.

I would imagine most of the balancing of the talent points in WoW is based on the fact that the development team over there uses the 3v3 arena bracket as a means to class balance.

Over here, no arenas.. well.. no arenas that matter. The devs on occasion have said that they use game wide parsing (or something similar) to determine who needs buffs/nerfs. I would assume than unless something from those parses is showing anomolies they don't even look at the acheivement points very often. Hell, they probably dont even remember what half the shit does.

To use Coercers as an example of what goes on in the think tank of SOE.. We have a spell which is a mem blur called Anmesia. With TSO we were given 2 places to modify/upgrade the spell. That's 10 points to spend. Unfortunately, some time ago the dev team decided to make damn near everything in the PVE game (that matters) out right immune to it. Classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.

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Pinski

WoW doesn't have AAs. They have Skill Lines. So stop comparing the 2.

With WoW you basically have 3 classes in 1, and divided up by the Talent System. Thus you get 21 classes, whereas EQ2 has 24 classes, and then the AA system on top of that to improve the class slightly, not to define the class which is what the Talent System does.

This is why you think that the AA system is horrible, while the Talent System is far superior. It's too bad they are 2 different things and aren't comparable.

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Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Dissolution on Nektulos
Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Confirmed on Unrest