The announced removal of Critical Mitigation will coincide with the conversion of Yellow and Red Crit Mit adornments into Health adornments. So why will the replacement adornments have less Health (less than 250 points each) than White health adornments? According to Omougi, it’s because the EQ2 team thinks we should have other viable choices, like DPS. Adornments should be about choice!
From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums:
Our goal with these adornment and spell conversions is to give you guys something in the place of nothing essentially. Before, you were playing a zero-sum game if you had enough crit mit. If you didn’t have enough crit mit, you couldn’t do the encounters — period. All these adornments and spells did is bring you up to a threshold. If you were past that threshold, it does nothing for you.
Now, [while] these adornments and spells actually do increase your survivability at all times – equating the amount of crit mit lost to an equivalent form of HP doesn’t really work out, because any amount of HP is infinitely better than a threshold stat with no use. If you were slotting your adornments for survivability before, you are still slotting them for survivability with HP – the only change is the adornments have been made more powerful in their actual effectiveness with crit mit out of the picture.
This change equates to a free survivability gain across the board, and we need to be very careful with numbers at first to ensure things do not get drastically easier. Changing the difficulty of content is not the goal here – changing the accessibility of content is.
A point which has been made by several raiders on the official forums as well as Flames is that the top end guilds already have more than enough Crit Mit on all their characters to meet the requirements of the zones they’re doing. These changes only affect up-and-coming guilds which are trying to do harder content, but can’t because they haven’t spent months farming obsolete gear whose only saving grace is Crit Mitt.
An oft-seen comment is “The EQ2 team will just replace needing 290 Crit Mit with needing 100k health to survive.” Omougi has a great response to this:
A few more HP is possibly the difference between an AE one-shotting and being survivable. We really don’t want guilds to “force” their members into slotting for survivability if they are trying to push progression. If the HP difference on the adornments was significantly higher, people would feel the need to stack up on HP adorns, similar to how they feel the need to stack up on crit mit adorns now.
We are trying to make customizing your gear with adornments a viable option while progressing through content. If we make an adornment choice too powerful, then there really isn’t much choice there…especially if what you are “forced” into adorning isn’t what your class is about. Many mages and scouts would really prefer to slot more adornments to increase their DPS, but they are forced into critmit adorns in order to not hinder their guild’s chance of progress. We really don’t want to replace crit mit adorns with hp adorns and have essentially the same problem.
and some great news about the relatively limited choice of adornments we have now:
Now, our available choices need some work, specifically with mage options. We are trying to alleviate the problem by allowing more adornments to go in more slots (critbonus, potency, etc), so that scouts do not get more benefit from this change than mages. Adding more adornment choices in the future is definitely something we want to do.
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Gninja Talks New and Old Mercenaries, Mechanics
In a stream of responses to two threads discussing Mercenaries, Gninja answered several questions and provided useful information about the current and next waves of mercenaries. With a recent update, the number of mercenaries has increased to twenty (20) and mercenaries are now avilable in all 6 cities. Although they lack some of the innovative features and options of EverQuest Mercenaries, they are still one of the more popular features of the recently released Age of Discovery features expansion.
Mercenaries New & Old
Let’s take a look at the list of Mercenaries by class. This was posted by Slayacissa of Permafrost:
That leaves just Beastlord, Bruiser, Fury, Coercer, and Illusionist with no mercenary.
After the jump, we talk about Mercenary Confidence, the “In Over Their Head” debuff, mercenary types, and where you can post your feedback on getting different types of mercenaries added.
Merc Confidence: “In Over Their Head”
One of the most talked about limits placed on non-fighter Mercenaries in EQ2 is the “In Over Their Head” mechanic. Mercenaries will fight for you, but the pay isn’t necessarily worth dying for! If too many (or too powerful) enemies are wailing on your hired merc, they will cower in the corner and lose much effectiveness until the situation changes.
According to Gninja:
This came up in the context of the Forgotten Pools where Stamper, the inquisitor mercenary, stopped helping on the first named that drops noxious “goo” which players must avoid.
Players have noted that mercenaries under this effect seem to stop all other actions and just stand there cowering. According to Gninja, they don’t stop fighting, healing, or curing, but instead their effectiveness is reduced:
Gninja opened up the idea of adding other types of mercs that focus on certain tasks or roles in a group:
Player Response
Not everyone is impressed with the Mercenary AI. kahonen had this comment:
LuckyPSD had a similar response:
A few Frequently Asked Questions
When asked about Mercenaries using Area of Effect (AoE) attacks which tend to attract the attention of nearby enemies, Gninja had this response:
Even though mercenaries are now spread out to all 6 cities (excluding Maj’dul), remember you only have to track them down in their home city once. Thereafter, they will make an appearance in your home city when needed. From Gninja:
Some players had drawn rather conspiratorial conclusions about how EQ2’s developers view wardens from the fact that the Warden mercenary heals from range and does not use any melee attacks. Gninja sought to debunk that:
Further:
On the subject of mercs pulling agro or attacking too soon, Gninja had advice for fighters who have summoned mercenaries: