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Scars of Velious - The best EQ expansion ever?

    • 245 posts
    August 6, 2018 7:03 PM PDT

    Size - The new land was huge. Western Wastes and the Great Divide were so large that it was easy to get lost. Dungeons like Temple of Veeshan and Kael Drakkel were the size of small cities and could house multiple raids each night. And everything you fought was enormous, from the Velium spiders of Velketor's Lab, to the Giants of Kael Drakkel, to the dragons that seemed to be everywhere.

    So much content, especially raid content - Velious gave us more raid zones and targets than ever before. Guilds could choose from different content and where they should begin: Temple of Veeshan, Kael Drakkel, nest dragons in Western Wastes, Velketor and Lord Bob? An all-day clear of Plane of Growth or a tour through Dragon Alley.

    The 10th Ring War - So much fun! Dynamic open content. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of players would take part in driving back waves of giants as they sprinted towards Thurgadin, and everyone who passed through could see and take part in the action. I remember running from all over EQ, whether Luclin or PoP as soon as anyone was going to trigger the event, it was so much fun. And if you failed, the PvE consequences to Thurgardin made it all the more meaningful.

    Factions - There were three main factions in Velious: Giant, Dragon, and Dwarf. Choosing a faction was a strategic move for guilds. You could choose to go with a faction that gave better loot, but you had to be prepared to compete with lots of other guilds for it. Faction affected travel, since it was much easier to get through certain places if you were friendly with the denizens. Some guilds would even work up faction during the week so that they could bypass trash mobs and zip past other guilds to get to the best targets first. Factions added new depth to raiding.

    Meaningful travel - Travel was extremely dangerous. ToV zone-in could be safe one minute, and the next, it could be guarded by Sontalak. Porting to the Druid rings in Wakening Lands was a roll of the dice, as you could find yourself zoning in right under Wuoshi the dragon! Scary but awesome. Just like running through Kithicor as a noob wondering if your invis vs undead spell will wear off at any moment.


    This post was edited by Ezrael at August 6, 2018 7:03 PM PDT
    • 134 posts
    August 6, 2018 7:10 PM PDT

    I'm partial to Kunark, as I came into the game at that time. I played EQ through Kunark, Velious, Luclin and Planes of Power - and found that to be the best experience in any MMO ever.

     

    I still remember Warslicks Woods and getting lost in there.

    • 1247 posts
    August 6, 2018 7:25 PM PDT

    Ezrael said:

    Size - The new land was huge. Western Wastes and the Great Divide were so large that it was easy to get lost. Dungeons like Temple of Veeshan and Kael Drakkel were the size of small cities and could house multiple raids each night. And everything you fought was enormous, from the Velium spiders of Velketor's Lab, to the Giants of Kael Drakkel, to the dragons that seemed to be everywhere.

    So much content, especially raid content - Velious gave us more raid zones and targets than ever before. Guilds could choose from different content and where they should begin: Temple of Veeshan, Kael Drakkel, nest dragons in Western Wastes, Velketor and Lord Bob? An all-day clear of Plane of Growth or a tour through Dragon Alley.

    The 10th Ring War - So much fun! Dynamic open content. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of players would take part in driving back waves of giants as they sprinted towards Thurgadin, and everyone who passed through could see and take part in the action. I remember running from all over EQ, whether Luclin or PoP as soon as anyone was going to trigger the event, it was so much fun. And if you failed, the PvE consequences to Thurgardin made it all the more meaningful.

    Factions - There were three main factions in Velious: Giant, Dragon, and Dwarf. Choosing a faction was a strategic move for guilds. You could choose to go with a faction that gave better loot, but you had to be prepared to compete with lots of other guilds for it. Faction affected travel, since it was much easier to get through certain places if you were friendly with the denizens. Some guilds would even work up faction during the week so that they could bypass trash mobs and zip past other guilds to get to the best targets first. Factions added new depth to raiding.

    Meaningful travel - Travel was extremely dangerous. ToV zone-in could be safe one minute, and the next, it could be guarded by Sontalak. Porting to the Druid rings in Wakening Lands was a roll of the dice, as you could find yourself zoning in right under Wuoshi the dragon! Scary but awesome. Just like running through Kithicor as a noob wondering if your invis vs undead spell will wear off at any moment.

    Couldn't agree with you more. Velious was the best expansion where Kunark was a close second. For WoW, TBC was the only good one imo. I believe Pantheon will continue where we left off, and I have faith that Pantheon will correct where EQ and WoW went wrong. 

    • 752 posts
    August 6, 2018 7:39 PM PDT
    Yes. Velious was where they got it right. Once luclin and fast travel and non functioning factions and to be honest aa’s and bazaar were introduced it kinda just started going down the easy path.
    • VR Staff
    • 587 posts
    August 6, 2018 8:20 PM PDT

    Hard call -- either Velious or Kunark -- quite proud of them both :)

    • 1714 posts
    August 6, 2018 8:22 PM PDT

    I'd go Kunark first then Velious. Kunark was an awesome "more of the same" expansion whereas Velious had some big time progression changes. 

    • 2138 posts
    August 6, 2018 8:39 PM PDT

    I think Kunark had significant Dungeon designs as well as tricky terrain. There were good camps in open world areas like the wasp hive or giant fort in burning woods, casters solo joy in yeti caves and of course the grand central Karnor's. Velious expanded the large dungeon/raid concept.

    • 96 posts
    August 6, 2018 8:48 PM PDT

    You can hang me for this if you like, but I prefered Seeds of Destruction. The lore of the death of all the gods was probably the only quest lines I actually read through. The zones were detailed and looked good for EQ. The tiered group gear was not aweful and I had good experiences in farming groups(albiet it was rare to get one) or banging out quests. The raids were complex and challanging; everybody died if you weren't standing where you were supposed to and spread a plague kinda deal. There were massive amounts of AAs that helped stregnthen you're character at that time. Although, I WAS a ranger then and could get around quickly and track / pull nameds halfway across the zone =).

    I was a Gimp warrior in Scars of Velious and had a bad time. The 3 factions was just a grind, I needed kael faction, and only got it in tov where nobody wanted to go lol. I had to sit out most of Kael raids and log out while killing bosses. Every raid in Scars was a simple tank n spank(sometimes you had to hide from an aoe). Travel wasn't very meaningful, just further away. Siren's Grotto was just.... cancer =/. On the plus side, Everybody needed a tank or I could grab a healer and start a group in minutes and never waited long for groups to hang with.

    Everybody seems to hate Plane of knowledge, but it was a usefull zone that connected the entire playerbase. You could go there to look for groups, meet-up, get buffed, and interact. The books didn't take you to the exact spot you wanted to be, you still had to run a few zones over sometimes. I think Kunark and Scars only felt bigger than they were becouse there were no maps back then, and run speed was as slow as frozen molasses uphill.

    • 1120 posts
    August 6, 2018 10:17 PM PDT

    Gates of Discord.  Single best raiding expansion in the entire game.

    • 25 posts
    August 6, 2018 11:12 PM PDT

    The faction system between the giants, dwarves and dragons remains one of the most elegantly designed systems in an MMO ever.  Truly brilliant - it added so much depth and content to that expansion.

    Velious was my favorite followed by Kunark and PoP.  No PoP love eh?  I know looking back the PoK books and some other features had some unintended negative consequences, but the zones and raiding were quite good.

    • 1714 posts
    August 6, 2018 11:15 PM PDT

    spryler said:

    The faction system between the giants, dwarves and dragons remains one of the most elegantly designed systems in an MMO ever.  Truly brilliant - it added so much depth and content to that expansion.

    Velious was my favorite followed by Kunark and PoP.  No PoP love eh?  I know looking back the PoK books and some other features had some unintended negative consequences, but the zones and raiding were quite good.

    POPs problem was that you had to wade through Luclin to get there. 

    • 1479 posts
    August 6, 2018 11:19 PM PDT

    While the size, dangerousness and lore of Velious was great, I feel it was too much raid centric and made a terrible inflation of stats throught the different steps.

     

    Just look at early Kael weapons and late Vulak'aerr ones, the gap is tremendous and would only bring chaos for the next expansion to come.

     

    I however, like the new spell lines (HoT for Clerics as an example), but the avaliability of the top tier ones and their importance (Torpor... ) was too much of a mess I think, making the step between low raider and high ones amplified by gear and spells.

     

    With negative thoughts, I still loved some parts of the expansion. The feel of danger, the loneliness in all thoses frozen areas, the war between factions, the sleeper. It was just too much raid centric and initiated the heavy raiding focus of the game over everything else, making raiding a standard that every game copy pasted until now.

    • 245 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:44 AM PDT

    MauvaisOeil said:

    While the size, dangerousness and lore of Velious was great, I feel it was too much raid centric and made a terrible inflation of stats throught the different steps.

     

    Just look at early Kael weapons and late Vulak'aerr ones, the gap is tremendous and would only bring chaos for the next expansion to come.

     

    I however, like the new spell lines (HoT for Clerics as an example), but the avaliability of the top tier ones and their importance (Torpor... ) was too much of a mess I think, making the step between low raider and high ones amplified by gear and spells.

     

    With negative thoughts, I still loved some parts of the expansion. The feel of danger, the loneliness in all thoses frozen areas, the war between factions, the sleeper. It was just too much raid centric and initiated the heavy raiding focus of the game over everything else, making raiding a standard that every game copy pasted until now.

     

    Fair to say, I think the most epic part of the way all the raiding was set up was just how meaningful the factions and PvE interactions were.

     

    I hope to see future group and raid content in pantheon where players must choose one out of two or three warring factions, each bringing you positives and negatives as a consequence of your actions.

    • 1479 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:54 AM PDT

    I just think designing 90% of an expansion for 10% of your playerbase is ultimately a flaw. While P99 or progression servers are crowded on the velious stage for obvious reasons, it wasn't the case back then.

     

    I didn't even personally buy velious until it was sold with luclin because of the lack of usefullness for me, ultimately it was only worth the bucks for a small minority of hardcore players back then.

    • 2756 posts
    August 7, 2018 1:34 AM PDT

    Aradune said:

    Hard call -- either Velious or Kunark -- quite proud of them both :)

    Haha!  It's so cool for the maker of EQ to be able to chime in on conversations like this ;^)

    • 2419 posts
    August 7, 2018 9:51 AM PDT

    While I did like Velious very much, I prefered Shadows of Luclin slightly more.  Temple of Ssraeszha, Vex Thal, Sanctus Seru were awesome. That invisible bridge in The Deep was endlessly entertaining.

    • 752 posts
    August 7, 2018 10:29 AM PDT
    If the factions had worked more like velious in Luclin than yes it was good expansion as the original aa’s were unique and exciting. And the raids were hard. PoP - if they had just not done a fast travel hub world and just had POT it would have been perfect. That was enough of a hub world and we already had bazaar/nexus.
    • 12 posts
    August 7, 2018 10:37 AM PDT

    I vote Kunark! velious was cool with the new types of raiding that it introduced. but anything after that started to get bloated. especially after planes of knowledge, and Gates of Discord when class purpose started to melt away and everyone was a winner.

    X


    This post was edited by ltdabes at August 7, 2018 10:43 AM PDT
    • 1281 posts
    August 7, 2018 10:38 AM PDT

    I am going to go with both Kunark and Velious....  To me the expansions started going downhill after that and the dumbing down of the game began.

    • 35 posts
    August 7, 2018 11:05 AM PDT

    It's impossible for me to choose between Kunark and Velious.  Both extraordinary layouts and open zones/dungeons.  It's impossible to pick favorite zones because they were all so good.

    If I tried to name all the brilliant aspects, I would fall short so I will just highlight one for each. 

    Kunark: Epic quests! As if it would be anything else (well okay, Veeshan's Peak was sweet too).

    Velious:  The fact there were so many factions in Velious to side with is a great way to help divide content in an open world.  In addition, it created expansion longevity as myself along with some friends swapped factions many times, and that was not easy to do.  I don't know how many times I had to kill that damn statue of Rallos Zek flopping between giant and dragon faction.  (Temple of Veeshan - Orgasmic).

    Thank you so much everquest for these expansions.

    Side note:  I would love to see world/gm events implemented again, and even unique rewards.  Anyone remember the Butcherblock Hammer?  I'd consider donating a kidney to get an item like that :)

    Thanks for reading.

    • 129 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:06 PM PDT

    Ezrael said:

    Scars of Velious - The best EQ expansion ever?

    Short reply : Yes. Everything went wrong after Velious (nexus portals and bazaar killed players interactions).

    • 19 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:37 PM PDT

    I had a problem with the end game gear setting the standard for the rest of the expansions.  It became commonplace to have gear with all the stats and all the resists.  Though it was nice you didn't need an upgrade for a long while.  Just seemed like it trivialized things.  Don't have to go into a fight thinking about resists cuz you got them all.  Didn't have to think much about that rest of the stats either.

    • 1281 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:44 PM PDT

    Snozzberry said:

    I had a problem with the end game gear setting the standard for the rest of the expansions.  It became commonplace to have gear with all the stats and all the resists.  Though it was nice you didn't need an upgrade for a long while.  Just seemed like it trivialized things.  Don't have to go into a fight thinking about resists cuz you got them all.  Didn't have to think much about that rest of the stats either.

    That's one thing that bothered me too.  How ne weapons released in following expansions trivialized the Epic weapons due to having better stats.

    • 129 posts
    August 7, 2018 12:49 PM PDT

    Yes, I hope they get the power curve right, like a log curve rather than an exponential curve.

    • 12 posts
    August 7, 2018 1:37 PM PDT

    agreed! expansions rendering other expansion trivial, is not a fun game, at that point it becomes a race to max level, and a race to skip all the game content.