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I see no point in bringing back the 50+ levels at all. As was said they didn't really add anything and rendered what little 50 content there was obsolete. I agree that scaling the 50+ stuff down would be the way to go. Simple EQ style gear progression is plenty sufficient.

I'll be honest, that I don't understand how people can say they want challenge and difficulty, but then go on to say that the 50+ content should be left out. I can't help but think that a lot of people that say this quit within a few months of the 50+ stuff being released - and never fully went through with all it had to offer.

It was, by far, the most challenging content that the devs put into the game. When they first came out, the POTA T1 trials were a true, horrific challenge of skill. There was no walking people through that. COB was the same way - you either played your class well or didn't play your class at all. Nothing in the 1-50 content ever reached the scale of difficulty - not even first run APW.

Look, this is not EQ. I never played EQ, I have no interest in playing EQ. If I wanted EQ, I would go play EQ. So I don't get why that keeps coming up for an argument to make Vanguard more like that (Other than Brad's involvement in it).

POTA post T1 did suck. It was time consuming, grindy and cost a fortune. I would much rather have more trials like T1 had, with the same challenge and difficulty. The same goes for T3. And the Sisters Trial, even when it worked properly, was one hell of a challenge.

VG actually made all this *easier* to do over time so that more people could enjoy it.

I, for one, do not want to see the 50+ content lost for good. I realize the current plan of the Emulator devs is to concentrate on 1-50 first. The 50+ content needs tweaks, but it was *good*. Magi Hold was great. The Magi Hold raids were some of the best in the game. Shadow Hillsbury was a lot of fun once you got past the grind. The Talfyn fight, was a ton of fun. It opened up the way for more casual guilds to hit APW. COB was ungodly difficult and challenging.

It was not perfect, but it does not deserve to be left out like it's some kind of garbage waiting for pickup.

I have no problem with there being 50+ content. But let's be really honest, a LOT of people quit playing or shelved toons once they got into the meat of the 50-55 content. I personally loved the overall concept of PoTA. You're absolutely right in saying that the tier 1 trials were some of the best content. But after that it's like the devs just got tired of trying and said "go kill 5,000,000 mobs in kdq to collect shards."
You are probably right about COB too. I wouldn't know, because I burned out on PoTA collects and didn't end up finishing, which means that I didn't have the gear to do CoB.
I'm definitely itely not saying that it should be more casual 50+, but it should definitely be much more interesting. 1-50 is so drastically different than 50+. Once you got to 50 you had some options for leveling to cap, but you had pretty much one option for progression-PoTA. If PoTA had been as interesting and fun for all three tiers as it was for the first, then it may not have been a huge issue. But the bottleneck was real. Everyone had to do PoTA in order to progress their characters.
I personally don't think 50-55, or even 60 should ever be off the table. I don't think that the content that was there for 50+ should be trashed necessarilly. But it definitely needs some love, and some diversity for progression.
Even if they kept PoTA exactly as it is, there should be something else that at least brings your character in the ball park of that gear. Not saying it should be easier, quicker, or less challenging. But, seriously, who would actually have fun doing PoTA gear on more than one or two toons?
It will be a large undertaking to implement 50+ content in a fun and diverse way. That's why I'm perfectly fine with capping at 50 for a good while. Changing content on the fly, while it's playable, doesn't really make much sense.

Oh, I fully agree, Jakkal. To clarify I was saying all of the content should be in, just that I found boosting the level cap for it to be an odd decision. If, however, you felt that levels 51-55 themselves added something to the game, and without detriment to the 50 content, that would be another matter.

I'm sure tons of 50+ content was collected and it will end up back in the game sometime, in some fashion. No way that content's just not going to be added cause it's 50+!

I think it's safe to say that a majority of VGers came from EQ and/or spent time in EQ, and that it holds a special place. Considering they're the same genre, created by the same guy which a lot of people follow, and a lot of people considered VG the true EQ2, it's fair to make some comparisons.

There's no problem reminiscing either - I played EQ for longer than VG's entire existence - just cleared out some old boxes in the garage and threw out binders and binders full of EQ maps, notes, NPC info, etc, etc.

Ahhh, good times...

[quote="Glenzig"] Once you got to 50 you had some options for leveling to cap, but you had pretty much one option for progression-PoTA. If PoTA had been as interesting and fun for all three tiers as it was for the first, then it may not have been a huge issue. But the bottleneck was real. Everyone had to do PoTA in order to progress their characters.
[/quote]

That is the shape it was beaten in to, but with a fresh start on a new server, no one will be able to just heft themselves into and through PotA. All the options will be back on the table. A tank won't survive Hoarn or even the cyclops on the key quest using a couple pieces of APW loot, regardless whether it is 50 or 55. To succeed, groups will still have to progress through pre-raid and low-level raiding to even get there, and that's what I'm looking forward to--such a ton of cool stuff that really got mothballed because people could walk you through trials.

I have written a post about this long ago somewhere, but I don't remember in which thread, but it's about my thoughts on how to tackle the 50+ content when that time comes. In regards to PotA gear I point out that I believe that we should have a long thought about different gear progression lines and if the PotA gear should be for group oriented players or for raiders. In live Vanguard the PotA gear was kind of mandatory for both raiders past APW, I'm not counting PUG raids now since those usually only went to the "easy" content where gaps could be filled with toons with lesser gear, and for difficult group content like CoB. My thought is that we then should tweak the content and the gear to fit that progression line better.

[quote="Amnath"][quote="Glenzig"] Once you got to 50 you had some options for leveling to cap, but you had pretty much one option for progression-PoTA. If PoTA had been as interesting and fun for all three tiers as it was for the first, then it may not have been a huge issue. But the bottleneck was real. Everyone had to do PoTA in order to progress their characters.
[/quote]

That is the shape it was beaten in to, but with a fresh start on a new server, no one will be able to just heft themselves into and through PotA. All the options will be back on the table. A tank won't survive Hoarn or even the cyclops on the key quest using a couple pieces of APW loot, regardless whether it is 50 or 55. To succeed, groups will still have to progress through pre-raid and low-level raiding to even get there, and that's what I'm looking forward to--such a ton of cool stuff that really got mothballed because people could walk you through trials.[/quote]

Yeah I realize that there was a lot of really good content that just got bypassed because of being able to get assisted through PoTA. And I'm looking forward to that aspect being gone also. I was really talking more about the same thing Kandra was, that you could really only progress past a certain point until you had done PoTA. Even group content required it. That's what I was saying created the bottleneck. There wasn't a real alternative to PoTA gear. Unless you just resigned yourself to the lowest tier content.

Not sure if anyone caught this old post by Faux about possible end-game tweaking; it's something the dev team is considering, though more community input would be nice.

Vanguard is fantastic for having so many ways to do the early levels, you would need to do multiple alts to experience it all. At the upper range, 45ish, it's going to funnel everyone into the same handful of stuff; that's a reasonable design. At that point, it's fairly non-linear, which I thought was great, although pretty frustrating to those who like games of a simpler design.

If I understand correctly, at release there was no RI for example, very little content 40+. Nevertheless, some people hit 50 in about five weeks by grinding level 43 trash mobs. With the level 50 cap, content was introduced from RI up to APW and a few overlands like Jagund. Most of the founders I've talked to were pretty pleased with this era and times of different guilds trying to camp out for the nameds needed for swamp armor.

It seemed to me that 50+ was all about content completion--the levels themselves didn't do much for you, gaining a level was very slow, no idea how many tombstones I lost to the sharks around BoD, and there was almost nothing worth looting until you killed the boss. Most people didn't know how to deal with it, and the game turned into quit, or be carried through PotA.

Much as in the 20s, I could log in and be like "I'd like to work on TK, but I'm willing to consider something else" -- because you probably wouldn't out-level it and could always come back, I'd like to come in at the upper levels and equivalently have fun doing Swamp/Graystone/RI/NN/Hillsbury/KDQ/Magi Hold/Griffon/APW/Vi'rak/BoD/low tier overlands, just because they're fun to play and challenging when not blasted by maxed out toons. It doesn't even have to be for my own progress, beefing up the whole group is just as good, and necessary to go further. I can't add OT to the mix, the shields thing was ridiculous, what I liked about it was everyone going into it made OT Knights pop constantly and those were pretty fun. It would be lovely to have that dungeon tuned to where it would be fun to play on its own without gaining a million experience every ten minutes. Probably mentioned it before, but requiring everyone to beat it individually in order to access Mercaius is probably a good idea. One person's Xennumet key working for the group seems ok, but you have to key PotA and APW individually, so why not Mercaius?

I'm not sure if a lot of cross-flagging needs to come in, just because the power requirements ramp up so much, that you have to get stuffed with the lower tier of gear before you can really attempt PotA/IoG/higher overlands/CoB/CoW. I never got very far with any of those, but introducing a new gear set with totally different stats just smelled funny. The debate about "why should I need six-person t3 in order to progress in raiding" is a valid question--all I know is I successfully tanked (eventually) everything I went up against, including Kotasoth and both chickens, and never used any armor from PotA. I would have destroyed the gear if no one told me that the actual t1 pieces simply upgraded. Tier 2 & 3 in PotA was a horrid non-design that said "nothing will be added to this game", but, since there is more, and we can probably get some of the unmade content into existence, 2 & 3 seem to be the prime candidates for revision.

Now for some of the higher-level stuff, where you needed someone with the secret room in Tricksters, someone who could summon Pharaoh, those sorts of things are fairly cool, and I guess it is a type of flagging, but it seems more like content completion than arbitrary grinding. And perhaps if there were a way to get a few t3 equivalent pieces via raiding progression, it might not hurt--it won't come easy or any time soon, that's for sure.