http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=121344

Quotes from Rashere:

Fabled are fairly easy to do for older events, but could be extremely difficult on scripted encounters, which being with PoP. The concern last year was that we were expecting to have another expansion shipping in February, which generally gives us just a couple weeks to put together Fabled in time for the March 16th anniversary. That being the case, we were looking at potentially just updating old fabled, but not pushing them forward into PoP.


Now that we are no longer doing a February expansion release, we may be able to pull off Fabled PoP. We'll do an evaluation after the launch of SoF and decide then.


Either way, Fabled will definitely return. The only question is whether it will include a Fabled PoP or just updating the current Fabled NPCs.

Not at all. The complaining happens regardless of what we do. For as long as there have been Fabled, there have been people complaining about them. That's just life when you have hundreds of thousands of people playing one game. Anything you do is going to upset someone, so you really can't let the complaints influence things.


The concerns about quality for PoP is what I was referring to. It's tough to upgrade a scripted encounter and, after evaluating it, if we decide that we can't do it well, we likely won't do it at all and leave Fabled for Luclin and below.

The problem is the pure fact that its being scripted. Fabled works by scripting NPCs to be more difficult, dynamically increasing them when its the Fabled event and leaving them alone when its not. It takes the base stats and bumps them up. But a scripted encounter very likely has already increased those stats, so you can't assume the baseline values are right. Instead, you have to go through every script to see what its doing and increase it appropriately (and make sure you aren't increasing it when its not fabled)...and not just the scripts on the NPC, but every script in the zone because you never know when the NPC is being affected by an external script.


It just adds a lot more complexity, and thus takes a lot more time and opens up a lot more room for problems.

Wow, I guess I was just running under the assumption that PoP was going to have Fableds. It's a lot of the reason I was going to give SoF a chance was I wanted to still play through a fabled version of my favorite expansion.

After enduring the marginal TBS and the gawdawful TSS (can you say Factiongate?) I can't fathom buying SoF for 3 accounts and continue playing if they're not even going to make the anniversary worthwhile.

Two years ago the comments were made that it would be damn near impossible to rescript all the PoP events in Fabled form. It would have equated to basically remaking the entire PoP expansion. The probability of Fabled revamps stopping with the Luclin expansion is not new information.

Announcements that -now- it might indeed happen is new information.

I can understand why some events would be difficult to do, especially more complex ones like Bertoxxulous in the Crypt of Decay.

I'd still prefer to have a partially-fabled PoP than a non-fabled PoP, though. Some mobs like Solusek Ro should be relatively straightforward.

yeah ... i agree with pala .. ill take partial as opposed to nothign at all

The Zek brothers should be fairly easy to do, The po innovation Dragon should be easy, everything in Sol Tower should be easy to fable. Mithaniel should be easy to do, don't remember to much of his fight though, just I did it a few times. Mobs like Terris, Bert. Rallos, and Saryn, amongst others would be a nightmare. Who would want to do Fabled Rathe Council? Although, they could probably get away with just a buffed up Avatar of Earth instead. Alot of the minis were killed quite a bit more for gearing up, so, I could definately see them upping the mini's instead of the more scripted encounters. Like dust rings and stuff like that I would say no to, they were buggy then anyways.

With I am sure everyone salivating over the possible Fabled Potime..... I just do not see it happening. The thing that really gets me about the Fabled Raid encounters though, is the risk versus reward element. Fabled Velious was ok minus a few details, that well, pretty much left every fabled mob up. The problem I had with them was the difficulty of the encounters, for the loot. While, they had good stats and hit points ratios and things like that, but, were so low in armor class that no one would do them. The other problem I had with them, was yes, with the low ac I would have actually wore that stuff as a what I could be described as a higher end casual gamer with raiding exprience. The difficulty of the encounters was just absurd. With some of the top geared raiders only able to do it.

A good example would have been on my ranger with the Fabled Master of the Guard. I had the key to Sleeper's since Luclin. A 30damage 20 delay weapon would have been a huge increase over the top end casual weapons with, at the time around 20/20 range at the time. But, of course he was way to brutal to fight with top end casual gamers, but, good geared raiders in mid tier guilds could handle him, but, his drops would rot.

I would like to see a bit more of a balance. Some good challenges with decent rewards for the effort, with obviously some advantages for top end gamed raiders as well and good rewards for their efforts like say, if, Potime is actually able to be fabled. With some stuff for lower end peeps like myself when I played that is challenging and fun raid encounters, as well as groupable encounters.

As I understand it, from Fabled Luclin last year, that Fabled Vex Thall was doable by pretty much end game raiders only. If, I was playing at the time, I was keyed for Vex Thall also, so, what would there have been for players like myself to do in Vex Thall, besides killing all the trash and then, get owned in three seconds after engaging a boss encounter. Same thing with planes of power, I am elemental flagged, would I have nothing to do in zones I am flagged for? Would I only be relegated to say Bastion of Thunder and starting up an open raid on named mobs there only, maybe, a shot at some of the floor minis like Oreen?

Fabled Vex Thal was not end game only. I remember doing the first 3-4 named with like 10 people. At the time, we where mostly CoA geared - maybe a bit of demi gear. We cleared most of the rest of the named with a smaller raid (20-30 ish).

VT was very good gear for where we where in progression at that time. I agree though, the AC was bad and tank types weren't that interested. I liked it for casters though. I got a nice fire and magic focus from there I still wear.

You make great points on most Fabled loot being sub-par for the majority of players though. I'd be happy with a re-tuning of drops for past Fabled mobs OR new PoP Fabled.

As I understand it, from Fabled Luclin last year, that Fabled Vex Thall was doable by pretty much end game raiders only. If, I was playing at the time, I was keyed for Vex Thall also, so, what would there have been for players like myself to do in Vex Thall, besides killing all the trash and then, get owned in three seconds after engaging a boss encounter. Same thing with planes of power, I am elemental flagged, would I have nothing to do in zones I am flagged for? Would I only be relegated to say Bastion of Thunder and starting up an open raid on named mobs there only, maybe, a shot at some of the floor minis like Oreen?

The difficulty of fabled VT wasn't horrid, the biggest problem was getting enough people that were keyed. Even today VT keying is one of the longest and most expansive quests in the game.

I don't see why this would be so difficult to do. All they do with fableds is increase the hp, mob hit power, mob level, mob name, and AE potency.

Like everything else they're doing in EQ nowadays, they would only have to use spreadsheets. The only thing supporting not doing it is the shear number of raid events in PoP, but they don't have to make everything fabled /shrug

It's because they have to edit scripts rather than just entries in a database to make it happen.

Aye, fabled mobs up until this point were primarily single static mobs that just stood around waiting to get killed. Not much involved there in beefing up 1 mob. Scripted raid events that involve multiple mobs that spawn multiple mobs, or events where action X causes reaction Y aren't very straightforward to "upgrade."