As we move into The Darkened Sea, we've made a few changes to ensure that adventuring in the newest content will be the best way to gain experience to advance their characters in both levels and AA points. Playing in the newest content should always be the most attractive, and demolishing content from several expansions ago should not be the fastest way to advance your character.
Once you hit level 101, content released prior to Call of the Forsaken will grant less experience. This includes tasks, rewards, and farming NPCs. If you’re currently planning on banking rewards and tasks from pre-Call of the Forsaken content to help level through The Darkened Sea, you will likely find the rewards to be less-than-awesome once you ding 101. We encourage you to participate in the newest content, and find places in The Darkened Sea to adventure with your friends.
Each Heroic Adventure Will Have a 6-Hour Lock Out
Heroic Adventures are great because they offer scaling content to players of a variety of levels. This content has a long shelf life for players since it can be accessed by players of a wide range of levels.
It’s not really a fun experience to sit in one Heroic Adventure for hours and days at a time, grinding experience to advance a character. Adventure is all about going out into the world of Norrath and doing things! To address this, once The Darkened Sea launches we have placed a lock out of 6-hours on each Heroic Adventure. Our goal is to reward players that explore more of the content, without punishing the players that prefer running a few Heroic Adventures a day with their friends.
We wanted to let you all know about this prior to the launch of The Darkened Sea, so you can start planning how to spend your time in this expansion. We’re excited about the 21st expansion to EverQuest launching on November 11th, 2014 and we hope you are too!
If you’re an All-Access member, you can purchase and play this expansion two weeks early (starting on Tuesday, October 28) and you can take 10% off your purchase of either the Standard or Collector’s Edition of The Darkened Sea!
A number of questions remain on this issue. See the post to give your feedback and see any replies by SOE.
Note: Roshen updated his initial post to clarify some things. I have changed the quote above to match.