Dear DPG, For the next expansion, please add difficult raid and group challenger achievements that build on core EQ mechanics to increase difficulty, rather than gimmicks that just make the fight awkward. I'd love to have a reason to improve my characters and stay subbed throughout the year in order to prepare them for the challenges to come. I cut my subs prematurely this year because I'm not motivated to fill out my AAs, work on tradeskills or get more heroic achievements or chase items. I'm working on the assumption that instead of being presented with a challenge that will require everything I've got in order to defeat, it'll instead be something like, "disable all your DoTs and then let a mob beat on you a bunch through phase 2 before killing them". Thank you.
No more achievements that just require you to hold dps until the script finally gets around to spawning that 20th add. Make achievements difficult, not tedious.
call it w/e you want, but I'd like to see something/anything that requires DPS players to actually push their buttons.
Should alway be at least one one easy raid to allow weaker guilds to gear up critical classes/slots, and one extra-hard raid; even if the extra-hard doesn't have unique drops it'll be more drops/currency for the strongest guilds. although I might exclude the extra hard raid from achievements to get special items; probably by adding the extra-hard raid later as 'bonus' content like GMM.
I get you, you're dealing with lazy DPS or DPS that don't know how to play their class. But it sounds like you are grouping all DPS together as being lazy, which isn't the case. It also sounds like you want a more difficult raiding scene as well (hence my previous comment). If DPG really wanted to do it right, they'd make tiered raiding a thing. Give those hard-core go-getters a challenge and give the more casual raid guilds something to do as well. Heck, if they did that, they could then do real raid completion competitions where bragging rights for first win actually mean something, like one-of-a-kind gear or something else cool. Then I woke up and found I was dreaming.
No, you're not listening, they wouldn't be forced to miss out on loot. You're stuck on an idea you have in your head that is not in line with what I keep saying. Right now, if they can't beat the event, they get nothing. Easy mode would allow people who can't beat the raid to learn the mechanic in more forgiving conditions and get a lesser reward. Given the options of nothing or less than everything, less is more. They wouldn't be forced to miss out. Pick the normal mode. Don't accept the handicap. Get the full loot. The only people who wouldn't be getting the full loot are the people who choose the handicap because without it they would lose and get zero loot. They would get a lesser loot for completing a lesser event. I don't understand how you can argue that people who choose to take a handicap should get the full loot reward and that somehow having the option of a handicap for a partial reward is worse than losing and getting nothing at all.
Fair enough, that wasn't my intent, but I see how it sounded that way. More what I was getting at, is that I see some people really trying to up their DPS game but then coming to the realization that the extra few percent DPS you might squeak out on a burn cycle doesn't really much matter. There's nothing that requires that level of efficiency to win, so in essence, that extra effort is just for "parse bragging" or magelo profile padding. With the amount of HP that raid mobs have, burst DPS is not valued much at all. I'd just like to see mechanics that require a coordinated, short-duration burst DPS to get past.
What might be more doable at this point is to make T1 raids into what you're calling "easy mode." Then T2 events be "normal mode" and T3 is "hard mode." T3 chests are more valuable than T2 chests which are more valuable than T1 chests. But they don't balance the events properly to make that a reality.
Yes they would be if you are suggesting that they make one version of the raid that doesn't drop spells or trade skill drops and one version that does. As it stands today every raider has a chance of getting both of those if they beat the raid. There is no point in making a lesser version of an event that people will not want to do and will likely drive members away from guilds that are doing them instead of the versions that drop all loot. The point of making raids easier to do is to allow more guilds a chance at getting all the loot which is important as the player base gets smaller every year.
My wife does not like what I give our daughter for breakfast. I ask her what I should give her, and she says to give her protein. I ask her to give me examples of food items she wants me to give her, and she responds for me to give her foods with protein. When I ask her what kinds of foods that have protein should I give her, she gets angry and tells me to just give her protein! Everyone has a complaint. But I never see any solutions. Everyone says raids are too easy, group missions are too easy, etc. Yet no one ever seems to give feasible, specific examples of what would be "challenging". They just continually ask for harder raids without giving any suggestions on how to make it hard that can be coded within the limitations of the engine and code devs are working with. Just thinking out loud.
Devs made ToL harder by putting in lots of one shot instant fail mechanics + lag. People didn't like it.
Now that EQ has proper corporate management their goals will never align with the elitists again. Their goal is to service the debt and increase profits, that doesn’t happen when you cater to 300 people at the expenses of 3000 other people. Pretty hard to sell as many expansions as last year when you lose hundreds of average and entry level raiders. Aiming at extreme challenge and hoping no one quits has backfired in the past.
Reduce the amount of lag from button slamming. I didn't experience lag near what I see on BB until I moved here, perhaps BB needs to be divided into two servers. Two whole events last cycle I could barely cast. To raid difficulty and what I've seen posted here: They've done easy mode/hard mode raids in the past - SOD era iirc. They've done zonewide difficulty based auras - DSK iirc had an aura that got worse as you increased flagging until you were fully flagged. Personally, I'm tired of trash mobs that have nearly no hps and are gimmicky in nature. I'm tired of punishing mechanics for DPS. The idea is to kill the mob, not slow down and wait for them to summon reinforcements. Mobs that truck a tank are welcome. The door raid was fine on beta when you could splash cure the fakes away, not sure why it was changed to individual curing, but those whirlwind models hit decently strong for trash and discourage tanking multiples. I personally like the mechanic of the midnight raid. There's enough run away, run to, etc type emotes. There's a healing the dmg'd mob component, then a balance (not my favorite mechanic). In that aspect I would have preferred when both reach 50%, they depop and *merge*, giving you 1 mob @ 50% health to DPS down, it would be fine to combine their HPs but allowing a nice all DPS on 1 mob rip is fun. I think the bigger issue is gear inflation and by that I mean most people don't care about T1 visible or non-vis gear at all, waiting on BiS for every slot. If I had my way, I'd incorporate roughly 1/4 of gear per expansion as evolving gear and make it last 4 years, rotating slots. Then I'd reduce the amount of raid dropped gear and coin / year. But bottom line in my book, you cannot increase difficulty, without addressing the lag. PS: Bring back titles for difficulty, like server first wins, maybe for server first achievement completions... and some of this difficulty argument may be alleviated.
I'm sure they could easily add a dps/mob hp slider to instances. But event mechanics don't scale that easily. If you try a raid where x people get called out to run away somewhere and will be out of the fight for a bit, even if it's percentage of the raid based you can't afford to lose people with smaller numbers.
I am not suggesting that the devs are making things lag on purpose, but ... things happen. Lag, LD, etc. that are out of the players control and when the event has a penalty emote that so harsh it is likely to end up as a wipe ... folks don't like it.
I can see where you are coming from on this. I think a lot of this comes from raid makeup though, and what numbers you can plop down on a table. We have a few necros that do the long-term DPS that are usually at the top of the charts, then rogues for that burst DPS (occasionally we get a monk creep up there, but then we kick them out of the top 10 club). We also have a mage or two that can give the necro a good run for their money. The rogues and other burst DPS, depending on the fight, will either just run a burn rotation all the way through the fight, running burst DPS as soon as it comes up, or hold burns until a burn is called. So, for us, at least with our makeup and strats, we have to coordinate our burns to get through some phases of a fight. But, I think I get where you are coming from (I am still waking up). Have a short-duration fight that is entirely a DPS check to win. No mechanics, just go in and see if you can down it in a certain amount of time or lose. Force the burst DPS to bring their A game all the time at the event. The only downside I can see to this is those that do sustained DPS usually require a ramp up to it.
