hmm ideal raid? no such thing 2 of my favorite raids are very different. i love coirnav, it has all these choas elements, in water massive amount of adds time limit, that made it such a mad dash rush. also win or lose it didnt take long to do. on the other hand i loved sendaii which was a different beast. it was a war against attrition and even if things were going badly you could recover from. i think the major thing i liked about both event was at there core they were regular eq gane play, not emotes or make ts skill items to hand or /say rat to brenda or figuring out who the murderer is.
The ideal raid ? Remember Vishimtar in DoN. A raid where tanks were tanking. DPS were dps'ing. Healers were healing. There was AE rampage to keep healers on their toes, but not to one round the best equipped melees. Everyone had to pay attention. Now, we see more raids with devastating stupid AE rampage. The return of the old stupid Death Touch, but AE and targeted for melee only. Or also the melee slow, or spell slow things. Yawn fests guaranteed for everyone. And CotF introduced the 95% avoidance mobs. For this fight I start by unplugging my brain, pretend to raid leader that I am hitting mobs, even when I have a Brell's Fishing Pole in main hand. Only the ZZZZzzzz that I spam in group chat show that something is odd ... Not that all the fights are bad. Xorbb 1 is ridiculously stupid, a true shame. Xorbb 2 is only slightly better. But Xorbb 3 is a nice fight when you have learned to control it the way it was planned (and possible to). And a hard one before.
... HA! except you really didn't - you just needed a good approach, because the raid designs themselves were incredibly simple. 'there is a named. there are some adds at some point maybe. the end' prior to DoDH there were really only a handful of raids in existence that weren't blindingly obvious tank-and-spank events. actually newer EQ raids are far more complex - but you do hit on the reason why it doesn't "feel" that way anymore, and that's because of instanced content and the fact that what i always called the Good Old Boy social network aspect of EQ is dying down. when raids were open, strats (like what mobs would cast, how to approach a raid) were tightly guarded secrets, and for YEARS after raids were all instanced it was still taboo to let other people know what to expect from a raid... that culture of secretiveness is lessening, making the raiding game more transparent.
..hmm you think? What about Inktuta (keep spelling errors =P ) for example? Either my memory is leaving me slowly, or there have been some very cool scripts in there... I don't think the new Eq raids are complex. They use some different mechanics like emotes, but are they really more fun or challenging? If 1 raider messes up and kills a bunch of people, that usually leads to finger pointing, and not challenging content for those who are able to create and follow some simple Audio Triggers...
...so what are we talking about, you said GoD was only tank and spank. I give an example that i don't agree, and you post "...and"? Boring conversation i'd say.
no, i didn't. because what you said had nothing to do with what i *actually* said. i would hope that a convo you're having with your own delusion would be boring, elsewise one would start to worry about you.
Read your own posts then, unreal.."no i didn't" doesn't cut it if i could paste it from 1 post above, you drunk or something? Here, to help you out...what you said about raids before dodh: "except you really didn't - you just needed a good approach, because the raid designs themselves were incredibly simple. 'there is a named. there are some adds at some point maybe. the end'
nice how you leave the sentence out that immediately follows. prior to DoDH there were really only a handful of raids in existence that weren't blindingly obvious tank-and-spank events. man, if one were inclined to actually read and understand words, one might think i was saying that there are complex raids prior to DoDH, just not very many of them - GoD having most of them, in fact.
This post makes me miss raiding and especially the raid within the raid. The under raid..that hot seething mess of barely bridled rage you keep in check as you contain your anger at all the people churning up the bowels of hell you keep neatly between your animosity for ninja afkers, the person/s that ~only~ shows up for raids when everything is on farm and then disappears when the new expansion comes out and of course the guy that runs a crap ton of mobs on a recouping raid instead of dieing. Yah..I miss the under raid, the secret raid where you can't take credit for a kill instead you just say things like.."oops..healed your pet instead..sorry", "oops..taunt was on cool down", "sorry..thought i was far enough from the raid before i FDed"...yar, I should go lvl then start raiding again, I misses it.
Really? Ever have anyone miss an emote in newer raids and doom it to failure? Also, back in what you might consider the good old days, much of what you take for elite strats was just patience to stay up all night and day learning what not to do for a month or two in content that was 50% broken and 50% overtuned just to slow down the content locuts. That is some real cat herding right there as there wasn't any other way. EQ high end was all about how much time you could commit to raiding back then and convincing people that it was worth missing work or your anniversary for. Now it is all about how little time spent raiding that is the merit badge of the high end. Which version do you think works better in today's world? My memory goes back pretty far, and it is riddled with lots of mid/lower tier raiding where raids were as much of a battle against ourselves as against the actual raids. Maybe you had the perfect guild of perfect players, but most of us did not. Maybe that is why mid tier raiding counted for more than face value. The server is considered a backwater more often than not and not known for Maelin caliber play. The raid leader was probably flustered. Half the raid didn't know what they were doing so the other half had to work twice as hard. In the end wins came, but only we cared about it as the big names downed it all months and months ago. One weeks flawless victory was always next weeks wipe. In retrospective, every win was special, unique and cherished although at the time they frequently got discounted because FoH or AL downed them 6 months ago. Still, it was our win. The ideal raid for me was any raid where we could finesse a win and make it look like we actually know what we are doing.
This has nothing to do with what i consider the good old days or not, i just know that back then following raid progression was an adventure itself. Now nobody cares, how can you even start arguing about raids where half of the so called strats that involve emotes etc are known from *group* instances. Strats are not just about finding out when person x should run from the raid because the boss told them to or something terrible will happen...how do peoples consider this challenging in the first place? At best most emotes are a dummy check, how many do you have in your raid? It's also about making the best of what you have available in your raid, and if you think content was "over-tuned" maybe that was part of the challenge. Because we liked our raid mobs bad-, where does it say such an event has to be fair to fluffy guild 123? Pretty sad some peoples cannot see this, but makes it easier understanding why Devs create what puts us asleep usually today.
