Will the Temple of Veeshan expedition be too big? (Phinny)

Will it be possible to clear the Temple of Veeshan expedition on Phinny in one night with a raid of 50-70?

I've heard the north wing alone is taking several hours to clear with forces twice as large as what most Phinny guilds average. It seems like North ToV itself would be a long raid night in the expedition and it's just 1 of the 3 wings.

Will the expedition be the only reliable access to Kael and Skyshrine armor quest drops?

I know this is discussed in other threads, but if ToV load balancing stays gone then many guilds will only have access to quest drops in their instances. WToV and HtoV raid bosses are time consuming, but clearing all of the trash as well for quest drops makes these wings take even longer. If it's the only way to get quest armor that's a lot of pressure to clear it.

Is it a single expedition or broken up by wing like the Plane of Sky islands were?

If not, should it be? I assume Sky had broken up lockouts because of how long the expedition took (in classic). Should the same apply to ToV? This would add complexity, but the only alternatives would be spending an entire Saturday in there clearing it (where I will end up) or for guilds that don't raid on weekends AFKing their force overnight to prevent the expedition from closing.

TLDR: Is this expedition too big?

I just want a constructive conversation on if this expedition is too big. Let's discuss it now while the devs have a 4 week head start on the AOCs going live.

my intial guess is yes, i dont know how feasible its going to be to clear all of TOV in one 6 hour session.

with the way expeditions are set up on phinny, i dont even think its possible to request it again the next day and pick up where you left off.

You could potentially request it twice a week though with a 3 day zone lockout. Perhaps do NToV one night and West/East on a second night half way through the week.

Each wing is gonna be its own instance.

Hopefully, but that's a lot more work I'd think.

No, you are not very likely to clear all of ToV in 1 raid.. especially not when the expansion first opens. In fact that zone provides one of the more questionable set-ups for how they are going to do instances.

I would assume they are going for the easy-mode which is full pop, with 0 respawn. This way people can't use an uncompleted instance as a way to farm items from zone trash, while each raid mob will have it's own flag, and you can't zone into an instance while the flagged mob is up and you're still on lockout for that flag.

Have any of you done this one test server yet? I suggest taking a group of 6 over to check it out before making a really long post about how it needs to change.

That's a great suggestion, GhostbustersII. If anyone does this with some high level toons and can relay the lockout details it would be appreciated.

Sure. BW cleared all of Velious on Test this past Sunday, except we didn't do GD/Ring War. Here are our findings:

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...eded-fixes-thread.231582/page-16#post-3425958

I'm not sure why someone above posted that ToV is more than one instance. It clearly isn't, all you have to do is log on over there with alts/friends/mercs, pop the expedition, and find out for yourself. No need to make things up.

I was wondering about this as well. Expeditions last what, 6 hours? That's not a lot of time to do E/W/N wings. As with all content, it'll get easier and take less time as guilds get used to it and become more efficient and effective but that's still not a lot of time to do the entire zone.

Without understanding how coding works and how feasible this is, it would make a lot more sense to me to split each wing into it's own expedition.

I would imagine that DBG is trying to reduce the amount of armor drops in ToV from what RF experienced. Essentially, 1 month into the expansion, a large portion of the server is armored, people are selling entire sets of armor and gem sales are by far the biggest portion of the economy right now.
That being said, I -highly- doubt they will break up ToV into different sectors. You'll just have to pick your poison it looks like.

If your guild os good enough to clear ntov, you shouldnt need to do too many mobs in the rest of the zone. Maybe dozekar and keeper. Of you cant clear ntov, spend time killing everything. Seems pretty simple.

Velious is going to be the first expac where guilds have to pick and choose what they raid. Unless youre raiding 5 days a week youre not going to clear it all. Once your ST keyed you can ignore a large number of mobs.

I like him!
He's Funny....

Yeah. It's surprising how many people have never raided Velious.

Please elaborate.

NTOV takes a long time to do. It's always taken a long time to do. The instances will save a bit of it by only having to do the tedious trash once I hope, but meanwhile the mobs themselves have several times the HPs due to MOTM. You need to kill the half dozen lords and ladies to spawn Vulak, plus Aary, and stuff like Dagarn isn't liable to be bypassed. You could be realistically looking at 3-4 hours of time in literal combat with these dragons, before counting any sort of setup, prep, movement, or any trash, to get Vulak dead - with a solid raid of 72. Depending on how much hps and mitigation is thrown out, you could be looking at killing Vulak with an instanced raid force in the 6 hours allotted being something unfeasible for most guilds.

Originally, guilds did not just topple N in a short period. In fact on many servers clearing NTOV was a multi day affair with gentleman's agreement rules like whoever kills Aary gets the next day to finish up.

I can't imagine anyone taking the trouble to kill WTOV in an instance. A quick browse through the DKP sites for Tempus and Darkwind (and digging deeper, Citizen's Fippy site still has SOV) reveals that items from WTOV don't get bid on in any meaningful capacity.

Wouldn't be surprised if the only place these dragons die is open world, or guilds desperate for 1 more ST key instead of another loot dropper in NTOV.

Weren't you still playing on Fippy when Velious dropped though? Here are my logs from opening night:

[Mon Aug 29 01:01:56 2011] <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>:The barrier to the Scars of Velious has been breached. Make haste, many new and exciting adventures await you in these foreign lands!

[Mon Aug 29 02:12:58 2011] You have entered The Temple of Veeshan.

[Mon Aug 29 05:54:33 2011] Vulak`Aerr scowls at you, ready to attack -- what would you like your tombstone to say?

[Mon Aug 29 06:07:17 2011] <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>: Vulak`Aerr has been defeated by a group of hardy adventurers! Please join us in congratulating Webin along with everyone else who participated in this achievement!

So right at 5 hours, probably 70 - 100 characters, in Kunark gear, no MotM. It will be interesting to see how the expedition plays out.

It does make me ask again, why is MotM a thing still?

Even if the West Wing boss loot falls short the Kael quest armor is desirable. This wing will be less crowded in open world ToV than east but I still think there will be too many guilds to rely on the single open world zone for quest armor drops.

MotM keeps the raids challenging and I don't think a lot of players have a problem with it. I'm just concerned ToV will have too much to fit in a single DZ and some boss fights will take too long (60+ minutes for Vulak). 4 hours without MoTM does seem like it'll be much longer with it. Thanks for supplying the logs.

Cant wait to be kicked out of NtoV instance while fighting Vulak because of the max timer, sounds so much fun.