Just tried the lava trial. People are right, it's too difficult! I did get it to 30% though. It'd be a lot easier if responsive spirit / divine reaction worked on the AE, I mean, that specific AE is the perfect use case of those spells. The hardest part of it for me was that the green mobs were invisible and no discernible relationship wit hthe big clouds of floating dust, so finding them was really hard. Especially in that cluttered environment with /follow. Is that normal? And is there any way to create a social macro that can effectively target "a swirl of disturbed crust"?
How are the numbers for a mob figured out? I havent seen anything in my logs or on my UI that would give that information.
If you know how the /xtarget command works, you know to try numbers starting from 00, 01, etc. Nothing on the screen tells you how to use it. It's just one of those EQ 'hidden knowledge' tidbits, similar to using underscore in the /target command (/tar a_trash_mob). Mob names for /xtarget use underscore instead of space and numbers for multiple spawns of the same mob. In this particular event, you get 6 of those things on track, meaning they are numbered 00 through 05. I've tried them all, and the correct one seems to always be the last one (05). You have to be close enough to the mob to /xtarget it though, so run all over the place until it succeeds.
It assigns the target to slot 8 of the Extended Target window. Picked arbitrarily to separate it from whatever other mobs that you may have there already (the boss and yellow adds).
This is part of what makes EQ great in my opinion. There is a stunning difference when someone plays a class very well, as opposed to average or poor. You put together a group of people that all play their class at or near top level, and it's crazy how much more effective they are then people who maybe don't have the time or inclination to master their class. Gear does help, but in all honesty, a skilled player in full group gear is still able to be very effective. I have seen it for myself, as I know quite a few group players with little to no raid gear that absolutely destroy someone of the same class in full raid gear, purely based on the fact they know how to optimize their class. This simple fact does make it very hard to balance content, as it's basically guaranteed to either be too easy or too hard based purely on the wildly different skill levels of the player base. The ideal situation would probably be to have the first tier of content tuned to the lower end of the spectrum, and then tune the middle to end tiers tuned to the higher end, but we all know with limited dev resources this is probably a pipe dream.
That's encouraging for mages tho your high hit point and runed earth pet doesn't fit my description of who dies easily in this entry zone.
perhaps, but my mage is not even fully conflagrant geared, and is wearing an RoS group pet earring. The only thing I've ran into that actually fits your description of not being able to actively tank multiple mobs in "6 person raids" to get through the first zone is the fight fire mission. and i'm pretty sure I can CC my way around that on the shaman with a little practice. the first zone, and its associate quests are not that hard if you position correctly and manage your mercs a little bit. at least one of the smoke trials IS boxable to get you through that zone and so far I also haven't ran into much, non-named that sees invis… The chicken little bit of "omg it's so overtuned you can't even kill 1 mob without wiping multiple times, don't bother!" is already old. some missions i'm sure are very overtuned. but not in the starter area... these are pretty much where they should be.
As I see it, the main problem is that there is such a major difference between raiders and groupers, and the expansion is made mostly after the stats of raiders. Now take the equipment, there is a difference between 1 piece of raid gear and Group gear of around 2k per item that is 42k + heroics, and 150*21 = 3k ac(basic in the armor, split that out on the amount people get. That is a huge amount.) . So Group geared will have around 170k if they got all items +/- 10k). And some mobs can quad up to 150k+. Now also for melee, take the difference in weapons between raid gear and Group gear radio on a rogue dagger is 9,2 for raid dagger, 6,5 for Group. The increase for dagger has gone from eok to ros to 8,2 -> 9,2... at same time for Group it has gone from 6,2 -> 6,5. This Means basically that rogues in this case becomes weaker and weaker from expansion to expansion. If you compare that for casters, they are more or less status que, since the focus increases in less amount, so the gap for casters are not increasing as massively for them. So if we take the 170k hps for groupers, and into first one, the DD will hit for 131k out of the 170k and add the melee damage to
Which missions have AE that group geared players are getting one shot by? Because the only one I know of is the lava trial which is an optional mission that I'm pretty sure they nerfed on test already
MMGA? Maybe instead of re-tuning TBL - Make Mages ! Remember the Banishment spell?- that consumed a star ruby or Call of the arch mage? or the whole repudiate summoned spell line- for which there are nice AA boosts (100AA's for max boost) Maybe put some updated banishment spells on the djinn spell merchant? that costs 2 star rubys and has - say a 50% chance- so its a risk when you cast it in smoke trials and draws a heck of a lot of agro if you fail. Likewise with call of the arch mage- give that a boost at the expense of the mages elemental so they have to pocket theirs to attempt to control the smoke trial elemental but for how long? and learn the pain that chanters know, but without the benefit of runes. Have any mages tried the repudiate summoned spells on elementals on TBL? I would think that is a necessary spell gem in slot in TBL, like swapping out fire spells for magic or blade spells. MMGA! Manouk
My guildmate Mazame gets all the credit for what I'm about to tell you, please don't think I'm smart enough to have figured this out myself... I cannot attest to being able to drag anyone around on autofollow for anything (it just plain sucks), so bearing that in mind, the strat we successfully did on the first attempt was to tank the boss on opposite ends of the area in your picture--started where the aura shows at the top of your picture (obviously there wasn't an aura there), then as soon as the aura spawned, move the whole group to the bottom of the photo just past the lava river, which puts you oor of the aura, when everyone is grouped together. For the green spawns that don't show up on extended, one group member ran to target them then we assisted and sent our pets in... so it would seem that a pet class is helpful on this particular mission, although surely there must be other ways to nuke and/or melee it. With the pets the green cons died quickly. For the yellow spawns we dragged them to whichever side of the platform we were on, and when the aura spawned we dragged them across along with the boss, making a priority to kill the yellow cons. I don't think anyone died when we did it, it was a full group of real characters, no mercs, and no boxes, although again, my guildmate had already ran this mission several times and had the strat down perfectly. I doubt it's very box or merc friendly, particularly as mercs aren't so great at running out of auras to follow the group. I hope this helped!
They are tuning most of it down so will have to see by how much and which spells. Its everything. Every damage spell I have seen is 100,000+ nukes or 70,000+ dots or some combination of both before some of its mitigated. Some of them being AE and some not. All of it to this point unable to be cured or dispelled. On top of any incoming melee. Some trials, missions, quests, named and even trash. You can be killing a single slowed trash mob and instantly have the tank and entire group drop down to 50% HP which at times can kill you.
I dunno, I kind of like the massive nukes to the tank. Tanks have gotten so good at mitigating physical damage that in RoS I was able to just pull multiple groups of mobs and handle them if I popped all my cooldowns. Now I have to tread carefully because there just isn't enough spell damage absorption abilities to handle more than a couple mob's DDs at the same time. My group geared warrior generally didn't have an issue getting one shot by caster mobs in TBL. Literally the only spell damage that was too much for him was the lava trial. That being said, I think the high DDs shouldn't exist in the first few zones. The first few zones should be moloable.
Not everything is over tuned ! 13 guilds have now beat TBL T1 Raids .... Today I hope they fix merc clerics dying to trash mob dots ..... YiMin
I basically agree with your post but it's worth noting the casters are hit just as bad by the DDs and AEs. I did a few smoke trials at around 140K HP (Wizard) and got eaten alive. Since then I'm around your 170K mark and survival was much better. But that said I was still taking 100K damage AFTER my spell shield was taken down. I ended up running through all five trials last night with a very solid group. I think most are pretty well done, but I still feel the spell damage is out of hand. It does sound like they realize that though and are toning it down on test, so it seems things are headed to a better place.
The AES are about 30 seconds between each other, more than enough time for a healer to pop a group heal. What is it you want from AEs exactly, to be able to survive multiple AEs without the healer having to group heal? The current AE damage just means healers need to do 1 group heal every 30 seconds or so, which I find to be more than reasonable.
