Raid content for the non 1%

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Windance, Sep 11, 2019.

  1. Metapsyche Augur

    I’m gonna have to disagree with you on this one. I think it’s a little disingenuous to argue that anything is as remotely beneficial to a raid as having an incredible dps core in modern EQ. Average tanks and healers can get by with incredible dps. The first thing an app generally says to me when they join a Valhallah raid is “holy **** things die fast”. Events seems to approach a singularity as dps increases. More dps leads to a shorter event, which leads to burns lasting a longer percentage of the event, a shorter event leads to fewer (RNG?) emotes, which leads to less moving, which increases dps... etc.

    I’m not saying that it doesn’t all need to come together, but dps is the single most impactful factor in a modern EQ raid (in my opinion). I’d be willing to bet that people aren’t running into enrage timers because their tank or healing team is too OP.
  2. Horyuken Augur

    Just adjust the mobs regen based on the adverage damage done per minute. Bam it's always going to be a challenge :)

    Edit the above post is 100% correct, when we have DPS logged in events are night and day. I don't think some guilds realize how big an advantage this is in the raid game. Fielding a 54 man raid is huge, the extra group or two make a massive diffrence.
  3. Maedhros High King

    You only get to apply "content breaking dps" when you have exceptional tanks. When I've taken my berserker to open raids and none of the tanks can maintain aggro, it's a safe bet that I'm not going to last very long unless I substantially lower my dps output.
    Exceptional tanks only achieve elite status when the healers are exceptional too.
    All 3 aspects are required to achieve content breaking dps, with the dps being only the final piece.
  4. grusuum New Member

    And a well played shaman makes it all possible
    Raccoo likes this.
  5. Metapsyche Augur

    I won’t disagree that keeping agro is important for content breaking dps. Keeping agro is important for dps that fails enrage timers also? I’m simply defending the fact that more raids fail from dps checks (or a lack of dps) than anything in my experience of guest raiding with mid tier guilds.

    Low dps on TBL Fire, more imps, more chances for people to die to explosions, etc etc. there are CONSTANT examples where DPS is king. It doesn’t even need to be “content breaking”, the shorter the event the easier it becomes. I’ve seen cactiki burned so hard that adds didn’t spawn until he fell over (sure lag was involved), and sure it was a hilarious amount of adds...

    No one is trying to belittle the importance of good healers and tanks, it all needs to come together to compete at the top. My comment is simply that you can limp thru a raid night short on tanks, you can limp thru short on healers. You cannot complete mearatas if you fail the dps check. You can perfectly stomp every hallway, every bane could fall over in 2 seconds flat and no one steps in a fireball. Once UFEE hits enrage, it’s over. So how is DPS not more critical?

    I understand that “if you can’t keep the tank alive, you can’t dps” and if you “can’t keep agro, you can’t make big numbers”, but those are both wildly exasperated by a lack of dps. All the tanking and healing in the world, the best of the best, can’t get you thru a dps check your dps is crap. Enough DPS can actually affect the difficulty of the encounter for your tanks and healers. If a fight only lasts for three disciplines, I can start stacking aa’s on my discs. All the sudden an average tank is looking really sexy because they don’t need to drag out discs for 10 minutes and they can run more at once.

    If the dps is crap, all the sudden you’re running out of discs, you’re low on mana, people are making mistakes as the event goes longer... it’s a death spiral.

    The most dangerous part of a dps’s day is the engage. Don’t hit mangling / epic / rampage followed by a braxi dissident on the pull and your zerker will last a lot longer? Lol. But yes I understand 100% that you can’t truly shine without all the pieces of the puzzle.
  6. Natal Augur



    In your opinion. But I have seen some of these "superstars" play down, and usually they are unable to adapt. Then they get all pissy and start ranting about other peoples "lack of skill" when in fact they are the ones messing up. In my view that indicates a player who is clueless about finesse but just mashes everything possible without considering the consequences. When those consequences happen (and they invariably do), it is someone else's fault. That may be ok when you have multiple redundancy in your raid, but when you have major limitations, for example only one tank with enough experience and gear to reliably tank the boss (ie you REALLY do not want him to die), then doing things like ganking agro just because all you care about is being on top of a parse, that is unacceptable. And I have seen these so called "skilled" players from top tier guilds do just that.
  7. p2aa Augur

    You are very mistaken. When an applicant from a lower tier raiding guild apps to a higher tier raiding guild, he's tested very much on his skill, and he has much more work to succeed this trial than if he was in a lower tier raiding guild. I have seen some low tier raiding guild apps labeled by their guildmates as "good skilled" in their guild, fail in term of skill in a high end raiding guild. An organized roster without skilled players would fail badly.

    Nah, it's not easy to be "good". I have been in a low tier raiding guild before moving to a high tier one.
    I also increased my skill in this new guild, not because i was in optimized groups, but because i had to step up my game. The easiest example is aggro. As a tank, I had (and still is looking) to improve my aggro because i was raiding with higher skilled DPS, who generate more aggro. A player can have all the resources and optimized group he want, if he doesn't want to improve by himself or with the help of others, he will remain a poor skilled player.
    I still raid from time to time with my older guild on RoS events to give them a hand, and I can tell you some things didn't change since my departure, low DPS, low aggro / reaction time from tanks.

    Nah, average tanks would be unable to keep aggro over incredible DPS, and the incredible DPS would die. Even if i'm not a friend of Maedhros,I fully agree with his post in this topic.
    Maedhros likes this.
  8. Natal Augur



    There are two things that result in a loss generally:
    (1) Not enough damage to overcome dps checks present in most encounters. Usually this is in the form of add spawns or triggered AEs, but even if you can just keep up with those, most raids have an additional power up mechanic, which means that no matter how skilled you are, if you can't do X dps in Y minutes, you WILL fail.
    (2) Your tanks die. The consequences of this should be pretty obvious. Usually this is caused by insufficient healing and/or tanks not being well equipped or being in high agro stances rather than high survivability stances. These sorts of scenarios are common in mid tier guilds where lack of equipment and low healer numbers due to sub-optimal raid composition mean that tanks die.

    Having massive dps is pretty pointless if you run out of tanks halfway through the event.
    Sancus likes this.
  9. Natal Augur



    I don't claim to be a skilled tank, but I am an experienced raider. In my experience the only people who can pull agro off our front line tanks are things like some pets (necro ones appear especially bad in this regard - not sure if it is due to the pet itself or the player just leaving pet taunt on) or dps who dive in before the tank has an opportunity to establish agro (this doesn't take long, 5 seconds will do). So, on a tank switch or the initial engage. When this sort of thing happens it is sloppy play on the part of the dps, and people from top tier guilds are especially prone to this.

    We also occasionally get issues such as inexperienced tanks who happen to have superior weapons pushing past the hate of the MT. Tanks fighting each other for agro is especially bad in any raid, it is the responsibility of everyone to manage their personal hate level and ensure that they never surpass the MT. It is not hard, you just have to get out of the habit of mashing buttons and be more aware of what is happening. Again, this is a common problem when tanks from top tier guilds raid with mid tier organizations.
  10. Sancus Augur

    There's some underlying truth to this. Raiding in the mid tier requires compensating for other people not adequately doing their jobs, and it wouldn't shock me that some in the top tier aren't great at adjusting to that.

    That said, there's absolutely no reason establishing aggro, especially on a boss or something that gets burned, should be less than instantaneous. Arguably the DPS player should be more aware (at least if this happens repeatedly), but the ultimate failure is with the tank who took 5 seconds to establish aggro.
    FawnTemplar, Ssdar, Gana and 7 others like this.
  11. Vumad Cape Wearer

    Unfortunately I think the problem is that the devs have painted themselves into a corner with raid developments such as the TBM augs. The completed aug is a massive advantage that is overly time consuming to back flag and even more so for guilds that make up for lower average attendance wit larger numbers, or open raids.

    Autogrant AAs exist, but similiar do not exist for these augs and other past raid completion perks. That makes tuning the events an extreme challenge compared to back in the PoP days when the only thing that mattered was gear and AA. Th spread between the top players and the mid-tier or returning players such a huge disparity that the events just can't be tuned right.

    This is why the arguments against enrage mechanics make so much sense.
  12. Brohg Augur

    No it isn't. The classes that benefit THE MOST from that aug benefit to the tune of 6% maximum dps; full balanced raids include 2-8 of those. Nearly all classes benefit more on the scale of 1-2%. You show me a raid that would have won a timered event with 6% more dps (like if every single raider were in the max-benefit category), and I'll show you a raid that could double their dps by playing & coordinating the buttons they have better.
  13. Bigstomp Augur


    For a boss:

    Initial engage:
    The tank should have it instantly. We have buttons for that and buttons to hold it long enough we can press our front loaded aggro buttons and shoot way up before dps has a chance.

    2nd tank after first tank death:
    Assuming we lag a moment we should have it very close to instantly (probably instantly since we should already be next on aggro). See the above comment about initial engage for the rest.
    (this is the most horrible job in the raid btw, 2nd in the boss TO)
    Gundolin likes this.
  14. BadPallyGuildLeader Augur

    I heard what you are saying...but then... some servers still have active pickup raid activity.

    How do they do it?
  15. p2aa Augur

    Tanks dieing can also be caused because the tank doesn't chain and use his mitigation tools. These tools have more impact than gear nowadays to stay alive.Yes, a good mitigation tank with bad healers will survive less than a bad mitigation tank with good healers, but still tanks need also to do their best to soak up the hits.

    No, these top tier DPS are used to tanks that hold solid aggro instantly, and not waiting 5 sec before engaging. I have seen low tier raiding tanks who had np to hold aggro in their guild suddenly having sucky aggro with higher tier raiding guild DPS when they attempted a trial in this higher tier guild. I'm not sure you realize how much the DPS quality can impact the aggro generated. Reaction fastness is also very important for a tank, and lacking of it creates lot of problem in a raid, tanks not grabbing their mob assigned, or letting the raid mob chew through DPS when the tank before them died.

    It's the job of the MT to generate more aggro than the other tanks. I had to give up to dual wielding 2 warriors aggro weapons (which is the best DPS 1h weapons for warriors atm) when some low tier raiding tank is tanking, when it's not a problem in high tier guild. Hell, even when using DPS discs with a 2H weapon (so no aggro proc) and just generating DPS (no aggro button used), I happen to end above 80 % in the aggro meter of some tanks.
    Which is so wrong. Some tanks need to press their aggro buttons...
  16. Tucoh Augur

    Maybe I haven't been playing with the right DPS but if I'm in a group and sense someone is holding back I tell them to get their



    Only time I have problems is with 2+ hyper DPS on different mobs where I'll pop the many tools available to warriors to maintain aggro and then see a different DPS targeting a different mob.
  17. Laronk Augur


    Oh there's no problem with pickup raids, it just doesn't work well on the FV model because of the tradeable loot. I would actually attend pickup raids on FV still if they did exist and were late enough because I think pickup raids are a good thing. I would actually consider playing a different server and I had rolled up a full group on emarr and got them all to 110 and good aa counts this year but then my brother and a friend returned to FV so I ended up back on FV.

    I also am a weirdo that supports the idea of 24 or 30 man raids though because requiring less people means more time zones and smaller guilds can get into raiding. If you only have 24 people I think it would be easier to tune raids (less variance in DPS) you could also make the raids harder. I'd much rather raid with just 24 people because then you could also be more selective about who your guild mates are. I don't think it's going to change but its a lot more work to get 54 people together. Pickup raids would also work better with a smaller number like 24 people.
  18. Horyuken Augur

    If you can out DPS the boss before tank A and tank B lose dragon glyph you will win easy. If you can't dps in that time you lose...pretty simple.
    Sheex likes this.
  19. Lianeb Augur

    Seems like a legit strat
    Glyphs are not required, they certainly help if you are struggling, but raids are not balanced around them as a requirement.
    I know we single tank events, usually without them, and we didn’t automagically start TBL with TBL raid gear.
    I generally only use dragon glyph when I want MT with my 2h or my healers want to afk (joking on that last part....sort of)
  20. Cadira Augur

    Not a joke.