Raid content for the non 1%

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

  1. Zunnoab Augur

    Yeah, and that's one of the things that really scews feedback sometimes.

    The final fight of Stratos has THREE AEs actually, if you count the Inferno Flares. Two for the boss:
    One is a PBAE with a large range. The other is a targeted AE that is blocked by line of sight... but I have no idea how the boss decides who to target.

    The two AEs are on different timers, but at just about exactly 90 seconds after the giant appears both of those AEs are used simultaneously. This is also around the time the second wave of adds is about to come.

    This means not only is there the AE blind, which CC has to be lighting quick to stop with mezz, but also two AEs on top of each other simultaneously around the second wave of adds. Guilds strong enough for TBL will likely only see one or two waves of adds. It wouldn't surprise me if the strongest see none.

    The final boss of Stratos, just like the snails in Fire, is wildly more difficult than everything else in the event for the reasons I outlined. Any strat other than burning it down as quickly as possible is gambling with who gets hit with that targeted AE, and spreading out on its timer to dodge it would be far too much of a hit to DPS.

    I only know these things prior to our merger. Had I been in IL at the time, I never would have analyzed the event's mechanics enough to know exactly how those AEs work. Well, aside from how he decides a target. I have no idea if that is random, but it's too frequent to realistically have people duck out of line of sight due to how dangerous it is to interrupt DPS while burning him.

    Edit:
    Also, the two minibosses after the three initial waves of adds have some weird emotes that suggest the developers had some convoluted strat in mind to approach them, but the explosion punishment for them being too close is so finnicky it's better just to burn one down while keeping them as far apart as possible. If you don't separate them like that, they can seem deadly.

    The developers nerfed the timers for the initial three waves too. They take a little bit longer than they did at launch. It's also possible to hold something mezzed to recover. The fact they nerfed it like that suggests to me they had no idea how devastating the final mob is.
  2. kookoo Augur

    here is what look like some difference from high end guild and some others ;
    our fastest GMM 1 raid kill : all these are with 54 players in raid **

    * [Sun Sep 22 20:04:40 2019] player tells the group, 'Combined: Rustbottom, Grinder of Gears in 1610s, { 1610 s , i have seen post with that one and it seem to be around 171 s on that one for the high end guilds }. our best dps player there was a little over 300k dps.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    one of our win from general resparm :: [Tue Jul 16 23:07:58 2019] '/g Combined: General Reparm in 2620s,
    , '| zerker + pets 502.3m@(192.2k in 2614s) [6.52PCT;] | rogue + pets 460.2m@(175.9k in 2616s) [5.98PCT;] | BST + pets 418.4m@(159.9k in 2617s) [5.43PCT;] | rogue + pets 418.3m@(159.9k in 2616s) [5.43PCT;] | Ranger + pets 376.4m@(143.9k in 2616s) [4.89PCT;] | player + pets 370.6m@(141.7k in 2615s) [4.81PCT;] | ranger + pets 359.7m@(137.4k in 2618s) [4.67PCT;] | necro + pets 342.4m@(131.1k in 2612s) [4.45PCT;] | Mage 276.3m@(105.7k in 2613s) [3.59PCT;]

    at least now we can kill a * little faster * for us general reparm , it is still over 1600 sec tho,
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    [Sun Aug 25 22:03:43 2019] player tells parse:3, 'Combined: Cactiikii in 708s,
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    [Tue Oct 01 23:04:42 2019] player tells parse:3, 'Combined: Ralaifin Sacerdot in 1233s, 4,374.4m @3547740 // bst + pets 291.7m@(238.1k in 1225s) // rogue 241.0m@(196.4k in 1227s) // ranger + pets 230.5m@(188.1k in 1225s) // monk ,229.5m@(189.1k in 1214s) // player + pets 227.4m@(185.8k in 1224s) // ranger + pets 213.6m@(182.9k in 1168s) // zerker + pets 198.1m@(161.2k in 1229s) // necro + pets 187.9m@(152.7k in 1230s) // mage + pets 150.3m@(122.4k in 1228s) // mage + pets 136.0m@

    i am not asking for all raids to be * easier * but if tier one was a ** little ** easier for us * weaker * guilds , and btw ,we are usually able to fill 54 players in raid , twice a week, ( we are raiding 4 days per week, )
  3. Lianeb Augur

    It’s targeted on the MT, or whoever has Agro when it is cast. It is also fairly small (50 range).
    If your melee are up his butt, then you doing it wrong it is a giant after all with a giant hit box.

    For the two minis put a group on one and the rest of the raid on the other (the fire elemental). Engage them where they spawn. By the raid being on the elemental you are not effected by the AE when he jumps to the other, and by engaging them where they spawn you do not get the AE for them not being far enough apart.
  4. Lianeb Augur

    To get lower times on rustbottom you have to utilize a very risky strat, that can go sideways fast. Otherwise you are killing mechanics and it takes longer, even for high end guilds if they choose to do it that way.

    I believe our first few attempts were around 18min before the nerf and before we were luring mechanics
  5. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    I used to use 10 minute burns 3 times on pre-nerf Rustbottom lol :/ I hated that iteration of the raid so much.
  6. Brohg Augur

    Those were pre-nerf Rustbottom. Killing repairers strat is 15 minute win for scrub tier DPS now, should be 10 or less for good guilds. The riskier way is just riskier, now, with not much gain.
  7. Vumad Cape Wearer

    I feel like making an easy raid that dropped group gear with raid foci wouldn't be very hard to develop and would be an agreeable place to both practice the mechanics and offer some minor upgrades to prep for the full event.

    The biggest disadvantages for mid and low tier guilds is the consequences of error on the learning curve. High end guilds can eat mistakes and push through the strat development phase much faster.

    Having a practice raid with minimal gear upgrades seems like a good way to balance things out.
  8. Allayna Augur


    Practice raids?: You mean every years raids prior to current? Do you realize how many times that a new event has a mechanic from 4-5 years ago?

    Kill old content for fun on off night raids, many of your members probably need viable RK III spells from those raids anyway.
  9. arsenil Lorekeeper

    Im sorry but the biggest disadvantage to mid and lower tier raid teams is not if they can or cant power through emote fails .. its that the people on those raid teams dont care to take the time and effort to learn and do the best they can with their chosen class. Dps classes that think 50k dps is good enough to raid with .. healers that dont pay attention or dont stack the right heals to get the most out of them .. tanks that dont flash fort or defect on engage ..
    Emotes are important . But you can get all the emotes right and never fail them but if the dps healing and tanking are not there you will fail every time.
    I raided with low to mid tier teams for years and the failure was always one of those 3 things .. if not all of them at times
  10. Bamboompow Augur

    You are cherry picking some information to prove your point and omitting other aspects. Again, welcome to 2019.

    Look, if you are were in a mid tier guild, than you have to understand one thing that makes their issue harder to get past other than in a more accomplished guild: Dilution

    Mainly mid tier have much larger rosters of active players. Some don't play every day or even close and others don't want to raid every raid. So there is a need to have a bit of a relaxed approach towards membership maintaining a certain RA as well as having a larger roster to keep the amount of classes needed to raid at some manageable level. It isn't just gear that gets diluted.

    Its also many of the team work aspects in addition to working knowledge of mechanics, emotes etc that come with practice and repetition.

    Am I saying that it is not the fault of the players who screw up? No.

    The nature of the beast with mid tier is that those screw ups are much more likely to happen. There is a higher chance of them not only going unpunished but also not being addressed in terms of corrective education that sticks. Mid Tier always has a core of fairly skilled players who carry the rest, but they can't be everywhere and some of them just want to play and be spared being thrust into the coach/mentor role. Even in Mid Tier there are the Get gud types. Mid tier also have quite a few hanger ons that really should pack it in.

    When I did raid, I was a mid tier environment. I was making 1 raid at best a month. When I did make raids, I was drifting into being a liability. No one ever said, "Hey maybe this isn't for you". They just stuck me in a bad group. That was it. Mid Tier won't have the harshness to say go kick rocks, but they will make it obvious that you need them more than they need you. There are many in mid tier that really need to know when its time to focus on family or career and that they are actually holding their guilds back by hanging on.
  11. FawnTemplar Augur

    No. No it isn't.
  12. FawnTemplar Augur


    As a philosopher, I can really appreciate this Marxist-epistemic-privilege-esq argument.

    That being said, you are making a key background assumption here which kills your argument. You are assuming that those people in top tier guild ONLY have experience in those guilds. Even if you are right and every member of a top tier guild holds an inherently less valuable opinion, less valuable doesn't mean not valuable at all.

    I started raiding in Lunacy Unbound which I think is still a mid tier guild, then I moved to Grey Horizon which is low tier, then moved to Ring of Valor and finally to Realm of Insanity. I remember very well the unique challenges each of those guilds faced. I think the real problems happen for mid-tier guilds when two challenges collide and put guild leadership on the horns of a dilemma. Top tier guilds are not insulated from the kinds of issues that mid and low tier guilds face but the key is that we generally don't face two of those issues at the same time, as with the problems of lack of skill and low raid attendance. In RoI we might have a night where only 3 clerics logs in but that is not compounded by the clerics that DO log in also having sub-par play. This, I think is going to be the challenge with any one sided answer, it will not adequately address issues where multiple problems have coalesced together.

    It doesn't seem like there is anything we all can do to solve the atrophy of player numbers so perhaps a good solution is going to include things like 0 tier raids (as many others have said) or raids which do not require a full 54 people to complete (something like WoW has... I know I know don't hate me). Necessary though likely not sufficient.
    Brohg likes this.
  13. Zunnoab Augur

    It's not that the opinion of people in the top guilds isn't valuable, it's that by the very nature of the power differences the experience isn't going to be the same. It's not uncommon for the average member of a guild doing well to not even know what some of the mechanics on an event are, because the force is so powerful it's either not a threat or bypassed so quickly it doesn't seem like much of a challenge.

    Cactiikii is a really good example of that one. With heavy DPS, he must seem like a joke. Meanwhile, Gorowyn is much easier on the force overall if the force doesn't field heavy DPS. It's just not the same game, at all. That's even ignoring the difference in going in with a likely fully-geared force from the prior expansion, something the developers outright admitted tuning for doesn't work with the Underfoot debacle.

    Two other examples:
    Sullon Zek, and her viral mechanics and such, and HP based adds. She even has a few occasions of two HP based waves a couple % apart. When I did that event, it was a long event, keeping the raid split in two with one add team, carefully hitting the % waves to not be overwhelmed. When some others did it, they just burned her down and kited adds pretty much bypassing the mechanics.

    Mindshear: a common thing passed around was that you are "punished" with an add if you do DPS to the wrong Acolyte. In reality, each Acolyte has its own mechanic. It happens that the last to spawn (as shown on track) pops a single add. If that add comes, and you kill him, then you can kill the add and it will not come back. To forces that could kill him before it popped, there is no reason they would know that.

    I was using those as examples of things I might not have even noticed in a stronger raid force than with what IE was attempting the raid with. I did not know who was targeted by that AE, but even surviving that final fight at all is a huge challenge for a force that isn't quite strong. Had I been in IL at the time IL beat Stratos, I wouldn't have bothered analyzing the final encounter on the event to the level I did. It was particularly the comment about someone not noticing the raid has heavy AEs that prompted my talking about it.

    Thanks for the insights regardless though, even though I knew most of it. If it helps anyone else out, that's a good thing. The last couple expansions have been unkind to the prospects of continued viability of the raid game overall.
  14. Allayna Augur

    I know it's a pipe dream, but a tier 0 with 2 or 3 raids every expansion would have some benefit for the mid-tier guilds out there. I look at GMM and wish that we had a delayed release as well.

    We took advantage of the 1/2 timers yesterday and did GMM and Smoke with 41 MS and 3 guests. Roughly half the tanking/healing that we normally do those events with and down part of a DPS group.


    0 wipes, 4 wins on an unscheduled night and we had a blast, because we challenged our roster. We had knights tanking bosses - because of the added self healing for smoke trials.

    The difference though in us doing these with 40ish and a mid-tier is that we are proficient and have been farming the events since release. Agreeing with what you said, that 2 deficits are detrimental, low numbers and low experience/knowledge of the class etc...

    I'm just hoping they put some tier 0 - non-flagging based, non-progression based raids in for the mid-tier this go around and it doesn't take away from the targets that remain viable all year for top tier guilds.

    ROI, MS, Triton - I'm sure all drop "rot loot targets" from the rotation as time goes on in an expansion.
  15. Bigstomp Augur

    You are killing Rustbottom. While it doesn't cover every slot, you are earning the best in slot gear for some slots.

    Museum is possibly even easier. Less of a dps check.

    The final raid also seems like less of a dps check.

    (If I am mistaken, I have not tried the latter two in a low dps situation so I could be just uninformed)
  16. Bigstomp Augur

    For T0, NToV during RoF was an absolute boon for our casual raid force. The gear wasn't great compared to what main teams were earning (T2+) (especially as we were not killing Vulak at the time) but it was pretty solid. And the events were fun but not too crazy so less experienced people handled them well.
  17. Metanis Bad Company

    Most games couldn't even have a discussion like this. The monster we know as Everquest is a large and complex beast with many moving parts. The Devs deserve a lot of credit for continuing to find compelling ways to feed it and keep it alive.

    We all know there are limited Dev resources to address the myriad issues raised here. One thing I think they could do with the resources at hand is to make "fixes" to the UI specifically intended to make life easier for beginning and casual raiders. The "fixes" could be as simple providing reference UI's for the various classes that help to focus relevant information and abilities more easily. Just providing properly configured chat windows and chat colors could help some people immensely.

    I've assisted a fair number of players via TeamViewer and their UI's are frequently awful because they're a haphazard mess cobbled together as their character developed and progressed. For example people don't use AA abilities because they don't have a place to add another hot button. Then they never think about using that ability. They don't have chat windows properly filtered and arrayed where their eyes naturally focus. They've never modified chat colors to make the most important stuff more readable.

    If they made a song for the current EQ UI it would be Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time"!

    Brohg likes this.
  18. kizant Augur

    They could create a simple handicap system where lower performing raids get a bonus the longer an event goes on. For example, you engage Rustbottom and everyone gets a buff added to their song window. It starts off doing nothing but after a few minutes it starts increasing your ac, hp and mana regen, increases your crit rate, crit damage, etc. Then it continues getting a little bit stronger every minute that passes.

    The only difficultly would be figuring out when to start increasing the stats. But it's something they could tune as the year goes on and more people are doing the raids. It might actually be easier to upgrade something like that than modify the complicated event mechanics if something is too hard. They already have zone wide auras that upgrade themselves over time. It probably wouldn't be very difficult to implement.
    FawnTemplar, Allayna, Vumad and 2 others like this.
  19. Wulfhere Augur

    The opposite of Mitigation of the Mighty. Great idea to re-purpose that concept to make it easy to tune events towards being winnable. :)

    Call it Fury of the Forlorn or Mitigation of the Meager ;)
    kizant likes this.
  20. Maedhros High King

    I think it would be enough to remove enrage timers and let people limp their way through no matter how long it takes. Gradually increasing the stats on a buff the longer you take could virtually assure a win assuming the stats were strong enough to make a difference in the first place. That toes the line way too much with participation trophy mentality.
    Spellfire likes this.