Terror of Luclin Raids: A Raider's Review

I do think it's interesting that they tried to flip the "melee loses out on DPS because boss has to be moved" that happens in so many other events to hurt casters instead. But man does it make it boring if you're a non-ranger hybrid stuck on the floor to keep the AE from wiping out the platform.

Ditto with the banes, I even like how on CTG they punish you if you try to use the wrong spell to bane with.

Bring back bane damage adding to parse!

Totally agreed about the banes. The one thing about banes that I will reiterate (again...) is that the damage logs need to show the effect of someone's banes with specific damage amounts, like with UEE and Aaryonar events.

Banes are a seasoning, we like it, but don't want too much in the stew or it'll ruin the experience.

Hitting bags of hitpoints for 20 minutes is bad.
Everyone-gets-shadow-stepped-into-death-auras is bad.
Overlapping auras that are larger than my screen is bad.
Mobs that keep rubber-banding and end up summoning/killing tanks is bad.
Mobs that are part of an event that wait 5 minutes to move due to zone/instance lag and then multiply and then all move at once causing a raid wipe is bad.
Needing 4 full hotkeys of which mob I am assigned to tank when it spawns is bad.
Having 1 person LD during an event and causing 53 others to wipe due to a failed emote is bad.
Ignoring feedback on the beta forum is REALLY BAD.

Woah how are you running 4 hotkeys? I have 2 social macros that cover all my /tar needs. I've got way more socials to spam out assignments into the tank channel.

How did you find 2 full hotbars? I have 11 bars nearly maxed.

I am not using 2 hotbars of social macros for mobs I am assigned lol, I am using 2 individual buttons. 2 slots on 1 hotbar. I've got about the same number of total hotbars showing as you, I just can't imagine needing 4 separate buttons just for raid targets in ToL. Shoot one of my hotkeys for targeting still has the smoke trial where you need to target the 06 mob on it.

You can put multiple mobs on the same Target Hotkey whether they are in the raid your in or not. The button just does the check and targets what IS there. You do not need a different key for each mob you're assigned unless they pop while your tanking an assigned one already.

I use a single hotkey and just change the assignments in it as needed, for the most part.

I think these raids would be fantastically more fun if the mobs had like 2/3rds to 1/2 the hitpoints. The same goes for the group content. The fights are too long because of large hitpoints pools and thus the mechanics go from exciting to exhausting, especially the ones that can wipe the raid if missed, like Aten’s silence and the shackles from Free the Goranga.

The raid composition isn’t always perfect, with the guild I’m in being tank heavy, so dps may not be as high as it could be with a more perfect setup, but the people in my guild work very hard to do max damage and are very competitive and monitor parses heavily, so it’s not like they’re slacking or anything.

If there’s one big takeaway for next expansion, it’s that my preference would be for more raids (12-15) and of shorter duration (5-10 minutes long).

Not going to give my review of every raid, but I'd highlight a few themes IMO:

• A couple of the events maybe have too many hit points in an absolute sense, meaning they take longer at modern DPS levels than raids reasonably should. That said, I think most of the raids are fine in isolation, but all are on the longer side of what I'd like to see. As bad as Arbiter was, the remainder of CoV had a really good variety of fight times, including some quick 60-90 second burns. I don't care how much the developers don't like short raids, players do. Not every raid should be burnable, but having a good variety makes raiding much more enjoyable (and plays more to different class strengths!). ToL skewed too consistently to the longer end of things.

• This expansion has a lot of individual emotes. Individual emotes are fine, but I don't think most people like them. In my opinion they increase probability of failure in an inconsistent way - they're highly dependent on who is emoted. It sucks to be doing a long event well into farm and have that one player get emoted and have to start over. On the flip side, those emotes don't make things hard for guilds like mine, because if we can just get one person to run away (usually on progression, we can), the mechanic is nullified. For higher tier raids, mechanics that require everyone or a large portion of the raid to respond/move (and not just follow the raid leader) are much better for difficulty and much less punishing for individual mistakes (think Mearatas).

• I agree with everyone else about lag. It sucks, especially with how progression works (effectively, a speed race). I know it's hard to predict how mechanics will lag when they don't on Beta, but some fail safe like only allowing one set of golems (on AHR) or sweepers (on Oubliette) to be up would at least mitigate the impact

• I thought the difficulty curve was pretty good, and it would've been a bit better if AHR/Goranga were shorter and Shei wasn't so conducive to low #'s. Close the Gate is my favorite raid, but it is not hard enough for a final raid, and Oubliette/Primal Vampire were a bit easier than I would have preferred.

I think Shei was a neat idea, but it was ruined by the stage with AE thresholds. As others have said, the optimal way to handle the design is to have less people (so they can all be up top); doing so negates most of the mechanics. It's easier said than done, but one would hope the devs could think about the optimal way to handle their mechanics; I don't think it was that hard to see how people would do Shei.

Close the Gate I thought had a nice array of challenges and differentiated mechanics. It has some (though not egregious) "power" requirements in terms of tanking, healing, and DPS (including things like tank positioning). It incorporates CC in a not annoying way and provides a lot of non-obvious options to optimize your strategy. It's one of few raids in the expansion that I don't think anyone could reasonably expect to one-shot (or two-shot, etc.) without knowing the mechanics; this provides a good sense of progression while learning. The problem, IMO, is fundamentally most of the raid still stands in one spot and kills things. I think final raids benefit from enclosed spaces (Mearatas, Drusella's Vault, etc.) and mechanics that require the whole raid to respond (and not just by following the raid leader). If you aren't emoted in Close the Gate you mostly are not required to interact with mechanics beyond doing your basic role. The same goes for the rest of the raids, but I think the final raid is where there should be a higher bar.

Also, obligatory completion statistics (note that all of the last 3 expansions have much higher completion rates, as a % of active guilds, than the any others in EQ's history):


To summarize the graphs, ToL T1 was completed by 100% of active/reporting guilds faster than any other tier in these expansions. ToL T2 is tracking faster than CoV T2/ToV T3 and just below ToV T1. ToL T3 is right around where CoV T2, CoV T3, and ToV T2 were. I think part of the reason more guilds completed ToL T1/T2 faster is the completely non-linear nature rather than an easier absolute difficulty. ToV/CoV did not have any entirely non-linear tiers. Having more guilds complete the raids without making them easier is good IMO, so I think that's a good paradigm for lower tier raids (linearity in T3 makes sense to me).

My thoughts:

• Zelinak and Doomshade punished low geared players with the AEs. That kind of mechanic probably is better for T2 and T3.
• I have played Shei from the perspective of melee dps, range dps, and healer. I find range dps to be the most fun. A lot is going on, and is the right level of difficulty. As a melee dps, I got to perfect my burns, as I never moved at all. Kind of boring, but it is nice to have the easy raid.
• Way to many single emotes that if failed wiped a raid. I don't think you should ever have a silence emote that affects everyone. Better for it to affect 10 random players or something.
• I didn't like the enrage timer on Aten Ra. If you had low dps and hit it, there was no way you were going to be able to kill the extra adds to win the event. Enrage timers should make things more difficult, not impossible.
• Not a fan of the ticks in Primal Vampire.

Just highlighting this one because I wanted to add to it. I agree that enrage timers should make things harder, not impossible. If you're hitting the enrage timer, you're struggling with DPS, for whatever reason. Adding more things that need DPSed basically softlocks the event for you.

I think my favorite "enrage" timer mechanics are ones that start ramping up the difficulty slowly. Tantor is a decent example where Tantor starts hitting harder and harder the deeper into enrage you get. I can't think of the specific raid, but I know there were ones where the timed AEs/emotes/etc started happening more quickly. Things like that where you still have a chance to push through it and it's not just the event saying "lol your DPS sucks, time to waste your time with the false premise of being able to win!"

Additionally, enrage timers that are an immediate wipe scenario (again can't think of specific examples, but I seem to recall ones that just basically DTed the raid) are bad too. Not that we have any of those this expansion, thankfully!

The enrage timer doesn't make Aten impossible. We've beat it on our casual raids after enrage. Almost beat it last week on casuals with 5 adds up after the goos died. We were working our way through them and got an unlucky tank death... it's possible.

It's very hard for me to rate the various raids in this expansion due to them not functioning properly more times then not. It's been literally months since my guild has had a good t3 instance. I'm not sure if it's our particular raid nights being popular or what, but the t3 instance is particularly bad for us. This turns vampire into a slog when the guild is doing much less DPS then it should be, and don't even get me started on trying to hit the ticks as a melee with instance lag and even more warping then they do already.

My favorite raid at this point is probably Shei as it seems to have the least chance of being laggy and as a DPS class the burn on boss can be fun. Goranga and Aten are probably next for me. The tier 1 raids I don't particular enjoy very much outside commander, especially since this is another instance that seems to be laggy for us quite often. I'm sure having 3 raids in a single instance doesn't help.

I am just having a very difficult time enjoying raiding in general at the moment. I honestly don't see how anyone can enjoy raiding much right now in the current state it's in, unless their particular raid nights just happen to be on the correct night of the week that has less overall server load.

I also agree with a previous poster in saying that this expansion seems to go a bit overboard with the fail-emote raid wipe mechanics.

Best line in some time. I wonder if the creatures of Norrath ever think of us in the same sort of way.

I sometimes call EQ "Home Invasion Simulator"

ooo, like it could have been an obligate ranged battle so all participants have to dance?

On the whole it is a nice set of raids, lots of variations. Main problem I found for most of them are they are to long and to emote heavy. Having 4 raids (on of which is T1) that can wipe on one emote failure isn't great.

For me fav raid is commander, love everytime we do the event it is a little different on which mobs we get on each wave. Its fun to MA. In the same vane I enjoy Close the Gate and Primal Vampire, but find both of these a bit on the long side.

Dislike raids are a bit tougher to decide the least liked, It is a close call between Doomshade and Oubliette. Oubliette is the shadow steping into auras, resulting in deaths and stupid yellow mobs if that person dies with a chainer up. I find I am bored most of the time on this raid when we hit the halfway mark on the final named. . Doomshade is just meh. This week 3 emotes in a row, with no time to get back to the raid before the next emote hits, standing around doing nothing makes my trigger finger itch.

For future events I'd like to see the one emote fail wipes raids restricted to the final raid, if we have any at all. Also more personal emotes rather than raid ones. For example dance like a puppet could have been a solo emote so you don't all fail when one person gets summoned into an aura. The same with the stay out the yellow aura in Oubliette that fails the raid when someone gets shadow stepped into an aura. The stomp achievement was personal in Aten raid so not sure why these 2 weren't as well.

Considering the devs that do raid are in the top 3 guilds and the rest do not raid, I think their perception is skewed heavily.

I'm mostly in agreement with Sancus, despite not being in a top 10 guild myself.

CoV had a great variety and ToL is too focused on long events. Sontalak and Zlandi were great one offs to counter balance Arbiter. But now we are basically doing 4 arbiters a week and its lame.

Zel is probably one of the most toxic fights in a while. Repeated stun AEs (just screw bards amirite), mobs spawning across the map and slowly walking in and then deciding to warp in. Rubberbanding insect aura.

AHR and FTG have far too much hp on the boss. FTG the fight is over after 34%? adds (I cant remember offhand) and we just have to sit there attacking the stupid dummy. Also, the fact that you basically cannot avoid 2 DTs firing is dumb.
I know I was an advocate on beta of pushing the blobs on AHR to happen later, having done the fight for this long, they should happen at 50% and she should just have 30% less hp.

Shei I would consider a failed experiment.

OoL is proof that the devs don't really understand their limitations with this game. The yellow aura of the grabbers gets basically blot out by the purple aura which is hilariously stupid. Also the fact that I can be in a safe spot, then just shadowstepped into a mechanic is A+.

PV ticks... lol. I like that they took basically every way to make this incredibly annoying to deal with. Nearly impossible to survive out of dragon glyph (even then its sketch). Insane pushback. Stat decrease.

Overall, I like some of the fights. I like a lot of the individual mechanics in the fights. As an expac... it feels exhausting.

Edit: Also the Primal Blood being required to spawn CTG is probably one of the worst design decisions of the expac. It removes the ability to close DZs and regrab them.