Yesterday my guild, and I hear several others knocked off all 4 new raids in about 2 hours. I'm expecting we will shave off about half that time in the next few runs. Desire to do T4 of ROF has now dropped off completely so we are still down to 1 raid night a week. We have a lot of the, I only play to raid, types. What kind of ideas does other people have to keep people engaged and doing stuff in game? For people who get their gear solely from raids, how do you encourage them to group?
Pretty much. I was hoping that the HA's would bring some interest. The hard core raider types are meh, to HA's.
Out of curiousity only, how much total time was spent in beta doing those 4 raids to prepare for your 2 hr sweep through them? I realize there is a practical value to going through beta, besides improving the live release by removing bugs and errors in coding. It helps a guild get new content into farm mode quicker, and for a longer period.
This is why i don't raid anymore and only play in the end-game, it has a slightly longer content duration.
Doing all 8 CotF raids in 1 night, while possible for the top several guilds, is too much of a hassle. Can't take a smoke break? No loot for alts, just let it rot? I don't see more than 1-3 guilds in EQ doing that. Splitting it into 2 nights of relaxed farming is much better.
Spreading it out a bit seems better than doing a single night of binge raiding. It might make grouping easier to do since there will be people on for the raids, be it only for a couple hours of raids, and there might be some time left over for some group content. Otherwise if all the official guild business is over in Sunday night or whatever, there really is no real need for anyone to log back until the next Sunday. The devs are not beholden to do anything either, unless people would like flagging/keying and other artificial time sinks to return or a massive increase in difficulty. That is a dead horse that needs to stay dead as far as discussion goes. As far as culpability, its on guilds as to how they want to manage their time. If guilds do chose to knock out all the events possible in one day, and you as a member of that guild happen to miss that one and only one night occasionally or routinely if for example you end up with a work schedule change, than you need to find another guild by default at that point. That would not be as much of a burden by spreading the raids out a bit, which still offers being able to participate if even in a somewhat reduced degree. Still guilds will do what they do and have their own culture to abide by. The top end prides itself on 1 night clears as being one of the few ways to still distinguish themselves. Personally I would rather have EQ be a way to unwind than just be more racing around like what goes on the rest of the work week. Ultimately, I just said F-it on raiding all together as the schedule is never the same one week to the next.
For veteran raiders at the top end I imagine they have seen just about everything. I'm not sure the devs could do much to stop them other than over tune the raids themselves or throw random uncontrollable elements into it that "surprise" them.
In this particular expansion?Probably yes, considering the group game is easy in group gear, and flatout god mode tier trivial in raid gear. (not any players fault for this its just how things have become in eq) i've experienced the game as both a raider and a grouper, in fact probably 7 of eq's expansions i was a raider. Two guilds in EQ beat all the raids in eq before *i think* anyone beat all the missions. So as soon as raids ended people in full 6 man end game raid geared groups could then likely easily make up for that lost time with rank 3 spells / raid weapons / raid focus effects and catch up to the people working on group content with relative ease.
That's why I take my sweet time with the group content... no reason to rush through it because as we've all seen, there's plenty of time to get it all done before more content is released. We may have blown through the raids, but I'll still do the group stuff... but I'm going to take my time. (which will probably mean like a week or two sadly, LOL). We'll see
There are a lot of new HA fortunately, so it'll be a while to go through them all. However the new missions were very short. I think the DH one we had 4 mins of fighting in total, and we weren't very optimal so could probably halve that with the right group setup.
How bad would it be to drop the lockout timers to 24 hours. So people gear up faster...is that such a big deal anymore?
The only issue I would personally see with such a thing (beyond burning out faster) would be for any raids that require previous lockouts to request. Would be annoying to have to beat all of Sepulcher in one day, as an example.
So you gear everyone, their alts and their alt's alts in a month's time after a brutal glutenous marathon of killing every raid over and over nightly. Then what? Is that the time when people decide to do HA's or will they just disappear since the loot chase is over until the next installment? HA's won't hold up too long either with people boxing them in full raid gear. Lock outs are fine how they are. There are already no time sinks, keying, flagging or even difficulty to slow the top players down. This installment there was no need to even onlock the events. The RNG is circumvented with raid currency/vendors. How much more streamlined does it need to be? Sometimes being exceptionally good at something means it no longer works in your favor. Still, as long as it still works for the majority of players than no one should expect the devs to bend over backwards for a small subset of players like the once did in the past. Otherwise, the next logical step is being able to just buy a full kit of raid gear with station cash. Over and done for however long it takes to process the transaction.
Make raids like the HA's in execution. Get past phase 1 or 2 of an event. There are 3 (random) possible outcomes for phase 3 and you have to adjust so it's never the same from one raid to the next. I believe this is where they might head with raids, don't make as many raids en total but make them where running the same raid twice is never the same process in execution. HA's may be the testbed for this on a smaller scale.
That won't matter. The top guilds are so disgustingly good at what they do and they have seen/done it all. It has jumped the shark. The devs probably think that their efforts are better served elsewhere at this point than trying to create a raid that RoI would actually be stumped by. It would be nice if they did, maybe make it DLC or whatever but so far there doesn't seem to be any indication of them taking that direction. Making raids for those top guilds is like buying a Christmas gift for someone that has everything. You know you can never top anything that was gifted in the past, so you settle for just taking that person out for a nice dinner.
24 hour resets on raids would be nice, but it won't happen. They can get more quarters put in the machine with the longer delay raids.
