There is no end-game for non raiders?

Existential.

Bardy, meet my friend Soren Kierkegaard. You two may have much in common.

Try to 1 group Huge Mistake or Undefeated Blade now.

It would be better if you wouldn't exaggerate and embellish like this:

Lots...? Are...? And have been...? (I haven't even touched that part yet).

If you simply said, "Some guilds are capable of clearing all 8 current raids in 5-6 hours", I wouldn't have any issues with that.

And that's really the only challenge/endgame you'll find in today's EQ. Create artificial limitations and try to tackle something. 1 group DDD/GGG. Try to solo that named that gave you a little trouble with 2 people. Try to beat your time trials for tasks. (one of my favorites was doing all 3 OMMs when they came out in under 1 hour total with only a mage, cleric, and enchanter)

I had fun doing those with three toons.

One of the most fun challenge-type things I've done in semi-recent history was doing all three achievements for Chapterhouse: A Matter of Life and Death, at once, with three people.

Some non-raiders suggest that raiders have it easy. They contend we raid 1 night a week and harvest too good gear as a result.

The truth is:

When obtaining end expansion raid flags was done through raiding
http://samanna.net/eq.progression/prog.pop.shtml
(see the chart mid page)

it was so arduous it made half of all the guilds that raided blanch and argue for 85/15, back flagging people 85/15'd into the endzone, and ultimately alternatives to doing the progression once content was not current.

Not at all 1 day a week sit in the East Commonlands tunnel and collect your 5000AA's for breathing both in and out.

When obtaining raid flags was changed to require doing the group progression we did the group progression in days while EVERY guild member who wanted to continue raiding had to complete it in weeks - a month at absolute most.

When there has been no requirement to start T1 raiding there's still an expectation that you'll be max level, maintain or surpass the minimum guild AA requirement, and acquire the augs and other paraphernalia from group content that distinguishes hardcore raiders from the indolent.

1 day a week - nearly flawless execution, the "A Team", and pressure.
2 days a week - more laid back but still no have to do the event a second time because of errors, every valued guild member participates if not 100% of the time by far most of the time, thoughtful loot deliberation, 3-5 minute breaks between events while strategy is recited...

PLUS in both cases group content.

The infamous "part time job" is spades embellished and polished to a beautiful patina.

Not at all, nothing a bit like, grandma's non-raider experience.

I hope I didn't hit a nerve. The fact is not everyone wants, is suitable, or can raid, And that's perfectly fine. In fact I wish Magelo had a non-raider checkbox when looking at the leaders in various classes. People who have 0 raid gear and still play hardcore and effectively deserve credit for their accomplishments too.

However, players who /wink /wink /say Only 1 day a week! /wink /nudge /nudge
are [redacted].

It seems that "end-game" content for the OP is all about gear, so in that light I think Phretts post would be most useful.

I did that LDON raid a few weeks ago to get the Aug that procs a skeleton pet, was a lot of fun even though it was trivial. Since I do not raid either, I still did not have a weapon to put it in (slot 8) so I "raided" Qvic and got my BL a twohanded weapon from one of the bosses there. I realize this is only a fun-weapon (stats suck off course) but still. Fun to see up to three little skellies with shields and swords beating on your mob.

I had nearly 5k AAs spent when the patch came around and got around 2500 from the grant, most of which went in the general tab. But please, do continue with the chicken little histrionics.

Hey now, 1 mil pp is nothing these days...

30+ mil pp or so, and you're getting somewhere

AKA "Then Hamster Wheel"
-R

Try to 1 group Huge Mistake or Undefeated Blade now.

That stuff is /yawn well before HoF opened. UB was on my 3 box target list from the get go.

This.

End-game going from... "Wipe a lot of times working out a strategy, compiling lists of Audio triggers / spell effects / emotes, figuring out mob immunities / peculiarities, and finally beat the raid after 30 attempts" to "unrestricted beta access to raids, do your learning in beta; some times with a dev write up available and log on mid-day during a week day to 1 shot each raid before the work crowd has even left at 5" is what killed raiding for me.

Stuff may be tuned better now. But I certainly had more fun during UF wiping to OP/Broken mechanics than I did facerolling easy raids in HoT or VoA. In fairness I did like a lot of the VoA raids... Pillars was awesome, Windsong was a great multi-tank endurance event (but F that mana drain in its face) which is challenging and fun for a light-healer guild, Fumerak was fun being part of the curing team though there were far too many adds and HP... And the power up mechanic was extremely vague at the start before it was patched, Sep5 I have a love/hate relationship with. I loved the epic duration. I hated the vague mechanics (Gods unlocking HP), instant death light orbs, death touch from not everyone being on aggro, and the fact that you had to spend 2 hours gettingn to final phase only to wipe to a single mistake / unknown mechanic.

I'm just glad I quit before RoF / CotF. Every raid dying the day it is released is extremely depressing. It used to take a month+ for the most hardcore of guilds to beat an expansion.

My friend and i did it with only 2 real players (them and myself), them playing one character and me playing 3, we aren't raiders and we did it before it was made an optional checkmark.

we also managed to do all 3 chapterhouse mission 2 conquests at the same time, we even have the timestamps to back it up

There are actually 11 raid targets to clear, for us anyway. 14 when we feel like doing minis (which isn't very often anymore). Yeah, it could all be done in one 5ish hour raid day. No, we don't do that. I prefer to keep it to a 2 short raid day cycle, with 5 days off. Everyone has their own preferences. None are wrong.

On the original topic: There is no end game in the group game, or the raid game, at this time.

^ Now this is a dude i wanna group with. Did you do the Chapterhouse 2 conquests before they gimped it though?

I have been here since 2004 and I have yet to see everything. I like to explore old areas I had to run from the mobs at lower level. Exploring can be interesting, especially now that I have mounts for my characters.

"I was informed Latent Ether gear is the best gear we can get without having to join a raiding guild.

Latent Ether armor will take me like 3 days to get max, along with all the other Heroic Adventure gear slots."

Be about 80 missions to get enough valor marks to get all your gear. I don't think you will get those done in three days unless you are grouping with raid geared folk and doing missions non stop.