with 4k+ dps, AoW doesn't drop below 100%.

Ideally the entire expansion's raid content is not balanced one way. If AOW and perhaps Tunare are balanced towards 72 people with great gear all playing well, that's fine, and it's really not something that the majority of TLP raiders (50ish oh Fippy) should worry about. It's the approach that the game eventually took - things like OMM and Vish being relatively out of reach for many but the rest is accessible.

The key is to lose a one-size-fits-all raid balance and actually make different benchmarks for different mobs. I want Vindi to revert to total pushover chump and AOW to be out of reach for sloppy guilds like DW, with the rest of Velious' raid content falling at DIFFERENT levels in the middle of that.

I don't think I'm alone here - I think even the loudest FI and proudest AOS are fine with balance that includes some easier stuff doable by 18-24 (eg Vindi), others with 30s (eg Zland, Tormax), some needing that 50+ cited number (eg ToV), and some needing max raids that don't suck (eg Tuna, AOW). Just make sure that last set of non-suck stays in; those top-tier stretch targets are just as important for a goal as having some low-tier entry levels for a start that don't require 40+ to do.

Because "lets pass the bill and we'll read it later" has worked so well in the past...

Sorry to jump in on this 3 pages late, but you really shouldn't perceive the term laymen as an insult or being elitist. I'm just saying the developers have limited time and asking them to spend that time on the forums is wasteful.

Considering I'm one of those "pre-existing condition" people that was screwed on insurance for the longest time, I'd say it did. Was it an ideal result? No - but it was a marked improvement for many people that share my plight. (And it's not exactly a rare plight - around 30% of the insurance market w/o Medicare clients was PEC - with Medicare clients it was over 60%, thankfully Medicare never had a no PEC clause though)

Stop thinking about "me-me-me" and about what is healthiest for the game. If it's too "me-me-me" and it's unappealing to all but a handful of people, these servers become unprofitable and stop being maintained. Everquest is already niche, when you reduce that niche to only the "ultra hard mode, throw 120 characters at an encounter" players you reduce it even further.

If your 80 people are unhappy but the other 2000+ playing on the TLPs are content, who do you think they're going to sacrifice if they can't make both groups happy?

I remember Brad McQuaid said in the Conquest banning emails that the 3rd and 4th warders in ST were intended to take 60 players. No idea if those were intended to be harder or easier than AoW, but that's at least some reference for how big they envisioned raids in Velious.

This has been their problem from the start.

The copy/paste concept of universally changing a mechanic on all raid targets leads to unintended consequences. Consequences that prevent more casual guilds from consuming targets that were afterthoughts to competitive guilds because you simply do not have the players available to beat them. This was Holly's plan all along considering past statements that casual's don't deserve to raid.

When you scale that up to the end of era bosses, I'm sure you see how those mobs present new challenges for guilds accustomed to steamrolling content.

This is why the TLP community scoffs at DW's statements about content being unkillable. They're not used to having to try harder, focus more, and really work to beat certain targets. Zerging takes little skill as we all know. From their kill list, it sure appears they've found ways to do things members posted were unkillable at the outset.

DW's hesitancy to post ANY information to evidence these mobs are indeed as difficult as they've been made out to be by their members makes the rest of the TLP community wonder if DW is just a sub-par guild capable of zerging.

Their claims become more questionable because the regen issue was not a hotfix and they've been made to wait a month to see in-combat regen changed.

I'm sure they will wear this past month's kill list as a badge of honor and lord over other TLP guilds saying they beat content no one else could beat (forgetting to point out they cried for the nerfs themselves).

Getting back to the game side of things:

By that logic, why even have a test server then?

Why are IT environments divided into at least test and production and preferably development, test and production?

That was my point, just get a fix in and see what happens is a terrible approach to an already flawed decision (regen combat changed at the last minute).

The changes have been on Test for over a week now - maybe even two weeks, FYI.

Yes, it was silly that the regen change didn't hit Test beforehand, but the excuse of "we can't test it" no longer exists.

I still dont understand the point of MotM on TLP servers, given that its as close as you can get to playing the original content as it was done originally.

If every Velious fight in Velious cap was the equivalent of Luclin era HP with snow I think a lot of guilds would have died well before the bosses did.

Unless TLP has its own test environment, Test has spent a lot of its prime time being locked the last week or two.


Whats a little disconcerting is the "didnt drop below 100%", since any meaningful damage done would have it sit at 99% until a regen tick.

This new regen seems to update per second, not tick like most.

MotM was useful when mobs had 32k hp as changes to combat over the years (pets, spells, resists, how melee damage is calculated) trivialized mobs with that low of HP. You didn't have to be good, you just needed numbers. Basically think of it as everything got inflated but the mobs themselves.

This proved to be an issue as people are now capable of running 30 or more characters at once and exploited petwalling to consume raid content. The idea of a single person locking out people from classic or kunark raid content had the development team arrive at motm as a solution.

It appears it was intended to address pet walling and also the changes to the combat system as a whole to make some of the classic and kunark content... "challenging" to raiding guilds. Problem is, it robbed the players relying on quality over quantity from enjoying the content because not only are mobs now hitting harder, but they mitigate better, have more HP and with regen changes, regenerate faster than any dps a small, skilled group can put out. It's now become a question of do we have enough DPS classes to have a realistic shot of winning before our limited resources (mana) run out?

Basically it ensured raid guilds were challenged a little bit more and locked out all but the absolute largest of box armies from most raid content.

Problem is, in Velious mobs don't have 32k hp anymore, so throwing a 5x factor to HP on a mob that already has 350k hp and turning it into a 1.8 million HP mob turns fights into Luclin era fights without an increase in combat ability via AA, new spells and significantly increased dps weapon ratios. At best, you get to proc avatar and due to mitigation increases your BiS weapons hit for 30 damage with avatar up and 25 if it's down. And it gets worse if certain mobs have debilitating effects (slow, mana drain, fears).

This has turned certain classes into DPS classes (like SK with Unholy Aura for 5 minutes chaining lifetap until OOM) and has marginalized dps casting classes like wizards because their manapools and mana regeneration do not keep up with the massive increase to mob HP.

MotM has many unintended consequences, not all of which have been forseen.

As for this combat regeneration issue, that's simply a product of someone in development green-lighting a change last minute without giving it much time to be tested at all. Subsequently, the top guild on the server where this content is live has griped and complained and provided anecdotal information that regen and AC are too high. Warranted or not, their approach raises many more questions than it answers.

The rest of us? We'll just have to wait until we get the content ourselves.

Actually while it wasn't tested it was intended to be as fast as it was more than likely - the patch notes when it was added stated that when out of combat MotM mobs would regen much quicker. And for that, regening to full in ~10 min or so sounds more reasonable than their old regen.

The problem clearly was that their "out of combat" flag doesn't work - not that the regen was inherently a problem. If their "OOC for MotM mobs" thing worked just out of combat, we'd not have ever had this discussion.

Game Update Notes: Mar 16, 2016
*** Progression Servers ***
- Bosses on progression servers will now regenerate more health, especially while idle.

It was there. Just no one understood it at the time maybe.

I didn't notice that. Given no context it would sound like they Cragbeasted the mobs and they now need to be steadily moved during engagement! DW, have you tried keeping mobs on the move and maybe using more piercers?

Yes yes, move the mob in little circles!

Eh, it was obvious to me - especially with people complaining about how easy it was to get something to 30% or whatever, rezz up and engage it at half with it being no big deal by zerging it down.

Any other interpretation seems misguided at best. Since we had a known complaint/problem which "unengaged" regen would serve as an answer to versus them adding a completely new mechanic to old encounters.

Top guilds will always find ways to deal with overpowered targets. Either with good tactics or more numbers.
But how many guilds can field 60-120 people?

I would say the middle range guilds are taking the biggest hit here.
The numbers you need to raid a buffed target became silly with velious.

If you really wanted the top guilds to have a challange you could have buffed zone XX or Boss XX to make them real hard and left the others. As it is now you are keeping alot of people outside the raidcontent.

2 cents from a middle tier guild.

Great post, and echoes the sentiment expressed by many other players here.

I heard the guild in attempting AoW was actually doing sub 2k dps and that is why AoW didn't drop.
This is also why a parse is not being provided.

I heard the trolls come out at night trying to find unsuspecting victims!

In all honesty its easy math, its very likely that AOW has 4million HP or very close by with the buff on.

what does that mean ? currently the regen is 0.1% and 0.1% of 4 million HP is 4000.

That means to even make him lose 1 HP per second without regening it back 4001 dps is needed.
so lets say the dps is 4100 , thats 100 actual dps , thats 40.000 seconds needed to do 1%.

Thats a good way to go, challenge in boredom instead of actual skills! i like it.