Time for a Modest Re-Tune on T2 EoK Raid Events

Looking over Elite Gamers, it appears that there haven't been any new wins on Atrebe's Vault in 3 months, and only 3 new wins on Queen during the same period, with about 10 guilds stuck on these 2 events at the moment, so roughly 1 per server.

That represents probably at least 40 people per guild or roughly 400 people of various skill levels, that haven't made any raid progress for a whole quarter of the year. Realistically, these being mid tier guilds they probably have double that number in total roster members. That is likely discouraging, and not going to be a positive thing for the long term interests of the game.

Considering that we'll likely have a new expansion in November, and we are roughly at the halfway point for this expansion, with about half the guilds that have beaten last expansion having already beaten this one, I think it is time to modestly re-tune Queen and Atrebe's Vault in particular to help some mid tier guilds make some progress over the summer with hopefully a handful more managing to clear the expansion before the next is released.

Yes, the content isn't all that hard/challenging/insert nay-sayer claim to push over content, for the well coordinated guilds out there, and we've enjoyed a longer than usual period of mostly bug fixes, instead of nerfs to events. That said historically many raids are revisited to help straggling guilds during the cycle, and I think we're at a point where it is appropriate.

If I were making the adjustments, for the Queen event I would look at the add timers, add hp, and the warcaster's AE's as the first places to make adjustments. I would probably reduce the damage of the warcaster dot, and reduce hp on the adds. It would not change the general feel of the event, while taking a little load off the healing and dps requirement and reducing the chance of instant deaths for those who get both dots.

For Atrebe's Vault I would probably just increase the hard timer limit between add waves and reduce the Core of Flame aura damage a bit, and maybe the reduce the golems overlapping ae damage a bit. The mana control requirement is actually quite neat in my opinion, but I would probably prefer it actually DT people who fail it and spawn the penalty adds, instead of letting the same people repeatedly fail it so raid leaders have to play detective and yell at people who fail at mana management.

this isn't EasyQuest!

just avoid the warcaster AE Deflect tank them away from the raid. while your casters blow them up. they dont have many hp. Discs/burns should always be on the big sets of adds/warcasters.

Drytank the cores, every reset they go longer and longer before they reset. so like around reset number 3 should give you plenty of time to kill all 3 cores

get in the corner on each golem, and just splash heal. you only get hit by the 1 golem

as for the fire core. use SK tanks, and chanter runes. you can also kite it with selos while your Shms/necros/Druids dot the out of it

tell the plebs who cant control their mana to take the AE TL your porters are pumping out.

A Re-tune of T2 is *NOT* in the best interest to the guilds struggling to get through the Tier, not in the slightest. If you are unable to win T2 raids you are *ZERO* match for T3 raids. What would the point be? A repeat of this post, just asking for a re-tune of T3 by August, instead?

Indeed. If you can't handle T2, T3 is going to be an even greater obstacle.

Don't take that as lack of sympathy. It is just that I don't think it is likely to happen or even that it is even in any of these guild's best interest even.

Rather than asking the devs to nerf raids it would be better for these guilds to ask themselves why they are coming up short. Do they understand all the event mechanics? Are they missing key salient points? Are there major discrepancies in ability in what these guilds are doing and that would be considered standard practice? What winning tactics are other guilds using?

In short: asking the community for help, rather then the devs for nerfs, would not only be far more likely to succeed, it also helps address the underlying issues that are causing these guilds to have issues in current content to begin with.

Lisard already pointed out some helpful points. I think the community would be much more receptive to:
"Hey, we're struggling, what can we do better?"
versus
"Hey, we're struggling, nerf content."

I'm all for tuning down raid content once it's been out for a while, to make it more accessible to lower teir guilds. It keeps the game healthier to include everyone. I don't want EQ to be "EasyQuest" but I also want to see the game live on for a long time. One of the common reasons people quit the game is because their guild dies. Nothing kills a guild like stalled progression for months.

[Sat Jun 03 18:00:57 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:00:57 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:00:58 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:00:59 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:01:00 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:01:01 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:01:02 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:01:04 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
[Sat Jun 03 18:01:04 2017] Burning ash gets into your eyes. You have taken 49280 points of damage.
I'm not sure why Core of Flame does that so often and if it is supposed to be that way, considering that's mitigated 35% or so..then it's like a 600k /tic Dot.
The high regen on axes/golems - just really annoying for lower level guilds or guilds that don't field full raids. It basically compounds the pain. Missing a phase means you only got 4mins (rather than 5mins 30) on Golems till Core's spawn, which requires more burn on the golems, when really you want to be holding the burn more for the Cores.
Saying that - those are just annoying - and guilds in that position are pretty used to that . Apart from the Core of Flame aura - i feel most things are about right.

That list on Elite Gamers isn't accurate at all, our guild recently beat queen, but according to the list we haven't even gotten past prince yet.

Being in a top guild is easy-mode, carrying a "slacker guild" on your shoulders through the content is the true hard-mode. J/K!

Content that encourages improvement within the guild, rather than just "letting them pass half-", is what I like about EQ. Seeing my guild getting more skilled for each expansion, is a motivator in itself.

I think my guild would prefer to win this before it gets easier(its a pride thing!). However, we want to do it in our own pace.

Regarding tuning for queen: I would like an actual AT-warning for the queen dot, rather than it just being timed, would make it easier to beat without having to rely on thirdparty-tools like gina...
The standard ingame UI-functionality should be enough to beat the mechanics, imo. Manually clicking a /timer macro every 55 secs, is not really optimal.

Something like "queen velazul begins to cast a spell, flamesong of ro" ---> 3 seconds to get out of sight, I believe it was there some months ago, no clue why they removed it? Never got it to work?
A setup like the skull-warning on lady life, could work. An AT-warning for the cast, and an AT for when it is safe to get back in sight.

Well, queen spoilers I suppose.

A change I would like to see would be when the Queen kills one of the two captains, they don't get to respawn. It doesn't make sense in terms of lore for her to kill one of them and have him immediately respawn, or to spawn again later. To cycle through her team would make it a bit more interesting - similar to the Grelleth's raid when she cycles through her sons. This would make the raid a bit easier (no more multiple warcaster waves), and make a bit more sense.

I'll leave the debate for nerf vs. not up to others though. I can see points for both sides, and don't really have a strong opinion either way.

Why would you try and avoid flamesong of ro? That would just lead you to neutering your dps and making the event much harder. Just have a couple of priests/paladins splash heal through it.

The only dangerous part of queen are the warcasters, and that is avoidable, either by killing the captain that spawns them to try and force a different one to spawn (suboptimal, good chance to spawn the same one and wastes dps), dpsing fast to get to the next 20% phase, and having tanks kite the warcaster wave before it even aggro's the raid, wait till they ae, then either have someone bring them in one at a time or all at once and burn through them before they ae again.

Queen raid is not hard. The sun emote is a joke to avoid, you can control a lot of it due to the phase/captain mechanics, and the mobs always spawn in the same places so you can control everything even more. Move the queen to somewhere else if you're having positioning issues.

However, I'm all for nerfing raids after X months. No reason to keep blocking guilds that obviously aren't likely to progress, and the only cost at that point for those that have already beaten it is making the boring farm night a little faster.

At best, we're clearing all of EoK in 2 hours once a week, if not doing achievements, people not being lazy or not caring. More like 3 hours most times. So it isn't going to change anything for us, so why not make it easier for a guild that really is trying to progress with suboptimal players, numbers or class make up?

Doesn't hurt anyone, helps some, seems like a win.

We don't have required raid-attendance in our guild, sometimes we have enough healers on, to just soak the dot, sometimes we don't. The tricky point for us on queen, is not the mechanics, it is to deliver proper dps, so yeah, queen is not complicated.

If I believed we were truly blocked and have tried everything we could, and still couldn't beat the raids then I would be in favour of nerfs too. However I still see room for improvement in our performance, we are just late-bloomers.

Still, Im not that self-centered that our guild-pride should block all the other guilds who are struggling, it is ultimately up to the devs what they choose to do. I understand the reasons for mid-season tuning too...

For our guild, the goal is just to beat the expansion before the next one arrives. Its still good, even if it is literally on the final week, but I can accept that each guild have different goals.

There is a difference between a guild that brings 54 players that, for whatever reasons, do not have the necessary gear/AA/skill/timing/knowledge to defeat T2 and T3 events... and a guild that, for whatever reasons, brings 38 players and expects to do what is designed for 54.

The former, I see no issues with a little retuning six months after the events are initially defeated. The latter needs to recruit/merge to get a 54 player raid force first before some fine tuning is done IMHO...

It does that when agro is poor or someone tries to kite. Stone would do the same thing - only our customary Stone tank reliably just stands, agros the out of his mob, and gets healed. So he never dies. It's pretty great.

Good post Belkar. I'm not a fan of nerfing raids etc. in general but for health of game I think a few things should be re-evaluated at this point. I realize it's been recommended numerous times but this would be a good occasion to implement an easier mode for some of these raids and make it only drop 50% of the loot table etc. Some servers have zero guilds that have defeated expansion and many have only one. Then you have the healthy servers that have 2-3 guilds with all content down, in addition to having pickup raids that get a good bit of things down. Watching the weaker guilds completely fold, especially on the struggling servers, while proclaiming this isn't EasyQuest, probably isn't in any of our best interests

IMO, one year expansion cycle:

1) Month 1-3 release + bug fixes
2) Month 4-6 re-evaluate balance and make changes to make it more accessible
3) Month 7-9 minor changes/fixes
4) Month 10-12 major reduction in difficulty on some specific mechanics to allow sub-optimal guilds to make it

OP, I really have to agree with everyone who said it here, if you think a re-tuning of t2 will help, you will be in for a shitstorm in T3. The difference in difficulty in t2 and t3 is very high. I do agree though that they should evaluate the number of guilds actually completing content. With populations dropping, guilds have been disbanding, others have been falling behind due to numbers and missing required classes. Maybe an introduction of "easier" raids with possibly less loot or not getting the option of certain items that you could get on a "harder" version would work. You cant just make everything easier because then you loose the players who do like the challenge and the top guilds. I think with TDS and EoK though there has been a very big problem with the amount of guilds actually completing the expansion on time and being able to farm it and not spend 3-4 months wiping day in day out. You are GOING to lose players making raids so difficult that guilds spend months just dying over and over again accumulating little to no items.

I have to echo what others have already stated. If you cannot beat EoK T2 raids right now, then T3 raids are so far out of your reach they aren't even worth attempting. For the lower tier raid guilds to be able to beat T3 they would basically have to reduce the difficulty up to 75% or so, which for the kind of gear that drops in these raids, would be ridiculous in my opinion.

Now, before I say anything else, my guild is not in the top 10 in EQ raid guilds. Yes, we have beaten all EoK raids. I actually enjoyed the raids in EoK. I enjoyed that some of them were fairly difficult (as far as recent EQ raids go), and that the entire expansion wasn't on farm in the first 3 months for us which makes for an extremely boring raid expansion for me.

I don't think making some of the raids just a little bit easier is going to help very many guilds. It might get another guild or three through progression, but for the bottom tier raid guilds they would have to completely neuter T3 raids which isn't what EQ is about. Nobody is guaranteed loot for buying an expansion and showing up to raids. This is exactly the reason I'm not a huge fan of gear resets every expansion, because lower tier guilds in the past were always able to go back to older raid content after a level increase and still get meaningful gear upgrades. Now, sadly that just isn't the case, its either current content or nothing.

I would be happy with them adding an emote telling you who failed, personally.

Also for Doomlight

I would be really happy if the failers were sent to another part of the zone. And they have to walk back to the raid with this lady following them