I'm not saying that raid bosses in Velious and Luclin were overly hard but having the bosses die in 30 seconds seems dumb.
Because things change, and this isn't 2002. If you want a challenge I suggest smaller raid forces. PoP isn't difficult unless you go out of your way to make it difficult.
Much higher average player/raider gear, innate player strength increases, knowledge of the events, experience doing the fights on other servers, etc. That being said, pre Elemental fights are indeed relatively trivial compared to “back in the day”. Rathe Council is still a time consuming pain. Plane of Time bosses aren’t trivial, and don’t “die in 30 seconds”, especially TZ and VZ. But yea, overall they aren’t in the same difficulty category as when they were current. Personally I think they are pretty right on as far as difficulty. If you think they are too easy then just split raid them. They weren’t designed to be only completed by a fully VT geared guild either. Even in GoD era, my guild was able to skip VT and go into PoP, though it was not an easy feat.
It can't be easyquest and hardraid at the same time really. Probably can be easyquest and tediousraid but I wouldn't push for that direction. Start at original and deal with some of the factors: gear is too easy to get... make it nodrop, tradeskill all attuneable. Turn off the meleeboost AA until GoD... if you scale back caster & pet DPS to classic reality as well --otherwise no point (would just make melee super rare) Reduce max raid size significantly. No picks outside of newbie zones... throttles the gear acquisition in "easy group zones". Can keep agents of change as that is still raiding, and raiding would be harder in this environment. That's if you want the game more challenging globally. One can always make the personal choice to only raid in a small under-geared force.
This right here is what people need to learn. Stop trying to make global changes when there are choices an individual can make to modify their own game experience.
Like Skeetari said, classic EQ wasn't an ezmode instanced loot piñata like it is today on TLP servers. We had people in less than optimal gear raiding because we didn't get to hit Ssra or Vex Thal with no competition every time it was up, we had to either get there first.
Player power is much greater now than it was when PoP was new, so that makes these events much easier relative to player power than they were.
PoP wasn't really a challenge when it was new. Some of the Elemental gods and some Time events somewhat, but the flagging stuff was always a joke.
funny i seem to recall every guild on every server being stuck at Rathe Council for a few months... that was one flag that everyone had to wait on for awhile
It's a few things. Raid size - Most guilds weren't filling 72-man raids during PoP. That was basically top guilds only. On Agnarr you've got a ton of mains and even more boxes. Most guilds are caping out their instances with 72 characters, filling in with boxes where mains aren't present. On the Mac server our raids were typically about 30-40 characters for everything except Rathe, Coirnav and late Time which we jumped up to around 50-60 for. Only really boxing Clerics generally. That made content a bit more difficult. Flagging Revamps - You now can 85/15 people past almost every flag and at the end backflags exist for all 4 EPs and Time. Alpha PoP there was no 85/15, no backflags and no checklist flags. So if you attended a Saryrn/KoS raid before you acquired a Bertox flag you missed out on the Saryrn flag because you did it out of order. On servers without instances it wasn't so easy to go back and fix this for a few people and those few people were left out of EPs and Time for a few weeks or months until you went back and did Bertox and Saryrn. DPS - Melee get the TDS Innate AAs that deal 50% more Innate damage. Casters have had DoT Revamps, their level 1-60 Nukes have been increased since PoP and a small handful of PoP spells like Shock of Magic, have been tuned up (PoP Shock of Magic was 1200-3000 for 600 mana. Current Live/TLP is 2400-3000 for 550 mana. So you're looking at originally doing on average 2100 for 600 mana or doing 2700 for 550 mana. In this era that's a huge difference). On top of these Nuke value increases, for whatever reason the OoW AA Destructive Fury is available during Luclin on TLPs, increasing critical Nuke damage by an additional 100%. Stat Calculation - The calculation for HP off Stamina and Mana off WIS/Int has changed. On Phinigel my Druid was around 9-10k mana in PoP. On Al'Kabor a profile for a full BiS PoTime Druid was 7200. On top of this there was no mount buff for a free 250 mana/HP. Heroic Stats weren't in, even Mod2s weren't added until LoY-LDoN. Distillates - These aren't a huge factor until EP/Time but being able to click a cheap potion and have a 600 HP/Tick HoT for 24-30 seconds out of every 2 minutes on a PoP TLP is mindnumbingly stupid. It was a catastrophic failure to return these to the server when people complained. They have no business being on a TLP server until DoN launches. Being able to faceroll your way through Bertox and Quarm in time riding these potions is dumb. Deaths - Speaking of facerolling, combat rezzing was far more sketchy a proposal when you rezzed in with 20% of your Innate HP with no gear because it's all on your corpse. A single AE would kill freshly rezzed people. Also this makes bind rushing PoTime events like Quarm more difficult. Misc UI stuff - Raid window wasn't fixed until mid-LoY. The original raid window showed room for 12 groups but was hardcapped at 10 group leaders. You could have the other two groups out of raid but it was tedious. Also this raid window didn't have a lock function and allow the raid leader to swap people around. You had to ask people to invite and kick people, and wait for that to happen. The Song Window wasn't added until LoY. Which meant on fights like Bertox in PoTime you had to allot 2 buff slots for his DoTs, 1 buff slot for Chorus, 1 buff slot for AE Resist, 1 buff slot for MGB SoTW, and maybe 1 buff slot for MGB EE. Leaving 9 real buff slots. AA Changes - Beastlords didn't get MGB for awhile into PoP iirc. Cleric AAs were all much worse. Celestial Regen was single target and 72 min reuse. BDA was 2 hour 24 min reuse, so was Purify Soul. So wiping to Tallon in Time meant you may not be able to go again if you lacked PS clerics. Headshot was useless and capped at 46, not a big deal for raids but it lets people level up quick and plow lower level raid trash in some zones. ------- Among many other things. If you want PoP to be hard, I suggest you encourage your raid leaders to split content and do the events with 30-40 characters. You can honestly get by with 25-30 for most everything.
another factor not mentioned is the to Hit tables have been adjusted greatly over the years, you do not miss nearly as much now as you used to and players mitigate incoming damage much better now.
