When does EQ become harder?

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by nodontcarekkthxbye, Dec 17, 2018.

  1. So Happy Augur


    Last time I sarcastically implied someone was a fool, I got warned. That may be why.
  2. Mashef Augur


    Probably not the right game for you. It's not a mechanic game. It was about figuring out the strategy, getting the keys, spells, and necessary gear to complete the content... not to mention racing for it in pure open world environments and hoping things didn't spawn at off hours and the Euro guilds got them.

    Hard has been solved as the strategies are public knowledge and changes to the game made the fights incredibly easy, even with MOTM buffs.

    Yet, when the events were live no one ever beat Tacvi during GoD and only like 3% of the population ever saw VT / killed Emp Ssra pre-PoP. Nothing like that has ever existed in another MMO as mechanics are easy to figure out when the fights are based on gimmicks and not standing in pools on the floor.

    Edit: In addition, no voice comms existed. Imagine stepping into PoFear with no voice comms, 35 to 40 people, and not knowing how it worked. You didn't understand death touches, how they worked, who they targeted, nor did you have the timer. This applies to all expansions. There were not videos on YouTube like in other games where you know whats going on before you begin. You learned through death.
    snailish likes this.
  3. Hirbow Augur


    Super simple, remove in game maps, Remove the /log feature (goodbye GINA), nerf charm pets. OMG I just diedz...
  4. WaitingforMoreEQ WaitingforTBC

    MMO PVE is never hard mechanically because it can't be. EQ even moreso because of the time it takes to cast a spell and mobs not being leashed to their rooms for the most part. But if you're wondering when EQ becomes mechanically "interesting" it's PoP, but even then it's still easy.
  5. Aurastrider Augur

    If you want to be busy try boxing your own 6 man group on live. Being your own puller, tank, healer, dps and then trying to figure out how to make all 6 toons mesh well together with 30-40k AA's and hundreds of spells/abilities at your disposal is a challenge for sure. Obviously live does not have the group game like the TLP servers do for the most part but if you are just looking to stay busy and expand your class knowledge there is no better way than doing it all yourself.
  6. Jhaerik Journeyman

    Only played up to WoD.. which I said... so I really don't care. :)
    I watched just enough of your video to see the "snowballs" you were talking about.. and I absolutely have to laugh at you for using that to support an argument of "mechanically challenging. An 85 year old stroke victim could dodge those with keyboard turning. They literally move at .5mph. Again MMO's are mechanically challenging. If that's what the OP wants them he should play a moba, FPS, or better yet check out the bullet hell genre.





    Those games take mechanical skill. MMO raiding generally does not. Again all you showed me was a different version of "walk out fo the green stuff/avoid the ghosts/valks." AND they move sooooooooooooooooo slowly... lol.
  7. Ceffener Augur

    You must be God’s gift to gaming given you think everyone in the world can easily do what 1-3% of games populations actually do. Congratulations on your big name sponsorship you must have with your amazing E-Sport skills.
  8. FIsh Lips Augur


    He gets the ladies with the bling, he loses them with the size of his...paycheck.
    Ceffener likes this.
  9. Siddar Augur

    Never it just changes what is hard expansion to expansion but the overall difficulty never really increases.
  10. Jhaerik Journeyman

    Wait why would you think I play any of those? Ever hear of the Youtube search feature?
    Just saying the MMO genre isn't one known for it's high mechanical skill cap. It's a very easy genre.. looking for "hard" gameplay just isn't going to happen.
  11. Ceffener Augur

    Anyone who compares high end raiding to “so easy it’s funny to make fun of old people with serious medical conditions”, obviously is an elite gamer on another tier who couldn’t be bothered to melt their brains with the mind numbing simplicity of MMO’s.

    So it’s clear you are a big name FPS twitch streaming trying to hide amongs us mortals.
  12. Lion of God Elder


    I asked you to post videos of encounters/situations in EVERQUEST that were similar in complexity to the video of WoW I posted. I'm scratching my head wondering why you posted videos of other games? None of which are even MMORPG'S at that. . .

    Moreover, you seem to be the kind of person who watches a video of another performing an impressive feat, and brags, 'It's EASY! I can do that, too!' But the more time I spend talking with you, the greater my suspicions become about your capabilities.
  13. FIsh Lips Augur


    He learned about /melody 1 2 3 4 and he stands around raids doing nothing, thinking he's playing his class properly.
  14. Moldar Augur

    Come play live 110 TBL raids and watch tanks get creamed while under the best tanking disciplines in 1 round with 2-3 healers targeting them.

    TLP's are just like locked in the era of gaming they were made for, and yes EQ is a much slower paced game, the raids do not have you doing/paying attention to 5-10 different things. Don't like that? I recommend finding another game to play.

    If your looking for something hard come play on live in the Burning Lands expansion, we are always looking for more healers.
  15. Lion of God Elder


    There are a few problems with your suggestions.

    1. Not sure if your comment is directed at me; but I personally don't care that the TLP gameplay is fairly easy. I enjoy EQ nonetheless, for other reasons.
    2. I've heard on EQ live that there is almost nobody to level-up with, because most who play are at max level. And going 100+ levels with only the company of my other box doesn't sound incredibly fun. Additionally, I don't want to spend 100+ hours leveling to max again and I'm not paying $35 x2 to boost to lvl85.
    3. I can't transfer my two $25 mounts to another server. And I'm not buying more.
    4. I don't want to start poor on another server; and if I did swap to live, I'd have to purchase Krono.
    5. I've read forum threads that claim the new expansion isn't worth the $35 it costs. And again, I don't want to spend $35 x2, on top of everything else I'd need to buy.
    6. I don't know how the AA system works on live, but I don't want to be 100 hours+ of AA grinding behind everyone else.
    7. It would probably be 20hours+ of learning before I had a intermediate understanding of all the live mechanics, AAs, etc...
    On the flip slide, I would be more interested in playing live it wouldn't be so expensive/time consuming for me to reach max level/viability. It's unfortunate the barrier to entry is so high. For these reasons, I think any reasonable person can understand why swapping to EQ live isn't an option for most people who've already invested time/money/energy on a TLP.
  16. Moldar Augur

    I want to make it crystal clear: I'm not targeting anyone specifically.

    I simply find this entire-thread almost completely irrelevant. The game is designed in such a way to be beat, most games are. There are very few "hard" missions or tasks or encounters in EverQuest. Especially on TLPs / older content on live server, the main reason is simpl it has been around for so long that most people know, or know how to find the information

    Also you have to take into consideration the programming ability of the era in which you are playing content in. Classic-Planes of Power -- 1999 - 2002, the Underfoot expansion or the House of Thule expansion are 2009/2010 respectively, but they are based off of the coding system from a game initially released in 1999 - that alone causes limitations simply because of the platform wasn't initially developed with games of the current era in mind. It also doesn't help there is a reduced development team as well.

    Live EQ has some interesting mechanics sometimes (for example, in The Broken Mirror there are spells that can heal the bosses for more than your entire 6 man group, or 54 man raid group can put out in total, because of the nature of those mechanics you can say it is hard, until you understand the events mechanics and know that certain spells from certain classes must be avoid (which they have alternatives to cast, so those classes are not useless or shunned upon). And suddenly the event (group or raid) is made a cake-walk

    Another example more modern example is in Ring of Scale -- the Skyfire mission the final boss puts a debuff on certain members of the group, and if your healer cures that debuff (which is their instinct to do a healers) they will end up nuking the group for 100,000 damage (or in the raid about 150,000), in addition to the 2 other AoE's (one nuke, and 1 un-curable DOT) that can happen all at the same time. As long as the healer understands to not cure that debuff the fight is VERY easy.

    The point I'm trying to make is EverQuest is only ever "hard" when you either have one or more of the following:

    1. No clue what to do. New raids / missions / etc.
    2. You are under-geared, under-AAed or otherwise unable to counter a "mechanic(s)" due to your character's limitations.
    3. You yourself are unable to cope with the "mechanic(s)" due to something other than the above mentioned so far. This can be not understanding how to output the most from your character, external influences such as medical drugs that make you drowsy or unable to focus, or your child is pulling your hair and begging for 115% of your attention, etc.
    4. Your group members (especially for a tank or healer), have one or more of the above mentioned problems.
    5. Your group is completely unable to coordinate basic commands such as "assist soandso" "kill suchandsuch" "don't stand in the ____" "soandso needs to run away when _______ happens" -- which boils down to communication / coordination issues.
    All of the above mentioned are pretty much generic answers to variety of "the game is too difficult." These loop back to the player not the developement staff that designed the game, which again they design to be beatable.
    Games by their nature are designed to be beaten. Now there are some exceptions to this rule, for example in the Velious expansion the "sleeper" event was designed to be impossible to win. However, that is an exception and generally not the norm.
    All EverQuest is simply engage, and kill it before it kills you, but due to the state of the game that depends on what type of content your doing.
    1. If you're on a TLP -- I'm sorry to say that because of the development teams restrictions and obligations to both LIVE and TLPs -- they are recycling and occasionally cleaning up older content, but the key word there is RECYCLING -- they're not reinventing the wheel and they are not making new content for TLPs outside of cleaning up and making sure raid targets are instances rather than/in addition to open world content. By extension because it is recycled content most guilds have beaten it at one point or another -- so there is plenty of information about those raids, so it is not all that hard to understand the mechanics, but because of the limitations of that era's coding really mean you have to worry about 1 / 2 things and the rest is burn "soandso" to 0 HP.
    2. If you're on a TLP prior to AA or "relatively" few AA i.g., think classic to PoP -- your play style is going to vary drastically to mathc the enocunters from that era than say the play style of a TLP that is more mission and instance centric i.g, The Serpent's Spine / Seeds of Destruction / Underfoot / House of Thule etc etc.
    3. And the original point of the TLPs was to in a relatively "short" period of time allow players who wanted to experience EverQuest's content as it started out in Classic and see how it evolved throughout as the years as the game went on a chance to experience it -- unfortunately, it took a rather long time to get from 1 mechanic "belly caster" dragon raids to current raids where you actually have a few quirky mechanics to worry about like the ones I mentioned above.
    As far as getting a raid close to like World of Warcraft's Mythic raids where there is environmental obstructions, waves of adds, the boss does different unique and interesting mechanics in addition to the normal hit the tank and needing multiple healers to keep him up. There isn't any one raid like that I can recall -- the closest thing I can think of is the Plane of Smoke raid on Live where you need a solid 2-3 tank groups in the basement, and a 3/4th split between the middle and attic levels, the boss himself hit hard, the middle island has 2 adds that basically cast a generic nuke (and can merge into 1 NPC with slightly more HP), there is a phoenix that drops a nuke aura on the ground once every minute and a half, and the floor is made of ice because why not.
    Another "complex" raid semi like that is Rain of Fears last raid where it essentially gets harder as the fight goes on, you have to power up 1 add by hanging out a crystals for X time and then kill it to unlock the bosses HP, once he gets low enough a 2nd hard hitting boss spawns and you have to balance them down, and the last 20% or one of them casts a horrible DOT, but it can be cured with relative ease as long as your pre-pared for it.

    But these raids are far and few between entire expansions. But I do not consider a lot of EQ content as hard, rather I view it as "____ needs to be used here to counter mechanic ______" and you win.
  17. Iyvy Augur

    What a joke. Heroic BWL or Cho gath in Cata were a billion times harder than anything in eq.

    I highly doubt you've ever done in in era top level raid.

    > juggling multiple yellow/red con mobs with CC and kite in EQ

    Lol.

    > RNG is what makes stuff hard

    Random doesn't make stuff hard, just makes it time consuming, and Completing the final boss of say 8.0 on Mythic took hundreds of attempts.

    There's a lot more to these encounters than "don't stand in purple stuff" and there's a ton more going on than there ever is in eq. Many encounters were lost just in terms of dps.

    Heroic lich king wasn't even downed until they were given a 5% buff. No one was able to complete it originally, it was mathematically impossible.

    In EQ you fizzle sometimes, and sometimes there are too many resists so you have to start over.

    Eq players are in their 40s and mechanically unskilled. It's a relaxed easy game that is time consuming and not difficult. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.
  18. Kragin Augur

    This guy did voa in era, lol.
  19. Mashef Augur


    3% of the population got into VT before PoP. Everyone can see Wow Mythic after every single patch and new content. Nothing in WoW is as hard as solving EQ strategies back in between 1999 and 2001.

    No one ever completed GoD during GoD era. No WoW content ever went undefeated.

    That was easy. Whew.
    code-zero likes this.
  20. Lion of God Elder


    You made 2 mistakes.

    Mistake #1 You assume the average EQ player is exact in skill and intelligence as the average WoW player. To be frank, I don't believe this to be true. . .WoW players are cut out of an entirely different cloth. They aren't as friendly, helpful, and are probably on average about a decade and a half younger. So the fact that 3% of WoW players complete Mythic, and 3% of EQ players complete all content in era is an irrelevant statistic. Were comparing completely different demographics here.

    I'd say in general, the average WoW player thinks faster and is more mechanically proficient than the average EQ player. This is because they HAVE to be, considering the design of that game. It's more fast paced and there is more happening. I'm positive the WoW player base is smarter in the IQ department also, on average of course.

    Since it's relevant: I seen a stat about FFXIV that showed how only about 2%- 3% of N American players ever complete the hardest content in era. Out of the Japanese player base, however, it showed how over 10% of the JP player base completes the hardest content in era. Here we see how two different demographics complete the same content at varying rates.

    Mistake #2

    Just because all WoW bosses were defeated in era doesn't mean they aren't harder than EQ bosses. Blizzard had to nerf plenty of bosses, or buff the players during the fight, in order for it to be possible to defeat them in era. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned how it was impossible to defeat the Lich King on heroic mode until a nerf/buff was done to make the encounter easier. This reveals Blizzards design philosophy when it comes to game development. They design bosses to be defeated by a specific number of players, with a particular tier of raid gear. Because once the next patch is released, and the next tier of raid gear begins dropping. ALL of the bosses in the previous tier becomes trivial.

    SoE, on the other hand, being the terrible company they were, released bosses knowing it was essentially impossible to defeat them in era; and apparently, refused to nerf them. Additionally, SoE created bosses (in-genearl) whom could be defeated with 30 super geared players, or 60+ average geared players zerging it. There is no real equivalent to this style of gameplay in WoW.



    During the years 1999 - 2001, however, I'm sure EQ was an extremely HARD game to play. There was no internet resources, there were untested mechanics implemented in-game, the concept of an online MMORPG was new to everybody playing it.

    But in this generation, when something is said to be 'hard', it's a different kind of hard being implied. It's more about utilizing your working memory and being extremely engaged in the moment, rather than frantically searching a digital universe trying to discover all its mysteries and solve its unsolved problems.