Change keying for 3 month servers

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by RainbowCane, Sep 29, 2018.

  1. Ryak Augur

    What's the plan here, devs...?

    Underfoot is literally impossible to finish without splitting in era and it's next.
  2. Quill Augur


    LOL @ splitting Underfoot in era.
  3. RainbowCane Elder

    Prathun / Ngreth can we please have the summary of this thread brought up at the weekly meeting. This particular issue becomes more and more pressing, and while I am all for updates to the UI like faction sorting, I would also enjoy being able to continue playing and progression on my server of choice.
  4. Kazz99 Elder

    I think the loot drops and AAXP are just fine on Phinny, it is the keying that is problematic... you can get a max of 6 keys every 5 ish days on Phinny for your ENTIRE RAID for SoD unless you split (most guilds will need to to get into tower in a reasonable timeframe).

    This matter is MUCH worse in UF (and beyond) and splitting even becomes nearly impossible as well because of how it is all artificially gated.

    Bump for a response.......
  5. Quill Augur


    Hope your tanks are farming heroic augs hard.

    Until you can get over 200 hAGI, you will have a very hard go of it with UF boss events. SOD is actually one of the few expansions where tanks really need to come out of it as close to max geared as possible, or UF will own you and call it good.
  6. Kazz99 Elder

    Pretty much every active raider in our guild comes out of each expansion nearly full best in slot geared so that is really not a worry anyone in the active raiding guilds on Phinny has I think.....

    The arbitrary gating of content by the current drop rate of keys after the event has been beaten is the concern. Several options exist to correct it, simply having the events drop more keys is probably the easiest to accommodate, but there are lots of possible fixes to the issue.
  7. Quill Augur

    Its actually highly critical if you itemize hAGI or hDEX as a tank, even more so on augs. You will not get both out of SoD, and it takes different items.

    If you go hDEX, you're basically a Fort Monkey. Sent into space the moment it drops, even if you get Defensive down. If all you have are Fort Monkeys, hope your DPS is tip top or something like Brath will own you after you run out of tanks. Basically, it'll be a kill him before you run out of Forts.

    Just out of curiousity, what is the typical burn dps you're seeing in SoD? Just a rough number.
  8. Baldur Augur

    You do realize gamparse hasn't worked for the last month or two right?
  9. Machentoo Augur


    Wrong! (In my best Trump imitation.)

    Phinigel players have consistently beaten every expansion in far less than 1/6th the time it took live. With the advances in knowledge, player power, and gameplay mechanics, it is just wrong to think of it the way you are putting forward. In fact, even compared to the previous round of TLP's, Phinny is crushing it--three Phinny guilds beat SOF faster than it was ever beaten before, and OGC beat it in 1/4th the time it took on Fippy/Vulak. For SoD, OGC beat the expansion in 5 days versus 21 on Fippy, 1/4th the time again, and I bet at least two more guilds will finish by the 21st day. Quite possibly 7 of the 8 guilds that finished SoF in era will beat SoD faster than it has ever been beaten prior to Phinny--all the guilds that have beaten Korafax already are in a position to be able to do so.

    For some expansions, Phinigel players have had considerably longer to farm the expansion in era after beating the expansion than live players did. It took live players 6, 9 or 15 months to beat most expansions up through the eras Phinny is in. They did not have twelve months of farming end game content, pretty much, ever. Live had to figure out the encounters, which were often broken for months on end, or in need of serious retuning before they were possible to beat by any but the very most elite guilds. They had no strategies conveniently posted on alla. That all makes a difference.

    So to complain that we have 1/4th or 1/6th the time and therefore need 4x or 6x the flags and loot, does not make sense.

    Phinny has proven time and time again that not only is it possible to complete the expansions on a short time frame, it is very realistic, even for casual guilds.

    That may not be the case for Underfoot, but I am increasingly convinced that even Underfoot will be defeated by most guilds in era, and it is the only expansion that will even come close to being an issue. And keep in mind that most live players never saw Convorteum raids in era, either.
  10. Quill Augur


    Nope. I didn't know that. Haven't been using it. But good to know.
  11. Kazz99 Elder


    As was mentioned, Gamparse has been broken since the log format changed so for over a month. Trust me though, DPS is NOT an issue, and BIS means "best in slot", that is not always current xpac for everything.... Our members know this very well, as was mentioned above, and most members of the active raiding guilds come out of the prior xpac with their dream best in slot set or very close to it, Phinny is crushing it.... though a large part of that was the load balancing of some bottleneck zones just in time for the release (Thank you DBG for so far keeping promises on making Phinny THE AoC server). I know I am way (way) better geared on Phinny at this point than I was on live during this era or any pervious era from classic forward..... and I was an end game raider on live after Velious (when it became a "thing").

    It is funny how folks comment here like we (the Phinny raiders) are all new to EQ or new to raiding, or do not understand gearing nuances or raid semantics.... This game is nearly 20 years old guys.... UF had many bad design choices including the artificial gating of the raid keys that alowed Sony to FINISH the release (widely believed it was not complete or tuned on xpac release), we are simple asking DBG to make the 2 months 3 or increase the key drops (or maybe both) so as not to hurt the phinny population by asking them to commit to EQ like it was a second job (or second and third and fourth....)
  12. RainbowCane Elder

    I agree with almost everything you said Machentoo, however we will get to a point when creative splitting and key-sharing between guilds, etc. will no longer win the day. Maybe UF / HoT will be that point and maybe it won't. Regardless, upping the key drop rate from 2-3 at a time per tier when there are 4 tiers of content is a needed measure. It's not about whether Live struggled and prevailed, or if we prevailed faster. It is about the fact that this is a progression server with a set release. The premise of this server is that it should be possible to progress through an entire expansions' content in the given time. That means raiding with the number of people the original encounters were tuned for, not splitting or having to rely on other guilds to give you their spare keys. Guilds should fail because the encounters are tough, not because they can't commit to fielding 80+ players for multiple splits. That defeats the purpose of having a timed progression server. If we wanted to play on a server where the next expansion doesn't release until the previous one is beat, we would have chosen a different TLP.

    On a separate note, in VoA the progression is gated behind a language and the only way to learn that language is to attend each raid a certain number of times. This will not be doable mathematically for set schedule guilds who do not raid on lockout. It may not be possible even for guilds that DO raid on lockout. You cannot split to achieve this goal any faster. This will need to be adjusted regardless unless we want to see the advent of eras where we simply cannot beat expansions in time because of artificial gating constructs.

    That's what this really comes down to. Let us see the content, and prevail or fail against it. Don't make it about needing keys that drop 2 or 3 at a time per tier with multiple tiers. Make it about successfully completing encounters and getting to the endgame before the next expansion launches. I'm not suggesting that 100% of guilds should reach this goal. But the goal has to at least be attainable.
    Starr and Ryak like this.
  13. Zapsos Augur


    That's bound to change if we need to spend half (or more) of the expansion to key up.
  14. Machentoo Augur


    Completely agree on that. If it is not possible to complete the expansions in the given time frame, that should be the focus. Not, "Waah, we have 1/6th the time so give us 6x the keys!"

    VoA clearly needs some adjustment, and Underfoot probably does too.
  15. The Hated One Augur

    Kill Keying for TLPs. The point is to revisit fun content in a timely manner while enjoying time with your friends. Only masochists enjoy keying. For the non-psychotics keying remains work similar to what they do at a humdrum job that they play EQ to escape from. Keying made sense when we had a year or so to crawl through and learn an expansion. 3 months?...just let us raid up and do content. ITS WHY WE CAME BACK! We wanted to raid with friends...not sit in some BS camp hoping that rod 1/15 will drop from the green mob so we can move on to the next useless camp to get the next rod...all the time hoping that someone doesnt come KS the mob that we need. Just saying...
    Crayon123 likes this.
  16. Biohazerd Lorekeeper

    I don't think it would be a good idea to remove the keys, but speeding them up wouldn't be an issue.

    As far as I can tell they were only put into the game to slow down progress until devs could finish the content. That really isn't an issue on TLPs.
  17. RainbowCane Elder

    I'm against completely removing progression as it is a fundamental part of the game. It forces people to work together both in groups and in raids to push towards a goal. The problem sets in when progression stops being attainable by normal means in the allowable time, before the next release.

    There are all sorts of radical ideas all over this thread. I would like to stick to the plan so to speak, which is asking dev's to look at and adjust as necessary, key drop rates for Underfoot and House of Thule.

    Additionally, figuring out what will be done about the VoA raid progression, as it is currently unattainable in era.
    Roxas MM likes this.
  18. Brumans Augur

    Also need to make all expacs back to 3 months, no more 2 month ones for non-level cap expacs. Everything has a ton of AA now at the very least.
  19. Baldur Augur

    ^ this.

    The server was promised as 3 months per expansion and they only went back on that later with the GoD/OoW bundling fiasco. 2 months worked great for those expansions, but it doesn't any more.
  20. Aegir Augur

    Doesn't look like you made any progress with this issues in this Months patch. So only one shot left before Underfoot hits!