Does it ever get challenging?

Have been playing on Mangler and frankly I feel like I am playing WoW. Last night I was grouped in LGuk which used to be a challenging zone. It is just so easy now. I see the dragons were downed four days after launch and people are popping in and out of fear and hate like they are just another zone.

I'm wondering if things get more difficult with some of the raid content or if things get harder in Kunark. My sub is up tomorrow and debating whether I should resub. Is the game just entirely trivialized now or does it at some point actually become challenging? Not that I am a super cool guy or anything but if this is as good as it gets, I don't know why I just don't play any of the other face roll mmmos out there that aren't 20 years old.

Thanks.

It wasn't hard 20 years ago either, we just all sucked & played on dial up internet.

This is such an uninformed revisionist view of what happened.

The game was challenging, yes the infrastructure at the time wasnt what it is now, but numerous little things all have been changed to makes things much easier.

Invisible more reliable
Casters getting spells every level not just every 4/5
Everyone tanking better by leaps and bounds. The ghoul lord wouldve killed an int caster in 10seconds during classic. I can tank him now as a mage.


These are just a few examples off the top of my head quick. It is what it is. If the OP isnt a fan, the current version of EQ isnt for them mist likely

I don’t think the vast majority of raids on Phinigel have been challenging through SOD, with some notable exceptions/adjustments to mechanics. Some of which are just dumb (like Daosheen). But supposedly UF is hard, so we’ll see how things go in a couple days. For Mangler, it’s a total cakewalk until at least TZ/VZ in time, which is just a mild speed bump.

Everquest depended on obfuscation of details/mechanics and outright lies/misdirection for it's difficulty curve. The information is out there now and those obfuscations no longer work.

The group game will never be challenging to a group of 6 characters. Whether that group is a 6-box or 6 humans, the group game is just too much of a face roll. If you want a challenge in the group game do the content with only 3-4 characters.

There are some small flashes of difficulty like the Ikkinz trials or MPG trials if you are group geared. If you’re raid geared though those are trivial also.

It looks like Underfoot is still challenging. So, in about 3 years if you stick with it.

No it won't ever get challenging. They dumbed down the game and greatly inflated player character power.

Anyone who played a few years ago (not 20) on the EQmac Alkabor server (frozen in time to circa 2002 code) can tell you there is a wide gulf between 2002 and earlier EQ and the WoWed up ez mode that it is now.

Nothing done or accomplished on these TLPs is noteworthy. There is no risk, xp is ez and no corpse runs. Maps are in game, travel is fast. Spells are overpowered and melee offense/defense is inflated far beyond what it was.

The challenges in early eq are not really mechanical. You will find garbage players who still can't manage basic things like chain pull timing or agro or etc, but the real challenge becomes coordinating and socializing and dealing with ninja afkers.

You can spike raid difficulty by using low numbers, including doing multiple sets of the same instance for 2+ times the loot. Group content that provides some challenge isn't until GoD.

Yerm: Part of the challenge of early EQ was absolutely mechanical. As someone who raid with and conducted many server firsts on Al'kabor with Temerity, the mobs were harder and the player characters weaker. I can also find quotes from the developers that talk about them going in and adjusting even the most minor things like level 1 character "to hit" ratios. Its been a long chain of changes from 2002 until now, always making things easier.

Of course anyone who played in 1999 knows this. I use EQmac as my example though so people can't claim I am remembering wrong because it was 20 years ago, or (as you hint at) the challenge was all just lack of knowledge. We on EQmac just a few years ago had access to a long history of classic through PoP raids to draw on. The challenge was not lack of knowledge of mechanics. It WAS the mechanics.

EQ mechanics have been made too easy, simple as that.

Yea... raiding PoTime with 72 characters probably about 50 mains and 20~ boxes mostly clerics/wizards on Al’Kabor was rough.

Mobs like Vallon Zek were dice rolls. Our warriors who buffed to around 10k HP and 2-2.2k AC were randomly getting combo rounded with a rough quad and a proc at the same time. Purify Soul AA was on a 72min reuse originally meaning you would only have 2 attempts at VZ generally before you needed to wait on the first set to come off cooldowns. Disciplines were old school and all on the same timer, so you couldn’t simply AE Taunt with Furious/Fortitude up and then roll into your Defensive/Evasive disc. You had to either give the CH rot time to transfer over and let 5-10 DPS die before your next warrior hit AE Taunt or you had to hope a ranger was up top with their Weaponshield finger ready to go.

Those dead characters if you rezzed them they would zone back in with no gear at 20% their base HP which was only a few hundred, then they would have to spend 30-60 seconds looting their entire corpse, maybe having to deal with multi-slot items going in the incorrect slots if they clicked in the wrong order, and then they are Ready to jump back into a fight with Rez Effects. Divine Resurrection would return a player with full mana and HP sure, but it was only your ungeared HP/Mana. If you wanted to corner a mob you had to accept that your rangers could no longer do their superior form of DPS because arrows would not hit a cornered mob due to collision issues. Your bards had to be mains if you wanted to twist because there was no melody. Boxed bards at the best could do a 2 maybe 3 song twist, but why bother because on top of this there was no song window, so every bard song occupied a precious slot in your 15 buff slots. Those minimal stackable benefit songs aren’t worth the buff slot they consume, you had to be very particular about the beneficial songs you would use for your group.

Even worse on events like Bertoxxulous where you would have AE Bard Resist, AE Chorus Regen, the DoT debuff, and maybe MGB Paragon, MGB SotW and MGB Ethereal Elixir (Celestial regeneration was a single target AA originally meaning every cleric MGB HoT you wanted to use ate 2000 mana and lasted half the duration of CR). That’s 6 buff slots devoted to bard songs, DoTs and MGB HoTs. Leaving only 9 buff slots for normal HP buffs, Haste/spell Haste, Horse, KEI/VoQ, self class buffs etc. You had to be very strategic about which buffs you could have on your character during certain AE heavy fights. Also there were no HoT potions you could use.

Etc. etc. etc.

Now granted, some of these come from annoyances like no song window or arrows not landing on cornered mobs. But none the less they all added up to a much more challenging game.

A few things:

1) The game has been WoWified quite a bit. It's not just the accessibility of information, but characters do more damage, they take less damage, spells are more reliable, regen rates are much faster - just about everything is made a bit easier in some way.

2) Every expansion after classic will increase the challenge slightly, but it will never be close to what you remember from classic EQ. You won't be able to faceroll fights like Emperor Ssraeschza, but it's still not quite the same as beating it back in the day.

3) This is like the 7th iteration of TLP servers. If you do something over and over again you tend to get pretty good at it.

I look at it this way... we all did the classic thing 20 years ago. A lot of us have done the P99 thing. Some of us did the Al'Kabor thing. The TLP servers off a way to play through the game without the time commitment and with a lot of the frustrating mechanics toned down a bit. It's a casual EQ experience, so if you're not looking for that then TLP servers might not be for you.

Hardest content for me was trying to clear one of the GoD group instances to access KT, but I was 6-boxing...

I played chanter on selo 1-55 which is probably the most challenging thing to do given you’re naked and relying on charm which can break at any point to hold on a pet that can waste you quickly. We actually ran two chanters with two pets in our static group on Selo.

I died twice, both from trains caused by others and nothing we did. In fact, the group composition of War Clr Clr Enc Enc Nec seemed almost unkillable given some of the pulls we made and for the most part everyone was naked 1-55.

That sort of speaks volumes to the knowledge and skill of today’s players versus yesterday’s in-era. People understand their class, their role, game mechanics and the content so well that anything short of a new game entirely won’t be challenging. The hardest part of this game is keeping people together and focused for long periods of time be it a static group to level or a guild to clear multiple expansions in succession.

When endlessly grinding mobs to level, the game was never the hard part of making it. Don’t care what spin people want to throw on things, diss other games, etc. If you can sit at a camp for 8 hours, the camp isn’t hard. It’s time consuming.

Raiding gets more interesting over time, but not a lot of mechanics until OoW.

GoD on a tlp is mechanically more challenging than original was originally. It's the time until then when the game is too easy. Part of the problem is also the flood of knowledge into the game - people simply know how things work and can plan better, whereas even on servers like stromm I remember a LOT of people who I thought just had no clue how eq works, that's mostly gone.

The challenge left is no longer mechanical outside raids. In raids you CAN get that challenge back if you keep numbers low, and many do this by split raiding several sets of the same instance. For others, the challenge is carefully avoided. I find a lot of good players flee tlps late into early expansions and a lot of bad players flee in god... when mechanically hard finally shows up.

You won't like what I have to say... It sounds like your guild just wasn't particular good. I raided that stuff in era, pre ldon, on a fresh start server aka no months and months of elemental farming waiting on the rc fix. Time was not that hard.

For one thing, it sounds like your clerics or tanks are ridiculously bad? If you want to tank swap you have the rotation change, then your tank ae taunts roughly 8-9 seconds after the first ch inc spam with his name on it. If you have 72 bodies in there, you shouldn't be struggling to swap on a death. The rotation again realigns to the next listed tank, a backup tank or ranger taunts and discs for 10 secs, the intended tank ae taunts once again as rotation is ready. You probably lose a dps or 2, but not 5+, tell your tanks and rangers to suck less.

It also sounds like you are not spacing out your mgb hots, and why in gods name are you epic rezzing in a zone that you can bind outside and run back to? Like dear god, what in the world? Run your behind back to the fight, dont waste cleric time clicking epics, and dont ever waste divine rez prior to looting, you use it AFTER a corpse is looted (but not rezzed cause you ran back) for a full recharge.

Your post is a clear example of the much bigger reason that tlps are so much easier: people today have a much better understanding of the game and know what they are doing compared to people in the past who hadn't been shared knowledge and were using suboptimal strategies.

You can enable hard mode if you want a real challenge. For your DPS only use Rogues. Only healer allowed is Druid but they cant charm. Then come back and say the game is easy.

I forgive you for not knowing, but Tem on Al'kabor killed versions *un-nerfed versions* of boss mobs that were never killed on live servers. The trash you killed on live servers were after mobs were nerfed down early into PoP and player power was increased.

Elemental gods died on Al'kabor (and untunned versions of those gods that were NEVER successfully killed on live) before beastlords were even given mass group buff paragon, as one small example of how far behind character power curve was.

This is the syndrome of modern EQ players. They think how easy it is now is how its always been. The game has been seriously trivialized.

Serious question:

Mac server launched: June 2003

Planes of Power launched: October 29, 2002

For Mac versions to be pre “early” live changes. Your saying Mac PoP was 8 months behind Live on patches? Kinda surprised they split the code base that bad, almost like it was always intended to be a separate game all together.

Thank you for all the replies. To those of you saying the game wasn't harder back at launch, you obviously didn't play then. Yes things took a lot longer, but they were also far more difficult. It was not all dial up and people not knowing what was going on. Anyone who says that wasn't there period and is talking out of their . EQ at launch was brutally difficult and brutally unforgiving.

Just looked at my first toon, created July 23, 1999 at 21:30:58. Level 22 with play time of 12 days 22 hours and 38 minutes. No trade skilling. I was playing on a cable modem and on a brand new server Brell Serilis.

Thanks for answering my question. Now I just have to decide if it is worth sticking around knowing how it is. The community seems great which is worth a lot and the classes are still the best thought out and engaging of any mmo I have played, maybe that balances out the face roll factor.

Because you say other opinions are not valid, what was hard about that 1-22 other than taking almost 13 days?
And how hard would it have been, after you know all the game mechanics?