Does it ever get challenging?

All this talk about level of difficulty misses one major point, IMHO: Only a small % of the player base is raiding. Only a small % of the original player base was raiding. Only a small % of the player population ever traversed the learning curve of how to play their main class properly, to the point where they could even consider being able to raid. In-era, group formations were chaotic unless you had RL friends you played with regularly. Random groups almost invariably had one or more who didn't grasp first principles of how to play their class, which meant groups would wipe for facepalm reasons. In terms of how current TLPs replicate the social chaos and the need for group communication to get past the non-trivial content, it's still the same. The biggest challenges in old-school content are social, not mechanical. This was all by design, since EQ was envisioned as a MUD with 3D graphics, not as a platform for ground-breaking mechanics.

Live servers have the crutches of mercs, unrestricted boxing and power creep. On a TLP, casual players can enjoy the original content at the scale it was designed for, and where the quest reward drops have (mostly) some relevant value. For the casual players it doesn't matter that it is as simple as WoW, since it was never more complicated than that for them to begin with.

Don't think this is the case any longer. With AoC's making raiding readily available to everyone at any time, a much higher percentage of the TLP population raids at least some.

The tank swap you described is exactly what I typed. It’s just that during that 8-9 seconds of waiting after first CH on new tank means we have lost 5+ of our highest DPS classes. It was described to illustrate that TLPs have it extremely easy where discipline timers are split out and not a single timer. VZ quadded for 3k, which basically one rounded every DPS class. You weren’t getting away with just 1 or 2 deaths on a tank loss.

MGB HoTs were done in rotations however depending on the mob we needed to run both a Druid and a Cleric one simultaneously to offset the damage, this was specifically on Bertoxxulous. Whose DoT was 700/tick and on top of that his rain Nuke for 975 x3 waves. Generally we would be staggering them but for this specific case we had to stack different classes HoTs.

To go further into how AK was alpha time that you aren’t familiar with, you could actually bind casters inside PoTime B. You could actually bind casters in every Elemental Plane too on AK. We didn’t Rez often mid fights, I mention it again because on TLPs you can simply battle Rez someone and they pop back in with their gear at 90-95% HP. Which further trivializes fight as you can Zerg far easier this way.

DR yep, if we lost clerics early that were bound in the zone on a good attempt they would loot all but a bag and DR. But again, when comparing against TLPs you can just DR anyone anywhere and they come back with full mana.

I don’t have any delusions that make me think my AK guild was out of this world talent with every player being top tier player. But it’s not as simple as “get good”. The content on the server was an entirely different animal and there were plenty of long standing bugs/mechanics/client limitations that prevented or impeded progress. On Live many of these were short lived or went through phases of fixes. We just happened to be stuck in an era where a lot of the fixes to improve the game didn’t happen and it turned out the lack of those fixes actually made certain fights a challenge even with 72 characters on our raids (but only 60 in the raid because the raid window didn’t allow for the 11th or 12th group leaders).

@Ceffener LoY was released February 2003 and even that wasn’t available on Al’Kabor. The server used basically a stock PoP code. For example there was no 85/15 pushing outside of very weird situations (HoH-HoHB and the click into Solusek’s Room). Also there were no checklist flags, Meaning everyone who got flagged into PoTime did every raid in order. Doing Bertoxxulous without Grummus resulted in no flag given. Doing KoS/Saryrn without Terris, Grummus or Bertox resulted in no flag given. This resulted in a very slow progression as missing a single raid on your character pushed you back months.

Other weird things that basically no one else observed because it was alpha PoP, PoWater/Fire minis each dropped only 1 item until a late 2012 Hobart patch updated those zone files to a mid 2003 PoP file he had access to. PoEarthB had a Gintolaken that blurred every tick rather than every 30-60 seconds as he does now. Also the 6 unmezzable Rathe Councilmen never flecked meaning they continued hitting for a max of 3k, until another Hobart update added that mechanic.

PoTime bosses dropped only 2 loot each rather than the 3 everyone is accustomed to. Half of the items were without focus effects and the Regen/FT on many of them were less than they are currently. Probably the most entertaining one was the Quarm AEs were completely different. You can actually look these up on the Lucy Allakhazam history tab for each of his spell effects. My personal favorite is the 300 PBAE range unresistable 18 second Stun that he would recast every 35 seconds in a version of PoTime where walls didn’t block AEs.

Now again, a lot of this stuff was dumb and broken. But that is often what made EQ hard in some areas. After they “fixed” a lot of stuff it became trivial for a large number of guilds. Before though, you had a small handful like Afterlife or TR who even saw this content, let alone beat it. It’s not a coincidence that Afterlife reaches Quarm and couldn’t kill it then days later all the AEs are patched on Live and they get their first kill on him a day or two after that.

Eq today is definitely easy mode.

But if you join a guild with returning players that run raids around 6 groups them you can still have a challenge, I believe.

If you join a guild with 60 or more in raids then there really is so much room for error. I mentioned ages ago that a server with something like 35 or 40 capped raids would bring some inclination of challenge back.

For example, raid composition through ldon is... how many warriors and clerics do we have?

Gear on the whole is consistently more proliferated on these servers due to player knowledge, faster XP, and picks. I’m willing to bet there are more SSOYs already on Mangler than there were by 6 months into Classic back in 1999. I also believe that the game mechanics have been optimized to make it easier, and that most players today know the game mechanics and how to use them in their favor. Add that these servers probably also have a much more significant veteran presence, and overall, the average Mangler group is probably on par with what would be a top 5% group back in Classic.

Great posts from darchon! Some of that sounds totally brutal!

No. EverQuest is not a hard game. It is simply a time consuming game.

EQmac was as flawed as it was difficult.

The one advantage the server had over all others was that it’s content had been in place for a long long time so BiS was a reality for many choosing to raid Elemental+ simply because we spent years upon years in that content. I only got to experience the last 3 years or so of AK and it was my absolute favorite time in EQ short of the races in Velious for ST dragons and being in a 3rd tier guild racing for Ssra raid scraps left up by our Euro friends in NoF.

As an example, I was able to BiS 3 toons and was working on a 4th in Luclin gear. We routinely cleared VT on rotation with 30-36, many of us boxing at least 2, mostly 3 toons. Even with BiS, PoP content was challenging because the mechanics detailed online were not always a reflection of what we were observing occur. By far, mechanics that do not interact as expected provided a whole different level of difficulty compared to my first experience on a TLP. It also is the leader for me as to why TLP seems so much easier: the vast amount of knowledge the players have on each and every encounter allows for sound strategic plans to be put in action.

I’ve also benefitted from the amazing collective knowledge of my guild members; there’s generally few things they don’t know or haven’t experienced first hand which helps maintain successful clears of expansions at rapid rates. So while player power (or lack of limitations) is a likely driver for how easy things are, I think it comes a distant third to known mechanics and the extent of knowledge people have for the game.

There are more SSoYs on Mangler than any server ever had back in the day through velious

Fighting the computer is never challenging, especially when people have done it for many years. Come PvP flag on Selos for a "challenge"

Easy play 1-40 isn't a harm. We don't need a MoTM buff on Emperor Crush.

40-60 needs to have some bite classic to PoP. After that, pretty much within 5 levels of cap should be a challenge of some sort to the average group --but if LoY/LDoN makes leveling 1-60 easy-peasy I don't think that is a harm.

Raiding should pose a challenge to your average size & geared & composition of force. BiS veterans are going to faceroll it with smaller numbers.


But if we want it harder, conceding that they don't have the resources to rewrite every raid, and aren't going to do things that mess up live servers --what are the viable and desirable options?

-lowering the level caps across expansions is an easy one to me
-can of worms argument... but lowering raid sizes and/or increasing the # of loot drops when you do a lower number raid (that way it is an option rather than forced reduction)
-make way more gear nodrop (especially pre PoP) and all tradeskill wearable gear attuneable. Reduces power creep (and makes a compelling argument for that free trade server some want).
-continue era-setting power creep changes

and a list that could go on...

I’m just really curious for GROUP content, what/why did/do people view the game as hard in 99? Non trolling, serious question.

Especially when you remove TIME (op said it wasn’t time that made it hard), from the equation. Maybe it was just my 10 year old brain at the time and I approached the game differently than older folks, but I don’t look back as EQ being hard. To me it was a non linear game (mostly), I logged on and made progression gear/levels. I spent copious amounts of time playing, but was never throwing my keyboard out of frustration.

There was a death penalty, but there was no game over. Your character never reset, etc. Nothing from the game gives me the nightmares of things like Ninja Gaiden (finally beat 2018, 0 cheats), Contra, etc. EQ was just another “normal” RPG to me, like Zelda or Final Fantasy, you just got to play with other people.

I am fully willing to admit the perceived difficulty could just boil down to approaching the game with a differnt mindset (that as a child). So curious to know what made it so punishing for some of you, compared to the other games of the era.

Everything in TLP is trivial. It's been done, documented, redone. Live is a challenge.
Conq

The lack of corpse runs and the addition of picks are what has made the largest difference to me. With a lack of corpse runs, my static group of friends did a bunch of truly silly stuff, just to see if we could do it. Pull 10 mobs in sebilis? Why not? Not like you're going to lose your gear, just a few minutes of exp if things go south.

And picks have enabled a huge amount of extra gear into circulation that never before would have been around. 6 picks of lower guk that are all full give a ton more gear than was available in classic, especially with the current knowledge of the game.

IMO, the most challenging thing about the old school eq/raids wasn't the encounter itself, it was racing the other guilds and taking down raid bosses w/ massive lag because you had too many people in a zone.

Start your own guild. Do raid content with 24 instead of 72 or w/e. You can make it more challenging.