We've done this before but the 2nd time we did the raid we had less players and not much raid lag as our first win which made a helluva difference in needing a 5th bard to lure.
60+ minutes....I'd say re-visit your strategy. Many classes can CC. There are many forms of CC. Lianeb posted a bit earlier, we went from a 20 min to a sub-5 min fight after a strat adjustment. The only thing I'll agree with in this thread so far...is that they should NOT have been linear raids. Definitely feels like the dragon first was a poor choice this way. The other two are much easier targets.
Well I was certain that finding a way to ignore the mechanics was how people were blitzing through this is less than 5 mins. Nice to have that confirmed. I can't imagine that the design vision was to find a way to ignore the mechanics (pun intended) in the raid. I'm pretty sure our dps is far too low to make it through the dragon without having mountains of mechanics needing to be "dealt" with. If it took one of the top tier guilds 20 mins to accomplish this raid killing mechanics I dont see a chance for the mid-low tier to finish under the 30min enrage timer anytime soon. I've heard multiple reports of over an hour. Our attempts our dps is too low to even keep up with the mechanics, which i understand is not your problem. But it certainly is the experience in low tier guilds.
Its a fun event. We've beat it a few times (lost many), and improved on each run. As a necro I've been doing over a billion damage on that dragon, I'll be happy when we get the time down so that my total damage is less than half that.
So the most viable strat is to Sirens-call 10+ mechanics and burn the dragon down? Are any guilds killing mechanics and doing this sub 30 min? With lag and the small dome area it's hard to keep them locked in our experience. Honestly the worst thing about this raid is after a fail sitting on your hands for 15 minutes waiting for burns to be back. The worst design flaw in everquest is when learning a new raid you might only get 3 attempts per night because 45 minutes is spent waiting on stuff to come back up. Then you lose 1 or 2 each run and it gets harder. The raids have no doubt become more challenging and it would be much more fun if recovery after an event reset took 3-4 minutes and not 10+.
RoV has done it in under 20 minutes while killing the mechanics, however it can be done much quicker if you can keep them busy and burn the dragon. One thing to consider is your casters should treat this like a belly-caster - they will spend a lot less time moving and thus do more DPS.
We'll give that a try and see how it goes. Thank you! However, I must say that I'll be quite surprised if this remains a viable strategy now that this information has surfaced. Lure of the Siren's Song was butchered quite a while back, and I would be shocked if it was allowed to continue working on the mechanics. I've no clue why, but it seems the only way Lure is ever envisioned to be "allowed" is on trivial mobs or trivial content. I thought it was to be stripped of working on anything with a raid tag and anything at or around current maximum player level. That line of thinking is mostly what led to the discontent surrounding this event. If it takes a guild like Machin Shin in the vicinity of 20 minutes (just 10 shy of the enrage timer) to do the event without this type of strategy, I can't imagine it'll be possible for almost all other guilds out there to duplicate the same DPS that is sufficient to kill the dragon plus these chain-spawning mechanics that possess a hefty amount of hit points, weird "warping" or "ignoring" of aggro abilities where they just poof and walk back into the dragon, and finally the ability to heal the dragon all at the same time :\.
Single target static tank-n-spank. Fantastic event for training that mega-burn DPS. While I wholeheartedly agree that the mechanic ...erm... mechanic... is not great, this is a really good event for testing your raid's DPS. It's incredibly easy to see what's going wrong where due to close proximity and a static setup. Definitely see the GMM Dragon as a punching bag of sorts - I used to use NTOV/Maestro of Rancor for that purpose. Now I'll be using this.
This raid is strange. Actually, all of them in GMM are strange. They drop the best items in the game, yet they are nowhere as hard as even T2 TBL raids. It must be the lack of testing and tuning. These raids look like they were intended to be much harder but simply weren't tuned properly. Or bugfixed. Or even polished. If the Dragon gets changed to disable the CC mechanics and force the 'straight up' DPS check - that would at least be in line with the quality of loot it drops. If a guild can't beat Empyr (for example) - it has no business getting this loot, no? I don't understand why some people are complaining here as if this Dragon was a T1 raid. If anything, this is T4, just based on the loot.
Cicelle can you easily post your typical raid make up? I'm wondering how close in class makeup we match up to your guild.
Until last week, we were killing them. Took about 14 minutes. We changed it up to keeping the mechanics busy. Yes, we definitely do a lot of DPS. As Lianeb said earlier though, the lower your DPS output the riskier this method is going to be. You get a mechanic every 5% plus one on a timed basis. So you're going to have a LOT of them to handle if DPS isn't high. I REALLY don't understand the enrage mechanics on events. Honestly, who cares if a guild is taking 60+ minutes to do an event? IMO, that's equally impressive as a guild that burns it down in 3 minutes. It takes a lot of perseverance, mana management, etc to keep on going for 60 minutes on an event like this.
Ignoring the mechanics would lead you to ever increasing levels of regen (mechanics healing the boss). So no, ignoring the mechanics is not in any way conducive to beating this event in any variable of minutes. I think the words you're seeking should be "Well I was certain that guilds found a way to crowd control the mechanics to keep them away from the boss, thus preventing them from healing it". This is our video of our last attempt with the Dragon. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/407822775 Winning attempt starts around 44 minutes in. We have beaten it sub 20 minutes while killing all the mechanics as they spawn but it gets pretty boring. Our first attempt the dragon warped outside of the static ring and then started massive regen. We had tried to CC the mechanics once before on our first nights attempts but it did not go well. This night we tried again on the second attempt and it went pretty smooth.
Welcome to Everquest.. I fixed it for you. Since the very begining of this game. DPS has been an integral part (most important if you ask me) raiding.. And thus why GREAT player's that band together over mediocre players will always see more success when they have great leadership. Problem is.. older eq gets .. the more lax A L O T .. of people get an they start to comingle the whole familiarity is good talent wise just because they are guilded with some one for a long long time. When truth of the matter is they are berely average players skill wise, you just been in that guild soo long that your familiarity with them has skewed your view on their actual skill level.
