Just going to say it, you are killing the game.

Guess the question becomes..

Are only the top 10 guilds considered hardcore ?

What define's hardcore ?

What defines a "Mid tier" raid guild ?

It should be

hardcore - those that finish the expansion before June each year.
mediocre - those that finish the expansion before the end of summer each year.
softcore - those that finish the expansion before the next expansion is released
nocore - those that just don't finish anything.

I would say based on UEE, which drew an enormous line in the sand, it would go something like:

Elite--RoI
Ultra Hardcore--MS
Super Harcore--Triton, Valhallah, Silent Redemption
Hardcore--Shadows of Doom, Fu World Order, Reckless Ascension, RoV, RotE, Crimson Tempest, Scarlet Vengeance
Midtier--the 8 guilds who have completed T1
Family or casual--all the rest

BTW, completing UEE before another nerf will obviously bump any of these guilds into the Super Hardcore category.

So somebody win already!

By that statement..

Basically only guilds who regularly clear entire current content are not mid tier ?

This being the case from everything I've personally seen as a raider in my entire time in norrath its simple math.

Typically a guild has soo many good player's verses not good players verses people who literally only there for 1 ability they can provide the raid. This has held true in absolutely EVERY guild I've ever been in ..

The more it's skewed one way or the other .. determine's where that guild lay's within the raid forces "Tier" or rank (mid tier, hard coore, super hardcore, ultra hardcore, elite)

The of the gooder player's the raid force has, the further the guild can go per current content raid clear. The more of the not good player's they have in their raid force .. again also directly applies to how far they make it in current content.

Couple things that hold raid forces back .
1. Not enough players.. per raid night.
2. Poor raid strats ..
3. Poor performance..
4. Poor leadership..


Couple things that can ultimately help..
1. Merge with other guilds new infusion of new player's has only ever helped an never has it hurt..

2. dont rely upon a single person for your ENTIRE raid strat. Good raid guilds rely upon absolutely EVERYONE IN THE RAID .. to help come up with what mechanic's happen when, where the aura's AE's , does this mob ramp ? what stuns that mob , does mez work what bout root / snare cc ?

3. Player individual performance is a huge deal in TBL (As it should be) This more then any other thing can fork a guild .. (esp in unfettered) Ultimately mid tier guilds have more poor performer's then they do the good performer's thus .. is why they are where they are by the very definition .. Help people learn their exact roles.

4. Meh .. if your mid tier has poor leadership an you choose not to leave thats on you. Because 10/10 times a poor performing Officer tag in the guild, will never step down. That O tag .. carry's with it what they consider "prestige" and no matter what they ultimately want it, and won't let it go.

Every time I've ever seen a guild demote an officer (3x only) they left the guild the same day. No questions asked.

I would put Valhallah at least one step higher because we beat all this with the dreadful FV lag. I am bias though /shrug

The only real solution at this time is EQ3.

However, a reasonable accommodation would be to make it easier for players to get better at playing their classes. DBG doesn't help much in this regard. If you truly want to be a great player you are absolutely required to spend a lot of time doing research outside of the game.

So if you accept my stated premise and if you want to keep the game alive then you need to contribute to the community and provide better methods to helping other players "git gud".

Where are the "official" guides on maximizing dps for each and every class? Or how best to play a raid <insert class here>? Yes, I know the information is "out there". But it's disjointed and likely spread across numerous web sites (many of which have went dark!).

[Kudos here to the people who have taken it upon themselves to help the community! There are too many to list but you know who you are!]

If information was more widely disseminated casuals might just become more capable raiders. Obviously this won't do anything for the Netflix raiders but it might provide a few more bodies to the recruit pipeline.

Maybe DBG could afford to pay an intern to populate a new forum section for "Best Practices"?

Lag can be better than Elite DPS and break many raid mechanics

Or just stop playing this version of EQ.

I have nearly 200 failed applications sitting in the VH forums, and could pull even more examples if I went further back in time or expanded my search to other guilds I raid with. These are people who were given all the tools to succeed but were unable to make the adjustments needed to perform at a raiding level.

In this expansion I'd define "well-geared" and "sufficient AA" as TBL group gear and about 20k well-spent AA. That's more than enough to complete all three tier 1 raids.

Knights of Infinity, a guild on FV that only ever completed Gorowyn in era, beat Stratos last month and should be finishing Plane of Fire in the next week or two. Thanks to a concerted effort by the guild's leadership to start placing a heavy emphasis on performance and providing the right information to its members, they're starting to progress through T1 of TBL.

I have no problem with Tier 1 raids being easier, but I also firmly believe that any guild in the game running 40+ members can complete Tier 1 TBL with the right focus on performance and a positive attitude.

Say it louder for the people in the back!!

Interestingly and despite the focus on dps being supposedly everything in the raiding sphere, guilds largely are successful or not in my view in the area of healing. Either they have a well developed plan on healing in all phases of the game or they are something less than "Well planned" and people drop here, there, and everywhere through no fault of their own....

You know, when you look at EQ, the missing inputs, which has been mentioned in some regard in this thread, is player development.

Guilds are mini organisations, right? You need purpose (to kill stuff hardcore in the face), you need leadership (to drive the organisation forward), you need policy and process (to manage the players).

EQ creates an ecosystem that dictates the context of each organisation.
Field 54 person raids that require specific skills and behaviours, manifested in class type and play style. Raids add variety by giving raid leaders the headache of working out which class types (and spells / skills) are more needed in each scenario, to be successful.

The barriers that this ecosystem creates derive from a guild's ability to manage it's people, from recruitment to succession planning to "retirement"

You cannot recruit new apps if the talent pool is non-existent.
If you do recruit, there is limited ability to train so that a player can individually build skills and competencies across the HUGE dimension of abilities in a quick fashion (no one raids outside of last 3 expansions regularly...), so the reliance on other class mates is high (not everyone is good at coaching / mentoring), and the reliance on a player to be pro-active in becoming the best version of themselves is high (not every recruit cares about being the best (or has the time)).

If you're in a guild where there is a significant (5% of guild make-up) number of players that are incompetent, you need management strategies to help those players be competent, or use your policies to remove them (disciplinary), which is difficult if you don't have a replacement for that person, but necessary for the good of the guild. We are making some tough decisions as a guild and, in the same vain as the leader of Machin Shin, reviewing data collected from raids to check who is outputting best DPS, who is making smart cast choices, who is healing, who is afk, who is constantly failing emotes. That's not fun for those that hvae to make the decisions. It's also not fun to have difficult conversations with players who are online "to have fun". Afterall, this is a game that players PAY TO PLAY, converse to a real organisation... DKP does not pay the bills.

So in all of that, it is a viable suggestion to ask that the EQ ecosystem is modified to make player management easier for guilds - ability to field fewer numbers in a raid instance without the challenge increasing, ability to play a different class (monster mission style) to support when someone is offline (without the use of alts), ability to play on different servers with the same character (rather than starting from scratch or moving server) - these are suggestions picked from thin air and I'm not suggesting they are relevant or workable.

The notion is, Guild's have a crisis now, the guilds that don't have that problem, will face it one day. There is an ability to ease that crisis by putting in place measure to help, or reducing the barriers that create player management issues.

I wholeheartedly share the sentiment Yinla posted earlier:
54 person raids are wonderful - would not suggest removing them, but consider scaling the raid so the difficulty is the same, but for 48, or 42, or 36 people. Hell, if there are 36 person events, guilds with large benches could run two raids. (RoS final raid, anybody??)

I also wholeheartedly share the sentiment that what makes EQ great is the difficulty and the challenge of working through a strategy to complete a raid - it's why I play !! The harder the better - GoD is my favourite expansion.

FULLY AGREE
DPS checks are one thing, but healing required to be successful is another ! Many of the encounters, we have specifically started to have healing strats, switiching priests around group make-up to win. And it's helped.

Healers need to be an important part of the event strategy? Who knew?

Sarcasm notes ;-)
Let me clarify - just throwing a load of healers to react does not equate to a successful raid always, and utilising priests in classic group make-up is not necessarily most efficient.

Please wave to all the old Stromm players in Inverse Logic ex- Final Door, Evolutia, Havens Edge etc.

The aspect of this I think you're missing (and others have commented on as well) is all of this information is useless if someone doesn't care to improve. It's a relatively small portion of raiders - even in hardcore guilds - who are constantly analyzing their performance and trying to improve. Far more are simply content to show up and play competently, but not exceptionally. And as was said elsewhere, the percentage of the guild that strives for excellence does ultimately determine it's overall success and ranking.

Making "how-to" info more readily available would obviously be a good thing, but I think most successful guilds can already help a player improve if that player is willing to make the effort. But nothing is going to "fix" the people who aren't interested in doing so.

I don't use the term "hardcore", that is your term.

I consider any guild that always fields full 54 man raids and is selective about who it lets in to be a top tier guild. Normally that means that any applicants are already experienced raiders, well geared and flagged. A guild like that can progress as almost all raids are gated around the assumption that all of that is in place.

Mid tier guilds are those who vary rarely, if ever, field full raids, and take whoever they can get. Normally that means people with only group experience prior, typically not all that well geared and often without flags.

Now, I am not saying that all raids should be designed around the mid tier, but at least some raids should be set up so they are doable by those organizations. That might mean 54 man raids with lower overall resource requirements, or 36/42 main raids with the current resource requirement paradigm (since most of the mid tier guilds can likely field enough experienced players to handle that).

If you think your guild is really that capable with your 54 man crew, try doing the following test so you can experience exactly what sort of logistical problems mid tier guilds have to face when raiding. Assemble your normal raid force, including whoever might have to sit out. Have them all /ran 1000, and take the top 42 rolls (whoever that might be, you don't get to pick and choose, if you are short on healers or tanks or dps, tough luck, that is what you have) and use that as your raid force. Have them all remove one or two armor pieces as well to compensate for their superior gear they might already have from current content. Then go and try to beat Reparm or Stratos with that force. Or any RoS raid other than Goro for that matter. See how far you get.

Then you will see how uber you really are then, because THAT is what mid tier guilds have to face on a daily basis.

Well, technically if your tanks don't die then you win (eventually, it just takes longer) unless the event has a hard timer. Ultimately any strat revolves around that basic fact.

Fire is easier than Stratos IMO. We have yet to beat Stratos (close though, we can get the last named to ~10%) but have Fire on farm mode. Stratos is a lot faster but is a straight up dps check. Either kill it in time X or you likely will lose. Fire does have a dps check of sorts, if you can't keep up with frog spawns you will lose for example, but you can slug it out otherwise as long as your healers keep your tanks up.