Nerf Mearates (Now)

Personally, I would like to beat this before they nerf it any further. Victory is within our grasp ! I can feel it. Can't wait for that " First Win RUSH!"

Allayna, the voice of reason. DBG, please listen! He's in a position for his voice to matter!!!

I agree.. and Kudos to the devs for what I consider fun and thoughtful raids throughout this expansion. It's not fun though that just 1 or 2 people dying at a BAD time, or an ill timed lag spike can wipe the raid. And honestly, having the poison dot thing hit while you are in hallways and unable to effect cures is too much for any but the top guilds. 2 of the mid level guilds on Luclin just merged and having been in both, I don't see them beating this at all before the next expansion comes out. (and they are T3 flagged now)

If we're basing rankings on order that beat Palace Gates, it would put RoV in 6th place. I love this guild, I love the raid leaders, and I love the effort the hardcore raiders have put in on UEE. This raid force is solid.

That being said, as much as it pains me to say it, I do not see us beating UEE in its current form. And, trust me, it's a brutal thing to admit and I take no pleasure is saying so. However, I emphatically support the raid leadership continuing to do this raid week after week because we have to stay fresh and practiced on this raid. So yes, I am certain we will continue doing it, ad nauseum until the cows come home, because it has to be done. Even a week or two off can make people super rusty (okay, maybe just me, but yes, I get rusty with even a week or two off on such a complex raid).

Is it fair to the populace of EQ as a whole, or at least the current content raidforce populace, to continue "punishing" us by not nerfing this raid already?

I have been perhaps overly vocal about this issue and never intend to step on the toes of those who enjoy the challenge, I respect your opinions and I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying that the voices crying out for it to be nerfed certainly appear to be a large majority (and not just the vocal majority, such as myself...).

I'll keep showing up and doing UEE and failing at 25% for as long as my guild wants me to. I just don't want to see guilds folding because of this event. And that is the rumor at this point. (Not RoV. I care about the health of other guilds, too, because the health of guilds helps ensure the health of EQ.)

While true, it doesn't affect my point especially for RoS+ (seriously that brick wall should have concerned the developers, and I'm shocked it didn't). It is design that seems to ignore the existence of anyone but the top few raid forces. That's both wrong and unsustainable.

While I don't know the raid this topic is about, I do think such tuning should be available for people who like it. It should be a difficulty setting though, and not a regression to GoD/UF design.

A situation in which the design grinds through the remaining player base until one by one servers have little or no viable raid forces until the least loyal of players jump ship for greener pastures to other servers isn't the right way for the raid game to end, in my opinion. That is the trajectory they have set the last couple years, and it alarms me (especially seeing the lower tier raid forces pretty much poof entirely).

They can't please everyone though, of course. I understand that. That's why difficulty levels are really the only middle ground that could mitigate stuff like this. I'm very careful not to call for this kind of tuning not existing at all.

I've said my piece on this. I don't want to go too off topic from what this thread is even about, so that's why I wrapped it back around into saying whatever they do with this event, they should consider letting people choose the insane version if they wish to.

I describe this event as needing to pat your head, rub your belly, hop on one foot while rotating counterclockwise, and reciting the alphabet backwards. If you miss doing any one of those things correctly, you punish 53 other people. I can do all the things this raid requires of me, but the raid does not consist of 54 of me (that would be awful, I hate playing casters anyway).

As a tank, I hate having to constantly move this boss. A new boulder gets thrown every 10 seconds, but it's not done smoothly. First, the boulder spawns, and there's a 1 second delay before it gets thrown. Once thrown, I move to a new position. There's a 2 second delay before the boss follows. When the boss arrives to my new position (if he doesn't decide to go inspect the Mearatas hallways), it's almost always on my backside because he has overrun me, and I have to back up. He may also have stopped too soon, too close to the previous boulder so there's not enough room for the raid behind him, and I might have to make another minor adjustment (can't push him because he's immune to forced movement effects). So that's another second of evaluation and movement. That's 4-5 seconds out of every 10 where melee damage basically isn't happening. I feel like the frequency of movement is the reason that this event just drags on. The 50-25% phase takes longer than the 100-85%, 85-70%, and 70-50%.

I personally still think that add-spawned-on-death is a dumb snowball-y mechanic, but I also came from a guild that stalled on Chapterhouse until they eventually collapsed because of the lack of progression.

Also, bane application is really inconsistent. Warriors can actually help with the snare and stun mobs, and I've made an audio trigger to tell me when I've successfully baned something. The same abilities can be used dozens of times in an event, but only get a handful of actual bane applications. Yes, I know armors have to be damaged first, I mean even when just focused on baning the mephits.

Fixing pathing/responsiveness of the boss and bane applications would be a huge help to this event without actually changing the mechanics. Lowering the frequency of movement would be a nerf, but the event would feel less dumb to perform and give melee classes more to do instead of spending half the active phases of the event waiting for the boss to get to his new position.

I think I've been on maybe 2 UEE runs so can't add a whole lot...

I'm just curious tho and have a question for the guilds who have beaten this raid. Do you do this event every week? Or is it not worth the effort with 10 other raids to do?

I really think people are over-complicating this raid. For most people you don't have that many things to do. Sure, hallway groups and tanks and people doing cures have more to worry about but for most people it's pretty simple.

You only have to do one of these things at a time:
1. Do you see a mephit around or on xtar that you can bane? If yes, then hit your bane hotkey. Keep hitting that key until there's no more left.
2. Don't see any mephits around you can help with? Ok then attack the boss if he's active. If not then try not to fall asleep with nothing to do.
3. Hallway emote just went off? Stop what you're doing and calmly move to your hallway. There's plenty of warning when this will happen. The boss is inactive and your tanks will keep mephits off you. Just calm down and go to the right one.
4. Are you bored standing in the hallway with nothing to do but see a mephit or sentinel near that you can help with? Help out like the good player you are.

Then while you're performing your one single action just look out for these two easy things:
1. Is your rock illusion lasting a long time and you see you're the only one with it still on? Click a potion.
2. See those giant fireball rock things? Don't stand on em. Why would you want to stand in fire? That would be silly. Nobody should have to explain not standing in fire. If this is a problem then more zones need to be like skyfire to get people to pay attention more.

Depends on your raiding schedule and goals. Beating it one time should be worth a lot for a raiding guild that wants to be in the top 10. But after that? Not so much. The lack of extra reward for extra difficulty is not good for motivation. It's still cool to farm it just for the thrill and challenge, but without sacrificing a bunch of other raids.

We (Triton) do it every week, but limit the time allocated for it. So far we beat it 4 times, failed 2 other times and went to kill something else.

It saddens me to see these mechanics being called "dumb." I strongly believe every aspect of the initial raid (okay, other than the lag) contributed to it being one of the best events in EQ history.

It should be nerfed now, and it's legitimate to have discussions about what should be changed to make it beatable for more guilds and farmable for those guilds that have already beat it. That said, reading through this thread, I find myself agreeing with people that certain mechanics should be changed now, but strongly disagreeing with some (not all) post's general characterizations and criticisms of the event's various mechanics.

I think this event was great for the top tier of the game, and I hope devs aren't generally discouraged from making more end-of-expansion events like this. I'd just also urge them to have an expedited timeline for reducing the event's difficulty after the first month or so. It probably should have been nerfed in March to where it is now, and then nerfed again in April (and maybe again in May, depending on completion rates).

And I feel like it needs to be repeated for the umpteen time, it's the last event of the expansion (excluding GMM). It should be difficult and it should not be compared to UF's progression. This is one of few events that deserve a special loot of some kind (hell even Talendor had the something).

I believe that most people honestly share this sentiment in its entirety, including myself. It is good for the game to have a difficult top tier raid, while it is similarly good for the game to expedite re-tuning of an expansion's most difficult raid.

I guess it must be resource intensive, but why can't they take the raid how it is today, make the keyword Hard. Copy the raid, make adjustments, make the keyword Easy. If people want the challenge they have it. If a guild wants to win and then try to challenge themselves well you have that too.

Because that's a waste of design time. Without any unique loot or more loot why would anyone do the hard version. Most people that play EQ want to down raids in as little time as possible for the most loot.

It is probably ready for another nerf.

Not saying that people couldn't get it in it's current form eventually, but now that summer is coming up each week you have guilds losing people that have been doing this for months and replacing them with fresh recruits. It's just going to get more difficult to get people to log in for June and July raids.

Scale it back a bit, hopefully a few more guilds can get over the hump and maybe it is a bit easier to put back into the farm rotation.

This might be the first post I will come out and vehemently disagree with you. The Devs need to use this raid as a measuring stick of what never to do again. Until this is a 64 bit game that uses multi-core technology and modern graffics card capabilities EverQuest has no right in make a raid like this, ever again. They should have known better. They have 20 years of experience making this game.

I live in NH, which means I have to go through servers on the internet that go through NY State - where everyone lives. If I do a trace route to Everquest.com, my connection drops to a crawl once it reaches Comcast NY servers and slowly dies on it's way to San Diego. It has always been this way, even worse before Comcast offered 400 MB internet in my area. There's nothing me as a player can do to defeat that lag. That back and forth ping from me to San Diego is horrendous. Any member of RA will tell you I am one of the most consistent members, performance wise on our roster. My sustained dps is 1/4 what it normally is. I'm a Warrior in Mearatas, that's how bad 50% on is for me on this raid as the mechanics amp up and do a sloppy job sending me the information. I rubberband on the 25% mark, I have no prayer of getting to the proper wing unless I happen to be closest to that wing. For the first time, ever as a raider in EverQuest I am a DETRIMENT to other 53 members of my raid force.

The design of this raid is one of the largest Epic Fails in the 20 year history of EverQuest. It should have been nerfed in April, at the latest. To allow this to continue the way that it has deserves any loss in subscriptions that have likely come as a result. Shame on everyone involved in making the terrible decisions for inaction. At least you got your priorities right - nerfing the achievements auto-granting on the raid no one else is defeating /golf clap. The executive level decision makers on the EverQuest team should on notice. You're making awful decisions that are ultimately going to kill the game.

fix Mearatas, already.

The answer is pretty simple: the people who want the challenge. If they absolutely must have better gear there can be invisible augs or something that give a very slight boost to stats, pleasing min/maxers. The latter does take dev time they may not have though.

Either way designing content for a couple guilds, sentencing most of the raid guilds/forces to death in the process, isn't the way to go. Also, there are already achievements for doing things a harder way (or hilariously easier way sometimes). There could easily be achievements for that.

The simple fact of the matter is that sensible tuning that will not ravage the raid player base is extremely easy to the strongest guilds, and always will be. It is impossible to design something challenging to the strongest guilds while not obliterating the raid game in the process.

Do you have all filters on under options? Could be what is causing you such terrible lag. Obviously i wouldn’t recommend completely turning off your logs for this raid (although you could if your able to pay attention to buff window/event messages). But should definitely cut off others dmg/spells if you haven’t already.

Honestly this was funnest raid we have had in a long time. The ONLY mechanic i think is dumb is the enrage timer. I do agree it should be tuned down now but i do think this is how the final raid should be at launch moving forward and like Sancus said tuned down later. That being said they should not wait as long as they have to make this more beatable.

Having beaten UEE pre nerf and post nerf I can understand people’s frustration. It honestly didn’t change a ton, 25% is still chaotic. My only comment will be that this event is the most fun I’ve had raiding in years (pre nerf). Trying to beat an event that took the best raid force in the world weeks of grinding to complete was incredibly satisfying. Now that we know the mechanics and how to beat the raid, it’s more of a chore. The only thing I would argue against is increasing the rate at which events are nerfed. As a guild that does not raid on lockout timer (and takes a holiday break), I think we should have at least a couple weeks to smash our heads into the “final” event before its dumbed down.

There's no good reason to nerf the final raid. Why deface things if they work fine as they are?

What's this entitlement stuff regarding the currency you might be missing out on some weeks? Too bad.