Agnarr Population?

It's also dead because it needed to be more like the mac server and less easy mode.

how was mac harder? or were mac players just bad

It was pre nerf planes of power and no power creep. I don't think you could piggy into zones.

This is true. I played on Al'kabor for years and when I left, only 1 guild was strong enough to get elemental flagged. Nowadays guilds get flagged in days. It's all super easy, no challenge mode now. And people get bored quick.

Some things I really miss on Al'kabor are Earthshaker pre-nerf and it was something to see in action
Bards being able to swarm and AE kite ( also something to behold ), being able to get pre-sleeper loot, and of course good ol corpse runs.

Plenty of reasons! Starting off with some of the most obvious:

• There were no backflags, checklist flags or piggybacking into raid zones. Every new applicant you got needed to complete a full circuit of flagging and if they miss a single raid like I did Carprin, it meant another 3 months of not getting flagged until another backflags circuit was done. The only exceptions to this were HoHB which allowed you to piggyback an entire raid in if you had 6 fully flagged members and Solusek Ro’s chamber which you could do the same thing if you broke up your raid and invited 1 unflagged at a time. Both very unique and limited circumstances.
• Classic AAs. Casters didn’t have access to Destructive Fury AA, all their critical Nukes did 33% less. Melee didn’t have access to Innate XYZ AAs making their Melee do about 50% less.
• Mana and HP calculations resulted in a max geared Time character having barely over 7k Mana. On Agnarr a max time geared player breaks 10k mana in the exact same gear. Another example, I had a Vex Thal geared Cleric with a few elemental piece set on AK with 5.6k mana. I have an Agnarr Cleric with the same mana using Halls of Testing armor some tier 1 PoP tradeable items and a few empty slots.
• As a result of both of the above points sustained DPS for all players was less than half what you currently experience on Agnarr.
• Buff slots were limited to 15, but this included bard songs. What this means is on fights with multiple AEs like Terris/Saturn/CT/Bertox in Time you are losing 2 buff slots to AEs, 2 buff slots to AE Bard Regen/Resist and then you need to dedicate more buff slots to MGB SotW/EE/Paragon.
• Celestial Regeneration was a 72min reuse single target AA. If clerics wanted to use MGB HoT they had to use a level 60 spell that cost them 2000 mana when MGB’d. See above about mana calculation, for most Cleric this was around 40% of their mana for just one MGB.
• No Distillate potions available. Meaning you couldn’t just hide behind a free 300 or 600 HP HoT for 30s every 2 minutes that TLP players raiding PoTime currently do.
• Discipline timers were linked. Meaning if your warrior uses fortitude his Defensive discipline is locked out for 70 minutes. Also this means no Bellow line of disciplines for warriors to pull aggro.
• Raid window was capped at 10 group leaders. Meaning you could only invite 60 players to your raid maximum. The raid leader also didn’t have the ability to manually move people between groups, it was up to the group leaders to invite each player. Imagine how much time you’d lose each raid night waiting for every raider to follow directions for dropping their group and joining another group. While it should be small it adds up.
• Skills were hardcapped at 252. Any item skill modifiers that reached beyond 252 were irrelevant. Mostly impacted tradeskills but also some of the specialization or normal Spell Casting items from VT or the hand to hand gloves from VT did nothing on Al’Kabor.
• No health of targets target.
• UI limitations like not being able to scroll wheel to 3rd person, not being able to see your actual mana value in your UI, only having one hotbutton page available, no bard song window, no discipline window, etc. While these may not appear to directly influence difficulty they do in their own way.

Beyond this, yes much of it was alpha PoPower. Some of the highlights from this:

• Planar flags must be done in order, you couldn’t do KoS/Saturn prior to doing Bertox, Carprin and Grammys. If you did the flags from Saturn and KoS wouldn’t count.
• *Bertoxxulous would AE Rampage the entire room in CoD.
• *PoWater and PoFire minis dropped 1 loot each
• *Warlord Gintolaken would memory blur every 2-3 seconds instead of every 15-20.
• *Rathe Councilmen didn’t fleck meaning they would continue to hit for 3k even when at 5% HP unlike the current versions which drop to hit for about 800 once they are that low if they are the non-mezzables.
• Plane of Time Phase 1 and 2 would activate concurrently once you zone into the fifth Phase 1 trial. Meaning you aggro phase 2 mobs through the Time dial while still fighting phase 1.
• Plane of Time Phase 4/5 Gods dropped only 2 loots each instead of 3.
• Quarm had prenerf abilities. All of them were 300’ PBAE, all were unresistable and on a 35s reuse timer. The most annoying among them was an 18 second stun. Imagine your entire raid getting stunned for 18 seconds out of every 35.

Though it wasn’t all bad. You could bind in every PoP zone including PoTime B which wasn’t an instance. Also Xegony didn’t activate her adds at all meaning we just pulled her to the back and killed her 100-0%. Loot tables were very different too. Xegony only dropped silk pants and Fennin only dropped chain pants.

*Around 2010-2011 I believe Hobart fixed this bugs, but for the vast majority of time guilds has to contend with them when progressing in PoP.

Don't listen to those people who say Agnarr is dead. Also don't listen to those who say it's a prison server. It all depends on what you want from the game. I call them to be on prison servers; always chasing new levels/AA/gear every three months, never really crossing the goal line.

On Agnarr though you will eventually max out and that might take some time if you don't nolife the game. Agnarr for me is almost the perfect server. (OoW locked being the perfect one for me personally.)

Yes, Agnarr has had a huge population drop when Mangler & Selos was released.
But there's still new players to be met all the time. I am playing at EU times and that it not exactly the server's prime time and on weekdays there are only like 90 people in General chat. On the weekend the number doubles.

I know, it's at least 3 times as much on Mangler. I am just saying Agnarr isn't dead. Newbie zones of course aren't packed but if you ask in General Chat for groups you often get a positive response on all levels.

Both types (era locked and time locked) make sense. You gotta know in advance what you want from the game. If you're happy to stay in PoP/LDoN content, go Agnarr. If you want to go on an on go Mangler/Selos. At least try it out. Fresh bloods are always welcome. If it isn't your cup of tea make a new decision

I am having fun each time I play. Have a network of friends. Be in a cool guild. Be social. Take it slow. If you're not like that Agnarr indeed might not be the best choice for you

Peace and love and underdstanding!
:: Corydon