I can safely predict the new expansion will be junk at launch

Thanks for brightening my day your post is right on the money not everybody raids and with raising the level cap I will make sure I get the expansion for my two main accounts.

Andarriel

Your a idiot if they took a poll on raising the level cap probably the only people that don't want it are the raiders.

Andarriel

Why people like you even play eq is beyond me..

No you don't have to buy the new expansion..

No you don't have to level up your toons..

Yes you will get left behind with others of your mindset..

Yes you can change games where there is no hard anything..

Perhaps a fresh game of angry birds is right up your alley?

I know that 1 is not hard even for casuals such as yourself.

I've raided with devs testing.
They do test.
In my experience it's mechanics they work on vs balancing.
It's hard to balance until you have a larger bucket of attempts (once the mechanics are fixed)
I think they appreciate having 54 people to test.


We all complained the end raid of RoS (Talendor) was way too easy.
Maybe they over-did it this time. It was certainly challenging.

I am pretty sure everyone was allowed into beta's lately. You did need to have enough people show up. I doubt a dev planning for a 54 man raid would be happy to test it with 4 people.

I predict from the hints that this next xpac is a return to Velious. I think that's great! Velious had tons of content for everyone.
The game needs a well rounded xpac for solo/molo, group and raid content. Velious could be good because it also had all the great TS quests.
I also predict that there will be a new Sleeper. It'll be so over tuned that no one will beat it because it not meant to be beaten.
I always liked NToV, Velks, Sleepers Tomb, Tower of Frozen Shadow. I think the new xpac has a lot of potential just not sure that DB had the resources for it.
Is it like with the new anniversary zone? Is this something DB has been holding up it's sleeve so to speak. No way to guess, have to wait for beta.

so form the sounds of OP hes mad cause when raiding is done in beta 2 things happen.

1st the top end guilds use it as their learning time so on launch day they are ready and have strats down to beat it.

2nd the raids are tuned round those top end guilds and not the lower mid ranger family guilds

for 1 I be more surprised to hear of a top end raiding guild that didn't do this. By the time of beta those guilds have the current exp on farm for alts.

for 2nd. What was it bout 2 or so beta ago that the dervs said they make raids for the upper raiding guilds(those that can beat them before the next exp is out) and that if a guild can't beat all of current content before the next exp they are not a raiding guild or such.

So help me if there’s a third NTOV....

Put that thing back where it came from or so help me! /musical

If there was a 3rd tov, I'd like to see all of TOV changed, so that it was more event based, you could split ntov into a couple events with more mechanics and combine some of the dragons into single events then it wouldn't be so bad.Then you could also have an event for the other wings too.

A paladin speaking blasphemy...

Personally I think that the next expansion might have a very good tier 1 entry zone since it has good options for big open zones like Great Divide where they could have lots of little camps. Excluding some harder missions the problem is that there's only one zone not locked behind progression, while two of the smoke trials are fairly easy a solo player who isn't in a good grouping guild has a hard time getting around early in the expansion.

I don't mind locked content but having only one zone available and that zone not being friendly at all was and is trash, we can all agree that stratos sucks. I was late to the party buying the expansion so I didn't see the original version but fight fire isn't too bad as in it can be mezzed, ghetto kited and rooted.

Hopefully there's at least a couple unlocked zones in the first expansion that are fairly friendly to oddball groups.

I'd also like to see entry zones have better rewards for hunter style quests with 1 day lockouts and unlimited quest timers that have larger aa bonuses (like 50?) and a bit of expansion currency, this would help players have something to do while they're lfg. It's a feature that the game is sorely lacking in new expansions (I box, this is more an idea for solo players)

always love hearing bout tuning for "raid" guilds and not family guilds....Raiding shouldnt be a gimme, family guilds are just what they are because of the force or effort they put into showing up, getting flagged or progressing.... man that gets old. if they want to RAID perhaps being a family guild isn't what they should be. just my 2cp. Like anything else, IF IT WAS EASY, EVERYONE would be doing it and killing it, should be some effort, skill and resolve to do it.

There is nothing stopping your guild from going into beta and testing the raids yourself and giving feedback if that is your issue. You don't need a guild invite to do it since pretty much everyone who wants to get into beta gets into beta. It is not the Dev's fault if you fail to do that. The same thing applies to group content. They may disagree with your assessment, but you can make it. The real issue with most feedback in beta is that the people giving it on the forums typically are neither precise nor systematic in their reviews, usually they say something like "this is too hard/easy" without going into the sort of details that would actually be useful to the devs.

That said, on a number of occasions in beta over the years I have had one on one interactions with devs in game because I happened to be actually doing the content they were working on at the time. Not because of what guild I was in (because I carried no tag at the time in beta) but because I was doing things. That is really the critical thing. If your contribution is primarily complaining on the boards then probably you are not going to have much impact.

That is not really the point. There should be a gradation of difficulty, with initial raids being relatively easy and the final ones stupid hard. Any guild that can field mid 40s numbers should be able to beat the tier one raids, while tier 3 raids should be the challenge for the top guilds.

Having tier 1 raids challenging for the top guilds is simply poor design and bad for the game overall because it locks out guilds that field lower numbers due to the exponentially increasing level of difficulty as your number of raiders in an event drops.

I agree. I mean if they went back to also having non-progression raids in addition to the progression ones, then I could see one of those being challenging even to the top guilds. But as long there are only progression raids then, the difficulty should increase relative to the tier.

However no new raids from lvl 111-115 should be a push over raid, there should still be some diffficulty in it, And if we relate it to TBL, it should be harder than the T2/T3 raids TBL at least in hitting power, Maybe the T1 new expansion should be that in hitting power, but simple in emote and such.

This is a somewhat relevant quote from the FOH Q&A that didn't get a ton of notice:

It does at the least indicate helping mid tier/low tier guilds is on their radar, though I have no idea the timeline for implementing any solution.

regarding tuning: It's pretty difficult to make a final raid that is:
1. Nearly unbeatable by people in previous expansion's raid gear + current expansion levels/AAs
2. Reasonably challenging in current expansion gear

Ideally the final raids achieve that in order to provide a smooth difficulty curve for raiders where they simply have to gear up over time in order to beat a raid while they also learn the raid mechanics. It's much easier to make a raid have punishing failure mechanics on tight timing like Mearatas had. These will get easier as people get geared, but not nearly to the extent as mechanics like timed spawns (better gear means more DPS) or damage input (better gear means easier to take damage).

Once a raid is created that is tuned reasonably well for the raiding guilds, it'd actually be trivial to create an easy-mode version for family guilds that can go in and face-roll it for sub-par loot. You just need to drop a few mechanics and nerf the boss' hp/dmg. You've got a huge target of acceptable difficulty because you're no longer tuning for what properly played characters will hit. In other words, you should aim for 80-90% efficacy for raiders and you can aim for 20-60% efficacy for non-raiders and it'll be fine.

I don't know why DBG doesn't take this approach, but they should reconsider. Doing this would open up the entire raiding game to a huge number of players, not just a couple guilds per server.

I can safely say that this post contains far too much whining to be taken seriously.

This has been the reality for decades across every game across, every studio. Most people who apply to betas "want to see what new" and make not one single post or file a single bug. But....

When Guild A wipes 6 times trying to learn strats ... that is still data that can be used and analyzed by developers to gauge an encounter. Most of the data they use is from people who just log in and do "Stuff". They often run focused encounter testing, but even if 20 guilds log in to "Learn Strats" and only 3 guilds report bugs, there is still 20 guilds worth of data to look at. So even if you dont feel like your helping, often just logging in and doing random stuff is, in fact, helpful.