My bad if there is another thread of sorts that already asks this, but I couldn't find anything when searching. I was thinking a lot about this expansion, next expansion, and Mearatas - and it got me curious as to where Mearatas fell within the hardest raids list. I've played off and on since early EQ days, but I really only started raiding in TBM. I know plane of war caused a lot of folks trouble, then I believe there were a lot of guilds that couldn't quite beat underfoot, and then of course - there's mearatas. So general question - if you had to rank the top 10 hardest raid events across all expansion, what would be up there? My viewpoint is skewed / more limited to recent events. But here is my list from either actively playing, doing it on open raids, doing throwback raids with friends, or just straight hearing about it and guessing. (I'm excluding the Sleeper event, because you could only attempt that once) 1) Mearatas 2) Plane of War (I've never seen this pre-nerf, just heard stories.) 3) OMM 4) Convorteum - First Creation 5) Damsel of Decay 6) Vault 2.0 in RoS 7) Karzok Raid (Pre EOTD 2) 8) Arx 1.5 9) Arx 5 10) Tower of Rot or maybe Chapterhouse? And Dev's if you are reading this - counter question to you guys, which raids are you most proud of?
Tunat In GoD was never beaten until guilds had feared up OoW. I could be remembering wrong but don’t think he was beaten till after OMM. In fact most of the raids in GoD were just flat out a** beaters, if I recall GoD was beta tested with a level increase in mind, but didn’t get the level increase on release.
This. I haven't touched live in a while (hey Zurril ) and no plans to but it is hard to imagine anything close to what GoD was until adjustments and OoW. Major guilds folded over it.
Biggest modern raid that you're missing is the Triun God. Pillars was pretty challenging but not sure if it will make a top 10 list. Queen in chardok and Atrebes vault probably need honorable mention for how many mid tier guilds imploded on them even though neither was too absurdly difficult. Prenerf PoWar is top of the list in modern EQ imo, with post nerf PoWar still deserving of an additional position on the list. 90% of the difficulty in Tower of Rot was due to the table of doom lag rather than event mechanics. Mearatas is definitely top 3 in modern EQ maybe even number 2 behind prenerf PoWar. I think I remember hearing that Prathun was surprised anyone beat prenerf Mearatas this year.
GoD had many broken raids, Arch Oversears were raiding on Bristlebane with a dev to see what was going on.
Your list definitely has recency bias. Rathe Council 1.0 was ridiculous to start off with prior to the flecking patch. I believe Afterlife was the only guild to defeat it in super power mode. Quarm 1.0 was basically unkillable. They patched it changing all of his AEs and then a few days later both Afterlife and Township Rebellion killed it. Then at the end of POP it became a joke of an easy mob with cleric and ranger tanking it. Tunat as mentioned was also basically unkillable in GoD. In fact I was fairly sure half of the minis in Tacvi were that way. Specifically South snake and Balance Zun. Triunity in VoA wasn’t so much as hard, but the event was very poorly explained and the script was very long. This event I think is the largest time between #1 and #2 defeating it among the modern year-long expansions. I seem to recall our first win was 2 attempts on thennight and 4 hours total raiding between those 2 attempts because it took so long. Fumerak in VoA was very similar to Triunity, very unexplained, very long and very overtuned to start off with. It eventually got nerfed down but to start it was a big gatekeeper. I think based on number of guilds defeating in era you have to put First Creation way above Mearatas. Only 5 guilds defeated TFC in Underfoot. Meanwhile 11 guilds have defeated Mearatas and that’s 8 years later when the number of active raid guilds has shrunk slightly. Clearly it’s difficult but not top of the list worthy. Also worth mentioning are Mayong in Demiplane, only 6 guilds defeated before the next expansion launch. Two Gods in Solteris only 7 guilds defeated before the next expansion launch. Granted these expansions were still in the era of 6-10 month expansion timelines instead of the 12 month timeline of modern EQ expansions.
Any and every raid in gates of discord.. Tunat was not beaten on ANY server .. until after omans of war was beaten.. It took 9 months for the first guild to beat the first encounter in natimbi which was the big giant turtle.. An even then thee only way was to have 3 warriors on it 1 big discing an 2 others /shield cycling while in defensive as well.. An dont even ger me atarted kn curse callers.. As i said you can literally pick almost any raid in gates of discord above any raid you mentioned so far .. for pure hardness Unless you wanna talk about original sleeper and how on lanys server thee only guild to have pushed it twice to near death while velious was current.. heh
Nah, that's TBL. For reference, here's days between the first and 2nd win for every expansion tracked on EGL (Edit: RoF is T2 btw; there was 0 gap for T3/T4): Edit: Another interesting thing when comparing TBL and VoA is that the gap that existed in VoA was produced over the course of a number of semi-difficult raids, whereas almost the entirety of the gap in TBL was from Mearatas. This isn't a perfect visualization by any means, but here's a rough comparison of the gap that existed between the #1 and #2 guilds, plotted against days after the expansion launched: This obviously captures a lot of things other than difficulty (like flagging, morning raids, etc.), but one interesting thing for me is that in VoA about half the gap comes from the Time and Tides raid. I agree to an extent, but it's worth noting that Mearatas has been nerfed 2 or 3 times now? The initial incarnation was pretty substantially harder than what most guilds have defeated. I would still argue TFC is a more significant accomplishment, but I don't think the number of in-era kills are comparable.
Quite a few events got 2-3 tuning passes before ending at their final state. Fumerak, Triune God, 95% of Underfoot pre-Convorteum, It sure would’ve been cool if they could have just copied the script for each raid when doing a tuning pass and allowed players to ask requesting NPCs for version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, versions of that raid instance. Just to see what prenerf versions of a lot of events were like.
Hardest raid in EQ was Talendor from ROS because it was the hardest one for me to stay awake while doing.
I swoon for Sancus graphs! I recall TFC being ridiculously difficult, but I was in a mid-tier guild at that time. Sancus' handy graph indicated that UEE had the largest spread, however, there were a lot more guilds raiding during VoA... so make of that what you will. I personally never tried to win any raid as many times as UEE. Somewhere in the 80 range of personal attempts. Oof. But boy does it feel good to pwn it now.
Overlord Mata Muram of course that,s when top guilds had no outside help with the massive cheating going on in todays EQ YiMin Cestus Dei
I believe our top two or 3 most tries before a win would include Rubak Oseka. I think there is at least one that is worse but I cannot recall it at the moment. (attempts, not days)
