What is the most Challenging Raiding expansion (that wasn't/isn't broken)

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Downtoplow, Dec 3, 2020.

  1. Downtoplow Journeyman

    With The Burning Lands a few weeks away from launching on Phinigel, we've received some feedback that The Burning Lands is one of the toughest expansions to raid overall, and specifically; that Mearatas is the most challenging raid in EQ history. Some live players have mentioned it was a guild killer in its time, and many a guild couldn't beat it until after ToV launched.

    Any truth to these rumors? And if TBL isn't the most challenging x-pac (current, post nerfed, not broken IE Tacvi at launch) to raid, what is?
  2. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    While TBL Raid content has had a raft of post-release changes like just about every expansion has and some retuning of it was done as I understand things only 7 live server guilds managed to complete the expansion in era, that's a rather brutally low number & speaks to how difficult the expansion was, part of that is however the rather onerous keying system, which if it stays intact for TLP servers is going to be a huge pain in the posterior, but hopefully it was included in the keying fixes done previously for TLP.

    Was TBL the most-difficult though? I don't really know, I wasn't raiding until late Velious era myself & was not playing for 7 years after SoD was available on the Beta Server.
    I did think Underfoot was a difficult expansion too but by all accounts I have seen TBL beats that hands down.
    If any guild on a TLP can beat T3 TBL in-era with a much shorter amount of time to beat it in era it will be a massive feather in their cap even if they have strategies available, that raid is 99% about practising until your execution is dang near perfect, and you can't miraculously speed up how quickly players learn, especially the older players EQ has.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  3. Cicelee Augur

    Mearatas is one of those raids that you will never be able to just waltz in and steamroll, at least for the next couple of expansions. I remember trying to get the hall emote achievement this past summer with current guild and not only failing that many times, but also wiping a decent amount. And that was with five extra levels, AA, gear, etc.

    It is easier than it was, but it is definitely not one that you can do blindfolded.
    Andarriel likes this.
  4. Moege Augur

    Sadly Mearatas is not what is was, was revisited 3/4 times to make it easier. Even that said it is a difficult raid. Every single player needs to pay attention, if you panic in later stages it is a death sentence.

    One player dying leads to more adds which leads to more deaths and the losses stack up quickly, even if you recover those players they have no resources to help with the final phase and is just a drag on the whole raid.

    It is a fun raid still.

    Rest of TBL
    Stratos: chanters/rogues
    Smoke: like this raid, pay attention once again
    Doomfire: meh tank and spank with some emotes
    Esianti: also a meh raid with balancing mechanics
    Palace: chanters
    Prince: need to pay attention to emotes (most fun people will have will be tower teams)
    Generals: not a fun raid, positioning is dependent on server lag (most bored people will be tower teams)

    Doing achievement you will be bored out of your mind, random chance to get what you need really sucks.
  5. Razorfall Augur

    Mearatas is actually not all that hard...until it gets to 25%

    I feel like that last 25% was designed when someone had a bad day, and they just took it out on everyone XD
    Gyurika Godofwar, Fian and Elyssanda like this.
  6. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Honestly with TBL the challenge is all in that final raid and the other raids are nothing compared to it.
    Axxius, Sokki and Moege like this.
  7. Sancus Augur

    As mentioned, Mearatas is still one of the more difficult raids in recent EQ expansions, but it is significantly easier than the initial incarnation. Many considered Mearatas to be the hardest raid since Plane of War, but that was also nerfed.

    Unfortunately for TLP players looking for hard content, it's very unlikely that a true "guild killer" raid from a modern expansion won't get nerfed over the course of it. I'd also note that the ToV AA changes/Necro DoT revamp will have increased DPS vs what it was in era, which for Mearatas specifically matters because a lot of guilds were wiping at <10% to the hard enrage on the initial version.
    Gyurika Godofwar, Lisard and Funky like this.
  8. Rylak Elder

    14 live guilds beat TBL in era. Still a low number, but not as bad as the number posed above. Only 20 guilds beat RoS when it was live. I'm not sure I would call TBL a guild killer either. Did people leave to join guilds that had already beaten it? Sure, but that happens every expansion.

    With the reduced difficulty of ToV, the raiding scene has probably never been better as it has in many years. 33 guilds and multiple other coalitions have completed the expansion. With CoV raids closer to ToV difficulty than TBL, it should be another good year for guild health.

    To answer the original post though, OoW has got to be considered the hardest expansion of its time in EQ history. No guilds beat in in era (0.5 yr) and only 19 beat in within a year. This at a time when there was 10x capable raid guilds compared to now. And while Mearatas is the reigning king for level of mechanics, OMM was the precursor to it all. It was the first raid where if 1 person, when called out didn't react properly, it was raid over. Even in Mearatas pre-nerf, you could survive the screw up of one person.
  9. ikarinokamii Elder

    i may be mis remembering, but i believe they had to nerf sky for it be beaten and it also need an expansion. it was 19 years ago.
  10. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    Underfoot was more broken than hard for many of the raids (nothing like beating against something for a month told it isn't broken, then find out its broken).

    VoA had pillars that if beaten legit was probably one of the hardest raids prenerf.

    Most of the hard events have been nerfed so many times its hard to say.
  11. Zynt Augur

    It's all so relative. I haven't raided for a long time. OoW was my last raid expansion. I raided GoD when it was current. Both were ridiculous. But neither bothered me as much as getting bat phone calls on a landline, because cell phones were really a thing, to go raid Sky or Fear at 3 in the morning. Raids that lasted days, with 50+ people all using chat to coordinate. I actually enjoyed GoD but I'm a masochist and took great pleasure in being the last player left alive or watching a GOAT die to a stack of dots the tick after everybody else had taken a dirt nap then rezzing a cleric.

    TL;DR I walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot.
    Issk likes this.
  12. ikarinokamii Elder

    except you aren't exaggering. i remember fear taking 3 days. i remember that a wipe on a simple mob like lady vox was a minimum 4 hours cr, and you needed a rogue. you right, players have way more tools, and penalty for failure is minimal. I remember one of the original designers saying that they could never get away with design a game as difficult as the orginal everquest again, and that they really didnt know any better.
    Zynt likes this.
  13. p2aa Augur

    In the recent expansions, I would say Mearatas first hands down, then Drusella Vault pre-nerf,
    Drusella Vault has been nerfed so hard that the current version is a big joke compared to what it was.

    Mearatas has not been a guild killer, low tier guild raiders don't care to beat Mearatas anytime soon and stayed in their guild. There has been a few high end raiding guilds raiders that left their guild to join high end raiding guilds that had beaten the event, but this didn't kill any guild.
    Also, there have been 12 guilds that have beaten the event before the next expansion went live, not 7 or 14, but 12.
    Look here https://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/encounter.php?id=288
    ToV has been released mid december 2019

    I would say Drusella Vault back in time has been one guild killer for a few low tier to mid tier raiding guilds, Raging Fury and D'Pikey merged into Age of Unity, Infinite Elysium on Luclin and Prosperitas on FV stopped raiding ?

    If I go back further in time, Triunity God and Pillar of Alra pre-nerf versions were also hard.

    But yeah I don't know if we will see anytime soon a Mearatas raid pre-nerf version, this one was just incredibly difficult. The current one is still difficult fortunately.
  14. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    IE merged with IL as both struggled mightily with Mearatas.
  15. KrakenReality Augur

    Mearatas, hands down. Also, it's one of the best raids I've ever played across any MMO. It gives every member of the raid roster something valuable to do.
    Axxius and FubarEQ like this.
  16. Drakang Augur

    Raiding Expansion looking at the content when it was current. I would still say Gates of Discord. There have been hard raids in multiple expansions. But looking at a whole expansion I think that one was still rough.
    Zynt likes this.
  17. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    The answer isn't going to be CoV, I'll tell you that. Raids are a joke just like in ToV.
  18. KrakenReality Augur

    I think CoV could end up being a guild killer though. It’s going to be really boring, and cause people to lose interest.
  19. Andarriel Everquest player since 2000

    They just making raids easier now to make the people with bot armies happy.

    Andarriel
  20. Zunnoab Augur

    I wrote a wall of text response to this last night and didn't post it, but there are numerous things TBL does wrong in my opinion. The biggest difference I can think of is comparing it to Solaris. In Solaris various events tax the raid in differing ways. The first is DPS. The third and second from last are control/healing. The fourth allows some choice in how to tackle it. The difference is many TBL events in era require strong dps and super strong tanking and super strong healing and not failing emotes all at the same time. The 1% balance mechanic on Conflagration Generals is just plain broken as far as I'm concerned. If you don't have it all, you basically can't do most events in the expansion.

    I'd say TBL is hardest of the non-broken ones for that reason, that it stresses a raid roster in all ways at once, and some events are far too reliant on random luck drastically altering the challenge (mostly Prince, Generals, and Mearatas).

    Post-retune Underfoot and Gates of Discord win otherwise, with some exceptions of course.

    T2's tuning in RoS is kind of a mess so if you can do the second and third events I have a hunch you'd be fine in TBL. Those don't spread the tanking out as much as TBL does, though.

    It was more IL, in spring, foresaw the need for a very strong roster over the summer to function raiding in TBL, because the expansion stresses raids in so many ways much less than extremely strong means nothing at all. The merge was a preemptive action against typical summer numbers and not one of desperation. 1.5 years post merge and I'm still in awe at just choosing a start time and filling raids. That is an incredible luxury.

    IL was mostly filling raids and had just beaten Conflagration Generals while merge discussions were ongoing. IE at the start of the year (2019) was the strongest it ever was, or perhaps second strongest. Drusella's Vault and the first events in TBL were so much harder than everything else prior that even at or near maximum strength the numbers didn't hold. When IE merged with IL, IE was farming Crypt Robbers and maintaining the DPS we had with 54 with rosters not breaking 42 most nights. Plane of Smoke was an impossibility to even consider. For Stratos, we could easily get to the end boss but could not burn down the boss fast enough for his insane AEs to not rip the raid to shreds. For Fire, we could not handle tanking both snails and Reparm at the same time long enough to get past 50%, and just one snail AE the wrong way was game over. I only saw the rest of TBL as a force already farming it and geared in TBL gear, so it's hard for me to judge the rest other than the above observations.

    The leadership of IL made decisions on Mearatas before the merge. Once we got to T3 shortly after the merge, we put in time to learn the various mechanics in Mearatas but due to the (frankly downright unreasonable) enrage timer (though it is the last event), it was statistically impossible to beat the event, so we did not waste the members' time with hundreds of attempts, instead focusing on improving performance. We came back and finished it a couple months after ToV launched.

    So in short, it's true Drusella's Vault plus TBL kicked IE back into a holding pattern of stagnation. We talked with others about merging but IL was the best fit, and everyone was civil and understood in the process. I'm glad there are still more active forces on Luclin-Stromm because I felt like we were abandoning those IE did not merge with and I knew they would not see TBL raiding for a very long time if ever. I'm glad I underestimated them. But still, if not for the tuning in RoS and especially TBL, Luclin-Stromm would definitely have more active current content raid rosters. I can't say for sure how the more moderate tuning will affect things overall, and going into new expansions fully geared changes how things feel considerably.