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. Bardy McFly Augur

    How far back are we going?

    GoD at launch, hands down. If you didn't consider it broken.
  2. dizzadar Lorekeeper

    Gates of Discord to me was by far the most challenging expansion ever created Uqua and Tacvi were super tough as current content.
  3. dizzadar Lorekeeper

    i think it took guilds months to clear the trash in tacvi to first boss
  4. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    Gates of Discord has to be the answer. The raids weren't broken, it was tuning. As soon as raid forces cleared Anguish a few times and made some 2.0's, Tacvi became a second Candyland.
  5. Tharkis Princess

    I guess no one posting was in a TOP raiding guild in Luclin. I believe only 4 guilds ever saw the 'first iteration' of Vex Thal. It wasnt broken, it was just stupidly hard and frustrating. Every NPC in the zone cast aoe blind (Because it was the plane of shadows and you cant see in the shadows!). Every caster npc in the zone would gate at low health. Blind effects were different back then, your whole screen just went blank, and there was no voice chat options. Ventrillo and Mumble and other options hadnt come out yet. None of your melee being able to see Eom Zom Zathun Zez Fubar begins to cast gate. meant no one knew when to coordinate bashes/ slams to interrupt. Any mob that gated meant a massive train (and usually the "CAMP A REZZER!" call)

    Vex Thal when it was first entered was a multi-day zone. Many of the fights had so many hp that they were multiple hour long engagements for a single raid mob. This was pre 'raid' concept, so every raid was just a bunch of individual groups, so there would be dedicated 'drag rez and buff' groups, you'd have groups rotate in and out to sit down and med up mid fight so they could get back into the fight, etc.

    As far as 'most difficult in its time' I would argue Luclin takes the cake. Modern day raiders would never put up with a zone you have to spend 8+ hours a day 3 days in a row to clear.

    After the first few guilds got into Vex Thal it had to be nerfed SIGNIFICANTLY for the rest of EQ to even stand a chance and not just rage-quit
  6. Plat New Member

    What about the original Veeshan's Peak? I remember pretty much no one on any given server could even enter the zone while it was the current top raid zone. I won't go into detail about everything, but just the following two things about VP perhaps made it one of the most challenging raid zones:
    -Once you zoned in, there was no legitimate way to zone out (no gate, no ports, no zone out*).
    -The trash respawn was just a couple minutes long, so your raid had to kill stuff and keeping moving at all times--and there was a ton of trash. In many cases this was unrealistic, so you just ended up dragging mage corpses to safe areas, monk would rez, then mage coh raid. Such a fun way to traverse a raid zone!
  7. Solanli Journeyman


    Pretty sure a handful of guilds did beat OMM before the next expansion came out. Abashi's Rod of Disempowerment :)
  8. Kragin011 New Member

    I didnt see anyone mention pre-nerf triunity or grandslam in era
  9. Fian Augur

    I think ROS should also get a mention from a weak raid guild perspective. To access the T2 raids you needed to have EOK T3 raid(s) on farm status to get a necessary flag. One of the T1 raids (Skyfire) required everyone in raid to have EOTD character flag. One of the other T1 raids was a DPS test (Cactus). Of the guilds I was with, one could farm Cactus and Gorowyn, and I think the other struggled to beat even Goro as people just stopped logging in. One of the guilds folded during this time frame indirectly because of the difficulty of ROS raids.

    It is good to see that with TOV they have learned and drastically reduce flagging requirements.
  10. Chaosflux Augur

    False the Tunat script was broken, he would have been beaten in Era however they didnt bug fix him till the 3rd patch in Omens only 2 or 3 guilds even made it to Tunat to find that out though.

    He was beat after the bug fix pretty promptly.

    He also hit quite abit harder than the version that currently exists, I remember getting two shot the first time we did him. Dont recall when they adjusted his damage output it was probably midway through Omens.

    There was also extreme bugs and broken scripts in Txevu, inktuta, Ikkinz, and Uqua.

    It was probably one of the best raiding expacs but the raids were broken.

    Txevu would require GM to manually repop the entire zone if Zun event script hung up, as an example.
  11. Axxius Augur

    RoS flagging requirements had nothing on the old expansions. Getting a guild flagged for Ssra and then Vex Thal back in Luclin - that was an epic time sink. And then the PoP progression flagging, before the 85/15 rule.
    Tsavo likes this.
  12. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    Expansion as a whole, probably GoD as others have mentioned.

    Individual event, probably pre-nerf Quarm who wasn't beaten until a huge set of nerfs to his abilities.
  13. Tsavo New Member



    On Rodcet Nife (now Luclin) Dragon Force, beat VP while it was current, which was pretty amazing at the time since the other top guilds were Ascent and Avatars of Discord.