It's a bit disingenuous to say "The organizations that have existed for years (decades?) explicitly to defeat these raids as quickly as possible are defeating the raids too quickly for me." These guilds raid multiple times a week, have mandatory attendance, application processes, and many have performance requirements. Many go into beta to learn the raid events (and help fix problems) so that when the events launch, they can defeat them as quickly as possible. Other raid orgs (like mine, the Norrathian Council of Guilds) have been raiding for YEARS and slowly catching up to current content (which we achieved in TBL). We beat T1 on day 1. We beat T2 before T3 launched. We beat Oubliette in T3 on our first try Saturday night. Does a casual raid alliance with no application process raiding once per week that mean the raids are too easy? I don't think so. All of us were CoV raid geared going into ToL raids. Most of us are pretty good at following raid instruction. Our raid leader has the patience and temperament of a f*cking saint. And most importantly, per our primary raid (Saturday Night Corpse Run), we're willing to take the rez. We beat Free the Goranga and Aten Ha Ra with gearing and planning in one hand and fist full of stubborn will in the other. Primal Vampire worked us something fierce. We'll probably take it down in our next raid night. If these raids were too easy, NCG would have been able to one-shot them all and that's certainly not the case. If the raids were "easy", don't you think many more of EQ's players would be raid geared?
That is a good point, 38 guilds are tracked as beating T1, 26 T2 (32/38/26) and 11 T3 (19/16/11) which does show a difficulty increase as the raid tier increases.
Elaborating on your point, there are so many class synergies now that if a raid doesn’t have the right composition then it’s going to make the events dramatically more different. There’s a significant difference between the same character’s output when properly supported versus not.
You really think a casual raid alliance with no application process raiding once per week beating a T3 raid on your first try is the appropriate tuning point for T3?
Oh, believe you me, it's not that it was "easy". We had abnormally good 1st try execution. Everyone was dialed in. We are all uber proud of the accomplishment. We've also defeated Doomshade in 51.3 minutes and 23.7 minutes. We have quite a range and when we're focused, we can do really, really well. Edit: Additionally, raid events usually differ on their "checks". Some are discipline checks. Others DPS. Others check gear. In my opinion, Oubliette is a discipline check and we were nearly perfect. Don't stand there. Stand over here. Split DPS here. Focus all DPS there. Primal Vampire seems to be mainly a gear/AA check and... well that was messy. Our raiders (for the most part) don't race to max AA. Additionally, we gear up *VERY* slowly since we only raid once per week.
Good point to make. Saying the raids are too easy would be like saying there are skilled contractors who do the job right the first time. EQ has professional raiders. They are the benchmark for excellence. They should not be the benchmark for the minimum passing score.
I think the tier 2 thing might work out well, because tier 1 raid gear is useless at the moment and a waste of dev time to create, so now both tiers might be viable depending on how much a guild can clear the 2 difficulties
Just to get some perspective. How many raiding guilds are there in EQ? Of those that attempted T3 when it opened, how many beat all the raids?
There are 38 guilds that have a tracked ToL win (and those 38 all cleared T1) and 19 guilds that have a tracked T3 win with 11 who have cleared all 3 of them.
I agree make them harder shouldnt be guilds beating raids on day 1. EQ guessing the E satnds for easy now.
The only real challenge in this expansion is the fact that some of the raid events have a raid wipe fail mechanic that can be triggered by a single person. I would agree that achievement completion within the raids is a better indicator of guild performance.
Grats to the Guild Alliance folks on Luclin. I am sure they have their number of casual players fresh off the boat but the truth is a lot of them are seasoned raiders that have played in high level guilds over the years. I don't think looking to them as a bunch of casuals that beat T3 raids is quite giving them enough credit.
Seems this statement is at odds with itself.. If the only real challenge is that a wipe can be triggered by a single person; then how can achievements that could be failed by a single person be a better indicator of guild performance? The shei achievement comes to mind off top of my head. After seeing some streams, guild performance can be seen by the guilds with less deaths/ no deaths per event, higher dps, and ability to perform strategy that people bemoan that guild's had months to practice on beta. Regardless of all that time, execution is what counts at the end of the day.
It is because in BETA the devs decided to test these raids with us. We knew the strats ahead of time. Also, years ago we didn't know things like ranges, stand close here or kite there. We knew to stand behind walls to avoid healers from dying. Now days, we have ground auras to show is...move away from that. Finally, posting a link to your win..."we beat ToL T3" . It is hard to NOT watch. So now teams of players that purposely don't want any info, to learn it on there own...just got ruined. I'm in one of those groups. We beat everything and have 2 T3's to win. But now there are going to be a lot of attitudes because people will know strategy. I'm bummed out. In the future EverQuest team...don't BETA the raids.dont give a heads up.
