What are the hardest raid encounters in EQ?

Nominating Elements of a Dream in Sanctum Somnium (HoT) AkA Mastermind. Not because it's actually a hard fight, but for the most fiddly annoying mechanics. Oh did the person on the north button have their aura on? Well that invisible aura pet is setting off the buttons.

I finally gave up on Coirnav around House of Thule. It was just getting depressing logging in adn seeing like 30 people in General chat, and 1 trader in the bazaar

My post is with the caveat that I don't know enough about content past RoF (level 100) to include any of those expansions. Also I don't think anything prior to the level 75 era is complex enough to make this list. Certainly events like Tunat and Overlord Mata Muram were very difficult back in the day they were current, but they don't pose much challenge on current TLP servers. So this list is very focused on the level 75-100 eras of EQ.

And "hard" is kind of a subjective term, but I'll list events that I think are just simply difficult to execute even when you have your strat defined.

If you're going in blind without knowing what's going on, some events would be "hard" just to figure them out to begin with, but then become easy once you understand them. But I won't include those.


1) Pillars of Alra: Unearthing Alra. Requires a pretty specific class makeup. In some pillars your warriors just simply cannot tank, they get steamrolled. Classes filling unusual roles (maybe your monks are tanking some bosses, maybe your warriors are kiting adds elsewhere, etc.) Each of the 4 sections are completely independent, and if a single section fails it instantly resets (so practicing can be difficult at first - even if your section is doing well, a different pillar failing stops your progress).

2) Brell's Temple: Trial of Creation. Lots of pressure on one individual player doing a lot of individual tradeskill combines with a time limit. This will also require several practice runs while your tradeskiller gets all the recipes learned and gets used to how to do it. Meanwhile the raid is split in half in two sections that can't really help each other and the mobs are MEAN - very difficult event that requires a lot of practice.

3) Lichen Creep: A Cunning Plan. This requires a ton of coordination with players assigned to different mini-bosses and other players keeping up with add spawns. Also the final boss is no pushover. Must pay attention to which effect you want cured (or don't want cured), respond to positioning emotes, and keep up with add spawns.

4) Sepulcher of Order: The Triune God. As a raid leader this one just made me facepalm a bit when trying to wrap my head around everything going on. The raid guides read more like a dissertation. One player screwing up during the Gods phase and aggroing something they shouldn't via healing or buffing or attacking etc. can just wipe the raid. Fortunately it does at least save progress halfway through. This is just a marathon event and we only farmed it a handful of times during VoA.

5) Convorteum: Magus Sisters. The most difficult event in a pretty well known difficult raid expedition. Requires constant attentive tank swapping (and thus heal swapping) and just in general a lot of coordination on 4 different simultaneous bosses. Also they need to die within a short time of each other, or they power up in such a way the event can become essentially unwinnable.

6) Chapterhouse: A Matter of Life and Death. This requires a lot of personal accountability for each player in order to keep themselves alive. Two vicious random target DoTs - one you have to cure yourself by running to a certain place, the other you need to request a curse cure ASAP. Keeping either of these DoTs on you for long is certain death - even worse if you're unlucky enough to get both. Dying is even more fun in this event because each player death has the potential to spawn a pretty brutal add if they aren't rezzed fast enough. These adds hit hard, have a lot of HP, and an AE nuke. 3 or 4 deaths in a row can just simply wipe your raid to the penalty adds. Also a lot of coordination is required for the shrouding players. The difficulty of this event is compounded by a longstanding bug (read: YEARS) that causes a lot of client crashing when a player unshrouds. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but in my experience it's safe to expect a good 5-15 crashes per run or so.

7) Erillion, City of Bronze: The Order of Three. This can be a very long event with lots of healing required. Requires good coordination to control which group gets ported to the rooftop and to make sure all 3 main bosses are kept busy. Also the Carnifex can just plain delete a LOT of people at once if they aren't super attentive to positioning.

8) Rathe Council Chambers Event #1: The Brothers Zek. SoD is overall a pretty easy raid expansion, but this one is pretty difficult. Requires a ton of healing and DPS needs to be prioritizing the correct types of damage on the adds. Took a few tries to get this one beaten.

9) Resplendent Temple: Two Sides of the Stone. Tons of constant AE damage during main boss phases, important emotes to respond to (everyone loves jumping out the window!), splitting the raid in half with different mechanics on each side.

10) Sanctum Somnium #5: Elements of a Dream. House of Thule expansion is pretty easy, but this event can be a bottleneck. The puzzles can be confusing at first, and they are VERY sensitive to various things messing them up (kiting a mob near a puzzle, a player with an aura getting near a puzzle, etc.). Once all your puzzle masters are well practiced and you know what various things to avoid, it's not THAT bad of an event, but generally it takes any guild a lot of practice to get it right.

Honorable mentions:

Solteris Event #3 - Stalwart Defenders. This one is just really easy for one inattentive DPSer to mess up for everyone. The penalty for failing to balance the splits within 5% essentially just wipes the raid immediately. It's not a "complex" event but it's very easy to fail.

Crystallos - Vyskudra. Careful positioning is key and anyone not paying attention will die pretty fast.

Miragul's Nightmare: The Force of Eternity. The raid starts off split in 3 separate areas with very different mechanics in each. Then the final boss requires a lot of overall tank/heal/DPS power to handle the 3 miniboss splits, and they must be balance DPS'ed as well or it simply resets. Again it's fortunate this event has a halfway save point. There's also some semi-cheese methods to handle the final section, which helps this event be lower on the list.

Xyroff has a good list as well. I wanted to shoutout "The Performer" event in Demiplane - Not that it was terribly hard but if you are in a guild with a bunch of lazy's who forget to set up their hot buttons or turn on GINA (even with multiple reminders) the event gets increasingly worse. A great event to separate the Netflix players and the raiders.

I think Hive Guardians, Trial of Deconstruction, and Unstable Creation are more difficult then some of the events on that list. However UF in general was just a difficult expansion.

I also you could consider throwing DK2 on the list, but that largely due to awful design.

Performer is a joke now. Fails don't do a lot anymore, it has been severely nerfed in terms of extra adds and performer taking damage. You almost need the entire raid to fail every emote for it to fail from missed emotes now,.

Yes, for Phinigel we only had a couple days to beat it before the next expansion unlocked, Selo had just 1 evening to try it before teh next unlock. Part of the problem there was how long flagging took & how many flags you could get even at a very active raid pace.

You'll always find players who are also doing something else besides EQ, some do it well, others do not but the game difficulty is no barrier to them doing so.

I would say the only TLP more challenging than any prior TLP is Vaniki, live would be more challenging in places in the past simply due to bug fixing and retuning that was done after the expansions originally launched.

I would say that the "Power Creep" of changes made to live that made TLP easier end right around Reign of Fear, others may disagree but that's what I felt was when the TLP game was pretty much undiscernable from the Live game.

Agree with this list for TLP servers, pretty much exactly what I would have said.

Deconstruction could probably make my honorable mentions list! Underfoot had some tough events for sure. But Hive Guardians was beaten on the very first attempt for us, and Unstable Creation became a snooze farm once we decided to just range DPS it. Unstable was difficult on the first attempt or two though for sure.

My guild didn't find Brother Zek nearly as difficult. It was just have an SK/Pally range tank Tallon, range dps on him, Melee DPS on Vallon, 2 SK Kite adds until they can mezzed, balance them down. I think we got it on the second try, and did the encounter several time during SoD. Where Hive Guardian was sometime that took us a several tries to beat, and we struggled a ton on that fight.

Solid point - some encounters will be more or less difficult depending on your raid's strengths and weaknesses. SoD Zek Brothers definitely took us more like 5 or 6 attempts before getting it right.

What are your raid kill records for each expansion?

I just have to stick it out to Underfoot in order to reach the good stuff, according to this post. Nice. Oh look. Another TLP is starting in Classic. Re-roll time.

What are the most time-consuming and/or difficult quests to complete in EQ? I keep hearing about the Artisan's thing. Luclin's shawl quest was only time-consuming if you started from scratch in Luclin. Do augs take a long time to complete later in the timeline?

I appreciate everyone's responses.

Do a lot of players still box these challenging encounters? I might need to re-think my trio and bring it back down to a duo. It's already hard to gear two toons and the third will probably never see a raid.

At one point or another, I've 2-boxxed everything through TDS except The Triune God (only raid I never did).

For late RoS through TDS, I've 3-boxxed every event except Calix Quirinus so far.

All manual, 2 monitors. Main focus on one screen, "tab" between the other two on the other screen.

Have to make sure any GINA triggers are set up with the {C} variable and clear your logs before any raid.

Is it optimal? No. Not at all. There is a marked difference from not boxing, to 2 boxing (depending on which class I brought) and definitely 3 boxing.

"Fire and forget" type boxes are best, if available. Shmans are amazing around CoTF era, Necros, Bards as ADPS, etc..

Depending on the event, you may need to focus on one of the boxes over your preferred class. Some events just need it.

I have seen a significant drop in multi-boxing on raids going from RoS to CoTF to TDS, simply due to overall mechanics and not being "worth" just having the extra body/DPS because the potential negatives from a failure outweigh the gains being brought.

Which classes require the most clicks to perform properly post Underfoot?

I'm glad that you mentioned two monitors for three characters because I tried three monitors for three characters and hated it. My main computer and my good laptop are absolutely fine to use for boxing. My third 13 inch notebook stinks even for a bard box. I can understand why so many people are calling for an end to truebox.

That depends on the event and role of the class in that event.

ADPS bard is low maintenance. Aura on, Song on, assist, attack on.
CLR/DRU/SHM for healing, are pretty low effort.

I think Bard always has, and always will require the most "clicks" to be good, but simply ADPS is a noticeable boost. Come RoF, they get an AoE mez, which makes them super super useful and less maintenance.

A lot of melee is about timers. Casters is about spell CD's and lineups.

I'm not even going to claim to be near an expert in every class, but I'd say Hybrids are the most difficult to get the most out of while boxing. You need to manage a mix of melee + spell abilites to really reach their potential.

In TDS, if I'm called upon to utilize the bard, it is 100% focus there. I may grab an add and off-tank something with my tank, but the 2-3 big events that bards are really called upon, it takes everything to charm, mez, move mobs, etc.. while still adding to the raid.

For my druid, I let him sit in "heal mode" for most of the times that I box him, and have two hotbars lined up for DPS burns (one for all the AA activation, one for spell casting rotations and item clicks)

When properly set up, you can get most things down to a few key strokes. Activate that window, hit a key or two or three.. make sure it goes through, flip back or do something on your main.

So I really don't know what is the best overall or worst overall.. simply that your returns from playing a hybrid will generally be lower than a pure melee or caster oh and ROG positioning can be a big pain.

Your own synergy matters as well... but really, you can't go wrong with a Bard as a 3rd box option. With the right melody setups, you'll get 7-8 (maybe more now?) songs going + aura and the absolute best "bang for your buck" as a fire and forget type box. Even if things get hectic and you can't give time to event assist in combat, the songs are there boosting you.

I don't know your general setup or your main, so there's that too..

If it comes to a tank box.. SHD or PAL all the way. SK's are a bit more intensive, but generally quicker aggro, higher damage, and the ability to FD pull. Paladins bring a lot of damage mitigation in the form of stuns, heal procs, etc., and also can play a pretty mean group healer. Warriors basically only bring their intense mitigation, higher AC returns, better tanking discs.. but are even more gear dependent and lack versatility. I've boxed all 3 tank types and always found the knights to be easier to get things locked down so I could get the other boxes rolling. YMMV there.

Maxing out the Artisan's Prize definitely takes the cake for most time consuming. 350 in all tradeskills by itself just dwarfs the time commitment of anything else, and there's a lot more to do as well to finish it.

Second would probably be completing the entire Hero of the Journey achievement which results in Hero's Sigil of the Council and Shroud of the Council.

A lot of the other most time consuming "quests" are really like expansion-wide meta achievements. A few that come to mind:

-Breakdown in Communication
-Skull of Den Lord Rakban
-Shield of the Otherworld
-Jonas Dagmire's Skeletal Hand
-Tsaph Katta's Urn of Rejuvenation
-Reconstructed Wereorc Head
-Model XLII Spatial Temporal Oculus
-Serpent Seeker's Charm of Lore
-Ancient Faycite Bone Circum
-Rallosian Battle Figure
-Timeshear
-Worn Old Rabbit's Foot
-Prismatic Selyrah Saddle

etc. Looking at the meta achievements for future expansions should give you an idea.

Don't forget Brell's 1-3 (Shawl 1.0 => Shawl 2.0 => Aug 3.0) and Jonas Degmire's Parrot aug