Of all of the events in the expansion, this one is the most challenging (achievements notwithstanding). On the final push of The Star it always feels like we're on the knife's edge of tanking and healing with the dots and massive influx of adds. For this reason it is my favourite event of the nine; I find that element of danger quite enjoyable. Objectively, however, it, like the other events, are very straightforward. I do not begrudge the development team (too much) for this because it's difficult to create a number of new puzzles each year that are constrained by the game's aging engine, let alone puzzles that themselves are challenging but doable.
Never seemed like much of a challenge and there are some other events that seem more difficult to me.
Myconid Mutiny is a variable experience. If a force's dps is high, then the adds are a constant stream. I haven't been able to get a reliable count, since many share names and (depending on specific participants) many will be killed before making contact with the force, but a pace of one every two or three seconds is not unusual for Silent Redemption. Frequently they will "appear" on xtar in waves due to zone geometry or lag. Some will inevitably reach the force, meleeing just as hard as the boss for as long as they last. This is what Zleski sees. A raid force that goes slower (we did a midweek alt/boxing raid with 29 characters, for instance) can take most of 14 minutes on The Star, cutting the pace of those adds by multiple spell cast times each. The encounter takes some attention still, but the challenge, especially to someone who doesn't personally take on the job of intercepting each, is lessened. If that's closer to how things seem to you, then that's how things seem to you.
Myconid Mutiny difficulty also depends on lag. You can go a long time with them spawning but not arriving then all at once you have a huge pile of adds.
These are very good points and I don't disagree with any of them. My only retort is: Given the limited budget for raids, it's probably easier to "autotune" and achieve a good balance by overtuning and dropping every week or two DPS checks vs being able to ignore mechanics by burning is a key part of the balancing problem that could be solved by autotuned hp. An apparent DPS check is often caused by an un-optimized raid forces, or raid forces that are bulldozing their way through failure mechanics by bringing more healing in lieu of DPS. One raid force being able to breeze through it may be a result of them running with fewer healers and running a tighter raid, an autotuned system that created these DPS checks would further separate these raids Required class stacking is often a result of poor class balance (which EQ has and probably will always have). Required archetype (DPS, tanking, healing) is often a result of multiple raids with imbalanced challenges (ex: one raid having a phase that requires high DPS while another raid has a phase that requires high healing). This could be alleviated by autotuning where multiple difficult raids with imbalanced challenges would autotune to having more balanced challenge based on the top guilds willingness to stack raids before the difficult dropped further. This could get interesting if TopGuildA had more DPS and TopGuildB had more healing, and both got first kill on two different raids, creating a weird bifurcation of raid difficulty One could stop the auto-tuning after ~5 guilds beat the raid, but that'd defeat the benefit of top raid groups game-wide being able to chew on the "most difficult but beaten" raid for a couple of months Overall I think the result you mention (top guild beats it, then nobody, including the top guild, does it until it autotunes again a month or two later) is a possible outcome. I think an auto-tune feature would be experimental and worth trying. Disclaimer: I don't currently raid in EQ so it's not my evenings getting burnt wiping to a possibly impossible raid, I'm just armchair developing. There's a certain amount of the top 10% raiding force in EQ that pretty much just want a fun challenge that takes a couple nights to beat, and then they can just farm it for a year and raid/log and there's nothing wrong with that.
Sure, but it those adds are not difficult to deal with even if they arrive. This does get to the point that a raid can be difficult for one force and easy for another and just "tunning" it to be hard isn't going to work for all raids and raid forces.
Here I think is the biggest problem with raids "not being difficult" is when the top raid forces are able to burn and avoid mechanics by either avoiding them completely or using lag to avoid them it makes the raids a lot less difficult then intended. If the raids got setup so that all mechanics had to be delt with could change how hard some raids are perceived as.
I think more guilds/teams being able to beat raids (even ALL the raids) is a good thing. It's a bit disingenuous to say an open raid team won them simply because they are easy (on Xegony I am going to assume this was the open RoI raid) where a significant portion of those participating are alts of people who have beaten the raids dozens of times (see also: Valhallah). Even in Freelance where Furro intentionally covers his ears over raid information, a lot of the people on the raid know what is going on and play accordingly. How hard raids should be is an argument that has been around a long time and probably will never be agreed on. I get the impression some of the most elitist players, who want things to be more difficult, really want things to be just difficult enough that they can beat it, but not anyone else. I see a lot of discussion about bad / lazy DPS. I think there is a lot more to it than that, in a lower tier guild. You can put a really good player in a group with someone who simply wont push their buttons and it will significantly negatively affect their DPS. Some raid teams think they are building optimal groups, but are not doing so, and this negatively affects the ability for the raid to win before the enrage timer. You also see a lot of saving of burns for a specific time, and people will often die, wipe altogether, or go 20 minutes without using anything before burn time, just because of old standing beliefs about when "the burn" should happen. And more than anything else, many EQ players have been playing for so long they really don't want to hear from you about what buttons to press, how to make raid groups, or when it's time to burn (or how to do the raid and etc). Having lower standards to be in your guild in terms of high level play (DPS, tanking, healing) means you also have (and I hate to even say it this way) a larger portion of your raid who is a liability on events with emotes that singlehandedly wipe the raid, and death mechanics that have a high chance of getting out of control and wiping the raid. In the process of beating Mearatas we lost two very long term players (a shaman and paladin who did not play at the level needed for the event). Others simply stopped playing for a while after finally winning, as it was quite a lot of grinding before we won. It used to be that many guilds didn't beat current content. IMO the reason this doesn't work any more is because group gear became a lot better. When a new expansion comes out, if your guild is still struggling on last year's raids, it becomes a lot less rewarding and you are more likely to lose players who simply lose interest or go to a better guild.
Call me crazy, but shouldn't all those things be things that a successful raid force is able to figure out? I mean, I don't think it's realistic to win current events when your dps isn't trying to make improvements on those things you listed. It doesn't need to be RoI levels of efficiency, but going entire events without using burns or even all your abilities is not behavior that should be rewarded.
Personally I would like to see more up to date information on what each class should be doing to maximum their DPS, Heals, Tanking, etc. Most of the EQ fan sites that were dedicated to specific class / roles have gone away and what is left seems to be scattered bits of information. I've seen a couple great write ups for some of the classes but then others haven't been updated in 5+ years. Would love to see those who want to raise the bar and make raids harder, help lift up the other guilds with better information. Freelance and the author of EQ Log Parser are excellent examples of folks who give a lot to the raiding community. I can vouch that raids are tuned such that you can not beat the enrage timers with using burns.
I did not think I was being disingenuous by stating that this expansions raids are super easy. Specifically speaking about tier 3 events. As someone who raids in Roi, Valhallah, Freelance, and a few other raid forces/guest raiding; I have been able to participate in these events from the highest end of dps to the other spectrum where hitting enrage on most events is the norm not the exception. I would think most people would agree that an open raid force with low 40s (where the majority are people on alts severely under geared) should have a much harder time on t3 events let alone one shot them. With that said, I'm not advocating that raids become so over tuned that only top 5 or top 10 guilds can beat them at all. However, with a little more difficulty than what nos currently offers; the top guilds would still beat the content on day one of it being released; whereas others would progress and refine their strategy and execution to beat the harder events, and perhaps a less than full open force made up of alts might even struggle to beat the final event or tier regardless of seeing the events numerous times on their mains. I am not sure if its a sense of entitlement that people who raid in eq believe that they all should be bis and their alts should be fully raid geared before the next expansion but that seems to be case for every expansion after tbl. For example, this expansion you did not have a universal ore gated behind winning all 9 events and people still complained. The barrier to unlocking bis weapons and items was easier and quicker to acquire via currency and yet people still do not like the system. So I can only imagine if they did make raids a bit harder what the outrage would be. With that said, I'm still on record that tier 3 and specifically the final event should be much harder next expansion. Whether that is with a dps check, enrage timer, multiple mechanics to contend with simultaneously, penalties for failing emotes like extra adds or healing the boss. If that makes me elitist because I'd like to see a little more difficulty on the final event; I can live with that.
When guilds/raiding forces are able to refine the strats based on beta knowledge and what other guilds learn from doing them when they launch it is possible to get it refined before they even try it on live. No matter how much work they do they will never be able to tune it so it challenges the top end guilds and isn't impossible for the lower guilds without doing pointless nerfs over time after they are released.
I don't disagree with what you are saying. However, when I help lead a raid; I might know the event but am not going to suggest a strategy that is used in roi that is dependent on a certain level of dps to execute said strategy. I agree tuning is never going to be a perfect when you take into account every guild that currently raids. They can't make raids harder after they are released but they can tone them down (example that comes to mind was defenders with the drakes in cov). So I guess what I am trying to articulate is that they should err on the side of higher degree of difficulty knowing full well they have the ability to make it easier, rather than having t3 events that can be beat by 40 alts in tov raid gear.
And if you know all the mechanics about the raids and what is needed to beat them you can easily work on a strategy works for the raid force in question. Personally I don't see the point of making raids artificially hard and tuning them down later so that people can beat them. I would rather devs spend time on other projects then trying to figure out how to have raids adjust as the expansion progress to allow for more people to beat them.
they've moved to using Discord. Nearly every class has a Discord where they maintain in-depth guides on exactly what to do, how to setup your keybinds, burns and adps coordination. There's actually a lot of good, current information out there being maintained by the playerbase. But it's the old "lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink" problem. If someone is too stubborn to make changes because "I've done it this way for 15 years" syndrome, you're not going to get the improvements that you should.
On top of most class discords having a general guide for each class, people are generally very helpful in answering any questions that are asked. Szilent is like a mini eq wiki on discord. Aside from that if I see someone in the same class doing better than me on the dps parse, tank parse, or heal parse; it would behoove me to reach out to them and ask questions in an attempt to get better. With that said, some people care about their personal performance more than others. A win in 30 minutes yields the same amount of loot/currency as a win in 10 minutes. Now one can make the argument that with better performance and faster kill times it would allow for more events to be completed per raid night/week if a guild isn't getting a full clear in.
For one of my raid forces, this year's expansion is the earliest we have ever cleared the expansion. Part of that is due to general raid performance improvements. The other part is clearly the difficulty level. I do feel that the final event of the expansion were a little on the too easy side. I do kind of feel like we as a game would benefit from another Corruped Veeshan level raid zone for T1 loots and spells with essentially glorified group mobs, paired with a non-progression top end raid that drops a good augment (type 5 maybe?) or special item with enough lasting power to make it worth returning to later but not enough to make it worth weekly farming would be appropriate. Additionally, I do think smaller raids would be smarter in the long haul. It would be a heck of a lot easier to have a 36 person raid designed for 2 of each class, than the current giant raids where synergy grows exponentially and where stacking classes the flavor of the month is easier. Also... new raid guilds are nearly impossible to form at this point since the threshold to viability is so high in terms of numbers. Part of the issue with the SoD experiment was that we kept both standard and small options, it wasn't announced 6 months before release so larger guilds could allow for more natural attrition etc. I would venture that even the top 5 guilds are down a group semi often right now, and without taking new recruits would be down to mid 40s by beta which would be a more manageable bench. Also fewer people means way less lag.
Hmm yes why would people possibly be upset at a loot system that can have one guild kill 2 events and walk away with 6 weapons while another guild kills 20 events without seeing a single one? Hell, the second guild could kill 2 events *without seeing a single t2 item at all*. Loot system other than the vendor is an absolute dumpster fire this xpac. We have seen 1 shield in 5 months of raiding, lol. What a joke.
