All T3 raids finished! Day 1 Feed us more! Too easy! 16 guilds beat it so far, if you haven't beaten it yet, you still got time. Day 1. Lets go. 16 guilds can beat all T3 day 1, you can too.
This isn't great for the raiding scene, surely? The only reason these raids last so long into the year is because DBG hold them back. I actually read some 'congratulation' posts on here before I even found this page which means the raids were being beaten quicker than some of us read that they were even available. This game has become the shell of what it once was. There is something fundamentally wrong with the strategy of this game nowadays and I can't put my finder on it. I can see they didn't make it easy to solo. They clearly don't want people grinding as groups in their zones with the exp per kill farce. They push you through the content as you move through progression. The raids are barely a bump in the road for many guilds. What is the strategy for this game? Who are they seeing as their 'perfect' customer? It doesn't look like it solo players, group players or raiders. It just feels like they're not putting much effort into any level of this game at all at this point. It wouldn't surprise me if they're using this anniversary year to just grab what they can before this game topples off the edge and drops away. We may all look back at this anniversary year with commiseration rather than celebration.
Part of the problem is guilds that have sub optimal rosters and have been complaining for years they are excluded, but the ability to fix that has been in their power to address it even before their complaint. We have now lowered the Raid bar so low you don't even have to pick up your feet to cross it. How many raid alliance complaints are there because they don't have access to a raid banner? Well fix that if you really want to raid and consolidate into a guild to meet that need, problem solved. The right answer is addressing your poor roster makeup, not hand out participation trophies.
I am pretty sure that if they implemented a more challenging raid progression. People would post here saying “how come that we didn’t beat it on day one! How dare you!”
When raids are hard people quit. Most of the racing guilds rehearse their raid starts ad nauseum on beta to the point if they fail when it goes live they should feel bad. In Beta, Absor posts the exact fight mechanics. There's really not much learning to do on raids these days. Unlocking the 8 raids over the span of three months is little more than an annoying stall tactic. It serves no purpose other than causing people to complain about pre-clearing alts and DZ startup times.
The only reason most raids have ever lasted as long as they did was because they were artificially held back. Before the current iteration it was through flagging items. there have been a few notable exceptions, and they did more to kill the game than to help it. the unlock time/date was not a secret... those that beat it quickly were standing at the raid giver when the script went live... if YOU didn't know about it, then that's because YOU didn't care to know. nothing wrong with that but it's not a game problem. yes they did. so wait... as you progress through an expansion's quests in a game called everquest you progress through the expansion's content as well??? say it ain't so! this has been being said for over a decade... you're not an original thinker here. eventually the "sky is falling" crowd will be right, but I doubt it's this year.
A lot of the top 10/20 guilds (maybe more) have done each raid in Beta dozens upon dozens of times. The ability to practice a raid, defeat it, and then immediately clear your lockout and refine your strategy or try out new things gives those raiders familiarity and knowledge with each raid so that when launch day occurs, it is a matter of execution and speed. And the devs literally tell everyone in Beta the mechanics of each event and what to expect. That, combined with raids that are easier than in years past, brings us to today where everyone knows the events beforehand, they know what to do, they have refined their strategy, they have beaten the events multiple times before... again, just a matter of execution. Imagine a scenario where the 8 raids this expansion were just launched and no one had any knowledge, any practice, any write ups, and everyone went in 100% blind to each event. Would you have seen 15 plus guilds defeat T3 raids yesterday on launch? Yes the raids mechanically and structurally are easier than original Mearatas or Plane of War or Underfoot. But the time spent in Beta on these raids provides a much greater advantage to launch day guilds than difficulty (or lack thereof). Now before people start attacking, I completely understand the importance of Beta testing the raids. If the raids were released in their original form released on Beta, then El Oh El. Bugs, scripts not working, mob damage way too high or way too low, Beta is there not only for the raiders but also for the devs to make sure the raids are working properly and to their liking. Of course there should be much better internal testing and quality control done internally, but they don't have 54 raiders on the dev team that can test the raids (a whole another conversation), so the devs need the players to test. And in return, the players get knowledge and practice and training. And you get 15+ guilds on T3 launch day winning, with quite a few one shooting each event.
Nice job all. You're free to cancel your subscriptions and come back next February, because any farming of gear, building your characters and maintaining a raid force throughout the year probably won't make it that much easier to beat next year's raids either. This will free you up to play MMOs with real PVE content. Maybe DPG will give a reason for you to log in by introducing a hard mode in raids and missions, but i doubt it! Most EQ players enjoy the casual, trivial experience.
Raids are a joke. Raiding is much less challenging than going through group progression with group gear. This has been the case for several expansions now, but this expansion Daybreak made sure even the dullest tool in the shed can beat these raids on day 1.
they're both pretty easy. a Shaman can pull & pet tank literally everything non-raid in the expansion except for Dok. it may take forever, but that doesn't make it challenging.
To all the haters, want some cheese and crackers to go along with your whine? A lot of people get some serious enjoyment out of the end-game raiding scene. Yes, we spent countless hours during Beta learning the events and fine-tuning our strategies. Yes we logged in an hour early and buffed and reviewed those strategies. We even suspended our loot rules for race day so we didn't get bogged down awarding items. A lot of people spent serious hours working on maps, triggers, food, drink, buffs, potions, etc. But... We enjoy the game this way. Maybe, direct your hate at all the FTP accounts contributing only lag to the game.
Too funny In beta? 1 month of grind? Back in my days. Omens of War. OG guilds like https://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/index.php?expansion=OoW Server/Guild/Anguish/Jelvan/Mata Muram Silent Redemption/ 2004-11-09 / 2005-07-10 / 2006-06-14 Ring of Valor/ 2005-04-28 / 2005-07-07 / 2007-02-16 Triton/ 2004-10-28 / 2005-02-01 / 2005-07-25 Back in my days, we didn't spend hours. We spent days Weeks Years Beta 1 month? Triton 2004-10-28 / 2005-02-01 / 2005-07-25 2004-09-14 OoW release date 1 month of learning you'd be still learning T1. Back in my days 1 month of learning wouldn't get squat. Months Months 4 months back in my days, now you'd be in T2 Months Months 5 months later now you'd finally beat T3 Beta 1 month learning period that wouldn't cut it back in my days. Most of all, back in my days, gear actually meant something. It wasn't everyone and their boxes with T3 full set of raid gear.
Beta is interesting, fun sometimes. This game is nothing like that on live because of how bad its gotten. Its only to play with friends (socialization) and the HOPE that things MIGHT change that people stick around. That and no real option to play the same kind of game elsewhere. There are tons of fun games. Tons of MMORPGs. None of them have the same basic gameplay and depth of this one, as they have sacrificed the same things EQ has sacrificed to be "more accessible". It took us 26 minutes from hitting the zone of the first event to beating the third event. 26 minutes. If we went all out we could clear all 8 raids in this expansion in something like 70-80 minutes? And that's with zoning 7 times. It takes longer to do loot than the events. Don't sugar coat this garbage. The OP is not worth talking to, complete troll, but your comments are ridiculous. You "enjoy the game this way"? Freaking gross.
The DP theme since ToV has been whatever it takes to reduce man hours. I really doubt DP is catering to any group in particular… They’re doing whatever it takes to reduce man hours and making the content with a bare minimum amount of difficulty because it requires less work than fine tuning harder content.
Maybe I am wrong, but the whining isn't stemming from end raid gaming in general. It centers around the difficulty (or lack thereof) around these raids, combined with two months of Beta practice and preparation to ensure you end up a top 3/10/20 guild on a Saturday in March. I enjoy raiding. I get a lot more enjoyment about learning events, developing strategies, and then doing an event that is challenging. Nothing about current raids is challenging. If your raid wipes on Anxefen because the three people who were supposed to run outside the fort (spoiler alert) did not run and the resulting AOE wipes your raid... that is not challenging. That is three people who were ineffective and failed. That is it. The only way for the top 3/10/20 guilds to truly challenge themselves would be to not participate in Beta and go into launch days 100% blind IMHO. Which we all know will never happen. And we also know that we are never going to see a Mearatas or Plane of War because, like someone earlier said, people quit if it is too hard. So unfortunately on the first Saturday in January, February and March... everyone takes a test. We all have our pencils, we have all studied for the test ad nauseum the previous 2-4 months, and it comes down to how fast the teacher can walk around the room and hand you the test and how fast you can run up to the teacher to grade your paper to see if you got all the questions right.
Something to keep in mind is a lot of the speed clearing is not solely a function of "the raids are too easy." A lot of the slowness in clearing prior to ToV was due to the "flagging" system, which required x number of clears of each tier before the next tier unlocked. That also meant to gamify it you had to raid "off lockout", for however many weeks that would be required to get the tiers unlocked in a timely fashion--this also rewarded being able to raid literally when the lockout expired, which might be at 1am on a Tuesday or something unpleasant like that. Another thing to consider is some of the "blocker" fights were not, IMO, truly more "difficult" as they were sometimes just poorly balanced for the raid community "in general." Take the 2nd event in RoS Tier 2, that event was basically predicated on having a certain amount of casters who could cast fire nukes. If your guild was really melee DPS heavy, or simply didn't have many Wizards or Magicians, you would struggle really badly on that event. That doesn't necessarily mean it was truly "hard", because a guild that was Wiz / Mage heavy could beat it trivially. Or take the EoK Tier 3 raids which were artificially made difficult by having to loot the raid blockers off the first event to mitigate the zonewide debuffs in Kor-Sha. And finally, there is greater communication between the staff and the raiders in working out the beta testing of the raids--which means raiders are able to raid more prepared. That last one is definitely something one can criticize, but it is kind of a hard thing to get right--if there was literally no player testing of the raids, they would likely launch in a very terrible state and be unplayable until patched. I do think if you look at the game purely in terms of the raid mechanics, taking the post-flagging era expansions (ToV through LS), the raids aren't markedly "easier", than flagging era raids. Like I definitely think the "average" raid in RoF / CotF / TDS / TBM / EoK was easier than the average raid in the more modern expansions. Even TBL which has a reputation for being very hard, outside of Mearatas most of the fights were not tremendously more difficult than contemporary raids. There have always been weird outliers--and VoA which is considered an infamously hard expansion, had a lot of raids total--but a lot of them really are quite easy. Yeah, Triune God even after being nerfed multiple times still stands up as a hard fight, but it isn't necessarily representative of the typical raid difficulty back in 2011.
The most frustrating part is that beta raids actually are harder. It's not till the end of beta that everything gets tuned down to the point that anyone with a pulse can beat it. The content is there (kind of), but they literally go out of there way to turn it all into participation trophies. It took longer to zone in and run to Ogna than it did to actually defeat the encounter - how can anyone in their right mind think this is acceptable? The final 3 events combined lasted as long as the final event ~5 years ago in Meeratas. Go back ~10 years and this would've been 1/3rd of an event(Triunity). A single hard raid (preferably) at the end of an expansion isn't going to make people quit as much as releasing absolute trash as "raid content".
Event length != event difficulty. A lot of tuning on beta is reducing overly high encounter HP--the first draft of NoS and LS had some fights with way too much total HP (NoS in particular.) Reducing this didn't make the fights easier. If you equate fight length with difficulty you are bad and wrong. Most Mythic WoW fights are significantly harder than EQ raids and they rarely last more than 10 minutes.
When you have all these guilds spending weeks practicing the raids on beta, then skipping all loot and finding any way to cheat/bypass any mechanic to go faster - amount of content isn;t the issue. If there was double the raids, it would just be an all weekend event of the same thing. The guilds ruin it for themselves by spending all beta practicing the raids.
