I don't know how WoW, does it, but EQ fights lasting 10 minutes or less totally negate most of the difficulty of the event. Mana is meaningless at that point, and discs are lasting most of the event. And I'm specifically talking about making the end of expansion raids hard, not every single one. I've hated events in the past where bosses have hp just to have hp. I've hated some of the insane flagging methods that we've seen in years past. But compared to what we're getting now, those old mechanics are looking better and better.
SSSHHHHH...... this is too much reality for them. There would be endless threads about how broken stuff was
Really? Your entire argument is 8 months 23 hours and 24 minutes till next expansion = fair, but 8 months 23 hours 34 minutes = it's the players fault. An extra 10 minutes "going slow" is meaningless.
It is the fact no one wants to farm 25-35 minute fights all year long, it isn't about race day. Super long fights are not enjoyable for anyone. And you are massively punishing the guilds outside of the top 5, where DPS drops down considerably--and there are like 50 entities between all the guilds and open alliances that raid this content that aren't doing top 10 race progression, many of whom will lose out on ability to clear events if you arbitrarily add too many hitpoints. Super long fights are frankly bad design. The top end DPS guilds clearing them faster is a feature, not a bug. The alternative would be a hilariously stupid design philosophy where you don't reward a guild that does 50-200% more DPS than other guilds.
This is an ideal world: T1: 1 tank and spank event, zero adds, no locking mechanics, there can certainly be unavoidable AEs so that priests have something to do, the boss should have moderate hp and moderate dmg output. 1 mechanic based event, some adds that can be killed or kited/cc'd including mez/charm/bane, personal emotes that do personal dmg, unavoidable AEs 1 mechanic based event that has zone banishing for secondary failures, adds, again these can be cc'd/killed, there could be 1 boss mob or 3-4 minis that all hit in the boss mob range, unavoidable AEs Those should unlock in order T1.1 > T1.2 > T1.3 and be in the same instance. T2: 1 tank and spank event, some adds that can be kited/killed but not cc'd, no locking mechanics, the adds should be % based only and not time based, unavoidable AEs, the dps output of the boss should be higher than that of T1 1 minis mechanic based event, some adds that can be kited/killed but not cc'd, zonewide AEs, with some sort of curing components 1 boss of T2 fight, zonewide AEs, adds that cannot be kited/cc'd, must be killed to defeat the boss, killing them in the order called and in the alloted time does additional dmg to the boss, movement....without auras and constant emote calls....just make the boss ramp up dmg output based on the duration spent stationary These should unlock in order T2.1 > T2.2 > T2.3 and be in the same instance. T3: 1 tank and spank burn event, zonewide AEs and curing, the boss changes dmg output and dmg susceptibility based on emote success/failure. If you fail an emote, increases dmg output by 1% and mitigation by the same. Succeed and it decreases. 1 mechanic based event with mass adds, adds and adds and adds, they absolutely can be CC'd, but not all of them by the same mechanic, they can also be all tanked, but NOT kited....killing them is possible, should be zonewide AEs, personal emotes, I did enjoy cooking the grenade in beta before they changed that mechanic...for Bidils for example. Failing emotes should spawn adds, adds should be percentage based and timer based as a DPS/CC check. 1 boss fight for the expansion, this should truck through fully BiS geared tanks from the previous years gear. It should require stacking defensives to survive and encourage tank swaps. The adds should be numerous enough to engage the tanks, some could be bane susceptible, but all should be required to be managed in order to move on in the fight....this could be by some CC mechanic or by some X number are dead... Curing, zonewide AEs...I'm not talking Mearatas difficulty in the final boss but it should be difficult to beat each week in the previous tier gear. It should make you manage resources. It should be beatable by 100% of the top 10 guilds in the first week to month of release. Again T3.1 > T3.2 > T3.3 all in the same instance. I never understood the desire to spin up 8-9 DZs a night per raiding guild... Feel free to comment. My goals in raiding would be to engage all the classes and make them work without handing out gear in every tier. T1 being fairly simple, T2 being moderately difficult and T3 being a challenge for those in the top 5 guilds, but still beatable with practice by those in all guilds...and certainly after 6 months with the banner powers.
Two minute fights aren't enjoyable either. Everyone is stuck on mob hp as part of tuning, but it's also AE and melee damage output. Most of these mechanics are tuned so that you can just ignore them, assign a single tank to handle all the adds, etc. Mearatas was a 17 minute event, and that was before getting nerfed 3 times. The difficulty came from mobs and AEs that actually hurt if you tried to ignore them. One of the best parts about this (and plane of war) was that it was primarily bane DPS. Clerics were doing damage on par with everyone else. Nobody's forcing anyone to raid every single raid every week.
EQ gives participation trophies now. During beta, when guilds with a roster of 12 clerics and 4 tank groups are complaining about the mobs having too many HP's or the events taking too long, they nerf it around terrible roster construction rather than encouraging guilds to field appropriate rosters. The side effect of this is guilds with real roster construction finish the raids in 25 mins or so and wait for it to happen again next year. What made Mearatas special was, people didn't know what to do after a certain % of the event on beta and when it went live the skill gap was truly shown. Beating Mearatas pre-nerf was the last true accomplishment in EQ for the guilds that managed to do it, it was totally unforgiving and eventually, they nerfed it to the point where most guilds who could do some DPS and follow emotes were able to beat it. Now, you are literally given every mechanic on a pretty little list on the forums so there are no surprises. The game is what it is now and I get wanting everyone to have fun and get nice gear, but balancing raids around the most casual of guilds is a slap in the face to the more hardcore raiding base who actually wants to feel a sense of accomplishment when they beat endgame content. That sense of accomplishment has been gone for years for guilds with proper raid construction. The balance is delicate and they want to keep everyone engaged but it's not really fun face rolling easy raids for 9 months of the year, even with a gimped out roster. I'd guess we are going to continue on the path we have been going down for the past 5 expansions and people need to decide if they feel this game is rewarding enough challenge wise to continue to prepare and care about "racing" and I use that term lightly in this context.
As a former guild leader, one of only two guilds that beat Mearatas pre-nerf/tuning pass... Extremely difficult encounters are as detrimental to the game as extremely easy ones. Attrition of players in a game that doesn't recruit new blood is real. The angst that people are displaying now over easy raids is nothing in comparison to the multiple page threads about how hard Mearatas was... the complaining about raiding multiple nights...about "unbeatable events"...
My apologies. You are correct. Also: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/nerf-mearates-now.255580/page-23 To my point about a 23 page nerf call for an event.
I think the added benefit of knowing they are making a truly difficult raid with the intention to tune it for the masses after a few months is an attractive option to satiate those who both want a challenge and those who might have to wait a little while before they can finish the expansion. In the end, everyone gets what they want, just on different timelines. Edit: For the additional info about the thread you posted. We raided Mearatas once a week, we didn't spend five days a week working on it because we raid on Mondays and that's basically it. We managed to beat it, following a 0% wipe the week before. Just because something is difficult, doesn't mean it needs to be hammered 5 days a week to beat, it just requires a great raid leader and people following directions and doing their jobs. The time investment of daily raids wasn't required to beat it pre-nerf.
A bit reductionist? Is there a lack of content? Of course. Is racing to beat content as fast as possible a bad way to deal with lack of content? Also yes. With guilds practicing for months and racing to beat it, 100 raids wouldn't matter. They'd still blow through it in short order and then complain. At issue are two things: ability to rehearse in beta, and difficulty. No raid in any game is that difficult after you've practiced it for weeks. This isn't an eq thing - its just reality. If they make the raids really hard, how many endless threads will there be whining about that too?
There are few two minute fights, period. I am going to exclude looking at Tier 1 finish times because a) there were only 2 events in Tier 1 and b) one of the two events was initially bugged on launch and would not activate, so it isn't a great measure of the real time to clear these events. Tier 2 was finished in 32 minutes. Tier 3 was finished in 31 minutes. By the very fastest guild. If you just check down at #5, Tier 2 was finished in 61 minutes Tier 3 was finished in 63 minutes. This actually averages out to "per event" average for both Tier 2 and 3 of around 20 minutes. Now, yes--there is some time lost to moving zones and DZ spinup, but I think saying the actual fights averaged to around 15 minutes per fight, is reasonable. Note also, for many guilds the first clear is the fastest. Why? A few reasons. One, most of the guilds really pushing a race don't use their normal loot system, they are instant-free grab all the loot, rot the chest without looting anything or etc. This shaves a lot of time off of doing content versus utilizing the normal systems guilds use to distribute loot. (While those systems vary, aside from FV guilds being able to just loot everything and bid it later, all of these systems will take meaningfully longer than just rotting a chest.) Additionally, a lot of times a guild puts its best force forward on race day. There are players who just aren't motivated to raid for 12 months, so roster sizes frequently shrink throughout the year. Note that for less hardcore groups, the first clear is usually not the fastest--since less hardcore groups typically aren't varying up how they do loot, will also not have a firmed up strategy and will be fine tuning their strategy over the coming weeks and etc--but generally speaking the first clear times aren't super representative of the time investment to do farm raids. And this is for the #5 guild. Outside of that some of these events are long--in fact the last few years of EQ raiding have had very long raids for the "average" raider. And the average raider isn't in that #5 guild, they are in a guild that is more like #30 on the progression site (because that site probably misses 10-15 groups, between the server alliances that don't post there, and at least a few raid guilds I know of that don't post there--and there are likely a few more that I don't know about.) I talk to people in some of these types of guilds / alliances, I hear stories about 90 minute long Sontalak clears, hour long Arbiter kills in CoV, about hitting the enrage on AHR every week in ToL, about 45 minute Zelnithak kills, 45+ minute Pit Fight kills etc etc. People advocating for fights to be longer are ignorant of how long fights actually are, telling lies that fights are two minutes, and genuinely hurting the game by spreading misinformation that, if it becomes a prevailing sentiment in fight design will actively hurt most raiding guilds and the game at large.
Genuinely curious if you watched any videos of the T3 race? There are plenty on YouTube. It took longer for the raids to run to Ogna than to finish the event in sub 3mins once engaged. It's there for you to watch, not doctored or misinformation. Fights are definitely long for poorly constructed rosters or those who are not maximizing aDPS or are burning at the wrong time or have people who are not very adept at playing their classes. Watching videos of complete T3 clears, the longest one I saw was 27 mins and that was with them standing at the door waiting to get in. The clear was ~26 mins once they zoned and that includes zone times between each event.
I think I'd like to see: 9 total raids: tier 1 - 3 raids - easy enough, unlocks 1/3 of the items on vendor tier 2 - 3 raids - easy enough, unlocks 2/3 of the items on the vendor tier 3 - 3 raids - 2 with a modicum of challenge, 1 that HARD, very hard, and gives double currency/ores 3 months after t3 release, nerf the difficulty of the last t3 raid So what if you can't beat the final raid in the first 6 months (3 months to work on it)? You can get all the gear off the vendor with currency and farm the rest. And then nerf it so more beat it. And make you beart the raids in order A, B, C each tier, by putting them in the same zone.
They literally just need to not beta test the tier 3 raids. No Absor write-ups on the boards, no notes about what to expect, don't let the raid giver give the quest out, nothing... There's enough data from them beta testing T1-2 with all the guilds, to make informed tuning decisions for T3. That way everyone goes in blind. Such a simple solution. . Itemization does need some help though - like why so many nuggets and let the Tier1 raid loot rot.. I get wanting a plat sink, but maybe you just put some time into the T1 itemization loot...Get rid of the current ore system and use the tradeskills as a piece that when combined, adds/unlocks the type 8 aug slot to the raid item or whatever (heck, you could even do that with your a similar 'ore' system.. one to add weapon augs, one to add visible armor augs, and one for non vis slots)... that way, you use the raid loot that drops without decaying it, and you add in your lovely plat sinks that you like so much.
This is a bad past, sorry. 1. Link to specific videos, don't make vague claims. 2. Yes, I watched some of them, my guild also finished in the top 10 so I have my own personal experiences as well. 3. Ogna had around 19b HP, which is similar to the total HP that Captair Kar has in Final Fugue, don't say "Ogna" like Ogna is an entire raid event. There is an entire first phase with waves of Rallosian mobs etc. 4. My guild's time on the event was: 3:08:58 PM ET first mob inside the event is engaged, 3:29:07 PM ET was when the active fight ended, that is 21 minutes of fight time. It is entirely fair to say "git gud", and that's fine, but don't portray it like most guilds are going to beat this event in 2 minutes. [Note for people talking times, the main parsing programs will not reflect that time, since it filters out inactive time, it would show around 13 minutes of active time because the event has lulls in the waves and movement time in the middle, but humans don't raid on "active" time, we raid on clock time--clock time it was 21 minutes from event start to chest spawned.]
Also to further address the genuine fake news being posted: https://www.twitch.tv/alkyvret/video/2079328099 11 seconds to run to Ogna, 4m32s to kill Ogna. So no, it "did not take a raid less time to kill Ogna than to run to her."
