I apologize to the OP as I posted a companion thread entitled "Sad", not seeing that this thread already existed. Suffice to say that I sit here this morning very disillusioned with DBG for what they have done. It is going to be difficult to even log into a game where it really does not matter what my efforts are, the rewards will be the same as anyone else's. Something very wrong with that, but that is pretty much the mindset of many people in this country these days. If you are successful, rather than be admired and aspired to, you are seen as somehow unfairly entitled and everyone should have the same successes no matter their effort.
I don't understand the sour posts from some of you in this post. This is the game's only metrics of competition that's in the game right now - it used to be who kills what first, now it's timed. What's the big deal overall? It gets guild something to look forward to and something to be proud of- let those of us who worked hard to do this enjoy their time in the sun. - Valcron
Gate keeping "who is a gamer" to make yourself feel better is silly. People who play games are gamers, some are better than others at playing a particular game, some care more than others, whatever.
As someone who primarily was a TLP raider from 2015-2021, I have a different perspective. On TLP we really are only concerned with raids, and frankly most of how TLP raiders view the game positively or negatively is tied into that. TLPers get "new" content on a very regular schedule, and usually have 15-20 guilds on a server to choose from with varying levels of time / effort commitment. As we settled in to becoming a live guild I found that on live you have a much larger player base that isn't focused solely on raiding. I would actually disagree with your analysis that the casual raiders "never log on other than raids." What I have found surprising as I've been on live the last few years is the "casual" raiders play a hell of a lot more than I do. For one, they raid more days a week, generally because things take them long. For two, they are almost all deep into group content, alt-aholic stuff etc. My perception after a few years on live is these casuals you wrote this screed about are almost certainly the vast majority of live players. And they often are paying multiple subscriptions a month, buying multiple expansions every year etc. Any serious evaluation of where the game is needs to acknowledge that actual reality--these players keep the lights on. It may not be how I play, or am interested in playing, but they are customers, and there are a lot of them. That being said, I think you're entirely off base that "Daybreak caved" to anyone. These raiders your screed targets don't participate in beta, most don't communicate with the devs. That is largely high end raiders who do that. Daybreak made some poor design decisions in RoS and TBL, frankly--having difficult things isn't bad, but locking a lot of an expansion's content behind them is. And this largely goes against modern MMO design. I can't think of an MMO for example that locks most of its zones behind a trial that a lot of casual players can't beat, and that was the case in TBL, and frankly it wasn't a good decision. You can have those difficult things without gating all the content behind it--which is the approach basically every other MMO does.
lol we messed up the clicks on the HF raid, got an extra blob, and still won first try. And our guild doesnt participate in beta so it was the first time any of us had seen it we are usually among the last 8 or so guilds to complete the raids. this was incredibly easy and the celebration felt a little hallow
I think there is a valid discussion to be had about raid difficulty--my thing is that you don't measure raid difficulty by the duration of a fight. I can pick 3 Mythic WoW raids or Savage FF XIV encounters that last 8-9 minutes each that would be harder than any content EQ has ever imagined having. Fight duration != fight difficulty. And people who are asserting durations should go up to "fix" live raiding, are pushing the wrong slider and in ways that could make raiding a lot worse. It is actually not easy to "objectively" measure how hard raids are. Because the data points are not static--the guilds that cleared TBL back in 2018 aren't actually the same "set" of guilds raiding now. Are some of them the same guilds? Sure. But some guilds have gone away since then. Some new ones have appeared. Some guilds have totally revamped their rosters since then. Also, because of the way MMO playerbases learn, even if DPG had just kept producing the same difficulty stuff forever, it is likely completion percentages would go up--the way an OMM mask click was "hard" 20 years ago but would now be too trivial a raid mechanic to even bother putting into a fight. Subjectively, which is all we can really say about raid difficulty, I do feel LS was easier than NoS, NoS was an even greater reduction in difficulty from ToL, and ToV / CoV / ToL were all around par difficulty with each other, at least in my opinion. I think, in no particular order, the reasons the last few eras of raids have been easier: DPS burning mitigates or entirely bypasses lots of raid mechanics. This has been a problem for basically 15 years to varying degrees. Some fights try to address it, sometimes badly, sometimes okay, but by and large this remains "the" winning strategy a large % of the time Low consequences. Kind of across the board. A lot of failure-check mechanics only punish either the person who failed, or punish the raid in a way that is trivial, e.g. a failure mechanic that causes a raidwide AE, but you can just glyph spray + splash through it so it is actually easier to just ignore the mechanic and keep burning. "Cheese", a lot of fights actually are decently hard "as designed", but "as designed" is not always how they are completed. Take the Under Siege fight in NoS, if you just read the write up you might think "hmm, this could be challenging." But it ends up you can just burn through most of it and cheese out 2 of the major mechanics of the fight to have no impact at all (these cheeses were reported in beta, but left in and are in to this day.) Tuning in general. This is a really big topic and kind of hits at the "game as a whole", but just off the top of the stack--it is very easy to heal through most raid wide damage. This is not a common raid design--most comparable MMOs with a raid scene, healers outright lack the ability to heal through tons of damage. This puts the onus on individual players to, usually, find ways to avoid that damage (a lot of raid damage in EQ is unavoidable, but also easily healed through, so falls into a weird category where it seems like it exists to make sure you don't have your healers fall asleep for 5 minutes mid raid.) All that being said, I'm not necessarily putting this on the raid design team (Absor), I think the community may underappreciate some of the conditions that make it hard to balance / tune EQ content, these are the most prominent: There is no standard raid composition. Most comparable "raid-focused" MMOs have a very narrow band of raid compositions. In FFXIV an 8 man encounter is going to have 2 tanks, 2 healers and 4 DPS. This doesn't vary. In WoW Mythic, you are going to typically have 2 tanks / 4 healers / 14 DPS (5 healers / 13 DPS isn't totally uncommon, rarely but it does happen, you will sometimes have 3 tanks.) This actually allows the raid designers to tune fights a lot tighter and make better decisions in tuning. There is nothing close to a standard raid composition in EQ--and it would be very, very hard to move towards one without another major design condition (point 2) The 54 man raid. This very large raid size makes it extremely difficult to tune raids in a tight fashion without resulting in "very bad" outcomes for the game as a whole. The 54 man raid size also causes problems with trying to revamp healing to make it more challenging, normalize DPS performance and etc. Sometimes crippling raid lag. Certain mechanics could be attempted, but in the environment of high lag, may make fights pretty miserable. I am somewhat leery of seeing certain types of mechanics added to the game as long as raid lag is still a common issue, because if you get in a scenario where some guilds are unable to do content because of lag, it is going to be pretty bad for the game. EQ's actual engine. We all know EQ runs an ancient engine, if you have raided all the content, you have likely seen some odd ball mechanics "come and go", and you have likely ran into some that just don't "work" in EQ, but may be good ideas if the engine was better. Unlike a lot of forum pontificators I don't have answers to these things--I don't pretend to be a game designer, but these seem like the main reasons events are easier now, and the items I called out as conditions inhibiting better design are ones that have been obvious to me for a long time, but none of which have great / easy answers. (For example if you just reduced the raid size you create really bad drama, I'm a guild leader and have ran guilds in other games--I remember the drama when WoW went from 40 man to 25 and then to 20 man raids, it causes problems, undeniably.) I do think within the parameters of what we have now, you could make fights harder by imposing bigger failure consequences, and also taking the time to patch out known "cheese" strats.
I disagree, difficult fights bring people together as long as they are winnable. Some of my closest EQ friends were made struggling to get some fight done.
The fact that your strategy took 21 minutes to kill Ogna yet other guilds finished the entire Tier in 26 minutes would suggest one of us is wrong in his assertion. I'm guessing it would be you in this case. I don't link videos on these forums, I'm a shill for no guild, but the information is out there. Even if it the algorithm doesn't give you that as the first result there are 2 in total, pick the shortest ones and enjoy.
The strategy for top guilds is the following: - Skip as much of the raid as you can. If you can beat the event with that add up, then do it. There's no reason to move DPS off of the main mob to kill something which isn't required to die and you are able to successfully off tank or kite. Figure out what the actual objective for winning the raid is, and then only kill what's necessary on top of that to ensure you don't wipe/reset the event. For example, the objective for Artisan & Druid is to kill Ogna. Killing any orcs at all is unnecessary. - Set up your raid groups like you mean it. DPS, ADPS, groups talking about when the best time to burn is, and so on. The top guilds are hitting 100m+ DPS on nearly every phase of every event. Don't let your knights stand there with a shield on if they aren't tanking anything, casters meleeing when feasible, make sure there's spice/cop and dirge/tvyls on as often as possible, etc.
That is awesome, congratulations! However, you mentioned the HF raid. While that was your first time on the raid, I am pretty sure most/all members have done the mission dozens upon dozens of times. So you weren't going into that raid 100% blind, as you already knew there was a blob and a lich and a spider and Shalowain, and you have to run away if your name is called, etc. Not saying the raid is easy or hard. But the discussion of "going in blind" on HF and Pal Lomen raids are difficult since the group mission mirrors a lot of rhe raids so there is some basic layout already in place.
I have mentioned Beta as providing an advantage previously, so I feel as if this post is somewhat directed at me. I never said it would be great if everyone went in blind. But just like getting a DZ one to four minutes earlier than other servers provides an advantage, so does practicing an event 30 times in Beta- where strategies can be changed and perfected without consequences on the "race". Just like someone who has a week to prepare for a school test, and some other kid has only an hour... there is an advantage to being able to prepare. All guilds going in blind on an event also allows everyone to start at page 1. No one was able to skip to Chapter 4 in the book and has an advantage. Now, I agree- the raids are easy. Way too easy. And that is probably by design because EQ wants to retain players, and if a player thinks something is too hard they leave. Whereas those who want a challenge and get easy raids will complain it is too easy, but they still stick around due to the time investment in the game. We can only hope the anniversary raid, if there was one for the 25th year, is a raid released blind to everyone and is a Plane of War difficulty at first. Then you can call it an actual "race" and see which guilds are the best to adapt on the fly, react accordingly, and be successful.
why not having the last T3 raid to be brutal , so there would be a competition for who finish the raids 1st , then after 3 months could be tuned down a bit , ect. we don't have the raid numbers we had to , sure the raids being easier help us there , but there is a need to have raids to be hard mode imo , ( specially last T3 one ).
I assume you're talking about SR here, and I believe they had 3 groups split off and start the Ogna event prior to Final Fugue finishing to get the initial trash clear out of the way, so that once Final Fugue was completed the rest of the raid could move in and just burn Ogna. This doesn't really count as killing Ogna in 4 minutes, because the actual Ogna event took longer, but by doing it concurrently with Final Fugue it allowed them to complete the entire set of raids faster.
Incorrect. No event was started while any other was in progress. (Hint: you don't have to kill the orcs, you just have to keep them occupied)
Sorry, I had heard wrong. The DZ was pulled and a banner was pre-dropped behind all of the trash with alts prior to the main raid force being there.
I am very curious where people are getting all this "inside information." You guys need better sources
If you're talking about narwhale's stream I believe she missed the initial DZ invite, which you can see on screen had no loot lockout. By the time she accepted a later one a mob may have been killed. None of my DZ adds included a loot lockout.
