Any classes still not happy on Live at 125?

Imagine if a raid started and spent 4 hours clearing trash without a single boss fight? Not 4 hours to get to candyland where loot rains, just nothing and no possibility of bosses/drops in the near future.
I seriously cannot understand how group content is designed to be such garbage.

TBL's difficulty kind of blurs this discussion because the implementation was poor. The entry-level zones were in many ways harder than the end-game zones and the expansion was largely locked behind challenging gates.

Expansions should feature very easy entry-level zones, be almost entirely open at the start and have and challenging final zones.

Well first, I wouldn't say that T2 Named mobs are designed to be defeated by a group of six unique players. You could argue that they should be designed so that they are designed as such but that's not how it's designed. Just like the group missions aren't balanced around having a full group of good players.

Before they make the game harder there has to be sufficient group content for players to do as a group that doesn't involve sitting in one place hoping you get lucky with spawns. There's also really big knowledge gaps between some players, some DPS don't know how to DPS at all. Lots of players don't use parsers, lots of players don't read forums and some players really don't know they do bad dps and they think the game is hard.

Content needs to be doable by everyone or you just lose more players. To have hard content you need to have enough content to satisfy the people who can't do the hard content. This is why hard versions of missions would probably be a good idea but really what we need is more missions. It's really hard for me to understand why there's not a group mission version of every raid at the minimum or at least the same number of group missions if they're different. Even if they're tank and spank then at least its guaranteed content that is easy to organize for.

I agree with this concept, and I think the SoF expansion really nailed that concept. I don't think they could still nail that design with these tiny expansions and design decisions llike requiring max level to wear any T2 or TS gear.

In my opinion the gear acts as a way to natural way to nerf content that gives the player the feeling of progression, but I don't know if they could achieve this with the current stats and gear bloat. They'd have to add something like a set bonus for visibles that give you increased damage and mitigation specific to that expansion.

To add to that, hard shouldn't just mean more numbers. Having raid gear doesn't make a skilled player. Yes many raiders are skilled, but just as many get carried. Development time should be put into making unique and interesting challenges for group content, not simply poorly watered down raids.

As well, content shouldn't ever require 6 individual people in the group, that bar is just too high for most people to meet since lfg has been dead for decades and its not coming back.

I never said raid gear makes no difference. You are saying that because of raid gear, I can kill a T2 named designed to be killed by six players. One player's raid gear does not equal six players. Sorry.

Raid gear does allow me to kill a T2 named faster, due to focus. It allows me to not have to heal the pet as much due to pet focus. But it is not the be all/end all you (and others) make it out to be.

And PS- raid gear isn't allowing a SK to swarm 50 mobs in LS. It is the SK abilities that allow such a thing to happen. That and the monsters are a joke as far as difficulty goes.

Content should be designed around a competent player playing his class in a competent manner. The problem is that content is created for a second grader to complete. Well a lot of players are in middle school and high school. They don't want all content to be achievable by a second grader. That is boring, and one can only be bored for so long before those players start to leave for content geared towards middle/high school.

And yes an expansion should start easy and then progress to difficult at the end. Content should be achievable by 1-2 players, but the last zone and last nission should require six players to be successful. Right now it is not.

You say that the game should be designed around competent players playing in a competent manner but the game doesn't actually tell you how to play and it doesn't have an addon system like wow. Most players don't run around with parsers, lots of players that are bad at the game don't even know they're bad at the game. The spells don't list their modifiers, without using outside sources it's not clear what stacks with what. Really the way to find out is to parse and/or read forums and guides maybe even join a discord.

I personally would prefer if Everquest was more challenging but it can't be unless the expansions have more content or there's a hard mode, I think a hard mode of missions would be better because the bad players should still get to experience the whole expansion. With how little group content there is there can't be hard content because what are the other players going to do?

How do we measure that and how difficult does it need to be are we talking something that is difficult for a group like shd shm brd ber bst rog while still being doable by a group like pal dru enc ranger monk mage. When content isn't hard class balance doesn't matter that much but if the content was actually hard then people would care a lot more about balance issues.

I really do think if you make enough instanced group content then you can have hard zones but we need the content first. Otherwise hard content is just going to cause people to quit.

Easy content that's done in two weeks is also causing people to quit. They spend AN ENTIRE YEAR developing content for two weeks worth of playtime. If not for raid stagnation and achievement bugs, plus endless/mindless grinding of leveling items, we'd be 100% done with the expansion before Christmas.

The player that 100% the expansion and quits in 2 weeks is playing for focused goals. There’s not a way to make the game hard enough for those people that will make them stick around. They complete their goal and hibernate. Content is never going to be made quick enough to satisfy that crowd. I blame the achievement system, too. It defined completion goal and took away the illusion that there was more depth to the game.

The community aspect of the MMO is supposed to be the part that keeps people coming back, but EQ never really figured out a way to embrace non-combat gameplay.

Because the devs have allowed themselves to lapse into a cut & paste development cycle, especially when it comes to group content. The raids are the ONLY part of an expansion where they spend any time trying to make it feel "new"...and even all that boils down to nothing but a bunch of "wait for the audio trigger and move/do something" mechanics. Then all they do is strip those down to make missions. They treat the group game as a joke these days.

They've forgotten how to be innovative...either as a result of attrition (losing devs who knew how to do things), or on purpose.

You say this like it's some innovative insight, but it's been done. EverQuest expansions were built like that. And it was exceedingly poorly received, leading to content nerfs within weeks of release.

What would you say is a good example of an expansion with a reasonable difficulty curve that was nerfed post release?


I view RoS as a good example of one that wasn't nerfed. Aside from drunk vampires and dive bombing drakes in skyfire and dotting cactii in overthere it had enjoyable progression. It starts with a nice outdoor zone (Overthere) with evenly distributed mobs and terminates in a challenging endzone (Veeshan's Peak) that can challenge a group of decent players. EoK is another example with a trivial entry zone in Frontier Mountains and a challenging end-zone.

I don't think anyone is inherantly against more difficult content if it meets a couple requirements:
1. more difficult content doesn't come at the cost of other non-raid content
2. more difficult content isn't just group stuff for people in raid gear. Then its just raid content for less people. At that point, the time cost should mean less raids

Anything not a raid should be doable by people in group gear and rk2 spells, so hard modes should still be doable in 100% group gear. A scaling level of challenge would be great, but gating it behind raid gear is just making more raid content - which is only for a subsection of the players.
There is far less group content in every expac than raid. I say this because leveling content is not group content - everyone does it once and never goes back. After you level, you have FAR less to do group wise than raiding. 2 missions? They're actually suppsoed to be leveling content due to how leveling is designed in the modern game. So the case could be made there is exactly zero group content in LS. I guess you can spend hours hoping a single named pops? Sound super fun right? Just like raiding for 4 hours without ever fighting a single boss and seeing zero drops?

I find it funny that gear keeps coming up when even raids are doable in T1 group gear with rank 1 abilities. There's nothing in a modern expansion that requires raid gear.

We have folks doing LS raids in CoV Endowed gear still, and LS group gear is right in-line with that.
Outside of a couple bad AEs that are partially unavoidable, you really don't even need hitpoints this year.

I feel like this is an intentional missreading. The discussion is about getting new "hard" content thats a challenge for people in raid gear. That would necessitate mob damage and such high enough to require raid gear, otherwise it wouldn't be a challenge.
There is no judgement about the difficulty of current LS content - which by all accounts has been a dismal failure (what little there was of it). Simply trying to reinforce that if a "hard version" of missions are made, they cannot be tuned so high as to require raid gear.

I'm curious, why did you use this as an excuse to bring up raid vs group gear? No one mentioned that. They just said group content should be harder to encourage grouping.

In LS, all group content is trivial with a good group of group geared players (source: I've been through it with a full group of group geared dudes, twice).

Where did you conceive this idea?

I think the idea is to have "some" group content that is challenging and rewarding to group geared players who get a solid group make up and aren't slacking in other deptartments. No one said anything about giving raiders a challenge in group content.

But you're right, devs will never give us any of the sort.

Honestly, because the majority of people who post and are active are raiders like you. Content that will be an actual challenge to characters in raid gear will be undoable in group gear. Almost all intersting content is already raid content. Leveling content is not "group content", its 1 and done content for all players.
This isn't a "raiders are bad". Its simply cognizant of the fact that devs DO read the boards, even if they don't say much. There seems to be this assumption that saying "group content cannot require raid gear" is the same thing as saying "keep content boring and easy". I thought TBL and Cov are great in relevant level and gear. No one wants easy boring crap.
Its more the frustration that all interesting content is already raid only content. Group missions are hot garbage and afterbirth from raid creation.
edit: not trying to say modern raids are the pinnacle of game creation... Simply that between raids and the status of group missions, one is not like the other.

But like, nothing prompted that. Most raiders like me don't WANT challenging group content for us. We want challenging raids.

You just pulled at out of thin air as an unwarranted, baseless attempt to make this convo about something it's not.

Right now neither are really hard for their respective players. I think tucos point about ros vp zone was a great idea, it was a hard, rewarding zone for group geared players. Although, I think they really scr***d the pooch on the t1 zones with all mobs having nasty dots etc.