Do any guilds still exist that don't use Discord or voice chat for raiding?

Curious if there are any raiding guilds that remain that don't use Discord or other means of voice chat for raids. I don't mean not require, I mean not use.

My guild doesn't use any voice chat for raiding. We have no rules against it though, as long as people can focus on the raid. We don't even require Gina or any other third-party apps.

A few guildies are using discord for cozy chitchat. I don't use discord, so no clue whats going on in there during raidtime.

What raids are you doing?

We are raiding Claws of Veeshan, we haven't beaten Aaryonar or any of the tier 3 raids yet.

We are generally raiding the latest expansion on AB.

You find lots of guild that don't require it. mine on Bertox don't but no way in the world you find a guild that it not being use in some way or another. My guild has a guild ts channel. you find lots in at all time. even raid time and while its not required and the RL dose everything in /rs people in ts are talking and doing raid stuff there as well.

We don't use chat for raiding, nor is GINA mandatory, infact those without GINA fail emotes less than those with.

Only raid yet to beat in CoV is Aaryonar.

I can't imagine a raid leader having to type out every command and instruction all raid night long. We don't require you talk, but we require you be able to listen because F off if we're going to make the raid leader type all that out. I suppose if everyone was super awesome at doing EQ and never made mistakes and always reacted immediately to things going wrong, you could get away with not using voice. But the ability to communicate by voice is just too powerful not to be utilizing.

Gina is also required because too many of our people have proven that they're are not good enough at watching Event Messages to be counted on to react to raid mechanics properly and in a timely manner. It would be nice to not have to require this, but it's never going to happen.

Triton still types out instructions.

TBH I loved that about them when I was there. I am so sick of raid discord channel lol.

You can do just fine without voice chat but I do hope your raid leader has hot keys for various strats or can copy and paste really fast. For their own sanity.

I find that incredible difficult to believe. I know a small number of great players that don't use gina; and who perform very well while missing almost no emotes. I also know lots of players who somehow manage to miss emotes with gina AND a raid leader calling them out.

Overall though, limiting your game play by not using voice chat and gina (or equivalent) is just screwing over your guild mates. Best of luck beating Aary w/o both of those tools in general use by your raid force.

There's nothing in CoV that requires GINA for raid emotes. Every single emote needed can be shuttled to a window and picked up. You do need to know how to translate some of them (like the aura calls on Aaryonar), but GINA is absolutely not needed for any raid in CoV. In fact, for servers that lag a lot, having your raid force rely solely on GINA can cause failures. And excuses.

ToV could also be done without GINA and so could TBL (as long as you added /say to your window for Reparm). [ToFS 1 without a GINA trigger for restless ice level sucks though]

I couldn't live without GINA timers on adps/adps refresh though...And I'd never want to raid content without voice available.

My impression is that people who uses the ingame AT feature, are actively maintaining their own AT's specifically tailored to their individual playstyle, and are therefore usually quite reliable.

On the other hand we have some Gina users who struggles with messy triggers that overload the players with un-needed or outdated warnings, because they rely too much on other people to maintain their shared trigger-library, without double-checking the triggers themselves.
I have no doubt that Gina is useful, but programs that seems user-friendly, sometimes requires more maintenance than you would expect...

We leave the decision to use Gina or ingame ATs, up to the individual player though, what ever works best for them...


And it is also my impression that our raidleaders are very quick at typing, and that they have hotbuttons ready for the "ceremonial" strat descriptions(at least some of them).

We do have a voice chat, but it's not mandatory. Most find it very helpful. But some still prefer not to have extra chatter.

GINA is mandatory though. I cannot imagine not using it in current EQ.

My curiosity mostly stemmed from the fact that I'm nearly deaf, and struggle with voice chat. If I try really hard, and have my hearing aids in, I can decipher about half of what is being said. But it is really exhausting and not fun. My guild uses voice chat, but does not require it. They were very good for a long time about also typing instructions in text chat, but that has been less and less lately (and I don't blame them it all, it's a lot of work - I lead raids before Discord was a thing).
I've struggled to continue playing EQ for 5+ years now. And it's only recently occurred to me that the main reason for that is the social disconnect I've experienced from everyone moving to voice chat and away from chatting in text channels.
I have no intentions on jumping ship, so don't view this as a recruitment post lol. Was just a curiosity I've been pondering lately.

curious , what class are you playing? some class got it easy to check emotes , those who need to keep their group alive since they can die very fast , need to focus a lot on checking their hp's ect .

I prefer typing to voice chat (like listening to music while EQing). But I can understand your frustration. We had a bard who is hard of hearing so really could not use voice chat awhile back and TBL was okay, but the ease of ToV meant we weren't as focused on raid instructions, especially typing stuff, and it wasn't really working for either him or the guild...he's retired at this point.

I assume your guildmates know your situation well. I know most guilds have gone through a good amount of roster turnover lately. If you have a lot of new folks, I'd make sure everyone is aware that you prefer the written word.

And I think it depends on the guild/group but we still do a fair amount of typing in guild here in MS. Although sometimes I feel like I'm talking (typing) to myself. Modern EQ can be hard to play at a good clip and type ... but I think it is what it is at this point.

Edit - I think I've died more to trying to type during fighting than actually bad pulls over the last few expansions. Sometimes the joke is more important...

Wizard main, but I play a paladin on alt raids. I actually don't turn GINA on that much when playing the paladin (different computers).

My experience has been once you get past a certain level of competence in raiding, most emote failures are because the raider has other things in RL to distract him/her (videos, web sites, children, spouses, very loud birds, etc) and is less about GINA failures. Most of the emotes flash in the middle of your screen ... that should easily trigger you to look in your emote window and double check if you are listed. But that's hard to do if you are pressing your multibind watching Netflix and miss it.

I'm relatively new to raiding (less than 3 years), so I was worried enough about emotes when starting at the end of RoS that I wanted my own backup separate from GINA. So I figured out the filters, placed the window in a good spot (and tweaked until it was comfortable), and focused on always glancing there during fights. When the lag started to get bad, I was ignoring 90+% of the GINA triggers for emotes given to me because I knew the text and saw the text. So it wasn't that big a deal.

I think there are a lot of folks who have raided a long time and have been very resistant to changing their setup (aka GINA emote focus) and are paying the price when lag got bad.

For me, the in game AT feature is better than GINA because it is less distracting and doesn't require a third party app. There no clutter with ATs and I don't need to watch timers tick for whatever reason or those things that other players do that are important to me. I do think there is a tendency for some people to overthink (and a lot who underthink it) the game.

As for voice chat, it depends on both the audience and speaker. I do better with typed instructions for complicated things because I can go back over them, but a raid leader being able to get out quick instructions mid-fight is a great tool too. Like GINA though, it is not necessary to raid efficiently.

Most of those who don't use GINA use ingame triggers. Which are faster than GINA, I've been told I've already moved before GINA even triggers the emote. MY triggers are a lot of Caption Jack Sparrow clips, which keep me amused while I raid, though some of my AT voices go back to PoR raids. GINA players tend to be the ones do not adapt well and miss things when 2 ATs go off at once.

Chat for us would be a nightmare, we have many different nationalities so the spoke word for some is not easy to understand, so writen word is better. We have a discord for those who want to use it, might find maybe 10 people in there on a good night. Discord is set up with german, french and english channels which helps if someone doesn't understand what is being said and needs it translated. For things like Chardok 3 we had 3 players on Skype doing the clicks for the orbs.

I would imagine AB would be one of the last servers to start using chat due to language issues.

this is one reason we do all RI in /rs we have 1 or 2 members in guild who have the same issues.