DPS Checks are costing you money.

In mid tiered guilds you cant just build dps groups around classes as the norm. You have to reward effort based on the individual.

If you have a few bad zerkers or rogues or wizards or whatever you are much better off putting a decent monk or ranger or mage in the good adps supported group instead even if their potential is a lot lower to start. Someone who just plays the right dps class but stinks at parsing should not be getting what adps you have if you want to win in many cases.

mobs have always powered up at the end of a fight... remember when Enrage was the end-of-fight mechanic of the day? or mobs that started to AE rampage at a certain point? it's just another mechanic. the concept of a final burst of strength for a last stand isn't alien to the fantasy genre (nor is it foreign to EQ really)

it goes along with the idea of preparation for future events. endurance/stamina whatever you wanna call it is important in some events. the idea of having an achievement as a "check" to see if you're really ready for future events makes sense to me... even if that's not how most guilds use those achievements.

The basic problem is that EQ is on a slow downhill slope to death. Player population is dropping, and raid teams have a difficult time recruiting. We need to fix problems. A problem has been brought up in these posts, and high end raiders aren't looking at what can be done to change the design, keeping the challenge, but give more people a chance to experience raid content. Telling casual raiders to look at parses is not helping solve the problem. Even if every casual raider were perfect, raiding with only about 40 peeps is pretty hard to succeed.

As player population has steadily declined, the game design has not been adjusted for fewer players being available.

What's the basis of 54 being the magic number to design for? Maybe it's time to ask why 54, for the good of the game, maybe DB should be designing for something lower. If 42 or 48 would get more people into doing raid content, then all would benefit.

If we don't keep in mind what will keep people playing EQ, then the game will die.

Mid tier and family guilds have plenty of raidable content. If they are unwilling to put forth the effort to down half of the most recent expansion and have no desire to do the most basic of things such as reviewing parses etc. then they can enjoy the much easier content the game has to offer. Most of the folks in this thread aren't illustrating that they are struggling to field a raid force. They are fielding full raids and still greatly underachieving. Some of these guilds have long histories of such that date expansions long past EoK. I have not seen a single parse in this entire thread asking for help or what can be done to improve(threads like these magically tend to never have them).

I'm willing to bet a hamburger that every 40 person raid force on EverQuest Live has the potential to double its own dps. Mine is one of the most successful 40 man raid forces in EverQuest; clearing Kor-Sha Labs is pretty automatic, beating Queen & Vault is volitional (unless the stars align so we get 50 in raid. then they're pretty easy) -- and I know for sure our dps could double. I know the specific players it would take caring more and learning more and then playing harder to get there. (it's most of us, obviously not claiming to be elite here ) I'm lucky to raid with just enough players that already care, and learn, and play hard to have examples handy for what's possible, or at least have hints of that on their good nights. I "look at the parses" to see what they're doing differently to provide that higher standard, and can see how the other players of their classes aren't matching that.

Telling casual raiders that low dps is a problem for developers to solve is not helping solve the problem.

These raids are easily beatable with 40 as is (and I'm not talking about 40 top tier players either). Lower the number, and they become easy with 30 or less. We have 16 different classes. Reduce the number that raids are designed for, and several classes don't have room because you'll still need a certain number of tanks and healers regardless.

Just because some guilds are struggling to field 54 person raids doesnt mean that they all are. Tailoring raids to be 42 people will cause problems in the many guilds that are not struggling with attendance.

We are seeing the normal ebb and flow of guild creation and destruction right now thats been going on for nearly 2 decades..
As some older guilds are failing to progress and numbers drop they are not replacing the lost players fast enough. That is not the games fault, that is a guild leadership problem.
Some guilds are failing and their members scatter to new guilds and some quit, but again, this is the guilds problem more than the games problem.
I hate to see guilds fall and I hate to see people quit, but changing the game at this point to make it easier or to be 42 person raids is not a solution, it just creates different problems.

I will be more than happy to talk to the leadership of any guilds that are struggling about any aspects of raiding, or of training under-performing players, or at recruiting pretty much anytime in game outside of ROTE raid times. We can even chat in teamspeak or mumble or anything like that.
Dont let your guilds fold without putting up a fight. Stop being too proud to ask for help.

in 7 pages , I've still yet to see a coherent argument as to why a hard coded games up "thanks for trying....not" mechanic helps anyone.

If said guild will beat the event in 40 minutes , when Uber_guild_101 beats it in 5, who does that bother or affect ?

Its part of the challenge of the event. You have so many minutes to get it done before it becomes incredibly difficult to win.
There are not really any legitimate complaints on this.
If you cannot beat this event with 40 ish people, get more people and try again.
If you cant beat this event with 54 people, train up your people and try again.
If you still cant beat it with 54 people that have been trained up... you need different people or at least a different raid leader.

Who does it hurt if raids can limp their way through it in an hour? Noone really, but thats a pretty terrible argument for making it easy-modelol.

If I cant finish a marathon I shouldnt whine that its too long and get them to change the parameters of a marathon so that the distance is short enough that I can complete it, I need to instead learn how to run long enough to complete the marathon.

Get the heck out of here with participation trophies. Youre going to have to earn your 26.2 bumper sticker.

This entire thing is going to be moot in 2 months when people are 110.

Well, except for the new raids presumably in RoS

I will say I prefer a more organic sort of loss to low dps than hard Enrages, though. Adds piling up, boss gradually powering up over a longer period, resources running down, that sort of thing. Much harder to tune, of course, than "at 24 minutes she AEs all mana users straight to death"

So people who run marathons in 5 hours should just give up because they can't do it in 2 hours like the pro's ? " that's it mate , go back and learn to run "

FYI, Google returns an https URL for the site, and trying to follow it you get NET_ERR_CERT_REVOKED even though expiration date is indeed in 2019. However, if you take out the s in https, site loads normally.

My analogy was about completing a marathon. The queen is not a marathon though so maybe a better analogy is a sprint. A sprint where they give you a head start and then release a bunch of hungry, angry, wolves to chase you. Hopefully you can finish before you get caught!
Either way, earn the win and stop trying to get it nerfed even more. It used to be possible to have warcasters at 100, 80, 60, 40 and 20.

This parse helps nothing other than showing that rogue 1 is mediocre and rogue 2 and 3 are pretty terrible or died 10 times. A group geared rogue with no adps can do more than 80k dmg total on a prince raid....... Also how long was this fight for your guild? This looks like a playerskill issue or ya'lls adps is that bad.

If it worked like that I wouldn't mind , hell , if she called her soko mount every 5 seconds , that would be a great mechanic , "im bored and im outta here" , unless you can keep the damn mounts dead , and the sychos , and still keep add more dps more than her innate regen.. this 5s dot and doomlight is plainly awful.

Honestly I like a hard event ,I just dislike the way DBG coded the finish , that stops any kind of emergent gameplay other than "DPS MOAR harder newbs"

Im not trying to NERF the event , I would like the stop mechanic looking at , as I think its lame.

Did you actually read what I wrote? Or did you just see parse numbers and decide it was a good opportunity to try and show off how elite you were by putting others down?

What I wrote is actually exactly what it is that you are trying to say with that last line. I wasn't trying to show anything more than it was adps and player skill that is essentially the difference between those damage numbers. I wasnt trying to represent them as good, bad or otherwise. I am simply trying to say that if you want to try and increase your guild/raid team dps output to beat these type of events, you simply have to look at your teams adps coordination and usage, and the players effort to actually do proper dps numbers.

But I appreciate your failed attempt prove yourself as elite. Maybe you are an elite raider, but you are not an elite reader

I've put myself in zero-ADPS groups before on raids to give newcomers full ADPS to properly evaluate them. (No point in giving them a crap group and calling them crap). Comparing my no-ADPS parses to my full-ADPS parses, I don't get double the DPS. So, lets call it double the DPS if you're in a proper group for ease of calculations - I think that's generous.

Looking at a 34k parse isn't an ADPS issue. Give them full ADPS and they might be hitting 70k if everything went correctly. They're still less than half of the top rogue. They died, they're positioned incorrectly, they're not using discs, they're slow to get to the mob, whatever. It's not an ADPS issue. The other rogue at 67k is still coming out less than half of the top rogue - again, it's not an ADPS issue.

From another angle, lets take away the top rogue's ADPS. They'll drop half, from 157 to 78.5. That's the new target for the other rogues. Proper disc rotation, proper positioning, proper engage on the mobs, and you've now more than doubled your DPS without changing your group structure at all.

Yes ADPS is important. But there are so many things that one can do to improve their own DPS outside of ADPS.

These numbers are from a raid that lasted 23 minutes.
All Rogues had reasonable aDPS support.
With EoK raid weapons I'm not sure how those numbers are even possible but it is what it is.

The raid size is exactly where the problem is. You can fix someone's DPS as long as they consistently show for raids. Getting 54 players to consistently show for raids is physically impossible for most small guilds. A decent raid GM can ensure his guild is consistent with raiders, but he cannot ensure another guilds player consistently. This is where guild teams breakdown. The the only real solution to the OPs problem is smaller raida.

It's a perfectly valid mechanic that's used in countless games. Time limits add challenge and are easy to implement. They're not going to give up one of the few options they have to make things different/interesting each year. Plus the obvious benefit to a time limit is that players won't have to suffer through a 40 minute event which would likely trigger even less people showing up in the future.

What I don't understand from this thread is what the goal is really about. Do you want to be able to complete all raids even though your raid force doesn't meet the requirements the devs had in mind? Or do you want them to add new raids that are tuned for less people so that you have something for smaller guilds to do? If they had 30 and 40 man raids would you still complain if you're not able to complete the content aimed at 54?