DPS Checks are costing you money.

EoK raid weapons are maybe 10k dps more than TDS (not a typo) raid weapons. Other than game play/deaths, you need to look at AA (the biggest factor), Disc ranks (old ones like at RoF and CotF), and progression completion (dicho ranks, Heroe's Fortitude).

A 23 minute fight is actually fairly optimum for rogues as that gives them a second burn right near the end to boost their average. Depending on when the last set of alchemists were, that's possibly two opportunities to AE and get some even bigger numbers.

Edit.... I should learn better math. Was thinking 13 minutes. 23 would be 3 burns

Sorry, no.
If there are 40 guilds with 40 players struggling on an average night, thats the problem.
There should be some restructuring to get it closer to the 54 mark. If those 1600 people were spread to 30 guilds, you would have pretty close to 54.
I understand that it sucks to see guilds crumble, but thats just part of an mmo, it keeps the system healthy. Weaker guilds crumble and their players are free to goto new guilds to replenish them.
The real difficult part is getting people to not flat out quit, and instead goto a new guild.

As others have mentioned, before the massive power up on EOK group gear, guilds that were far behind in content would simply continue to raid previous expansion raids and then would make their way forward at whatever pace suited them.
The group gear in EOK is just too good, and it pretty much ended the need to do any raids prior to EOK for anything other than ACH for special things like the Eyes of Life and Decay or the Mask of Immortal End.
Lets hope that in the future, the group gear is always a bit worse than the previous expansions raid gear at the bare minimum.

Every guild is recruiting classes right now that they normally would not getting ready for BETA. Why is that? It's because we *ALL* have turnover. Not one guild raiding bleeding edge content isn't almost always recruiting. As the player base continues to fall, something has to be done to the keep the game on. 42 man raids would be a start. Yes, right now it would be terrible deciding who to let raid. People put a lot of time and effort into being in a raiding guild between learning and improving on the events themselves to getting Progression, AA's and Augs done ASAP. The long term health of the game would benefit in a big way from shrinking raid sizes.

Who really wants to do Raid achievements for Augs for all your newer packs of members every summer? It's a constant work in progress no one wants to do that did the entire raid cycle for TBM and this year with EOK. I REALLY DISLIKE TBM for the record. It's all because of turnover - and if you claim not to have it, you're lying to prop up your guild to something more than what the reality is. Nerfs, two decades of playing the same game, real life, god forbid health - all of that effects EVERY guild in EQ.

Shrink raids and make EQ ! <---Sorry I had too

Having a decent amount of people log in for raids would be a good start....40 will actually do to beat EoK.

Having people that know how to play their class helps more that the sheer force of numbers.

Dumbing down the raids is honestly not needed, they really are not that hard ( Valhallah clears EoK in 3-3 1/2 hours one night a week).

Like it our not some guild just will not beat what is considered current content until 1-2 expansions later. This doesn't make them bad, just lacking in some areas that may or may not be possible to fix.

So when they shrink raids and rosters adjust to it in a year we will be talking about guilds struggling to get 42 people on for raids.
The number is not the problem, the recruiting is. Nothing is more attractive for recruits than being successful at beating content, that's why guilds that struggle end up struggling to recruit as well. It's a sad downward spiral.
Of course my guild has turnover. I think we have 10 recruits right now and turning more away all the time. You can see them on Magelo in case you want to fact check, recruits are the peasant rank.
Would it be more ideal to keep the players that got their TBM ach and are already fully geared? Well ya, but it's better to have new recruits that need to gear up and go back for ACH than the alternative of not being able to stay competitive.
Guild management is a 365 days a year job.

Other side of the coin would be making raids easier and top guild split raining them causing lesser guild to complain more.

I agree with literally everything you are saying here. The problem is, for how long is 54 really sustainable? That's why this is even a discussion right now.

42-man raids is a terrible idea.
So if a guild consistently has 54 people log in for raids (barring the occasional excess) 12 of them now get to ride the bench?
You could run a second raid in parallel but now you need an additional 30 raiders which most guilds probably don't have, unless right now currently every raid day they have 84 people ready to go.

Sadly, I don't foresee DBG putting forth any effort to modify EoK raids at this point in their life cycles, specially with RoS right around the corner. With the incoming power upgrade players will naturally receive with a 5 level increase, modifying would be a waste of man power in my mind. The good news is, this is the perfect time of year for those guilds that are currently struggling in Mid EoK raids to "Change their stars" (sorry for the movie quote).

The reason why the "lower" guilds feel that the "higher" guilds always set the raid difficulties in the new expansions is because they are. The reason behind this...the "higher" guilds are the only people that do a full roster /beta, and start raiding the new content while it is being created. Most of the guilds that do that will never have a Developer tagging along during the raid making tweaks, but will be able to make valuable comments in the Beta forums Raid tab due to their first hand experience. I know that the Dev's actually keep on top of those posts, even more if the input is valid. (not complaints) Example: Only a few high end guilds were testing Chardok during EoK Beta. During the Vault event, one of those guilds made fun of the fact that the initial adds were more of an annoyance than a challenge, and that the Devs should either add more and give them more power, or take them out all together. Now you have more for the challenge...see, Devs listen, but they won't listen to you if you aren't there.

Back to how you can "Change your stars"(Great movie). Before your next raid cycle, hold a Guild meeting and see how many of your 40-45 raiders are going to /beta. If that number is too low, motivate. If motivating is not enough, send a tell to the guild leader of another struggling guild and work out a /beta guild merge (doesn't even have to be from the same server). Once you have your /beta numbers up to 40-54, change your /guild MOTD to say that the month of November is Beta raiding during your normal raid times. Now it is time to get to work. Actually do those raids that are available. I am sure the Devs would love to get valid input from guilds that are only fielding around 40-50 a night...at least for the lower tier raids. This is the only way that I can see a "lower" guild ever being able to have the same input to raids that the "higher" guilds always have.

"Yes William, if he believes enough, a man can do anything"

Disclaimer: In no way am I affiliated with DBG. Buy the expansion to get into /beta or don't, that is up to you.

Maybe, just maybe, people need to accept that if they can field a force of 54 people and cannot beat content designed for a 54 person raid THEN THE FAULT IS ON THEM NOT THE CONTENT !! If you don't have the tools/skills to get the job done; then maybe you should go get some people that do, or get them for your self.
If you want to play easy mode, anyone can win mmopg ... then go play WoW.
If you want the best gear, items, etc the game offers then you got to earn it. That's life folks ... there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I'm all in favor of scaling raids based on number of people in the raid. I just don't know if it can be done in such a manner that difficulty stays the same no matter the number of people in the raid. I don't know if a simple math formula would work or not for example 48 people = mob hps/regen are 90% of max, 42 = 80%, 36 = 70%. All other raid mechanics stay 100% ..... I guess it would depend on the event as to whether the difficulty would be the same if scaled in such a manner. IE: Prince could easily be done with 1 tank group and 5 dps groups, Queen, Kar Zok, Vault would probably still require at least 2 tank groups and would probably be far more difficult with half the number of dps groups even if hps and regen were dropped by 30%.
Scale # of drops in chest in a like wise manner so fewer people = fewer items.

Then there is the issue of resources ... how much of the dev's time would be spent on designing scaled down versions of events?

It would be easier if DB would just do another server merge, but at this point I doubt they've got the resources to do so.

Doing so would enable those guilds that need, to consolidate into bigger guilds that have numbers. Having to get everyone to transfer servers would be annoying and just because of that, the thought of a partnership like that may not even come up.

To be fair, I really don't think this expansion nor the last expansion takes a full raid to beat.

The real reason mid tier guilds have issues is because there is a lack of accountability on the players within the guild. Most mid tiers anyway. They are afraid to tell someone to pick it up.

A lot of the raids in this expansion and last have mechanics in place that make it so that a single error by a single person will impact the raid as a whole. Viral dots, auras, AEs, etc. Queen, Vault and Karzok seem to be the raids that hold people up and each one of them has at least one of these mechanics. Populating a raid of 54 isn't necessarily a winning strategy if 5 of them stand in the wrong spot and kill the raid.

As others have posted, this expansion can be cleared with low numbers - Karzok / Dragon / Atrebe probably less-so if you don't have the blockers. But these people each need to know exactly what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. This isn't an elitist thing - if you get an aura around you and you need to act, you're not doing yourself any favours by standing next to the healers instead of isolating yourself.

Indeed, a truly awesome option would be scaling raids where you could specify size in groups, say from 4 to 9, and raid difficulty would scale accordingly. The hard mode where you get 6 group limit for a full-difficulty raid would still be available.
The rewards of raids would scale as well, in quantity. A 4-group raid would yield 1 item for every 3-4 from 9-group. Progression towards achievement/next tier would be a point system. If next tier requires 36 points, 9g raid will may award 12 points per win, while 4g may award 3. On the flip side, smaller raid may have shorter lockout, but the idea is that full 9g raid remains the most effective way of getting gear and progression, provided you can beat it.

Really, massive raids of EQ are a thing of the earlier days when they were in the open world and the only thing preventing guilds from throwing 100+ toons at an event was the resulting lag. However, the fact of life was that any smaller-scaled evernt would get zerged as long as the lag was within reason. With raids geting instanced, and number of people allowed to enter able to be strictly controlled, scalable raids shoulld have been a thing long ago.

Sorry that you see the truth as "putting people down" and the way ya'll seem to post your parses on forums is confusing with alot of useless info and old spells that aren't relevant and it would be more efficient to improve dps and adps coordination if your groups communicated and used the gamparse HTML file conversions to make it much much easier to read parses and ADPS/spell counts instead of going down a list of 500 spells that shows irrelevant info. Though it is true alot of becoming good dps really comes down to the player wanting to improve and adapt and any dps class without adps can put out respectable dps still better than that. Part of putting groups together correctly really involves the top players knowing who is top DPS/ADPS and coordinates well together, like is X bard syncing FE/2.0 with X shamans 2.0 all the time? It's really a group effort and the leaders should honestly talk with the players and get an idea of what would be their perfect group peoplewise and who syncs well together.

72 weren't sustainable, so raids were lowered to / tuned around 54.

Honestly, numbers are not "the solution" - not in "just recruit enough" nor in "lower required number".
It's the mechanics of raids that are "the issue" imo.
And that the DPS checks are overused.

Some guilds have enough DPS to even break scripts.
Other guilds, with a less-than-optimal composition, struggle more - some even to the point where events power up.
(and some of these power-ups are only manageable for that long before they mean certain wipe)

And as was said above, one member can spell doom for the entire raid.
That is bad enough when it is about an achievement, but for the normal course of the event such a hickup should be recoverable.
What's missing are innovative mechanics really.
Instead, they're clinging to unimaginative stuff like these DPS checks - probably because they are so easily coded/parsed.
And we're not talking "problem" here for any top15 to top20 guilds here, much less any top10 serverwide.
But for those guilds per server that for some reason or the rother can not compete with their server's number1.
Because those guild's rosters are often suboptimal and so things like alliances and "proper" aDPS are thing they can not employ as much.
But events do not care about raid compositions.
And that's why DPS checks are... bad.
At least when "perma"-used and especially when misused to create bottleneck events.

Seriously? The the 40 man raid that lacks proper DPS isn't because they all suck. They don't have the proper gear and AAs because they do not have enough players that are consistently raiding and doing progressive tasks for their character. My guess is they at least 18 to 24 well geared characters that raid consistently. Lowering the raid size would ABSOLUTELY help them.

You sound like the "old" people the OP is complaining about that simply do not want to change.

I think you'd have to look (by "you" I mean DBG, cause players don't have the data) at current pop on each server. You can't look at 54 man raids in a vacuum, you have to look at it in relation to how many people are on in prime time. At some point, the server pops just won't support 54 man raids. Some of them already may not.

There are two solutions... merge servers, which, with pick zones and instancing now available, isn't a bad idea. Or support more than one size fits all for a raid design (like WoW). Decrease the loot dropped for the smaller sized raid, so it's still the same proportion of drops/player.

How long have raids been 54 players?

Developers do not have the time to give multiple versions of raids. I think and believe the focus should not be on 18/24/36/54 players versions of raids, but rather getting to 54 players (or close). Developers should not adapt to us, we should adapt to raid content IMHO.

Then server merges are likely needed

How long do you think EQ can sustain 54 man raids outside of tlp? You already have uber guilds filling in the holes with bots.