I am as tired of hearing the constant complaints about this raid as anyone else is. BETA for Ring of Scale is open, so here is your free guide to beating the Queen. First of all, there is alot to discuss and coordinate before the tank ever starts this raid. A raid leader or coordinator should be able to assess the forces present at the raid and assign certain abilities to be cast at certain marks during the raid. I make sure my Shaman have an order for tranquil blessing or MGB casting Ancestral Aid, Clerics are casting Celestial Regen and Druids are casting Peaceful wood. We know that there are five percentages that you deal with the Captains add spawns, 100, 80, 60, 40 and 20 percent. My advice is to assign shaman clerics and druids by alphabetical order to cast thier AE heals at each of those 20% interval marks. It is up to the raid leader to ensure that these spells have indeed been cast. Make a gina trigger if you need to. Circle of Power, Life and Mana, as well as Guardian Circle should be coordinated for the event. Auspice and Warcry too. These concepts apply to all raids, but are especially necessary on the Queen. Positioning on this raid is critical. Keep in mind that this event is a giant DPS check. If you are screwing around far away from the spawn points of the Captains, and are far away from the tunnel then you are wasting time that should be devoted to dps. Place a campfire directly south of the tunnel entrance in the middle of both sets of Captains and their crews. The melee and tanks need to be tight on the campfire. Healers and casters can be on the north side of the campfire, but not inside the tunnel facing north. Melee should be on the south side of the campfire facing north towards the tunnel. When your name gets called for Doomlight you can quickly run north to the 3-way down the tunnel. I recommend clicking off levi spells so you dont get hung up on the wall or inside the tunnel. A ton of responsibility is on the tanks to pull whatever they are tanking so that the feet of their mob is in the campfire and then maintaining their agro, and staying the heck alive. Competent tanks with good positioning and agro means that your melee dps can stand there and kick some without having to wander around looking for the next mob to assist on. When you are ready to start the event. The Queen tank should be standing directly in front of her with a hotkey with the trigger phrase on it. Have attack on and be ready with Flash or Fort and get ready to crank agro. There is a short delay after the trigger so it is important that the raid leader or tank gives a good accurate countdown til engage. Healing should be cranked up before the Queen goes live. Knights or additional warriors that are assigned to the Captains and adds should be ready with Flash/Shieldflash or Fort/Deflections at the start. If Warcasters are up on the first spawn before trigger, do yourselves a favor and use Fort or Deflect. If no Warcasters, use Flash/Shieldflash. All melee and tanks need to be aware that if Warcasters are up and you get hit by the fog, you are unable to use most of your abilities til the fog dissipates. I recommend melee/tanks hitting discs at 100% during the last few seconds of the countdown before the event goes live if Warcasters are up. When the countdown is about to reach zero, Ancestral Aid, Celestial Regen and all those other abilities we talked about coordinating at the start, should be up. You shouldnt be wondering if those abilities are on. If a player is assigned one of those, a raidleader should be able to count on that person hitting it. If someone fails to click their assignment, call them out and make sure it doesnt happen again next time. Meeting expectations is important. As soon as the event goes live and all the mobs, including Queen and the Captains, are pulled to the campfire, you need to unleash full Supernova burns and all holy hell AE healing. Get those adds down asap. It is important to express to your paladins, shaman and clerics that splash heals need to be hit on cooldown every time they repop. (Shaman Pro-tip - use Glacial Gift followed by Shear of Renewal then immediately Spiritual Swell). Learning how to power through the AE instead of trying to be cute and avoiding them will put you in a position to succeed on the Queen and many other events. DPS must not utilize AE effects except with great caution. Throughout the event people will be charmed, usually healers, and killing them through careless dps is shooting yourself in the foot. Raid leaders have to be stern with the dps that kill charmed players. Berserkers especially need to look at the ETW for charmed players to make sure that it is clear before they hit Rampage, Arcslice or Warcry of the Braxi and should not be using Furious Rampage on this event whatsoever. On the other hand, it is important for charmed people that die to know that if they picked a fight with an SK or warrior while charmed, there is not much they can do about that. Assuming things went well on the first set, your dps should be chugging quickly towards 80%. Tanks need to be ready for the next set of adds, and the next assignments of Ancestral Aid, Celestial Regen Etc should be ready to hit their abilities BEFORE the Queen hits 80%. If you get Warcasters on this set, tanks need to have their Fort or Deflect available and AE heals need to be hammering away while you deal with adds. Be sure to get all those adds to the campfire! Sometime around here, you are probably going to get your first set of Sycophants and the puppet. Knights need to be at the tunnel entrance or all the way down by the 3-way to grab them and get them to the campfire ASAP. Remember this is a DPS check event, every second that those mobs are lollygagging around and arent at the campfire with DPS applied, the clock is ticking. Unless youre going for the Charm ACH, dont charm the puppets. Its a rookie mistake for a guild with low dps to try charming these to use them instead of just killing them as they spawn. When you have 3 or 4 chanters with charmed puppets and someone eats the Doomlight, now you have 3 or 4 loose puppets that are just itching to wipe your raid. Remind the raid to reorient themselves so they are facing north often. Doomlight typically starts sometime around 55% but can vary a lot. Everyone should have an audio trigger or Gina trigger for these lines of text. Sunlight gathers around you = run down the tunnel to the 3-way. The gathered sunlight dims = safe to return to raid. Be sure to reapply burn abilities every time they refresh. Dps groups should be coordinating clicking burn abilities, or the entire raid can synchronize if youre up to it. The interval between Doomlight and Sycophant adds spawning will get shorter and shorter every time they occur. You have to be ready for this. Failing the emote makes a tough raid that much tougher. Failing to get Sycophants to the raid and killed quickly eats away at the overall dps on the Queen. Casters and rangers need to be ready with Eradicate Magic or Entropy of Nature to dispell the Queens reflection. I recommend utilizing necros if you have them, because they should be on the Queen the entire time for proper dot application. At approximately 15% the Queen will summon a mount because she is getting bored and is missing Desperate Housewives of Chardok. The mount will not appear on you etw on its own, but you can set one of your ETW locations to 'raid assist 1, 2 or 3 target" and so long as the assists are on the ball, you will see when the mount is up and dies. Make a /tar vel hotkey so that you may target the mount while it is up. Come to me, my pets = the trigger phrase for the mount spawning. She may call on the mounts several times, depending on how fast or slow your dps is. I have experienced the frustration that goes along with raiding the Queen in a guild/raid force that struggles on this event on my alt on open raids. Invariably the strategies are designed to try to get cute and avoid AE's by some trick of positioning. When you do this, you are never going to be successful at avoiding all the AE's 100% of the time, so it is essentially a death sentence for the players that get hit by the AE's because you do not have the AE healing in place to counter it. In struggling guilds, the tanks are poor so they either die often or fail to keep agro which leads to dps deaths. Healers are often boxed or have tunnel vision on spam healing the tank. They sometimes wouldnt know what an AE heal was if it bit them in the backside. DPS players are often flubbing along doing a pathetic amount of their classes maximum potential. ADPS classes often fail to hit their ADPS. These are all aspects that are directly under player control and can make or break a raidforce. The first complaint I hear in regards to the strategy I have outlined above is "we cant survive the AE's, there is not enough AE healing for that" BS. You absolutely can. My guild and many others beat this raid when the greater share of our members were in mostly TBM raid gear. All the guilds that have been stuck in the Droga/Lceanium/Prince raid trio for the better part of this last year should be in far superior gear to the guilds that beat these raids for the first time last December. The tools are there, you just have to use them. Here is the last Twitch recording of the Queen I could see on Zaknaffeins history. https://go.twitch.tv/videos/181062750 We performed like crap that night, but still got the event down. Then we wiped to Vault but got it down on the 2nd attempt. Even strong guilds are going to fail these events from time to time. Its important to not get discouraged. We got Queen down for a personal record time of 5:20 this week. I know other guilds beat it even faster. Track your successful runs and push to beat your personal records every single time. Many other guilds do the Queen different ways and are successful. Most of them try to get cute and avoid the AE's. Weaker guilds will struggle far more with the cutesy Queen strats than the simpler method that I use, that we just power through it. Always remember, the more complex a strategy is, the more that can go wrong. The most important thing to note, if youre trying to beat this raid with 42 people for the first time, you are almost certainly going to fail. Recruit better. Invite guests. Allow members that are capable of boxing a bard or another easy box class to do so. (I know there is a vast difference between an elite bard and a boxed bard, no offense intended!) It is not ok to beg for this raid to be nerfed because your guild or raid team fails to beat it when you cannot even field a full force of decent players. If you need more advice that is tailored more to the strengths and weaknesses of your raid force I will be happy to help you come up with something that will work for you. Youre welcome.
I find it hard to believe no mention of Shaman or Cleric Alliance in your strat. IMO Alliance *is* the strat for keeping up the large percentage of your raid force. The person who heals me the most is generally the Queen tank, even when I play a tank on this raid, the most heals always comes from the Queen tank. I'm sure folks appreciate the strat tho - But I honestly think it's a mistake by the Dev's to not allow non Kar'Zok folks a shot at least at the T1 RoS raids. And I hope others vote with their wallets like me.
Alliance is in deed huge on this. (and many other events) Your writeup seems overly complex, but then I've never experienced the raid with weak dps. Sounds mostly right to me though mechanic wise.
Light variantions on positioning aside, this is one way of doing it. And very similar to how we did it. Yet, people also have to be aware that the strat presented is heavily dependant on the healing side. Not all guilds have the luxury we do in that regard. All in all, i personally call the presented strat the "hard mode" one. Another guild on our server does it VERY differently and they're having an easier time. Yes, some time is "lost" by the longer ways. But doomlight is NOT the issue - time is ample to run from the south to the tunnel into safety. And the effect is easy to see, so no excuses to die. Also, with the changes over time to this event, it has become progressively harder to beat. At one time (following our slight variation of the above) i had 4 or 5 different negative effects on me. If your guild struggles with healing in this event, you will probably want to reduce that overlap as much as possible - and in that case the above probably isn't the "right thing" for you. I am not about to give any detailed strat, because what works for one does not necessarily work for the next guild. But if the above does not work for you, then take a closer look at AE ranges vs. spell ranges for example. Use the terrain. Basically the entire north side of the area is fine for (off)tanking, some spots are better than others. Having the melees semi-stable at Queen while the ranged deals with repops is possible, as is grabbing and kiting the 20% repops (by a "knight-chain" perhaps, so at each point you have one with deflection up). AE'ing the warcasters (and their single repops) though is basically a must since the change that made them more susceptible to that type of spells. And Alliances, as also mentioned in one of the replies above! p.s.: preactivating some defensives prior to engage (if warcasters are up) or the 20% marks as mentioned above is not a joke - do it! Even if that means "killing" a disc a bit early if it is about to run out in the next 3% or so anyways and using something else instead. Of course, whether Fort (as mentioned above) is carrying you through the repops or if you better use some kind of mitigation disc much depends on your ability to dispatch of the adds quickly.
You guys are right, Alliances are huge, but I consider that general raid practice and not something that is specific to the Queen. I suppose it warrants mentioning that healers should be using Alliances on tanks that are not in their group, as your own heals will not be eating the counters towards fulmination on the tank that you yourself cast alliance on. Priest Alliance targets should be assigned for all 3 classes before the event by a priest boss/officer. Additionally, healers should be running Responsive Spirits, Nature Spirits and Divine Spirits to fire those additional group heals. Druids and Shammys should be running Ferocious Growth on themselves as number 1 priority, and any other players as lower priority. A dead healer is not doing their job. For all players, on events like Queen with the big AE dmg, you should be running the Geomantic Steelstone powersource since Hp > All. Finally, I advocate swapping some or all of your slot 5 augs to stamina as you will gain several thousand hp if you find that you struggle to stay alive on events like Queen. Again Hp > all. Your heroic dex, wis/int or agi arent worth jack if you die to AE's. Dead dps is zero dps. Dead healers are zero heals. Dead tanks are not tanking.
I couldnt disagree more. What is more simple than standing in the middle of all the mobs and powering through it? I will bite. What does constitute ROV worthy DPS? I would be shocked if your best times on Queen are much better than 5 minutes. If they are, kudos.
A discussion on which strat is "better" or how "static DPS" is good for it's output is not needed i think. It's mostly moot and totally dependant on the guild's roster. All in all though, i found the trend to a static raid force and "active" tanks responsible for positioning the mobs to "spoon-feed" the DPS a rather disturbing one. This leads to complacency and it's no wonder that some people are missing emotes or even "dare" to go afk mid-raid as a result of this.
That is completely ridiculous. If your tanks cannot be counted on to stand in a particular place while they tank stuff, then youre in really bad shape. Standing at the campfire and pulling mobs there so that melee can be "spoon fed" does not lead to complacency, it leads to efficiency. Players being able to predict where the mobs will be and position themselves accordingly so that, in this case, they can quickly run a short distance in a direction that they are already facing to avoid Doomlight is again, efficient. We arent talking about some easy cake-walk raid. This raid is causing guilds to fold. Any and every single thing that struggling guilds can do to make it more efficient for their dps players to apply their damage, is a move in the right direction.
Thanks Maedhros for sharing. Personally, i find the strategy set-up and tactical execution of raids to be the most interesting thing happening in Everquest. When you throw egos and the human nature of leadership and crowds into the equation, the variances in successful runs of any given raid can be quite wide. The method you've laid out here looks like it requires fairly strong coordination and organization, not only among the archetypes but between them. It probably runs very smoothly most of the time and blows up spectacularly when a couple key mistakes are made. While i won't expand upon how my guild works through this event, i will say that success can be had against queen given a force with lower dps, a more chaotic tilt to coordination and a number of people not playing up to their maximum potential. You may have to "get cute" as you put it. Queen is certainly a gatekeeper event. 3 of the 4 aspects of raiding (as i see it) have to be meeting a reasonably high bar of performance to win - Tanking, Healing and DPS. Your strat more or less ignores the Utility angle and i respect that, but with lesser DPS output from your raid force, this can definitely make a difference.
Failing to read the strat posted above in it's entirety, likely means you also missed this (well placed) comic relief as well. Well played.... -Rat
*sigh* One up for yet again not getting the point. Of course we tanks can be counted to (mostly) stand in a particular place. That is not the problem. The problem i've seen over the past expansions with "presenting" the mobs to the DPS like you do food to a toddler is that they (the bulk of the raid) gets used to being immobile far too much. And i don't think that is a good idea, overall. Efficient and in some events "needed" yes. But there is some... inertia developing from this that i've witnessed in many situations. Mostly those, when things start hitting the fan and people start running around like headless chicken. A prominent example i've seen with Wither+Decay... I am convinced that the strongest raid force isn't the most micro-managed and spoon-fed one, but the one whose members have exceptionally high situational awareness and the mental... flexibility as well as the "trust" in (or intimate knowledge of) the reactions of their peers. While we always strived to have as static a raid as possible, i feel what had a lot more movement and such back in the old days, e.g. in DoN raids ("shoulder my burden"). And that wasn't all too bad a thing.
Why are people arguing with someone trying to help others????? I don't see anyone else writing up a long post with proven strats that work. Instead of arguing the strat employed, post another strat that works as well. It took him some time to write this up and post, I don't get others coming here and arguing it. Write up an alternative strat that is proven to work or call out things that should be obvious like alliances in case some guilds are still not using them. Yes, tank positioning is crucial. As a rogue main for raids, It makes me more efficient with doing dps on a mob's back instead of constantly trying to figure out where the backs are in a big group of mobs. I follow the MA and stay on south side and rock. If I get Doomlight, I am in the tunnel and back out in less than 20 seconds and right back to doing dps. You don't want your dps having to chase mobs around or when switching to next target, having to run somewhere to do more dps. If they are all at the campfire, dps is highly efficient. Efficient is not being lazy or complacent. Also, equip your melee types with poisons they can use, it helps with the rogue's alliance to fire and helps them do more dps. Teamwork. If I was able to help another member in the raid do more dps, I would gladly do so even if it meant I got bumped down the parse rankings. If you have members that won't execute or do the things that are needed to beat a raid, then why have them? If friendship and personality are more important than doing what is needed, then why raid? You can have both. If you want ignore group progression and just raid, how are you going to have strong enough characters to employ and execute the strat needed to beat a tough raid? I see horses being led to water, but those horses dying of thirst. Maybe they don't want to bend their necks down to reap the benefit? Teamwork. You will never beat these harder raids if you can't operate as a team. Know your roles and do them the way they should be done in whatever strat is used.
The low dps comment was in reference to how all of the positioning stuff. To me it doesn't seem hard for the dps to stand behind the mob and hit it. As for times, I'm not sure. I just know that after doing EOK for a year, each run feels like a week.
Though coordinating alliance casts among clerics and shamans as suggested is fine (druid alliance is just bad due to its inferior range unless there is a severe lack of other alliance casters) , I'd recommend that a raid team leave alliance casts to shamans, provided there are enough of them willing to do it (1-2 motivated shaman alliance casters are enough for us and we often get by with 1). Aside from the larger AOE heal range of shaman alliance (60 feet compared to 50 feet for cleric alliance), having shamans use their alliance prevents all clerics from being excluded from proc'ing it on anyone. That's not to say that excluding shamans as proc'ers is a good thing (they can be really good single-target healers if they are focused on it), but clerics have more fast-cast heals and (generally) a higher single-target heal output, so they are better proc'ers and if a priest has to be excluded from proc'ing alliance, it's better that it is a shaman than a cleric.
I feel like I should emphasize that I have raided the Queen with an open raid team that has a success rate history of 1 Queen win for approximately every 10 wipes. In ROTE, we failed Queen 2 weeks ago because of Doomlight failers. Sometimes people fail to pay attention for just long enough that even a good raid will get stomped. Before that, I dont know the last time we failed Queen, sometime in the spring perhaps. I have watched what is successful in a high end guild and what is successful in a low end raid force. I have seen what does not work well for both. The evolution of my Queen strat is with repetition in mind. Any strat that is chaos and reliant on luck of the draw with Warcasters is a bad strat that is difficult to repeat. If you fail to plan on how to power through Warcaster fog, then you are planning to fail when the Warcasters spawn. All the raid forces that try to "hide" the raid far away from the Captain spawn points I am sure will tell you that it works great some of the time, but on the times that there is a tank fail and Warcasters get to the raid and hit fog, what is the panic level there? How often does this lead to a wipe? I assure you, there is no panic in ROTE when Warcaster fog hits, because it hits at least 2 times every single time we do Queen. I apply the "keep it simple stupid" process to every raid strat that ROTE employs, because complexity just means there are more steps that can go wrong. I know there are guilds that go with complexity and kick butt at it, but this causes a high learning curve for any new apps or returning players that have never done a particular event before. Complex is also pretty highly unlikely to lead to success in low tier guilds that are struggling with the Queen right now. Know the intended audience, I do. What I fail to understand is for those of you that are calling my strat "hardmode" or too complex, which part exactly are you referring to? I may be able to give some more in detail explanation of those parts like how I broke down tank positioning for Zhaunil_AB. Coordinating things like Ancestral Aid, Celestial Regen etc I imagine can seem complicated, but it is nothing more than noting the alphabetical list of your players of a given class and then saying "hey shammy_02 youre on Ancestral Aid at 80". 100% agree with Clarisa, if you can simplify it down and have 1 or 2 shammys with high attendance that you can rely on to hit all the tanks with Alliance, thats the best bang for the buck youre going to get. Thanks for the shout out Belexes.
Any strat that Maedhros lays out will sound like it has that requirement, because that's how Maedhros plays and experiences EverQuest. His… style includes things like the the raid leader (ahem, that's Maedhros) "coordinating" (an unkind observer might say micromanaging) anything on a larger scale than each player's multibind. Buffs, debuffs, epics, discs, you name it - from Maedhros' perspective, that's all on Maedhros. The stream he's linked shows off some of that…style.
I'm going to give everyone the super top secret strat for EVERY EoK raid... At the end of the night, if your log is not at least 65% consumed by... You are healed by an ancient alliance. You have been healed for 11820 points. Then you're not winning.
