How will the "Easy Mode" standard affect raiding?

What top tier guilds need help to "power through" events? =P

FV is only hitting 30s-40s in every raiding guild right now. Back in Feb-March there were benches in every guild, and now we're running through content with 5 or 6 groups, where we have rogues and mages and tanks all sharing a group because of how random the numbers are.

More difficult content by May/June of next year means more are going to quit the game, and not come back. Difficulty is great in the beginning, but after doing raids for 6 straight months and the weather turning nicer, this game is barely on life support.

We want challenging content, but we also want to be able to still raid content 4-6 months later.

Raiding elite will turn their noses up. This is a fine attempt at finding a balance between being able to raid and giving raids a choice.

Well done, Darkpaw.

What are you talking about? Why would the "raiding elite" care about these new banners? Since it sounds like they will cost the same as the current banners they will just use them and finish raiding a little faster.

Unless all missions can drop all ores, not really that big of a change.

You're still going to have 2 completely useless missions and 1 must clear on cooldown.

This! I have been raiding in EQ since raids existed and trust me, at this point an earlier night off ranks way higher than doing it the hard way! I only hope management agrees with me

I doubt the raiding elite will turn down any advantage. They may complain that it makes things too easy, but, they will use it every time.

Lol. No.

People will use it every time to get raids done as fast as possible, and be off to doing fun summer stuff IRL.

I dont think the new banner will make it easy mode. It will give a small bump to power.

I think this is awesome.
Not many guilds are still filling all 54 slots on their raid roster in the middle of summer.
This small bump in stats on the banner should help make up for the summer time attendance lull.
If this helps keep a few guilds afloat during the summer then I couldn't be more supportive of it.

Options are good. Elitist guilds can always choose to not use the Superior Banner.

Also small bumps in power are one of the things that differentiate the top tier members. Every advantage available is used or acquired. We (mid tier generally speaking) guild wish we had more players with that desire.

I don't think this is a good idea.
If the raids are so hard that only 2 or 3 guilds can beat them for 6 months, its going to be a huge disaster.
The only way I would ever support having extremely difficult raids go live on launch days is if there was a very clear timetable for when, how often, and how significantly they get scaled down after the initial launch.
Scaling down would need to take place gradually over several weeks or 2 months tops, not 6 months to get to this Superior Banner.

Its 6 months after an expansion for the banner. T3 doesn't release until 3 months after the expansion is out. So its 3 months for people to beat t3 without the bonus buff banner.

Hmm good point.
I'd still rather see incremental adjustments, maybe every 2 weeks.

^^ pretty much, this. Unless there's some other benefit to not using the new banner, I don't see why you wouldn't.

We normally only cancel raids due to a lack of healers or tanks, I don't see the new banner is going to stop this.

Reminds me of the threads we had over banestrike. People thought it would be game changing and it really wasnt.

Top tier guilds are clearing all events without this banner now with low numbers. Non top tier guilds are clearing all events without this banner. 33 alts beating a t3 event without this banner.

So yes, put me in the camp that this is a precursor for harder events for next year. Since the events have been super easy; the majority of raiders have a sense of entitlement that they should be best in slot before next expansion. If the events in general are harder ( I would hope that it would be based on tiers) it might affect some guilds from having everything on "farm status" right out the gate. Then by the time the banner is available; between the months of gearing up on the events that are on farm status in addition to the banner; it would in theory help the lower tier guilds get all or most targets on farm.

Making it so fewer guilds can complete events before the 6 month mark would be bad for the game. This is likely to help both guilds who are struggling to beat them now and those who start to have attendance issues during the summer months. I don't see this as a reason for them making raids harder in the future as players won't want to raid for months and not being able to beat it while waiting for the banner to help them slightly.

This banner isn't going to make a large enough impact to make raids harder.

Has anyone done any parsing to see what kind of DPS boost one might expect from the new banner?

I've seen some speculation that amounts to ~ 5% boost in DPS, while others say its going to be a 20%+ boost but no hard numbers behind it.

Based on the difference from a standard banner to the empowered banner I'm expecting a very small bump.