I got what I wanted after 15 years...You can keep it!!

I played EQ back in the early 2000s, but never had the time to raid, so I was a professional Casual, devoting all my time to leveling alts. In Fact when I got bored and switched to Wow, then Knight Online and back and forth, it was the same every game, play lots of alts but never join a raid guild and commit to raiding. I never wanted to give a game that much of a time commitment, but knew I was missing a great part of each game by not being part of a raid kill.

When Ragefire launch was announced I got excited as I remembered the nostalgia and the great grouping but what gave me an extra thrill was that the launch date coincided with a month long leave I had from work, recovering from a surgery. This time I would not only get names that I wanted, I would be able to make the time sink to level up a toon to 50 and actually join a raid guild as I could play like 10 hours a day while being paid..gotta love short term disability!

So I made a mage and hit the server hard from launch and was 50 within a few weeks and joined the strongest raid guild on the server. I remember the day that the shout went out that "Naggy" was in window?? I was thinking why would a dragon be in a house and wtf window were we supposed to find to cast spells on it, I thought this must be some fighting strategy to keep it at distance.

I had no clue what that meant but I heard people say it could spawn any time and I didn't want
the guild to know I never raided before so I didn't ask for directions and took too long to figure out the way, so I missed the groups that formed to get to the lair.

I remember my heart pounding as I hit Sol B and it was all on fire. I couldn't ask in chat how to get to the lair, so I asked to get into a raid group and was hoping I could use Find to get to the right place...I was starting to get real nervous as of course that friggen mysterious force prevented me from finding the path, so I had to keep my map open, while running through the dungeon, filled with mobs I had no clue if they could see me or not.

I saw a flash of some lil gnome necro ahead of me and I thre all caution to the winds and just started running after him, hoping he was going to the raid. My heart was racing as I ran past beasts and then bats and then past the gnome who was standing still in some fire filled corridor, I kept going..seeing some paths in lava that I could levitate across. Suddenly I got an angry tell yelling at me that I trained bats and the person died. I couldn't stop to answer back as it was too much for me to keep my map, levitate and sneak past mobs, with each turn of a corner bringing me the possibility of running into some mob or groups of mobs that would kill me, and I would miss the Naggy klll, after all , it had been almost 30 minutes since the shout that he was in the window. I kept hoping the guild had not killed him yet.

I got another tell from the same person begging me to drag his corpse to the ZL..I sent a quick im sorry im on way to raid and didn't know squat about where I was..it was too much for me to multi taks to add dragging a corpse..truth was it had been so long I had forgotten how to do it anyway..

Then I ran into the staging spot and saw my guild there....it was glorious as I had never seen so many people gathered in one spot..was like 50 people. I was so happy and for a moment, the game took on more meaning than anything I had experienced before in a game, all the time and effort was about to pay off with a dragon kill with my guild. I made my toon start dancing and then others around me started dancing and I started to raid buffs popping on me without asking and I thought..This is so cool! This is what I have been missing all these years and I could see why people devoted so much time to it....I kept dancing..wooohoo and waited to see where the window was that I was supposed to help shoot spells through on Naggy.

Wooo..and then an hour passed and people were still dancing and every once in a while, we killed some fire giant and other mob there to pass the time. I was still excited and happy.

Wooo..two hours passed and I thought..ok this is long but still fun..kept dancing, worked on some spell skills and killed more giants..

Wooo..Three hours now and I started to feel a heart beat in my ...wondered if that meant I was getting a blood clot from sitting to long and decided I could chance a quick stretch, bathroom and sand which and get back hopefully before naggy was dead.

Fours hours now, bored outta my mind, my is really beaten like a second heart fell in it and I am wondering when the hell is this Dragon going to show up and if it does, can I make myself small enough where it wont eat me on sight?? I made sure I moved a bit farther back so there were a few others in between me and the front of the room and made sure my gate hotkey was easy to find.

Five hours and my is flat now, I had not realized I had turned on my on demand movie option and was watching season four of Game of Thrones and occasionally looking at the screen to see if I had been turned to toast by Naggy..I really wanted to see it now and didn't care if I died..id waited so long.

At the sixth hour I gave up and asked my wife if she had any honey do projects for me to do as that torture was far easier for me to bear than this waste of life...and as the monitor faded to black, I thought to myself, 15 years of not raiding, I didn't miss much.

Having had the above experience, I am impressed with how organized and committed raiders are and after actually being on my 1st Raid kill after three unsuccessful waits during the "window" pop, I did manage to be on a VOX kill..that took all of about a minute to down as there were like 50 mages and was so anti climatic that I didn't realize she had gone down until everyone started to gate out.

I understand what Holly meant when she said that casuals should not be able to kill raid bosses and I agree with her to a degree. There should be unbelievably hard challenges in the game, that take a great deal of effort and organization to accomplish and when done, people should feel like they accomplished something big, even in a pixel game like EQ. It cheapens the game when you talk about adding instances and this rotation for raid bosses is so disturbing and distasteful to me and is part of everything wrong with this watered down, everyone has to win, mentality we have in US. This would never happen in an Asian game, where being the strongest means something and the weak have to figure out ways of banding together to beat the strong.

Its like those climbers that spend years preparing to climb Mt. Everest, conditioning and making the commitment and as they go up one side of the mountain to reach the summit, God plants an escalator on the other side so the whiney " I want the easy mode" climbers to reach the top without putting in any effort.

As I said, EQ is not a life accomplishment like having work, family and real life obligations to meet, but it does make me sad that even in this game, any real feats of accomplishment are being watered down.

A few quick wish list items from a casual for the game:

1) Epic should not in terms of waiting for what can be a full day for a mob to spawn. Id rather see the mob buffed up so it really took a huge force to kill and have the spawn window only a few hours and then have a flag on each person that did any damage to the mob be flagged to not be able to attack that mob again for a few days.

2) Add some type of PVP area where we can pvp for gear. NOT a world PvP server but do cross server battle grounds and have a system of earning gear. Give people something to look forward to besides just raiding for loot.

3) Add an option where guilds can "ally with each other on a raid so their combined DPS could win a mob, that way if there is a top guild on server, other guilds could work together to figure out ways to beat them, rather than these rotation schedules that make it seem like you are punching in for work.

For anyone that actually read through this and got to this bottom, you ROCK!

Good hunting

I hear what you're saying, and I agree. I've been on CT, Inny, Yael, Sky and Vox raids on Ragefire (keep managing to miss Naggy). The one thing that is constant between all of the kills is the fact that they are EXTREMELY ANTICLAMATIC.

Seriously. Nobody is missing anything by not raiding these targets. It's get to zone, send tells for buffs, engage, mob dead in ten seconds or less, send tell for loots and origin out. The longest raid hits I have been on since joining TL have lasted no longer than probably ten minutes from time of raid call to time of loot call.

It's the single most anti-climatic thing I have ever done in a Mmorpg. And, that has nothing to do with TL. TL is an awesome guild with some great dedicated gamers. The simple fact is, this content is boring and ultra simple to beat. The only thing that made it fun was the competition for spawns, and the rotations destroyed that.

Raiding is very anti climatic indeed, I've killed each boss once and I have no interest in killing them again. It's just so boring.

The fact that people have level 52 characters on live that they keep specifically for hunting Vox and Naggy should have been a tip off that the encounters were never really as hard as it was remembered

The only thing hard about raiding classic is getting there..
What an achievement!

level 52 people solo them on live servers..

It's funny because it's true. Raiding in a crap guild is actually more fun than raiding in a good guild, because if you finally get the kill, it's much more rewarding. One of my all time favorite raids was doing BOT tower bosses with a 58 druid as the third healer and the tank was still in Endo or whatever that crap from hate is.

Congrats! you just found out that classic raiding ( and up to PoP) is 90% waiting, 9% CH rotation, 1% skill! That's why only the most dedicated players get to kill stuff in classic; everyonelse just get bored.

you probably also found out why instances/expedition make the raiding scene so much more enjoyable ( not only because you don't have to care about the competition, but also because you can raid what you want, when you want)

The 1% skill, try to LEARN that by watching faceless....
Skill, using run vs walk...We move faster, thats our special; power... wonder twins...

The challenge in Classic is the challenge of out-racing, out-manning, or out-gunning the competition. The fights are simple and not much more than a number game.

I'm not anti-rotation per se, but what OP says is the exact reason so many people are. Instituting a rotation IS removing the challenge from the content. People who want a rotation and a challenge at the same time are trying to draw seven perpendicular lines.

Unfortunately Runes you missed the original EQ raiding experience. Now if you want to raid on these TLP servers you have to be part of these zerg colonies that mutated the game into their versions of EQ. You would have enjoyed the original EQ raiding, it was still easy but the communities back then were more mature. Now you only get the option of zergers were the only skill they actually have is the ability to punch 10 numbers into a phone and call it raiding.

There are no learning curve, no challenge and no risk in raiding classic, only the statement that casuals shouldnt raid. You didnt have to make a lo g post for that

I've seen 70 people go splat on a god at 94%. I've also killed dragons with high 30's.

Not sure how people define unskilled and zerg, but there's obviously some differences between #'s and the capabilities of various groups of people even in simple content.

15 years late to the party and then complain that it sucks.

I am so sick of you people whining and complaining about whatever hasn't gone your way. Maybe you didn't realize it but Everquest is a "game" and contrary to what you were lead to believe growing up, not everyone is a winner. You don't get a participation trophy for showing up.

If you want to get the phat loots f'ing join the right guild and put in your time.

That is all.

I wonder if the realization has sunk in that only people of same ilk as the OP think Holly and company are doing a great job. This is about the thinnest veiled hack post Ive seen in ages.

Yeah raiding in classic and well all the way through several expansions sucks, we knew that 15 years ago thats why I didnt do much until SoL and PoP and why I am so disinterested in doing it now.

The only laughable thing remaining is that somehow skill is the determining factor in getting a crack at a mob. Oh there is skill, in some leadership and key functions, but for everyone else its fairly basic, follow the dam directions in particular the one about sitting around for a few hours.

I started playing EQ in 1999 and was in a raiding guild from classic through PoP, and stopped when a lot of people did with whatever bad expansion followed PoP. Yes, there was a lot of "poop socking." But for people, including this Holly person, to somehow equate "poop socking" to skill is absurdly stupid. Honestly, the "poop socking" mechanic is probably an intentional move on the developer's part to get people to buy more accounts. I started boxing multiple accounts so I had something to do while either camping epic pieces or waiting for the 30 seconds of action between all of the downtime prepping for and during raiding. If an encounter takes skill, and a lot of the raid fights back in the day did, then only a few guilds will be able to do it. The encounter itself would require having people properly geared, and eventually, having the right AA points.

What is Ragefire? It's certainly not what EQ was actually like in 1999. If you want that, go to P99. I was playing that for several months before friends encouraged me to come play on Ragefire with them. The game mechanics are way easier. That has a lot to do with why there is so many people in the planes and competing over raid mobs. And even in Lower Guk. Anyone who doesn't suck can solo or duo several guk camps on their own--even if they're not what people call mages these days. So please, stop comparing Ragefire to Classic EQ. It's not the same, it's ridiculously easier.

If an encounter is truly based on skill, then it shouldn't matter if every raid encounter is instanced. Figure out a way to flag the player out of repeating the same raid mob(s) until whatever time delay you want on the mob(s) is met. Make it several days if you want, but seriously, I don't understand why anyone would want to sit around waiting for stuff to spawn. This is something that WoW got right. Another thing WoW got right was allowing for racial PVP other than in newb zones and obviously instances.

I enjoyed your read Runes. It was only a quick forum post of course, but I think everyone has been in a similar situation on EQ. So much in this game is not known by many, and until you have experienced it first hand you cannot know what it feels like. Sounds like a crazy run through Solb, right into....a poopsock. I am sorry that had to be your first experience raiding. It is why I respect Faceless on Lockjaw so much. They will never initiate a sock, they rely on extremely quick mobilization. 30 minutes to get to Naggy once he popped would have been about 20 minutes too long.

There is a very real thrill to hurrying to a target as he spawns so that you can be ready before the next guild, or so that you can make sure that if you do train adds they can be dealt with quickly before the boss is pulled. It all starts when the spawn is called, and by the time the fight is over your adrenaline is going crazy. And then bam, its over. "Did we get it?" awww yeah them yellow broadcast letters are ours, /check loots. Sitting in a spawn for 4/5/6 hours is not competitive or fun, and takes away the drive and desire to play. Honestly, it saddens me that many people will never experience that rush like you and I have described because of either rotations or instancing. These players will never have to make do with 30% mana and half buffs because go time was called, or accidentally pull it early and mis-position the boss as the raid is still arriving and down it anyway!

Runes if you truly did have fun, then dont let a couple bad experiences dissuade you. Not all guilds are like that, nor need to be. I would decide what you want out of the game and go and get it.

I think slot of. The veteran players have more ffa experience than you give them credit for. My favorite ffa moments was racing for Velious dragons for sleeper tomb keys, and later racing for sleeper tomb nameds, or later getting swearwd off by several guild leaders for dAring to spawn Aow and shortly After killing it, or breaking a rotation and ffaing the actual cleric ragefire when one of the guilds in the rotation were,to weak..... In my mind Naffy is just. Mob i one grouped ten years Ago, and i cant get exited for one second over killing it now.

Racing for keys was always pretty fun. That's one thing Velious brings that helps, even Kunark with VP for that matter, but not quite as much.

But with Velious there is so much to do in the way of raiding that rotations are more an annoyance than anything. At this point most low end guilds are raiding Classic or Kunark. Also you have plenty of raid targets, ToV has alot going on with armor quest dropping mobs, plus NToV, then open world dragons for loot or keys, Kael, PoG, Skyshrine, etc.. So much more opens up.

bahahahahahahah. hitting enter from character select screen, the thrills!