Increased Raid Boss Difficulty: Increased Reward?

How about no, or sure as soon as they instance the bosses with lockouts

Was wondering when this would pop up.

No.. you don't get increased loot. You get the reward of being better than the WoW players like many EQ players claim to be and can actually back it up with the feat being accomplished.

Not getting a cloak of flames off of a tank and spank mob.

By the way, it isn't that a guild will have to bring more people. They will have to bring more quality people. So if you're in the top guild, and you PL'd your way to 50, you casting skill is under 100, and you fizzle your mana away within the first minute of the fight... expect to be replaced.

That's right, people will once again have to justify and earn their raid spots. Joining with the zerg may just not work anymore.

I have no doubt that the top guilds currently on Ragefire and Lockjaw will be able to complete the updated raid content in July. I'm sure they will be able to tackle it. What I find interesting is the drama that will happen when the zerglings that joined and didn't actually learn their class get cut.

I've been in top guilds before in these games. The worst trolling and whining about the guild come from Ex-members who were cut for ineptitude, and feel they were treated 'unfairly'. I just got one of these: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Northern-Popcorn-8-Oz.-Popcorn-Popper-Machine-with-Cart/23891073 for the den.

I'm going to be wearing it out come July when someone's feelings get hurt.

The term 'zerg' gets thrown around pretty heavily. Today I learned that filling a raid is a zerg.

what?

Why? They didn't decrease the rewards because player power is so much greater now than it was back in 1999 so they were a lot easier.

more drop maybe ( or bring back the loot on fear-hate minis)... but better loot surely not; they would imply they'd revamp all their loot table , + all the loot table of veeshan peak and kunark dragon ( can't have classic raid drop better stuff than kunark stuff) and so on so forth...

And yes, alot of the raid drop in classic are craptastic. There's a few juicy item ( cloak of flames, runed bolster belt amongst other) but there's a bunch of.. questionnable.. item

Innoruuk loot table, almost all of it ( erudite paladin only shield...)
planar armor set ( bard gear with int on it. caster with str...)

All raid targets that get harder should drop 2 more Shaman items every kill. Possibly only usable by Gregolo. I can get behind this.

I vote for no loot at all cause hey.........competition.

yes... 72 player for any classic boss is absolutly a zerg. when he dies within 10 seconds or less, it's within any doubt, an overwhelming zerg force. When clerics nukes... because the boss will be dead before the tank die anyhow ( if there's actually a tank, not just 72 people throwing all they can as fast as possible) it is, definatly, a zerg.

even back in 1999 those guys were killable with 30-40 player. heck, few people had computers good enough to support 40 player on their screen at once.. let alone 72.

that number, 72, only began in PoP where the raid window was introduced ( and even back then. not everyone filled the raid : Triton made it to plane of time with 40ish people?) that number was quickly shrunk ( DoN, 3 exp later, had 54 man and 24 man raid).

believe it or not, there's some people out here who would really like to attempt a 6/12 man naggy-vox, ( and not with 6 mages...) or planar stuff with minimal force. Without an actual chance to wipe... there's no fun.

The way I see it, and we obviously disagree on this point. Is that if Everquest has a built in mechanic to hold 72 people into one party. Filling it is a raid, not a 'zerg'.

The part I truly don't understand is why people use this term as a directed attack on the way TL raids. You want us to tell 40-50 active members to sit out because, why exactly?

Exactly. All these raid changes are going to do is make the targets in question inaccessible to pickup groups and only achievable in era by properly skilled and geared raiders. They'll end up having the opposite effect that the unwashed masses of level 35s that think they're entitled to camp GEBs think they will.

they dont need better rewards

I wouldn't start saying you are better than WoW players because you can kill EQ Classic Raid mobs. The most "skillful" thing about killing EQ Classic raid mobs atm is having enough people on and running through zone lines the fastest. The actual kill is a joke.

Well currently..they are already inaccessible to pick up groups. So nothing is changing.

Typically, the "hardest" raid mobs of an expansion are not easily PUGable.

There are many mechanics in EverQuest that if you use them to their full extent it has a negative connotation.

That's how it is now.

Hopefully that changes with the patch in July. Personally I'm hoping the tweaks they are doing prove too much and they have to scale it back... But not before some of the 'hardcores' (and that's in quotes to represent those who think they hardcore) break their faces on their keyboards.

Right. However. one would get the impression from people posting here and on Reddit that there are random pick up raids looking to kill these bosses all the time, but they can't get to them. Therefore, they need to be instanced so mean old TL doesn't have them on lockdown so everyone can take a shot at their leisure.

I would think the reward would be all of those previous kills where the loot was easier to attain than it should have been, versus all of the people that will no longer have that opportunity.

Bingo, and forget about loot, I'd settle for a decent spot to hunt that's not perma-camped by asshats leveling their guildies and alts, or power-leveling for a fee.

Early EQ was not designed to place a cap on a raid and tune the encounter for that cap, so unless someone has a small force that makes it a challenge, they are "zerging", relative to the game at least, whether they like it or not, by overwhelming the encounter. No one wants to waste time, though, so given the choice, they'll definitely bring a force that will definitely win. EQ is a big time commitment; this isn't like some single player game where it's actually fun to re-do it on hard mode.

That was PvE. Note that there are variable interpretations on the definition of zerging. A few consider only unorganized masses of players to be a zerg, others consider even an organized force to be a zerg, if numerical advantage is still the main advantage leading to victory. Personally, I say both apply.

For indirect PvP, aka the "competition" in early EQ, if a guild outnumbers the other guilds by a lot such that any typical DPS race would be unwinnable by the other guild(s) in any typical contention scenario, and it can be substantially if not totally attributed to numerical advantage, regardless of class makeup or skill, I'd say that's zerging, whether it was intentional or not; and it's certainly going to be seen as zerging. But these games have a sort of political system too, right, and valid tactic, no?

If someone wanted to analyze that further, some introspective questions:

1. How many estimated raiders are there serverwide?
2. How many of them does the self-analyzing guild have?
3 How many times do they end up in DPS races, and how many players does that guild have on hand vs how many does the other side have?
3b. If these situations don't actually occur, is it because the self-analyzing guild didn't even show up due to knowledge of being outnumbered?
4. If the guild analyzing itself is a large percent of the server's raiders, was pre-launch recruiting aimed at gaining a numerical advantage?
5. If the guild analyzing itself is not a large percent of the server's raiders and is losing DPS races on numbers, why isn't that guild merging/allying with other guilds, recruiting underlooted players from the other side? Daybreak isn't likely to do anything about numerical advantages.

Why is this thread even being entertained?