Always been curious and fascinated as to how long it would take 54 players, starting at level 1, to complete EOK expansion. Especially if they choose not to do AA auto grant. These 54 players could already have defeated EOK raids, so they have event knowledge and experience. I assume you cannot just level straight to 105. You have to get gear somehow, someway. At some point along the way you have to do some raids to gear up, whether it be OOW for epics or Underfoot for Brells augments, etc. You could raid EOK named for some augments and gear if you are not fully geared yet, I suppose. Just wonder realistically how long this would take. A year? Six months? No power levelling, no mains giving their alts gear to do this journey. Just you and 53 players, starting at level one, all by yourself, no outside support or help. I would guess a year would be realistic- you don't necessarily have to gear up every person throughout the journey, just some key people here and there.
Is it possible that by using Tribute (personal any/or Guild) that you could field a portion of your raid casters and/or priests semi naked?
If you were to do it in order without jumping ahead for levels / AAs / gear, it would take considerably longer than a year to do. Even with raiding lockouts, EoK took a couple months to do. The flagging constraints put in place to slow people down are going to be your downfall. If you weren't going to do it in order, just burn through to 105 skipping a bunch of content then go back to various expansions and stomp 'em out, you could do 30 raids a night until you get caught up. That wouldn't take a year. You could do the flagging for multiple raid sets at once.
Interesting question. Let's imagine that all servers were wiped in an accident. No backups were possible and GMs were unwilling or unable to manually recover anything. There are mass-quits and DBG releases only one server. A completely fresh server, and there are at least 100 or so very dedicated, skilled and experienced players who join it and burn hard to be the first to beat EoK. In that circumstance, I think the raid lockouts and keying would be the biggest impediment. Motivated people could be 105 in a week or two, and EoK T2 group geared in another week with a good amount of AAs, which is enough for an experienced raid force to beat T1 raids. The existence of Defiant gear makes leveling extremely easy, even if you're crawling around half-equipped with old defiant gear. A lot of the ease-of-use stuff that was developed (even if you ban autogranting, which makes little sense IMO) makes it even easier. As gimpy as mercs are now, undergeared players can ride their coattails very well. Gribble's and other CotF instances make low-gear/low-AA grinding very easy. TBM makes getting a baseline-gear set very easy since you can funnel tokens from very easy missions to your tanks. A group with a TBM vendor geared tank and everyone else in mid-level defiant gear can kill named in EoK. Warriors not only have a small amount of total AAs they need to get, but only about a third of those really help with mitigation, the other third help with aggro (not that needed especially with gimpy DPS) and the last third help with the warrior's DPS. EoK T2 gear is generally on par with TBM raid gear (with a few big exceptions), so people would immediately start keying EoK and TBM raids after getting EoK group gear. Bottom line is that the low levels of modern EQ have been so neutered that despite our memory of working through some tough expansions and levels, dedicated and experienced players can breeze through it. I've never played any TLP servers, but I know Quarm was killed like, days after PoP released. And I've been hardcore in a lot of MMO releases where I'll be awake and playing for the first 80 hours of release (and only sleeping when we break the server).
Group gear is so good and so easy to obtain, it'd probably negate the vast, vast majority of content. Perhaps better to ask how long it'd take a guild to beat every expansion in the game in succession from scratch instead.
Or how long would it take if they had a TLP server where the next expansion unlocked when a guild beat the last encounter in the current expansion.
I think in that case, the result might very well be Incomplete. The fickle, entitlement era TLP brosefs would all quit (or re-roll on the next flavor of the month/nostalgia/kronograb server) before finishing, since their population usually implodes by the time they hit many of the modern expansions anyway. I'd imagine expansions like UF or VoA would be really rough for a crowd like that, to say the least. One guild might make it through the gauntlet like the dudes on Fippy (captip to those guys), but they'd be an exception and definitely not the rule. It'd certainly be interesting to see.
Fippy being in TDS doesn't count? Granted if it was no voting my guess is t NH ey would gave had better member retention
My original thought process was strictly to defeat EOK raids. The thing to me is, you just cannot go straight to 105. You *have* to have some gear and AA along the way on your journey. To start at level 1 and just go straight to 105 without regards to AA and gear seems impossible to me. Sure EOK is outstanding AA, but you cannot walk into Lceanium in defiant gear and start killing. Sure Gribbles is great for levels and AA, but again you have to have some stuff in order to be successful. Your raid force has to have some gear and AA. You cannot go into EOK T3 with defiant and expect to live. I think initially I said a year to complete EOK T3 raids. Maybe six months would be a better guess. Maybe if everyone was ultra hard core with very high play times you could get enough guild gear and enough guild AA to do it in three months. But I have a had time seeing 54 people get together at level one and defeat EOK T3 Atrebe in a month...
Would depend on the dedication of some and preparation by all. Some classes can and would. If it were a concerted effort, it only takes one person and six characters can be leveling Lceanium with an AA bonus and almost no gear. Couple days later and there's enough pet AA floating around to start taking down some named. Few pet focus items and some gear on a tank, the targets get bigger. Couple weeks in, several groups are farming AA in T2, finishing out their gear. I think a timeline in the low months is possible. I think reality is a decade or two finding players willing to do it. I've always wondered about it, too, but I think it would fall even further short than the semi-regular "live server progression guilds" that start up and last a week or so.
Nothing is stopping the guild from raiding group zones. If the players were strong enough in their knowledge base of eq they could know what you can live without. You could probably be geared 2 expansions back on most players and still win easily. Once upon a time I had a project tank and tanked voa t3 group named in hot t1/defiant and open gear slots x3 Half of what players have is superfluous in terms of as and gear
Also worth noting at first the force would only have to be good enough to beat Droga/Lceanium, which are really easy raids. They do have some relatively large AEs for people with crap gear, but most of the raid shouldn't get hit by them barring someone screwing up. After that, you have at least 22.5 days before you can even attempt T2, which is plenty of time to farm T2 gear, more AAs, etc.
You can get TBM vendor gear from tokens with a fresh 105 in crap gear. TBM vendor gear is enough to do EoK T1 (and T2 probably too). You can also funnel TBM tokens to one person, so a group of 6 people would be able to funnel their tokens to the tank, get them in TBM vendor gear, and then go right to EoK (or keep doing TBM).
Mercenary tanks take no gearing, and with debuffing support that also takes no gear, tank group named. Charmed monsters work too. Due to last year's … adjustments, the difference between Imprint of the Enhanced Minion EM XIII and top group focus EM XVIII is probably not enough to keep groups from using a mag/bst/nec pet to get started farming current named, either. Bingo bango, full Selrach's & off to the races.
It has yet happened that a progression server caught back current live server expansion. Realm of Insanity in August 2008 opened SoF on The Combine server, two months before SoD overall release in October 2008 .
Without mercenaries, this would be a very fun event server. However, everyone would cheat out the wazoo.
