I'll be interested to see how many guilds have beaten this when we hit the 6 week mark (the length of time it was originally supposed to be in game). How many weeks it takes before the first guild beats the raid and how many raid hours it took them to learn the event so they could beat it. And see just how exclusive the dev want this raid to be originally. I'd like to know the thought process on how a raid this hard was implemented as temporary content. Eldroth said it was intended to be this hard, I'm curious as to why.
btw this reminds me of sep 5 pre nerf.....3 hours strait n the whole guild couldnt up at all or you failed.....only 5 guilds beat that darn event before the dev's made it easy mode
PoP was different, all the raids except time were open zones, so something this hard wouldn't have been an issue we would have just thrown more members at it. Our first AD raid had 104 members.....only 72 flags, but we needed a lot more power to beat it.
Probably zero. The event enrages in less than a half hour from engage. I'm going to have to time it out and make sure it is a set interval of time (dps check) instead of another factor. Also, time to 'learn it' isn't probably the most apt term. The raid is exact copy of the old Zek Brothers, all the way down to ability names and add names. There isn't any original thought in this entire event. There are only tiny tweaks and stupid fail mechanics. We all know the raid. Its more of a 'how many wizards can we stack' question at this point.
Not entirely true, there any many differences in the two events, specifically with regards to mob weaknesses. We've made really good progress on the raid. Won't win it this week though since we're off for the holiday.
Im glad to hear about the progress, and you're absolutely right there on the adds. The weaknesses are significantly different (aside from the fire/ice weaknesses, which hold a lot of similarity to the original event). The overall state of the event, though, feels very familiar regarding the bosses. The flips and imbalance penalties, the abilities used, etc are nearly identical to the original. Vallon still irritates tanks to no end, Tallon is still a pansy with a massive AE range debuff. The names of the adds haven't changed, but the abilities have been tweaked. The fight definitely re-tuned, but its still The Zek Brothers. They've just shuffled the deck, but I'm not sure anything 'original' can come nowadays. After twenty expansions, we've seen almost every mechanic that could exist. I start relating fights to other fights. Its like X with the mechanic from Y built in.' My main concern is the wipe mechanic at ~25 minutes or so. Its one thing to learn the event and get the adds under control - at that point, everything has to change into a bit more of a bursty situation and tactics have to adjust. I think guilds are running in one of three phases - beginning to find efficent ways to lock the bosses and wiping on the first wave (finding weaknesses, ranges, heal/cure strats, etc), trivalizing the bosses and starting to clear multiple waves (event knowledge, practice, placement),or staring in bewilderment at some of the enrage, heal, etc and trying to find coping strategies. RoI is the only guild that I've heard of that's moved beyond that.
The upward curve for gear and new spells+aa's is minimal unless it's a major patch with completely new things (Frenzied Resolve is a good example). T2 gear likely will not make any difference in powar unless it's all clicky cures and snare immunities. It's just a really hard raid, that has a steep learning curve. Something EQ hasn't seen in a long time. Probably since VoA.
The new COTF raid (lag aside) is a good mix of challenge but doable. So they can be built where they are challenging but not ridiculous.
It's okay, I guess. I'd rather other mechanics outside a painfully annoying debuff and a lot of adds in a confined space to create a somewhat challenging raid.
I'm not sure how challenging that raid is without the horrible lag that is its main challenge currently. And a couple of bugs that make it harder than intended. Once they fix the lag and the bugs, it may not be much more challenging than Bixie Warfront raids.
So took the best from both our raid teams to heavily stack the raid. Props to ROI and any other guild that has gotten this below 50%. But After tonight I definitely see very very few guilds doing well here.
So a month after release and have not heard of anybody winning this. Betting most guilds have stopped even going there. I am sure whatever Dev did all the work to create this is so thrilled to see that work wasted with few guilds even bothering. Is a month long enough to admit that the raid is overtuned and needs to be changed a bit.
Its secretly on farm status. The trick is training the mobs into the raid instance of Tower of Rot so they lag out and don't do anything. That's our secret strat anyway, it won't work when they fix the lag problem in Rot though .
Is this a cute comment on the SoD version of the raid? Unless this happened within the last five minutes, the developer is still a Senior Game designer according to twitter and facebook. The last person to have left the EQ team as far as I know is Augur.
