Presence of the mighty?

You need the MotM AND disabled focus effects.

Also make UDB spawn in instances or spawn more frequently or have real Trakanon drop guts.

Oh man, the speculation about that last sentence will be the main focus of this post, I'm willing to bet. not so much about the focus effects, but the fact that it will become "Hey! Prathun said a new progression server is coming!"

Personally, I like harder bosses and don't exactly care about the lower dmg numbers. I just like content that isn't a pushover and I'd prefer to leave in the focus effects, since it provides more variety and interesting gearing options.

Disable all focus effects, remove the MoTM buff, and make the mobs harder to kill whether it's more HP or stronger AEs, etc.etc. There are a lot of spells and weapon combos that are awesome for group content, but are trash when used on bosses with MoTM. It would be nice to get back to having options, instead of streamlining it to 1 or 2 certain spells or 1 specific set of weapons (or bare fists for monks).

MotM with less Mitigation and more HP would be preferable to me. Please don't make grinding levels more tedious then it already is. Also, to be honest the defense skill caps are far more gamebreaking.

For me it would be. It feels really weird to have my power level change so dramatically depending on my location (sometimes it changes in just seconds if for example you pull a regular trash mob with a boss).

Is it possible you'll be able to make unique rules per server? Right now it feels like Phinigel is getting a lot of changes that may be required on Ragefire/Lockjaw but aren't really addressing a problem Phinigel is having.

Prathun, do not disable focus effects! That is a terrible change! Focus effects allow an avenue of REAL character advancement through items beyond just spells. Physical damage has inherent bonuses from attribute gain, plus "haste" as a similar focus-like attribute when gearing. If you remove focuses casters are extremely limited on gear upgrades. It's not even as though mana pool is really all that great. You take away a key ability to improve through gear by doing that.

Meanwhile the casters are actually not that broken anymore from what I can tell. In classic, the pivotal raid zone (sky) they often can't land anything. In kunark, monks and sometimes rogues will top parses and wizards/necros others - which is good and balanced. As expansions progress I assume this will come even more into parity, with rogues finally cementing a good position, necros shining after a level increase and wizards on shorter fights or later in the level cap range.

If you want to get around the melee imbalance at early levels there are much better ways to do it:
- start the TLP in at least Kunark.
- give hybrids (especially rangers) their spells a little earlier pre-50.
- give melee abilities like kick, backstab, etc right away; by level 4 they should be set up.
- scale the damage of these melee abilities to be slightly higher early on and evening out by around 60
- give rangers a bit more inherent attack bonus early on as well; this class is really weak.
- drop beastlords and berserkers in at start. Do not have people making an unwanted class and rerolling later, or waiting to join for Luc/GoD. This is bad design. Having 2 (well, one and a half) more melee classes in at start is good design.
- make the pet debuff far more of a curve, if not a pass/fail line eg 12+ pets = no damage. Make it exclusive to mage pets so that necro skeletons aren't gimping mage damage. Nobody box armies necros anyway.
- cap instances at 54. Not 72. This is how the rest of the game works; there's a good reason the 72 number for instanced raids was not continued. With a lower cap, you are far more free to balance the MOTM to a reasonable state in all other areas.

It would "feel" better if you just gave the bosses more HP rather than mitigation. Hitting for a fraction of what you do on trash is lame.

Agreed.

Hitting for 35 with BIS weapons is lame when you can look forward to getting BIS in the next era to hit exactly the same.

I still think the solution is simply adjusting in combat hp regeneration of raid encounters. NOT A BROAD COPY PASTE!

Setting a DPS check really solves so many issues without the need to nerf classes, weapons, spells, resists or pets.

If you need to breach 3k sustained dps to beat top tier content, that has plenty to do with gear, raid composition and actual strategy.

Making a guild figure out how to keep healing at 2 seconds indefinitely? Didn't we learn from Luclin that wasn't a good strategy to make things "harder"?

Pop basically got it right on DPS checks, take a cue from those raids.

If that's all you'd do, it's not nearly enough. Remove the huge melee boost you all just added, remove the mitigation changes, add back in the appropriate ac caps, revert seventeen years of combat changes that have boosted player strength overall, and then get all of these changes progressively right over the course of all 20 expansions, and we might be talking.

Barring that, keep buffing the mobs. Just buff them in appropriate ways that counter the changes, and keep it simple. IE since player HP hasn't gone up significantly over what it was in 1999/2000, and player resistance hasen't gone up much (actually down if anything since the resist check revamp back in PoP or so), you don't need to make spells hit harder, or at least not much, maybe just a tiny bit to counter extra healing power from focuses. But since player mitigation has gone up, then buff the melee damage of mobs accordingly. If players hit 80% harder, then boost the mob's hp by 80% or mitigate player dps back to the original levels. No need to add regen that creates a dps threshold that didn't exist on the original mobs. The less changes you make and the more simple you keep them, the smaller chance that we'll have a month of broken content at the launch of each expansion.

Also, I hope we are way too early in the cycle to begin discussing a future set of progression servers. Fippy/Vulak haven't even finished running their courses, and Ragefire/Lockjaw/Phinigel are just getting started. Let things lie for a good long while here.

I'd play YermQuest.

Prathun gave me an either/or question and I answered it. But if this was a third choice it'd be an easy choice. Also the whole pet thing is really messed up I wish they'd think of some new way to prevent mage armies (though again we're affected by a solution to a problem Phinigel doesn't and can't have). If we have a rogue and bring another neither is penalized. It doesn't make a lot of sense for me to do less damage whenever we add another necromancer or magician to the raid.

This is false. There are currently/have been multiple necro armies on LJ. DoT's receive less mitigation on MoTM bosses, that's the appeal of re-rolling.
So your pets are a little weaker? So what when all of your DoT's are hitting for full damage when a Mage nuke gets mitigated by 1/2..

Besteva re-rolled all of his mages to Necro. Then 3 other 18-30 boxers on LJ followed suit.

Honestly YES please do this for a future progression server or even for the current progression servers now. Revert back to the old spells file, and also please also make sure you also revert the AC softcap and doubling of the base hp/mana values that got revamped in SoF for player characters so you can bring those values to be more in line to their original intended power. Currently the only ones that are playing at nearly the original values are the mag/nec pet classes due to their pets being the only ones being even below their original stat values.

Currently everyone else benefits from the drastic revamp to the AC Softcap changes from SoF and the nearly doubling of base hp/mana values. Add those with the revamped dmg/mana ratios of spells with the newer spell file is the 3 primary reasons for the current iteration of the progression servers being such a cakewalk. Even phinny with the anti-box code is too easy because of those things. Reverting those few things would bring a progression server being nearly 90-95% back to the old intended challenge.

The amount of time it would take to do that isnt worth it. Prathun is trolling you all day.

Phinny will be the last real progression server.

The buff support 50-100 raids way to much as it is. We the lower tiers have a hard time even a era behind when mobs hit for 1300.

You may agrue that you should field the best force around to be able to kill targets. That never been the case
people used to roll the race and class they wanted and smaller guilds never had the exact right setup.
We used to be able to hit a era behind or smaller targets in era.

As it is today even the smaller targets that used to be 1-3 group content require a very good setup or a 40-50 non optimal raid.

You are killing the casual gamer.

If you want a challange keep buffing the highend tier mobs like endbosses in Kael or NToV etc, keep the others tuned down so there is stuff to do for everyone.

Or maybe you want one elite guild per server and thats it?

No not every one are elitist players...

TBH this Motm crap is just that. from what an officer in darkwind told me, it took over 230 people for them to get past the Aow regen and kill him.
thats flippen insane.
your Killing any guild thats unable to field 100 people to not only compete but to even See a raid mob drop. i got people in my guild SO frustrated that they are really thinking about quiting because they Dont want to be * just another darkwind number*
get rid of the dumb Motm crap
drop the max raid to 54 people
give us instanced raiding * so u can inforce the max player number and say no to zerging*
stop changing on us .. be like the tipsy gnome race.. be Consistent !!

Well, they had 230 toons to kill the AoW, but the kill took 17ish minutes. Fewer toons would have taken longer, but could still have gotten the job done.

But the insane regen should be fixed tomorrow, so hopefully that won't be an issue from then anyway.

I want to know where all of these people that want hard raids were when Underfoot launched on Fippy? The real golden content of EQ starts occurring when actual mechanics are introduced to the raids. Kerafym in SoF on Fippy was the single most difficult encounter that I have ever experienced. Mobs do have their abilities and strategies changed, it just happens in later expansions.

Stop trying to cram new ideas into content over a decade old. Enjoy the walk down nostalgia lane before you leave as soon as the real raids arrive.