Presence of the mighty?

So the golden age of EQ is these complicated mechanics, but we shouldn't want them on our nostalgic old content? I know I'm not the only one who's asked them to just cut and paste some latter mob's abilities and dump them on stuff like instanced AOW.

Asking DBG to retool an entire encounter with abilities from other mobs and put them in special instances seems like a tall order. You want nostalgia but you want it your way: Available whenever you want, strong enough to be challenging but not overly so, and you want it now so that you don't have to wait for raids that were actually designed to house these mechanics.

What do you have in mind? An AoW that powers up each time it kills something? Maybe a health drain AOE? Why don't we just copy/pasta RZtWL and put him in AoW's body and drop him in Kael?!

The golden age of EQ may lie in the era that lasts through PoP, but Discord and beyond is when raids actually require some effort and thought, which is why you see those populations crumble after PoP. The GoD vote from Fippy notwithstanding, of course.

I think the beauty of EQ was that it -wasn't- complicated, nor was it overly challenging to kill stuff if you did everything appropriately (i.e. you group kill content that is meant to be grouped, you raid content that is meant to be raided).

The challenge of the game was to get the loot to drop, not necessarily to kill the mob. The fact that you know Mob_x has a certain item and you put in the time to get him to spawn and drop it was the satisfaction. You can add in a wrinkle of difficulty if you try and hold a camp that might be above your level / abilities, or maybe raid a target with a non-optimal or undersized raid force.

The most fun I have in the game is when we just gather a force of about 40 or so total peeps and just cruise around Norrath trying to whack as many dragons as possible before old-man bedtime.

The buff is dumb, get rid of it. Or, keep it on LJ or RF, and let the players transfer to the server of their choosing. I view the buff as a total cop-out on how to deal with OP mages / pets, and the changes that have occurred to EQ over time.

True. It was a band aid put on a bullet wound. We're still bleeding here ... You might want to ... I don't know, take the bullet out, sanitize and stitch the wound?

No, get a bigger band aid.

I'm on board with all of these, actually, yes. Maybe have it spawn an uqua-style add on player death if powering up is too tricky to balance. A health drain AOE would be phenomenally better than just hitting harder. I have specifically asked for RZTW elements to be dumped on him - the banish ability. If Rallos' ae wasn't a curse I actually would be fine with a full paste job.

I'm not asking for some design or encounter overhaul. Just recognize that mobs are not more challenging because they have more mitigation, and hardly so with more damage. That just escalates how many people have to come. Regen gives it a baseline. What would make these more challenging is just slapping aes, or making them more impactful. If you want to buff a mob to add real difficulty the non-tank-and-spank elements are where you do it.

I'd rather have AOW throw an axe at me that I need to duck than hit a tank for a little more. I'd rather he temporarily reflect spells and damage shield attacks than just mitigate incoming damage X percent.

i rather enjoy going through the whole progression of EQ raiding tho.i like the walk through history. i dont feel adding extra mechanics is really what alot of people are looking for on these servers. motm and updated damage, while not perfect, does bring these more in line with the challenge they were originally. the thing is, the vast majority of raids in early EQ never were that challenging

I agree.

I liked the later era raids which had some element of first, working out what to do, then second, doing it without messing up. Where everyone there had to do their bit. These mostly started in GoD, though some PoP ones had elements of it (e.g. The Rathe Council where they all have to die in a short timespan). Demiplane of Blood had a bunch of different ones. These were raids where you had to do something in particular at particular times, or you had to kill things in a particular order, etc. Or not be afk and hail something or click something at a particular emote, etc.

Velious, though, was never that, and shouldn't be made to be that. Velious/Luclin I think were the turning points where the designers realised that bigger AEs and harder hitting mobs with more HP weren't always the way to go!

Think back to the original implementations though. In Luclin they took the raid game in the direction of more hit points and mitigation. AC values were staggering at its release and fights went seemingly forever. In POP they took the raid game in the direction of faster fights with more raid-wide damage, soft time limits, and faster overall battles.

People despised the Luclin content. It was rapidly changed to lower mob AC, dramatically cut HPs, and tone down the absurd battle length requirements. People loved POP raids. People STILL love POP raids. For whatever reason though, DBG has decided to buff the old content in the initial luclin style everyone hated of more hps and mitigation but not real challenge, rather than focusing on the much loved pop paradigm of fast but brutal fights with raidwide damaging abilities.

If you want them to back off and not MOTM at all, I'm not adverse to this. I wasn't expecting raid mob buffs when I signed up on Phinny, and initially joined a tiny guild mistakenly thinking our 2-3 groups could do things. If you ARE going to have raid mobs buffed, though, the direction to take should be the one that was well received and still well regarded - pop raid style - and not the one people despised and had to be rapidly nerfed across the board - luclin raid style.

Maybe a personalized Loot Pinata that runs up to a new character as soon as they enter the newbie Trash Yards, Pinata hits player for 1dmg (Hard coded, and never attacks more than once), player attacks Pinata, Pinata Bursts open revealing Max level worth of EXP and BIS items specific to their class! Process is repeated upon zoning into any new expansion with Loot Pinata's Geared for that Expansion!

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say. I just like the fact we still have old style raids, then progress into the more advanced ones starting with PoP. I like that sense of progression.

if they ever did a different style server, and did a total revamp of old raids, I might play on it. but I think for progression servers, keeping the raid progression in tact, at least in terms of style, is important

I wonder when we're going to get this buff nerfed?

Probably when enough people quit due to Luclin fights all taking an hour plus to chew through the HP.

really not a fan of this presence thing.

unlike MoTM, i dont think it was really needed to begin with. player resists and HP pools really havent changed all that much. lowering resists especially didnt seem needed and acts more as an annoyance than anything.

then theres the mechanics of it, its a HUGE passive radius, which breaks FD, and agros pets. again, simply an annoyance that makes raiding less fun, for no real benefit.

i dont really think players were ignoring raid mobs AE's as it was, positioning and dodging seems pretty commonplace. if players were just standing and eating the AEs because they were so trivial, i could see the need for this debuff. but i just dont see it.

PotM is just another terrible design choice that goes to show how out of touch the non-fired staff remaining at DBG really are.

Not sure if mentioned but they need to fix pet aggro when this debuff is applied.

This debuff is fine. It was awesome watching Darth get aggro on dragons that warp onto clerics, and then we all had to move to the staging wall.

It's like you guys don't even know how to adjust and have fun with new improved mechanics!!!!!

Yes it was awesome! Druushk warping behind us from across the room to kill the pets and said owners then AOEing immediately upon warp made VP much more interesting.

The buff breaking FD and invis is pretty amazing as well. /sarcasm off

i dont get this.. why play on a tlp when you want a Live raid encounter? those encounters Are coming, the same way that instanced raids Are coming. no way around it.
why do want that now ? why not enjoy what kunark , velious IS supposed to be ?
enlighten me please