Raid Changes coming in July

Hey everyone,

As Holly mentioned, we've been doing some work on raid targets and high end zones on Progression Servers. There are more active players on Ragefire and Lockjaw than there ever were on our launch servers, and right now there's too much competition for some very limited resources. We know some of you have suggested moving the raid targets into private instances, but we firmly believe that competition is a definitive component of the original EverQuest experience.

At launch, as now, there is only one Lord Nagafen and only one Lady Vox. If you defeated them, you also had to compete with a server full of people who wanted to defeat them, too. That's a pretty big accomplishment.

So, in the spirit of making raid content more available while still allowing for competition and accomplishment, here's what we have planned for an update in July:

• Nagafen's Lair, Permafrost Keep, the Hole, and Kedge Keep are now load-balancing zones. This will let more people have access to these zones for XP and non-raid items (WTB GEBs, PST).
• We now have a way to prevent raid targets from spawning in extra load-balanced zones. We have done this with Lord Nagafen, Lady Vox, Master Yael, and Phinigel Autropos so they will only ever spawn in the base version of their zones.
• All raid targets (dragons, Phinigel, Yael, and gods) now spawn more often than they used to, but have a much larger variance in their spawn times so they'll be more difficult to predict.
• We've made the raid bosses more difficult, so that they will require coordination of more adventurers to tackle them successfully. Healing and support should once again be very important in these encounters.
• Speaking of Hate and Fear, while we didn't implement load balancing, we did reduce the respawn time of all non-raid targets by two thirds. Any mini-bosses that didn't have persistent timers (such as the Fear golems) now have them and have additional variance in their respawn times. This means that they won't necessarily be spawned when the server first comes up.

In summary, we're increasing availability so that there are more chances at the content, increasing difficulty for both a greater challenge and to require coordination of larger groups of people, and increasing variance in spawn timers so that knowledge of the last kill time is less of an advantage.

We're hoping that the combination of these changes will both relieve some of the competition for experience and item content at the top end of the server but keep the integrity and uniqueness of the race for raid targets. Thanks for playing!

Swing and a miss.

TL will be glad for their more loot and us casuals are left with precisely nothing.

Unless you made raid bosses hard enough to actually need 72 person raids, you may need to consider a decrease in the max number of players in a raid to prevent guilds with bottomless rosters from gaining an unbeatable advantage.

Otherwise, we'll see how this works.

grats for all my alts getting more dragon loot

I strongly approve of this thread, good job Daybreak (no sarcasim intended).

Oh lord, more batphones at all hours. Oh well, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

+1 for more xp zones. I assume this will carry over into Kunark.
+1 for harder, will like to see how much.

Guess we will see how more often and larger variance works out. Feel like it will result in socking.

I think this is great the spirit of competition is still there and will take a coordinated effort to take the raid targets down as it should from the sounds of it.

Increased variance of spawn with increased frequency is just going to mean the socks are finally coming out.

While the group changes are nice, aside from Hate/Fear trash this does not help the raid situation become more stable.

Also, how is SolB/Permafrost going to work when there are 110 people already in the base zone? Are you eliminating the population cap that currently exists in every other instanced zone, or are guilds going to be able to park their raidforce in there and prevent anyone from even entering it to contest? This has already been an issue in commonlands for the past few weeks due to the limited number of slots in the base zone for trading and it has yet to be addressed.

Thanks for the instanced zones with no bosses

No thanks for the even more end game nastiness.

Once again this Team puts what it wants over what some of the customers want.

Some of us want a fair chance at end game content in era with out having to engage in what you call competition that really is not.

looks like i will need some bigger Poop Socks

Excellent changes. Thank you for maintaining the integrity of the EQ experience.

Will all these change apply to other non-instanced raid content in the future, such as:

Trakanon/Veeshan's Peaks in Kunark?
Kael/NoTV in Velious?
Ssra Temple/Seru/Vex Thal in Luclin?

If so then this change is Mabbu Approved!!!

Thanks EQ Team!

It sound's more like the only people benefiting from this change is going to be TL lol great fix guys.

@Aristo can you guys disable memblur on raid npc? people are bluring them at 5% and hiting harm touch

Absent expeditions or lockouts, they'll still be permanently camped. No matter their spawn time.

Veto

This is a good change, Raid mobs won't spawn any more often, and people have access to at least clearing the trash. Well done. Especially making raid mobs more difficult. Pras.

I say give the changes a chance before making any judgements. After all the point is to prevent the lockdown of mobs by one group. If it works yay, if it doesn't work and one guild continues to lock down content they will likely look into other options. It actually would behoove the non-instance wanting folks if they failed to lock down content.

Not that I care much. I am on the server where content isn't locked down.

Ha ha, harder! Good luck with that TLP. The dev team knows two things about harder, it's either making mobs hit like trucks, inflating hp massively or both at the same time with adds. Cheers!

This just increased the chances that casuals will never get to participate in these kills during era.