Raid Development Time vs Live Play Time

(I was going to put this in the T3 raid thread, but I didn't want to disrupt the positive vibe there.)

Yea lots of people!

I don't raid anymore, but I am curious about those that do. According to EGL for the top finishers, T1 was completed in 45 minutes, T2 was completed in 52 minutes, T3 was completed in 41 minutes. And now you're done, just farming gear for 9 months.

Do you feel cheated with how little Live time you actually spend on getting raids completed the first time? Would anyone prefer less Beta time and more Live time working on raids or would that interfere with getting gear?

I know most (all) the guilds who one shot these when launched spend lots of hours working and thinking about events in Beta. But for something that takes up a large portion of development time each expansion (cause let's face it, the missions are just raids with stuff cut and numbers changed), it feels like the community isn't getting the best bang for the buck here.

For those that put in the time for raiding, I'm just curious how you feel about it.

<3 <3

If we put in less time in Beta, the raids would launch more broken than they already do. There isn't any raid in NoS that took the top guilds more than a few (if even) attempts on Beta outside of periods when the raids were broken.

I prefer this kind of raiding. . lets folks have real lifes.

If I could trust Daybreak to: create a raid, keep it a secret from the guilds they raid with, have it be functional, fun, challenging, functional and interesting... sure, that would be the dream.

That's not the world we live in though. I don't play EQ to see new innovative things, its just a retirement home to hang out and play with friends.

I'd take another Plane of War or Maeretas right about now. We're due for another unbeatable event.

Triune God, Mearatas, something worth a challenge would be nice, seeing 15 guilds beat the expansion on launch day somehow cheapens the effort spent.

Call me elitist, the final boss to an expansion should be, idk, a boss.

Right, if we wanted to go fight Dark Souls bosses, we would go play Dark Souls.

I get that some people don't want grindy content. But the missions that require us to utilize one trick, or memorize one stupid mechanic isn't it.

At least on grindy fights people get to play their class.

I do not feel cheated and I don't see a need for change. The fun in a new event is testing mechanics and trying new things. It is awesome being able to raid beta with 0 XP loss and endless rez tokens.

A lot of the events are complicated and have weird gimicks that are not included in any developer information. A big part of any new event for me is testing every CC mechanic (mez, charm, slow, root, stun) and logging that information. This information is not given by the devs.

The experience between learning the event on beta or after launch is not very different. What is very different however is all that stuff we find wrong and report during beta is mostly fixed when the raids go live. Thus the farming cycle is not delayed or needlessly miserable.

The thing is, those metrics don't really matter that much. It is the only measurement available. Pretty much any guild that completes on launch day is a very strong guild. The difference between 50m and 60m doesn't really matter and the best guild for the player is the guild they enjoy being a part of.

A better metric would be vanquisher, which is not tracked.

I like this version. As an analogy when I played soccer or football or just PT in the Military, its all about the prep. Race day is the time to put your best foot forward and do your best. My guild did really well on 3.2, minor hiccup that could have hurt us very hard on 3.1, and we made a rookie mistake (x2) on 3.3. All that being said if we hadn't done allbthe prep it would have gone way worse for us. Totally worth it.

Another way to look at is camping a named, you camp for however long, then get your named. For me just happens I know when the named will pop.

Yeah, I don't think NoS raids are hard but ...

Let's say the raids are made to challenge RoI. Then they would be unbeatable by most/many guilds - hi Mearatas - and what's the point of having devs spend time creating raids that only 1 guild can beat.

What are you suggesting as an alternative, less dev time devoted to raids and more devoted to the group game?
I assume most raiders are only keeping their sub all year because of the raid game. If you literally doubled the dev time for group content it would just go from maybe 1 week to 2 weeks of group content time for higher end players. So I sub for 1 month for group content?
Unlikely. I'd just no longer subscribe.

What would actually be nice is a larger budget to improve both group content and raid content without robbing Peter to pay Paul. (Tunare, I can't stand that freakin analogy or whatever it is).
I'd like lots of unique, engaging guests each expansion with unique and fun, rewards.
New freaking epics, with either no level limits, or all of them having level limits.
No more super overpowered 20 year old epic clickies like shammys, SKs and bards, unless all classes have something as useful and powerful.
I'd like more raids, with exciting mechanics and memorable bosses.
I'd like a few tank and spank raids each year, and I'd like a few marathons.
I NEED an end boss of each expansion that's hard enough that no guilds are beating it day one that does not simply punish the guild from 1 minor mistake that leads to a single death causing an instant wipe of the raid.

I assume that all of these old boomers that are still playing after 20 years would pay higher expansion and subscription prices IF it would result in more fun, memorable and engaging content for both group and raid game.

I want to go back to the Planes of Power model where it takes weeks/months of flagging raids to get everyone flagged just to enter the final tier of raids. Where you need a good amount of the T1 gear on your raid forces before you can have a realistic shot at winning T2 raids and then you need to farm T2 gear to have a chance at winning T3 raids.

Need an actual measurable difference between last year's gear, this year's T1 gear and this year's T2 gear so that it is actually worth upgrading, even necessary to upgrade, in steps vs being able to just jump from last year's BIS to this year's BIS on T1 events. T3 raids should not be winnable when your raid force is still wearing mostly last year's gear.

It absolutely cheapens the experience when 10+ guilds clear all the raids within a couple hours of them being unlocked. There's no challenge there. We're just farming the treadmill on low speed. There's no progression to this "progression raiding" game. You can win, and win easily, on last year's gear within hours of release. The "race" is exciting, but the feeling is fleeting and it absolutely requires that your entire guild rearrange their normal raid schedule to accommodate being online and spam hailing the NPC at the exact second the unlock happens. Then when you win, you just dump the entire chest because loot distribution is time that you can't afford to waste.

I would reduce lockout timers so that you can raid the same event multiple times per week and increase the amount of loot on chests and have real, actual tiers of raids where each tier is much larger step in difficulty and better rewards.

I mean, requiring flagging would prevent people from quitting one raid early to account for zone times so they can /kick the expedition and half a force is ready to zone into the next instance.

or instead of all that they could just fix the lag/zone time nonsense.

As much as I want hard raids, I also acknowledge "unbeatable" raids isn't good for the overall everquest population. I don't think it's too much to ask for at least the final raid of the expansion to be more difficult, but again acknowledge that tuning can be tricky.

I've always thought the demiplane of blood raid design was a great way of tuning. Have blockers and banes drop from each raid that makes the events become easier every week. The top guilds will power through without needing to gear up. Weaker guilds will catch up in a few months from simply farming blockers. Can anyone that's run through progression lately confirm how long it took them to go through demiplane? I remember it taking at least a month for T1 then weeks to get enough banes to finigh Mayong.

It's not exactly recent (although far more recent than when demiplane was current) but on Phinigel Mayong was beaten the day after the expansion unlocked by the top two guilds and on the 4th day by the next couple.

Well that really makes me wonder if strats and rosters are just that much finer tuned or what to be doing that in a single day. On combine, full raids just didn't have the dps to keep up with the script and would get overwhelmed without banes to blow up the minis. Or have spell/gear revamps totally changed the old game?

Likely a combination of having the strats down due to years of it being in game and spell/gear/AA changes like you said.

For the blockers they were really just given to pullers while everyone else just dealt with the debuff.

Demi-plane in 2005 and Demi-plane in 2022 are not comparable in the slightest. No TLP comes close to replicating the original difficultly of events in era. MotM is just and HP boost and (sometimes) damage mitigation.

Yeah I wasn't saying they are the same, I was just answering because he literally asked "Can anyone that's run through progression lately confirm how long it took them to go through demiplane?".