Raid Development Time vs Live Play Time

I agree that the difficulty isnt close. But MOTM stops in LDON. The 3 big differences from 2005 to current is the availability of gear, baseline AA and general gameplay changes, and information.

When I was on Stromm working on Demiplane prog, we were still doing Tacvi for gear and hadnt even beaten OMM. My monk was wearing PoP items. We also didnt really know all the events. Our sisters strat was to have a squad guard each monk. Now sisters is 'pull all the trash, then afk for ~22min while the monks do things' or you can pull hatchet trash if you are tryhard.

ALSO original vule is the most toxic fight ever designed (and should be brought back)

MotM was in reference to earlier events to prevent a "but MotM!" argument. I know MotM stops in LDoN, and gets progressively less powerful in each iteration.

I'd argue the biggest change on TLPs vs original will always come down to AC. The changes to AC softcaps (basically increasing it by x3-4 for everyone), makes it a completely different game.

While it is true that most players came nowhere near BIS in those days, most guilds generally had at least 1-2 warriors with BIS or as close to it as possible, and having triple to quadruple the ac softcap is a massive, massive difference in the ability to keep a tank alive since the MT staying alive often determined whether it was a wipe or not.

I'm disappointed. I don't know what the solution is either. I guess its kind of the state of this game right.

Everything was cleared in one night by a majority of the guilds. There's nothing to strive for as a guild, there's no sense of accomplishment. Congrats... now go farm the events for gear for the next expansion in the year.

Raiding should be a little tough.. It feels like raiding this expansion was not tuned well at all. Just my opinion tho.

Even on top of that, going into DoDH with no information vs after all events have long since been solved is a different beast entirely. Learning attempts were an important part of the bottleneck in how long events took to beat. Throw in other bottlenecks like 3 HC guilds on the same server competing for Vule spawns to grant their guilds access to DPoB. It was different times.

We can argue the best guilds now would still tear through current content quick if they had 0 information, but with everything laid out and explained, while it may be better for testing, it reduces the learning element considerably and puts more emphasis on execution. When guilds have executed enough on Beta, it also means the raid force is going to have that consistency because prog isn't being done on live. When we used to test raids on Beta long ago, we were only given information for a specific phase to test, not the entire encounter. I don't know when that changed, but it's much different now.

For the guilds that aren't as hardcore, events these days still take a while to beat and aren't just all done in a day, especially when they are figuring things out entirely on their own.

DPG does not have the available personnel to accomplish all our wishes. They do a great job with what they have.

I'd like to see more than 4 missions per expansion. Granted I'd also like to be able to take my 4 box crew and be able to do more than 1 or two missions per expansion. I am by no means a great boxer and do not use any programs. Just good old alt/tab'ing on 2 pc's.

NoS overall could use some tweaking. The RNG of augs, ore/slot specific tradeskill material.

On the original question, I dont think the Dev's play as much casually as most of us play. Look at it like the plumber, they spend all day doing that job, they might go home and chill vs working on their own stuff.

Having raids that require beating this before that is also not fun for a guild that could beat raid_02 but cannot get past raid_01. Think RoS T2 events. T2.2 was fun, where-as T2.1 and 2.3 were much to easy.

I agree with this. ToL and especially NOS have been extremely easy with regards to the events, and I have seen guilds beating a lot of these raids with 35-40 players fairly easily much less a full raid. There should be a tier at least in each expansion that is difficult, and not have every event just fall over from a half-AFK raid force.

That said, I don't really see how they can make another maeratus type raid zone or something similar without finally addressing the raid lag. A truly difficult event with the type of raid lag that is still fairly common on some servers would be pretty brutal. You are talking 30-35% hit on raid wide DPS in some of these instances along with mechanics that bug out, don't work, or are extremely slow causing all sorts of problems such as double spawns, emotes, etc.

NoS raids were challenging for many raiders while still being accessible to many. And these raids won't be trivial for many weeks or even months. And they all worked reasonably well! I'd give all the raid Devs two thumbs up for sure!

2 raid forces I raid with did 0 beta and have had no issue beat 7 of 8 events and 5 of 6 events. They haven't tried the others yet. I would say guilds who are walking in relatively blind and winning is the exact opposite from challenging.

My hot take would be to hold back one raid in t3 from beta. So that the final tier/race is decided by guilds learning on the fly. This could show which guild is best at adapting in the real time, ability to recover from a wipe, etc.But most likely if this were to happen, would have a raid with bugs, broken script that was not tested enough.

The simple fact is that there's not really a good way to change the race to make it particularly meaningful.

If you make it Vanquisher then people will just spend more time practicing on beta, and in cases where you have mutually exclusive vanquisher awards it will come down to whoever is willing to raid again in exactly 4.5 days. You also have the question of personal achievements an whether they count, and how much of the raid needs to have them to count. There's also the problem of broken achievements (right now, one of the NoS achievements isn't able to be completed).

If you bring back flagging, if it comes entirely from raids at least, then you pretty much just limit yourself to the race being whoever can raid on lockout in exactly 4.5 days. You could try to make it harder and mix in group progression with raid progression and launch it all at once, but it still is going to largely come down to who can raid on lockouts.

It really all comes back to two things:

1. Beta. As long as beta exists and people can arbitrarily test every raid event and do all of their learning before hand, there is no race metric that doesn't boil down to the race effectively being a speed run of who is willing to rearrange their schedule and stack the most DPS. Unfortunately DPG doesn't have the staffing required to release unbroken raids without Beta (who else remembers spending a week convincing the devs that True North was not a targeted spell and couldn't be used as a mechanic to avoid a death touch).
2. An unwillingness to tune raids such that they're difficult for the top end guilds to one shot on launch day. Unfortunately with only 9 raids an expansion, I suspect this is a calculated change to not lock out the bulk of the raiding population from getting 9/9 in a reasonable time frame. If you make a raid hard for the RoIs and SRs and RAs of the world, then the casual guilds will just never beat that. Maybe some kind of planned nerfing could happen over the year to essentially make the fights easier as time goes on to alleviate that, but then the developers have to essentially make multiple versions of the fight.

I would prefer raids to be a little harder, or at least progressive; the current situation with expansion raids is in a decent spot.

However, I would love for there to be an additional raid (and zone) each year like Plane of War. Something that isn't beneficial except for some clickies or extremely minor power creep with a very hard raid to boot. With low power creep and low reward, there would be little incentive for most guilds to even bother with this in era, except on a whim. You get plenty of gear as is from the normal expansion raids.

The addition of this would give the top guilds something to compete over, as well as provide returnable content for years to come in the form of these minor clicky upgrades, or heroic AAs, or whatever. So even if it's something that only 10 guilds beat in era, other guilds and raid forces over the years afterwards will still be stopping in, providing you content for a longer period of time.

Ahh yes, “accessible”. The buzzword for dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator. Rarely if ever in my opinion have games been made better by making them more “accessible”. Let’s fix the raid lag and actually have challenging raid events again. The raid game in my opinion is in a very sorry state at the moment.

You might not agree with the idea, but it's the core reason behind why FFXIV's raid scene has thrived since the end of Heavensward. The majority of players in an MMO are not hardcore high end raiders.

Yoshida and his team made it a point to never return back to the higher difficulty raid tiers where they found a sweet spot with the Creator tier of difficulty and for many years since has been the yard stick they have designed against.

For the most HC of players, most encounters are a breeze where the only challenges they feel will be the last 1-2 encounters of a given raid tier (with 4 encounters in a tier, 3 tiers an expansion). To those who race and beat the content in a day, they yearned for a greater challenge. The dev team eventually created Ultimate raids which, despite being a single encounter usually between 15-18 minutes long, instead takes the teams upwards of a week of continuous pulls to beat. The idea is that 2 are released a year.

EQ doesn't have an equivalent to Ultimates and perhaps that's what the best of the best are also yearning for, but we're talking about current expansion content that in XIV is eventually cleared by 2-4% of the active playerbase. What would that translate to in EQs, <1%? It has to be worth their dev time for the asset and content creation pipeline.

I don't think competitive eaters complain that they didn't enjoy the 73 hotdogs they eat in a 15-minute race. They'll eat in non-competitive situations as well and enjoy their food then.

I'm all for everyone getting useful clicks, but don't take my epic!

Why is vanquisher not considered part of the "more difficult raids" discussion? It may not be the most insane challenge ever created but there is a reason it always takes longer to do than the first clears, not including raids that require 2 weeks because of conflicting achieves.

Broken vanquisher achievements are also annoying though, has anyone been able to get pit fight vanquisher?