I know we did what seemed like a bunch of Beta raids, from beta to live they changed. Alot of times a small tweek is all that needed. One example was the T2-2 raid, during beta all int casters were insta splatted on zone in... so they was fixed then it became fun! Gorowyn raid we did this in beta many times in one night to help the dev tweek small issues. Beta was fun, I just want my damned Cactus hat!
The paradigm of having an easy and hard mode in raids makes a lot of sense to me, and I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented in EQ. Specifically, allowing the easy mode to be beaten by less capable raiding forces, but the top-tier loot comes from being able to beat the hard mode which should only be done by the more capable guilds after they've geared up a bit from the expansion. This allows for more people to see the content and help build up up-and-coming players to enter the higher raid forces, while allowing more flexibility to introduce harder mechanics for more ambitious players, which helps promote a healthy game. This, of course, requires that developers have enough budget to properly tune encounters and gameplay, which may not be possible in today's EQ.
Hmm there actually wasn’t a NDA last year lol “There is no Non-Disclosure Agreement specifically for this beta session. We'd still prefer though that you keep related discussions in the Beta Forums (or the Issue Tracker) so that we can keep track of and find information more easily.” Unlike past years “Please remember that when you sign up to participate in any beta you agree to the Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) terms which in summary means you agree not to disclose information about the expansion. You must read and accept the full NDA before you get placed in the pool.”
Could be something as simple as the current upgrade system too. One loot table for both but hardmodes drop the equivalent of diamonds to upgrade items.
There hasn't been an NDA since The Darkened Sea (TBM, EoK, and RoS did not have one). So now that that's cleared up, are you gonna clarify? On a related note, yeah, it would be nice if they posted writeups like they used to. Here's an example of one from TDS beta (the formatting's a little off, and it's in google drive so this post isn't super long). I'm sure part of the reason they don't post those anymore is it's probably time consuming to properly document the raid, and in general beta documentation has gotten significantly worse in recent years. Part of it might also be that they have no NDA now though. It's not like betas that had NDAs were particularly selective, but they might have reservations for whatever reason about those being immediately available. I can only guess though. It would be nice if the information given out was shared with everyone. That said, Old Man Thorren granted anyone flags this expansion, which means every guild could test all of the raids.
I guess Daybreak did that later in Beta. I know we were not flagged for T2 until A GM flagged us after that I didn’t pay much attention to flagging. Btw who tested each event?
Yes the flags from Old Man were only added towards the end of Beta, maybe the last week? So the option was available to everyone for at least a brief period.
it still depends on your raid make up for any wins. RA of needed classes , gear, DPS , CC if needed . but more raid guilds have won Balance of Power 1st in ROS. http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/index.php?expansion=ROS1 I been pushing my guild to go win it 1st before our 1st The Kar'Zok win but its hard to focus on learning two new raids with limited time.
You are definitely wrong with this statement: For the beta for RoS they have made the beta forums readable to ALL. Only to post there (and ofc to take part) dd you have to pre-order. They have hidden/removed the beta forums only shortly after new Year (may have been JAN 2nd i am not sure). From who posted on the beta-forums, you also got at least some indication on who did beta them. On the thread: I do not take this as a "too hard" thread, but instead as a "make raids for different audiences" one. Ideally, the difficulty would be selectable / adjustable, of course with a "cost" or "benefit" depending on the difficulty setting. But things aren't ideal, i'm afraid. And since one raid-force differs much from the next, they can't design raids "progressively harder" as (they should be able to) with group content where we have a lot less variables. With raid-difficulty, we are in a catch-22 atm. Some guilds have "figured out" setups that lets them break scripts (see EoK queen raids), so these guilds/forces have become "the standard" over time, much like raid gear (or at the very least a full set of max-tier group gear, visbles AND nonvisibles) and maxed-AAs (no "or" there, these ARE taken for granted i'm sure) seems to be "the standard" for a new expansion's "design". Anyone not able to meet these requirements are "punished" by finding themselves stopped instead of merely "held back". Even more so when the wanna-be raid force is hit by multiple "disadvantages" like low-numbers, low RA, more casual (as in: more infrequent) raid times, less number of AAs and so on. That is, imo, mostly a player-made problem generated by min-maxing guilds - even if that is "human nature", almost. And as Ngreth has said: Players/characters have attained a power-level that makes it HARD to sensitively design or adjust events. On top of that, we're hitting program/system-related ceilings (like mob-HPs) so the "easy answer" of "throw higher HP and DPS mobs at players" is no more. Instead, outside of a conversion to 64bit, it'll become "throw more of those same HP mobs with more DPS at players" in the future. And keep us "busy" solving riddles or following emotes while we are doing so (the "complexity" that's going to increase according to Ngreth). They (Dev's) have little choice there too i'm afraid. There is no easy solution, least of all within the known and unknown constraints the company operates under.
I think they were available for a couple weeks? We didn't test any T2 or T3 raids until they were added.
Thank you for the well thought out post. That is why I am not proposing different difficulty settings. Instead I am proposing that some of the T1 raids (or even T0 if you want to call it that) be made with weaker guilds in mind. The elite guilds are going to plow through content whether it is too easy or hard. I don't think all raids should be for elite guilds only. I think TBM Hate/Fear was a well designed approach to open up raiding to the weaker raid forces. No currency, and it was an extra time sink to clear the zone.
Didn't RoF have Corrupted ToV as a similar idea, which I think was larger in scale when compared to Hate or Fear, right?
Spit-balling an idea here, I'm not even quite sure how I feel about it, but... As it stands, it seems a pretty common path for raids to be tuned a bit on the heavy side to start. Over time, they see changes, tweaks, nerfs, etc. I can't remember which, but one of the devs mentioned a little bit ago that they lean towards making things a bit harder to start rather than easier and then tune it down later. The bickering over exactly what should change and more importantly when it should change seems to cause a lot of issues here. Perhaps it's the uncertainty that gets people so up in arms. What about something like scheduled tuning passes? Tier 1 is going to die quickly to the high end and be a pure piñata for farming very quickly. Maybe a month in, tier 1 sees a tuning pass that makes it a bit more accessible to more guilds. Under the current flagging model, tier 2 will likely be in the same state after another 2 months - perhaps a tier 1 re-visit and a tier 2 tuning pass after 3 months. Another 2-3 months later, the same process for tier 3. Again, this is just a thought and not a suggestion nor a hard-set though-out timing. But tentatively, it would look like: December patch - expansion release. January patch - tier 1 tuning pass. March patch - tier 2 tuning pass, tier 1 re-tuned a bit lower. June patch - tier 3 tuning pass, tier 2 re-tuned a bit lower, tier 1 re-tuned a bit lower. September patch - tier 3 re-tuned a bit lower, tier 2 re-tuned a bit lower, tier 1 trivialized to completely allow all raiding guilds of any current level flavor into the content ahead of the next expansion. An example of the progression of these passes: Cactus releases; Cactus timed adds are reduced to 2 minute intervals; Cactus timed adds are reduced to 3 minutes intervals; Cactus targeted emote is removed; Cactus timed adds are removed entirely. Guilds farming it would stomp it either way. Guilds with less and less DPS would gain access. More alliances and PUG-type groups would eventually be able to partake. Would it work, would the devs have the time? Who knows. Perhaps if something of the sort were planned before release, it would be a trivial amount of work to adjust along the way. Some months into the expansions, everything just melts for alt loot for the bleeding edge raiders, I'm not sure why it would be a major concern to allow it to be more accessible across the board.
Yeah that approach could make things more accessible to weaker guilds. I am not sure that is what I would choose, but it would have the benefit of making the game more exciting to the mid and low tier guilds. It would be like unlocking raids so many months after expansion release. Personally I would do each tier every 3 months, so 9 months until tier 3 is tuned. On the subject of difficulty. It took a month or two after RoS release before my guild was able to beat the Queen raid. When we finally beat it, I was shocked at how difficult they had made it. The extra RoS hitpoints allowed us to survive warcaster assaults better, but we actually kept hitting the timer on the raid. If you take too long, all of the queen emotes go crazy, and you only last a minute or two before the emotes wipe everyone. The raid is hard enough, they didn't need to put a 24 minute timer or something like that to complete the raid. Timer should have been 60 minutes if at all. Queen raid really did need to be rebalanced. Even now, a public raid force that I join, can't get past about 60 health on Queen. Warcasters show up and raid wipes.
Reasonable. My inclination towards incremental tuning is that there is a big variance in the strength of guilds, especially in the 10-20 range. Everyone wants to have a challenging raid (I guess maybe not everyone, but you get the idea). Going from strong to trivial in one pass negates the chance of guilds in the huge range between to work a challenging event. While some things (Vault!) are very difficult and likely not worth the time for some guilds to bang their head against it at the cost of morale and time, the event would provide a great challenge for a wide range of guilds with slight tweaks along the way. Taking it straight to trivial at the 6 month mark would take away what is a really nice event that may just be a bit too difficult to start for many. Doing this event in passes could look like: 1) Release 2) Increase the time between phases by 1 minute. 3) Remove Tomb Rot. 4) Modify the damage multipliers to apply to all damage types. 5) Remove Drusella. The event would be very challenging at the start. On the first pass, it would be a bit more forgiving. On the second, it would become substantially more forgiving. On the third, it would still require paying attention but would become much less punishing to sub-par roster composition. Finally, it would become a fight full of add management that would require some thought, but not be completely barring to a number of guilds. Again, not specific requests, but an example from a brief moment of thinking.
I think having a series of tunings would be too much work. I expect one tuning, and only a mild to moderate decrease in difficulty. For Queen, remove the timer and decrease warcaster AE damage on raid would go a long way, although the biggest issue is probably the dps test, so a longer time period before sycophants spawn would make it more accessible. Also, I am less worried about tuning of T2 and T3 than tuning of T1 raids.
The problem with nerfing the T1 raids is that when the lower tier guilds hit T2 they will get absolutely knocked out. Need to grow and overcome T1 as is before you hit T2. It looks like T1 hasnt been too terrible for the lower tier guilds but T2 could use a slight nerf soon.
