The old pattern did have them making raids easier over time. But EOK gave us a new pattern: Nerfing players over time. Almost every patch
I am all for every expansion having a tank and spank raid or two that smaller/low tier guilds can raid and feasibly win. PoHate and Fear was a good example of that, if the end fights weren't actually harder than a lot of the progressive TBM raids. Aside from that I like the progression raiding. I like the complex events. If I had anything I would request to be changed about it is that they would never allow one LD or lagging person to wipe the raid. This happens all the time. No online game IMO should set back that many people based on one person's internet connection. This isn't Korea, we have really bad internet service in america.
I have not raided in years, so take this with the deserved grain of salt, but: I always thought the DoD concept for Demi flagging raids was a good way to impose a challenge on a raid, as it (at least in part) allowed guilds to tackle certain events in an easier way for their guild make-up. I recall many if not most guilds found Sendaii the hardest, but our guild found it to be one of the easiest since we regularly fielded 7-9 paladins a night (not kidding). The basic gist of it was that there were five raids, and for each one you beat you received a higher rank of the debuff such that the last raid you beat before becoming fully flagged would have had the most difficult debuff on you. That, coupled with the mechanism to reset those flags at will was a pretty neat way to let guilds choose which type of raid was "easier" or "harder" for them when they made the final push for flagging . . . but they could try them all at easy or medium or hard as they wished (assuming they could beat at least one of the five raids). Unfortunately it went in reverse in tier 1 Demi, but I digress.
The real problem with DoDh was it required stringent raiding day after day or for a long period of time. Many guilds during that era folded due to never being able to get all the events on lock-out in order to even see the end of it. I remember the Zi-thuli pulls being brought down to the zone in, and how everyone hated it. At the time, as a cleric and druid all I thought was: "Now you know what we have gone through for a decade," every crap raid had the same design of hide behind this wall and chain cast one spell. Oh how exciting that was. Come to find out that dps and tank classes couldn't handle that level of excitement! They would fall asleep at the keyboard or /ex out from sheer boredom. Then we would get past it and work on Redfang. The next raid day we would head to sisters. Then on our third day the lockout on Zi-Thuli had expired, and we had to do it again. It didn't take long for more and more people to grow so fed up they left the game or the guild. There were three raiding guilds on our server that folded over Demi-plane and its badly designed raids/lockout mechanics.
I cannot relate to that at all. DoDh had the raids i enjoyed the most (outside of old chardok + PoTime) - sisters and (unless i'm mixing things up) performer. Granted, at the time i was in a more casual guild, not a "hardcore raid guild" - but we had no problems with lockouts and getting through those raids. And we hardly had "full" raids either. We also had no problems with the entrance mob that spawned off some random trash after the initial learning. I never got my page for 2.5, but i got my title... It was a great zone imo, and great raids - a great expansion, even though some zones were quite erm.. dull. At the time, we were "behind" - but our gear was no better than what the original people had when they beat it, and our AAs were probably (much) less developed. But the overall situation and design allowed us to "fall behind" too. With EoK you basically had to raid EoK or fold. With RoS you have to raid EoK still until your force is Essence2 flagged. But you do not have much elsewhere to go - that was much better "back in the time". So now - and that's where we get back to the thread - they either need to make the gear-gains "last longer" (still mostly in OoW gear we did Dodh for example, even though we also had done DoN ofc, and you try to do RoS in TBM gear these days...) to span not only one or two expansions, but more again OR, as the thread suggests, make "dedicated" smaller raids for that target audience. On the tuning down of events: My experience with EoK was that they tuned raids UP over time, not down - with the one exception of the queen raid to the very end of EoK when they made Warcasters more susceptible to AEs and less frequent (but almost guaranteed when before you could be lucky and go completely without at a higher chance) Tuning is a thing that should be done in beta, not just making sure that the events themselves work. Over time, and certainly not just a month or two after release, but more like in spring/summer, around the half-year mark, they should look at the metrics and either lower flagging requirements or difficulty for the "stragglers", so they too have a little chance to gear up for the new expansion that will again have the same prerequisites (of last expansion's raid gear for the current one). Especially for the bottleneck events. Between release and retune though they could seed some "spoilers" perhaps instead of relying on the grapevine. Some guilds are missing only one crucial element, e.g. because their raid leadership is somewhat stubborn or so...
Cactus event is definitely beatable by a semi serious force. There are plenty of videos available to a raid force that will disclose the commonly used strats. Once your crew gets this event down you'll notice an obscene amount of gear can be acquired per event. Use the 6 diamonds wisely to offset your guild's shortfalls and you'll be gaining power at the fastest rate I've seen in my EQ career. Who's to say that raids are too hard or easy? I suppose there is no definitive answer to this question. But what is clear is that if you wish to beat every single event you can join with a group of more serious players and do so. If you just like to chill and put significantly less effort into playing the game than the most serious....then join a guild that is the same. You won't see all of the content immediately. But you'll definitely beat a current raid or two and be able to make a wide variety of gear that will enhance your fun. Suggesting that our game devs create an entirely new system of hard/easy mode raids sounds great. But realistically....the time/resources are simply not available to them. Prlly best to move on and deal with what we have as it is.
There are a few raids I personally think are a bit overtuned, (vault for sure here) and also others than I think are undertuned. (for sure the last raid. Maybe goro, although that's a longish event with tons of running around)
Goro is all about co-ordination and listening to orders. If your directionally challenged good luck on it, it is one of my fave events. OT is fun, Skyfire is rough, hate flashing red circles! Sathirs Tomb we are still figuring out the hails and so far I hate it! 2 out of 4 events I enjoy isn't a bad start.
Crypt robbers is very fun once you figure it out, so long as the coffin openers arent getting blown up. Vault is when you find out what your guild is made of. Good luck!
Crypt Robbers wasn't actually bad, Vault seems like another story. I haven't really enjoyed Vault yet because it feels really artificial and like forced difficulty.
Plenty of videos online of Crypt Robbers. One guilds strat might not work for another but learning the basic’s, timing, and sequence of events when something happens can take this even from 20 mins to 6 ish...
We are getting there, its figuring out the clue mechanics and hails and coffins and artifacts that is slow at the moment, every try we gain knowledge so much so we now know too much! Lol I think we have figured out the best way to kill trash and avoid being blown up. Lol
You will be able to beat OT and Gorowyn. There are 4+ guilds now that have beaten some ROS raids without entering T3 EOK (tho elite folks didn't think this was possible). OT drops shields and slow belts. And they are very common drops. 9 backflags also drop, so you'd really need to use the OT/Gorowyn gear to push further into Queen/Vault and T3 to gain additional flags + EOTD2.
RoS raids aren't that difficult to begin with, but the gap between the few guilds at the top and the rest of the raiding population may be increasing. In order to serve both groups, Daybreak would need to go back and retune most events after the expansion is beaten. My explanation of RoS raid difficulty - none of these raids come close to say the Karzok, Ancient Dragon, Plane of War, etc. The difficulty that was encountered came entirely from the flagging race. When you take into account individual guild raid schedules, the top guilds beat every event within a few days of having a full 54 flagged raid force. RoS was basically a participation trophy expansion. Raid tuning - there are multiple guilds actively trying to help get raids in a working and tuned order during beta, but there's never enough time. In order to do a proper re-tune of these raids later, it takes more time, which is in extremely short supply. It wouldn't hurt to have more non-progression, throwaway raids for casual raiders, but again that takes time. I personally think they should keep the currently tuned raids available as an option for guilds up to the challenge, and just make a weaker copy of each event. Pick some combination of lowering AE's, dmg output, total hp's, add quantity and timers by ~10%. Remove 1-2 loots, diamonds, all back flags from the chest, and there will be ample motivation to beat the harder raids whenever possible. What we'll most likely get is a one size fits all hack job that isn't a good fit for the majority of guilds...
Gorwyn is a lot easier than queen or vault, it is probably your best bet for current content. With your numbers you are likely to still have issues with queen and vault.
The problem with raids like Queen and Vault is not so much the difficulty, which you can probably handle with lower numbers, but the fact that one person screwing up on an emote can have severe raid wide consequences. The fewer people you have, the longer the encounter takes, the more likely it is that someone will miss an emote and the more likely a power up will happen. The basic design of those raids really punishes guilds who do not have full raid rosters on the encounter.
not really, the basic design of these raids really punishes people who can't follow emotes / mechanics and focus for 20 minutes at a time... ROI beat T3 with how many people? the heart of the complaint here is that EQ has reached a point where a lack of skill/attention cannot be always overcome by sheer numbers. sometimes the answer really is that you just have to get better. sometimes the answer is that you need to get more people AND get better....
I just wish they would do away with the dps checks. So what if it is taking longer to kill the queen than other guilds due to lack of DPS & support classes. Get rid of the power ups, this never really punishes the top guilds and only slows down/blocks the lower raid guilds.
