That's the problem with most nostalgia seekers trying to revert things to how they remember. Everything is viewed through rose-colored glasses. The game has been endlessly modified throughout the years and seldom are the "classic" ways better than the current. Many positive changes have been made with the players in mind, barring the more recent ones targeted at the nostalgia seekers. Those changes have been up the game.
No, this game demands enough of my time already to deal with splits, figuring out how many i can make with whose boxes in which groups, and dealing with "I don't like soandso, don't put me with soandso", and the inevitable lack of class balance that most raiding guilds that aren't yours have to put up with and work around. Split raids are ridiculous and doing it makes you a bad human being. Stop that. Either content is too easy for 72 people and you split your guild into two or more guilds, or you raid together. The end. It's fine, let's continue to make this game the insufferable slog we remember it, and let's see what happens.
How does split raiding make you a bad human being... lol. Some people have large and coordinated enough guilds to do this effectively. If people cant pay attention to possibly 2 screens and play their characters effectively they shouldn't be allowed to box during raids imo. If that's your concern then, just sucks for whatever guild you're in. Thankfully, we didn't deal with this nonsense on Agnarr.
Being party to, and going along with a bad policy makes you a bad human being. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing", and in this case, men are doing something bad. You may think you're being clever or at the very least pragmatic, by deciding to split raid, or RMT, or train out weak groups in a camp you want, etc., because those were the rules DBG set, and you're just working inside the space of their rules. But all you are doing is hurting yourself, hurting other people, damaging the game and letting them win. The purpose of guilds is to raid together, to help each other beat the game, and generally to keep each other motivated. Split raiding ruins that completely, fragments your guild, forces you to recruit more people than you need or want to fill balance holes, forces you to keep toxic people because you need their class, and generally undermines the social value of a guild. Don't do this thing. If some idiot wanted to remove RGC so that he can try to form his krono empire selling Remove Curse from a rare spawn mob that he can farm out, then boycott him and hope for the best. If people burn out because the game isn't fun and DBG elects to do nothing and stop buying their krono or paying their subs, then maybe they will finally stop doing this crap.
I believe that was a Beta drop table because I remember it only dropping from rhag 1 when the xpac went live.
You kind of went off on a tangent there and started lumping everything together which diminished your momentum. While I agree that split raiding should not be the required solution to badly managed mock obstacles (limited key drops, etc), split raiding itself is not innately bad. It allows people to farm a larger amount of loot which in turn speeds up any future processes. It should be an optional method and not a requirement to meet the gear check for the upcoming expansion given the reduced unlocks. The problem you're facing comes down to the changes they made to Spell Research. It almost outright nullified an entire tradeskill and now forces players to split raid or engage in niche tactics used during DPS races to obtain an adequate amount of spells to comfortably field a raid force.
How does split raiding undermine the social aspect of a guild or fragment things? Everyone works together to achieve a common goal, which is the purpose of a guild as you've mentioned. In fact, split raiding requires a much larger, coordinated effort to pull off effectively. You can argue that a guild that can split targets is actually more cohesive in many ways than a guild that can't. And... why is recruiting a larger force bad? On TLP servers you probably want to recruit as many people as possible because rates of attrition are really high, and recruitment efforts are almost always inconsistent. Thus, it is in the best interests of a guild to bring on more people than are needed because you assume a certain % of people will quit or not show up to raids consistently. So, if you over-recruit and can split targets, everyone wins. Not sure what's bad about this. You're also just making blanket assumptions that guilds that split targets have toxic players. While this may be YOUR experience, you shouldn't conflate your personal thoughts or experiences with universal fact.
Split raids are awesome. If your raid leaders are really catering people crying about not being in a raid with someone they dont like, they should tell them to grow up and deal with it. We're all here for the same thing, loot, and splitting raiding is more loot, after the raid you can go back to avoiding soandso but to cry about it instead of promoting raid efficiency split raid is a thing now, accept it..it's part of the mechanics. purpose of a guild is to improve together, and be ready for the next expansion right? split raiding improves your guild as a whole, improves people individually because the same x people that carry one raid dps or heal wise won't always be in each split raid, which leads to other people to preform better, improving your guild as a whole. If I had to guess the only reason to cry against split raiding is because you dont want to do your best, you want to be carried in the same raid each week, collecting loot when you can win it and dont care if your guild is decked out in raid gear for the next expansion. split raiding is also good when you have dkp hoarders that are waiting for one item, if it drops in two split raids then that gives opportunity to more than one person to get it and gets the ball rolling on the line of people waiting for that loot and saves their time too because they did two raids in one night for two of those items instead of one raid a week waiting for that top dkp hoarder to finally buy it and you to be next in line. ORANGE MAN BAD.
Alternative and blindly obvious solution: increase the drop rate, a lot. This enables an awful lot: raiding as a guild, the ability to make well geared alts inside the 12 week expac window, the ability to gear up properly for the next expac rather than having to "settle" on craptastic items that you can't afford, etc. The status quo feels a lot more like knifing your way through a bread line to get some crust in the end. And the worst part is you are stuck doing this just on your main.
5 Guilds have killed EMP, and they are all the guilds you'd expect would kill EMP. The state of RGC did not in anyway affect the final outcome. I'd say that makes the RGC drop rate/mechanic PERFECTLY tuned so that it feels like another small challenge, but not a insurmountable road block. Its a fun addition to the path to a guilds first EMP kill.
Sounds to me you just want an easy game where everyone in a instanced guild that raids once a week can have two characters fully decked out in 12 weeks, which was not the case for even one character on a classic server. As vicious above pointed out you just have to split raid for RGC copies but you would rather complain and ask for an easier version of the game for less work. I think this is the definition of world of warcraft at this point. The game is already easy enough thanks to focuses and other out of era things, if you continue to make it easy people will get through it so fast then quit until next expansion, eventually interest dies in the next TLP cause wheres the challenge and now you have a dead game.
It’s simply not necessary for every priest class in the raid to have a copy of RGC to beat the content. It can even be beaten without a single copy. One copy alone makes a huge difference, making the fights where it is required much easier, and two copies pretty much allows seamless RGC coverage. You just dedicate the people who do have it to chain cure and you are pretty much all set. Give it to your high attendance shamans first is my recommendation.
Yes I would, and you are a fool for not wanting the same. This is not actual difficulty, this is a stupid time-sink added for reasons that absolutely do not benefit players or enhance our enjoyment, quite the opposite. I have more important things to do than hang around camping crap, standing around waiting for rebuffs or slow walking places. That the RC spell is on a particular permacamp rare spawn and benefits a particular RMT turd is absolutely hilarious, but in line with DBG's usual lack of foresight, or possibly malicious intent. Now, in the fantasy world where the curse makes fights substantially harder, I might accept an argument that not having RGC at all, or having it be incredibly rare actually does make the game more difficult. I consider this to be a totally fair, totally reasonable challenge. Except that isn't really how this mechanic is working in practice.The curse lasts approximately forever, UNLESS you wipe. Long after the mob is dead, you are cursed. Or you duel/kill yourself and clear it, and cost the raid precious time to rebuff. Exactly what purpose is this serving other than to slow people down and increase the timesink? Zero. If you want to make the game harder, remove all remove curses COMPLETELY, but also turn down the timer on that debuff to 5 minutes, and simply have the mob re-apply it frequently. All the difficultly, none of the timesink. So yes, get rid of the timesinks. They no longer serve any purpose, if they ever did. This is a 20yo game, and I'm not playing it through ever again regardless. With the existing content, even if another expac is never released, there is enough content to last about 5 years. Possibly, after 5 years, if this game continues to exist, I might be ready to play it through again anyway. But not at the present rate.
Even if every priest had RGC, everyone knows you can only count on about 3 players to reliably do these sorts of things anyway.
While I think whoever Fish Lips is he is somewhat ridiculous in a lot of what he says, I DO agree with him about Split raiding. I've been in guilds that split raids and guilds that dont and there is a marked difference in the split raid guilds. They tend to be more elitist, more "hardcore" and a frankly just a bunch of cliques that are doing their own thing with very little guild cohesion. My guild on Phinigel did some light split raiding pre-PoP but when they decided to start heavily splitting Quarm the guild died (IMO - They are still going on Phinigel and from what I hear are doing just fine, so I acknowledge there are people who like that kind of thing ). It was the same guild and was only a shell of itself that cared less about its people and more about who got the most phat loots (One officer even created a "loot per hour" chart lol! how ridiculous - even if I DID really like that officer and hes a great guy, but the notion of loot per hour and the only thing that matters is loot was what drove me away). Either way, when Agnarr rolled around the guild I helped create decided early in the server that we would never split raid unless 100% necessary and we would form a cohesive guild. Did it work? Sometimes, no guild is ever perfect and lord knows I wasn't a perfect leader, but I do think the guild felt more like a group of friends instead of a group of loot as most of the "uber, we like to split everything" guilds tend to feel like. So, meh, to each their own. Some people like splitting and good for them. I choose not to join guilds who do that. To each their own!
Unfortunately, once the concept of open world mobs go away, all you really can compete on is loot per character. And it is far less compelling, IMO. If they made the game an actual challenge again there would be that. But on Agnarr? Every expansion was beaten basically during the prior expansion. #MakeEverQuestHardAgain
Who is competing? I am not competing. I do not want to compete. I am playing a cooperative group/guild based RPG, I am playing against the dungeon master. And I will use every single tool at my disposal, including meta tools. They should either dramatically increase the drop rate of RGC, or dramatically reduce the debuff duration of the curse, such that after the mob is dead, it can fade in a reasonable amount of time. That isn't a change to difficulty, that's simply removing unnecessary torture from the game.
Remove curse should be questable without a bunch of toxic , or it should be a global drop in 2-3 mid level Luclin zones. I understand making RGC not researchable, but just leaving remove curse as a drop from one low level named is just asinine. We want an enjoyable experience not some toxic nonsense that's 'classic'
