Terror of Luclin Raids: A Raider's Review

This was our first live expansion we did from launch day and I think in general I liked the raids, on average, more than CoV. I echo what Sancus said that I do miss the couple "fast kill" raids from CoV, they were just a nice way to help fill out a raid night with quick boss kills and loot--and I also note those sorts of events are usually very rewarding to the various server open raids and lower progressed guilds as a means of getting modern raid loot.

My perception as someone still relatively new to live is that ToL has been better for the overall raid community in terms of raid accessibility, I know on my server it seems more of the guilds / groups that aren't able to 9/9 the expansion are killing more of the content in ToL, earlier in the expansion, than was the case in CoV--which I think is a good thing. We don't have variable raid difficulties like some other MMOs (i.e. WoW Normal / Heroic / Mythic raids), so it's generally good if some decent chunk of the raids are broadly acceptable (6 out of 9 feels "right.") On the other side of that it is nice if at least the final raid is really hard, which admittedly CtG isn't really although I do really like CtG overall design and it has minimal annoyance factor to me.

Like many my biggest issue is with lag as it relates to raid mechanics. Others have listed most of them out but there are just a number of raids that work pretty well if the server was rebooted the day before, but seem to just break down almost completely in high lag environments. You can still power through all of them, but lag really makes a good chunk of these raids incredibly unfun and frankly puts a bad taste about the entire game in people's mouths. Four waves of AHR golems up at once was kind of a meme to laugh about 6 months ago, the fact that you still see it in July sometimes is more annoying/disheartening about the state of the game.

Deleted dupe post.

They wanted to code it so clickies don't work at all so it would be chaos with people having to stop heal to cure people. Thankfully, that wasn't implemented. Also you can just click and hold on a clicky to make a hotkey. You don't need social button macros.

I feel like we see one wave of emotes for the cures (maybe two?) and one wave of emotes for the lightness/darkness on ctg. So that's 8 to 12 people possibly emoted with potential overlap.

Also what is the enrage for free the goranga? I can't recall if we saw it on beta.

We typically see 3-4 lightness/darkness emote "waves" on CtG. Similar for the cures/clickies.

We see it on casuals, 4 extra shades. Then 6. Then 8. I assume if your DPS is really terrible that can start on earlier waves of shades and you'd get even more.

Last night in SoA we were 1171 seconds into Goranga w/ achievements, one person lagged out at the end, missed their run away / hide emote, and we wiped. That was a lost 20-30 minutes of time with no reward besides exp loss. We were running 25-30 mil DPS so it's not like we were slow, these events just take forever.

This is not how modern raid events should be going.

1179 seconds for Shei to do the healing achievement
1408 seconds for Aten
1171 for a failed Goranga event

That's over an hour for just 3 events, not including travel / laggy zoning / rebuffing time.
Shei engage to Goranga wipe clocked at 1h 35 minutes. I wasn't active during TBL, but ToV and CoV were nowhere near this slow.

That's correct. I wasn't 100% sure at first, and I don't think there's an emote calling out the enrage. If you end the event with the last wave at the very end being only two (or four if you skip freeing the Goranga that reduce the adds), you didn't hit enrage.

On a side note, it would be glorious if freeing the ones that are claimed to do nothing was actually a great help, unannounced. If not for the event length, I'd totally have advocated trying it.

iirc if you pop the pool it's 2 extra, then 4. I don't think it goes from 2 shades spawned before enrage immediately to 6.

I think we have typically experienced 3-4 waves of light/darkness emotes. Makes it a much more difficult event than the people who can literally skip killing the ravens.

Fair enough! However, we don't skip killing the ravens. We just kill them after the boss is dead usually

I do not agree with this. While it does add additional rounds of emotes, we had a fairly easy time killing the ravens on spawn on Beta (that's what we did at first). We opted not to kill them to increase our speed on the progression race, and we did so by keeping them stun locked for the ~4 minutes between the first spawning and us killing them (on our first win). We didn't just skip them by doing a lot of DPS.

A very large portion of the time we spent developing/iterating on strats was dedicated to that phase of Close the Gate, and a large portion of the time we spent practicing was also dedicated to that phase. A lot of that was to deal with contingencies in the event one or more of the three Enchanters was emoted (taken out of PBAE stun range), died, or something else went wrong in the stun rotation. Given we were stunning the ravens at the boss, an unstunned raven would have resulted in an AE silence on most of the raid (and a cascade as the Enchanters were silenced and unable to stun other ravens).

It's not necessarily something that's hard to do once (nor is following emotes), but there's a lot of things that can go wrong. Any guild could theoretically not kill ravens by following the same method (stun locking them). The duration you need to do so obviously depends on your guild's DPS, but now that they despawn when the boss dies, you'd only need to do about 20-25M boss DPS to finish the phase in 4 minutes (the length we stun locked them on progression, and we did save burns for that phase). I suspect very few guilds do it this way because it really is difficult to pull off consistently.