I disagree with OP. Lady Nev and Vulak have *always* been long fights in-era on purpose. They arent fights like Vyemm which is chaotic, they're battles of attrition. Granted we're in for more of that with luclin, but I wouldnt want to change how these fights go right now.
If you kill everything that you can kill in a week i can easily see guilds of most sizes being able to increase their efficiency by 10% per week. Over all we'll have 4 months in velious so this will be a none point soon.
It's confusing to me why we are making the same exact mistakes from 2002 all over again. SOE realized that constant twitches, mod rods, and extremely long fights were not fun and a poor approach to making fights artificially "harder." They nerfed mod rods, and significantly reduced the HPs of mobs in luclin and velious, while slightly increasing their damage output. So after more than a decade of this knowledge, DBG has decided that we need to inflate the HPs by a large margin and increase damage mitigation. Yes, I am aware that players are doing more damage, have more HPs and mana than they had in the past but these fights are being drawn out to the point where they are no longer fun to do. Great, we can prove that we are able to maintain an infinite CH rotation and joust mob AEs... but why not have a 5-10 minute fight as opposed to a 20 or 30+ minute fight? Perfect examples are Vulak and Lady Nev- we get to sit there and ::yawn:: while we slowly chip away at their overly inflated HPs. If you can get one of these mobs to 70%, you can get them to 0, but you will be bored to tears doing it. MoTM, PoTM, and +++HPs are quite possibly the worst addition to the first few expansions of EQ. Thankfully all this BS goes away (hopefully) once we are past Luclin. The fact that we are even going to have to deal with this nonsense in VT and SSRA which already take ages is bad enough.
All of these mobs are dying in 5-10 minutes. If it's taking you 30 minutes then you're either bring 30 shaman to the fight, and not enough dps classes, or you're just now starting to kill them, and should get better as you get gear.
No one is doing vulak "legit" in 5-10 minutes.... hell I doubt even with the "other method" people are killing him in 5-10 minutes. (in instance) maybe in open world with 100+ Also who cares if the top guild kills vulak/Lady nev in 5 minutes so the rest of us can kill him in a timely manner.... 20 minutes beats the hell out of 44 minutes. Even tho I would prefer a 5 minutes fight but we dont want AoS dropping him in 1 minute. gotta compramise
The last Vulak kill I was at, was about 13 minutes. Learn to keep melee cured, get resist gear. AoW is sub 9 minutes, since we never need a fourth warrior these days.
You're not going to get away with the same sub optimal raid setups in Velious, Luclin and beyond that you could in Kunark. This is what broke many pretender guilds in era and through other TLPs. Time to start recruiting top tier DPS and putting them with bards. Gone are the days of running raids dominated with hybrids and support classes and still beating content in rapid fashion. I think maybe 20 or so slots in our raids are filled by some combination of MNK, ROG and WIZ. Necros would prob fit in that group once your healers hit critical mass on flowing thought items; but that's a pretty subjective assessment right now as we haven't had enough time to completely fill out a chain of clerics in FT12 or whatever the max FT is for clerics in this era. Until then, many necros still are chewing up EE to keep pumping cleric mana.
It makes me wonder what # of players these fights were 'tuned' for (if that was even a consideration) when they had Hit points levels adjusted... I know expeditions allow 72 people, and open world even more. But honestly any fight that is tuned to require more than 48/54 people to kill it in a reasonable amount of time is just not really fun... if people wanna bring a full 72 to make it faster/easier fine, if people wanna turn them into mage pet training dummies and feel "accomplished" whatever.(thats a bit of a different discussion, which i hope they find a way to appropriately fix without completely screwing up the encounters). I would hope that less people would resort to such "tactics" if the encounter's HP/AEresists were properly tuned. 13-15 min should be a long fight, not a better than average fight Yeah sleepers tomb(if aoc gets fixed) & more farming off other ntov stuff should make it faster/efficient, all due respect to yall but the top raidforces should be a bit more of the exception than the benchmark.
Balancing mobs around a full raid is moronic. It's like I told my old roommates regarding the thermostat - I like it cold. If you like it warm, you can put on a sweater, but I can't get any more naked. Balance around 48 man raids. If you want it easier, recruit more players. If you want it harder, recruit less.
You do realize that 48 people can kill everything in Velious? It's possible 42 might be able to with some more gearing - we'll probably play with it as time wears on.
The only reason you would bring more then 50 on velious would be a) more main wants in or b) some are undergeared.
Being able to kill something with 48, and balancing an expansion around raiding with 48 are not the same thing in my mind. Yes, 48 people can kill Lady N, but it would take about an hour (unless you cheese it which I'm sure most do). That is an example of a fight that is balanced around a full raid, unless you can honestly tell me that you think 1 hour fights are reasonable and fun.
What 48 people are bringing? Tanking with a Paladin? With 13 shaman healing him? And your DPS is 21 bards? 48 people in a balanced raid can do Lady Nev is sub 20 minutes. Likely Sub 12 in era appropriate gear.
I eagerly await evidence of a 48 man raid doing Lady Nev in 12 minutes (there isn't any). Until then, it is very clear you are just spewing uninformed nonsense.
Vulak been killed with less then 40, and im sure AoW can be done the same. Would just make the fights longer.