When does EQ become harder?

You ever done the Sep 5/ The Triune God?

Reading this post humored me. Jhaerik simplified and wrongly portrayed WoW in all of his points. He seems to be the kind of person who has attained elite status in EQ, but refuses to accept the reality that such a feat is comparable to winning the Jog A Thon in Elementary School.

Hate to break it to you buddy, but even normal raids in WoW are more mechanically difficult than just about anything in EQ; and the most brain dead WoW spec has more buttons and responsibilities than a Bard, too. (Running out of the 'green stuff' is about 10% of what you need to be worrying about at any particular moment, during a mythic raid.)

When I first started playing EQ, I was shocked to learn that melee press auto-attack and just stand there, for the most part. Whenever I bring this up, somebody usually mentions melee 'sometimes' have to pull also. Such skill indeed! I think this realization is what spurred the OP to make this thread. EQ gameplay is so simple it can be quite shocking, especially for someone coming from a newer MMORPG.

I used to wonder, when playing WoW and running a dungeon why certain people thought it was okay to auto attack and not use their abilities. Well, now I know, they probably were coming from EQ.

What's so hard about admitting that WoW is mechanically and even strategically far more difficult than EQ for end game content. EQ is just fun in different ways (which I enjoy), but we shouldn't confuse being time consuming with difficult.

I can only imagine the only people who would agree or support J's comments are the ones who have never attempted to clear a WoW mythic raid within 1 month of it being released. The majority of guilds who try, will fail; only a minority will partially make it thru; and only a minority of the minority will actually do it all the way through. There's a reason for this, it isn't easy.

Hardest part of EQ is getting folks to log in and keep logging in.

I don't think this thread is about the difficulty of each respective expansion - or MMO's raid targets when first encountered in history. It's about their learning curve and the challenge they offer - despite they have been re-tuned, data-mined throughout the years for the current TLP's running in this game.

^It deserves a like for that reason.

Talking about WoW gets people riled up on these forums still. Different game, took some of the best ideas of what came prior and made a more saleable package. I personally never last more than a few months in WoW every few years and yes I have made it to level cap in era in WoW (something I haven't done in EQ since 2004). Lots of buttons to push isn't necessarily more purposeful or fun.

Much of the hardness of EQ is lost when you are overgeared and overnumber the content.

Do Lower Guk, Sebilis or any other dungeon with caster NPC in it at intended level with terrible resists... and suddenly way more challenge --especially if no one in group interupts them.

Player knowledge also severely trims the difficulty down. Used to be you might have a person in your non-elite guild that knew the encounter, on progression guilds full of people have done almost everything multiple times.

AoC stops in-era content blocking... Time was blocked out because progression was blocked out on my old server into OoW era.

Obviously though it "humored" you you didn't actually read my post. I was a WoW raider from BC-WoD my dude. WoW raids have never been "hard" they were just highly dependent on two things. Gear and people following direction. The "individual" mechanical skill require to be a successful raider through heroic content on WoW basically amounted hitting buttons at a preset time as per addon instructions, for a tank, following a preset dps rotation for dps, spam healing tanks with mouseover(clique) + grid for tanks heals. Raid healing I'll admit was a tad challenging at times. I'm sorry but "moving out of green " isn't "hard" just like "walking" isn't hard. There were a few "gimmick" fights with more than that "Kael in BC comes to mind with the weapons, Ulduar vehicle nonsense, and the occasional "click the portal to dodge and ability/kill adds in a phase.

I've played Warrior/Rogue/Priest/Shaman/DK through most of the content WoW had to offer between BC(obviously not dk) and WoD excluding MoP cause I skipped that silly kung-fu panda xpac, Did quite a bit of Arena as well. I've tanked, dps'd, healed, ect ect depending on what spec was good for whatever patch level. I have more WoW experience than EQ experience by miles as I didn't get into EQ until rather late. Though I did play Luclin before quitting due to hating PoP content (chanters.) My MMOs of choice from 97-2004 were The Realm Online, T4C, AO, and DAoC.

I say this again, the hardest part of WoW raiding was finding reliable people with basic motor skills and the required gear. Pugging people was painful as hell, but happened a lot if you weren't on hardcore pve raid server.

Both games are a time sink, EQ is more so. It has steeper requirements for gearing/grinding and is more RNG based. You can do everything perfectly... and still wipe due to RNG. Neither game is mechanically "hard" to play (excluding high end WoW arena). Though to be perfectly honest I find EQ "harder" just because half of the fight is dealing with an archaic UI and clunky movement controls. If you look at ANYTHING other than the raiding aspect EQ is leagues more difficult than WoW. Go solo a character to cap in WoW, then do the same in EQ. It's not even close.

All that said tab targeting MMO's in general just aren't the best examples of skill expression/difficulty. It takes more mechanical skill to dodge a typical LoL skill shot than it does to deal with any mechanic of any of the major tab targeting MMOs. The "difficulty" is finding 4 to X other dudes who can also do the same, or you just repeat the same crap over and over until the slowest kid in the class gets it. MMOs aren't about how good you are. MMOs are about how bad your worst raider/groupmate is.

Dude he soloed it with charm pet and an out of era concentration pot.

There is no way to make that statement without being insulting and offensive. Obviously.

Have you played EQ before? Slow is its hallmark attribute. It is deliberately slow, to encourage cooperative play in an era before we had voice communications and were playing on dial-up connections. You might be used to say, WoW, which is much faster paced, but there is very little cooperation, mostly people mashing out their combo's and dodging events in parallel. EQ still does cooperative play better than any other MMO, and I've played all of them. The price is being slower, which many of us enjoy. EQ is like a Korean movie. An hour into it and you're still working on introductions. You could try playing a more interesting class, good enchanters should be very busy, and pullers should never, ever stop. If they do they need to drop their group and find better players.

You might hit a lot of buttons in WoW, but they don't really do much. Last time I played a mage in WoW, I was rotating between 4 abilities, all of which had the meaning "do damage", the order I rotated those abilities controlled how much damage I did, but it was just "do damage". I never understood why I needed to hit 4 buttons for that, why not just one button "do all the damage". Give me some other buttons that do interesting things.

That’s the hardest part of any of these games. After that it’s just people arguing because they can, leveling in EQ is “harder” because it’s slower? No, it’s just slower. I killed mobs for 4 hours last night in PoFire fore a couple levels, nothing hard about it, just slow.

You get a group of competent people together who are willing to learn the game and they will complete all content. The developers don’t design the bosses to only be defeated by some magical unicorn group of people, just people who work together.

But to WoW’s credit currently 27k people have cleared the current top tier raids, assuming only 1 million active players (probably higher, who knows) that’s 2.7% of the population. So 1-3% of the population are able to clear the highest level of raiding in era. I would assume EQ raids are probably tuned around a similar population base clearly content.

So either both games are so hard a small percentage of people can clear the content at the time. Or just such a small number of people care.

WoW Mythic anything is harder than any EQ content ever released, prove me wrong.

Rather than continuing to exclusively debate with you about this. I'll just post a video of the current Mythic Final Boss in WoW patch 8.0.

Some things to note before watching this video that counter your points.

1 Notice the cotton balls randomly floating around and the AoE death zones that pop up around the battle field. This is RNG (which you claimed WoW doesnt have). A single failure to dodge one of these RNG mechanics (that are non-stop throughout the fight) can lead to a raid wipe, very quickly. These mechanics are far more interesting than the 19 year old EQ spell 'fizzle'. At least skill can help you overcome WoW RNG, whereas youre just screwed regardless of skill if your spell decides to fizzle at the wrong time.
2 Players save major defensive cooldowns for end of fight, when healers are OOM and damage is consistent. If a player makes a mistake, and has to pop defensive cooldown early because they failed a mechanic, they will probably just die when boss is at 3% HP and the boss may not be defeated due to the lack of DPS. (This almost happens in the video.)
3 Players strategically save major/minor offensive cooldowns for particular phases of the fight. Notice the ray of light shining down from the sky, If i remember right, this causes the boss to take increased damage; if offensives cooldowns arent popped during this phase of the fight, the enrage timer cannot be beaten.
4 This isnt shown in the video, but the tanks are periodically popping defensive cooldowns as the raid boss uses certain abilities. If the MT/OT aren't rotating through their def cooldowns and trading aggro properly, tthey won't have a defensive cooldown available for the bosses abilities and will basically get Death Touch'd by the raid boss if a Defensive Cooldown isn't up while it casts an ability.
5 Players are navigating strange mechanics throughout fight, such as periodically turning their back to raid boss everytime he fears.
6 Before fight even begins, players prep the battle field by strategically placing teleportation nodes to the left and right of boss to run the orbs through the gauntlets, located to the left and right of boss.
7 The DPS are periodically switching to certain adds and priotizing adds A over adds B, while also popping minor offensive cooldowns on certain adds rather than the boss. Failure to constantly be aware of ones role during this encounter equals wipe.
8 Top left of screen this raider is keeping track of the major cooldowns the other members of his raid has. If he is about to die, or requires a boon from another player, he knows who has the ability available to him that he needs.
9 This player in the video is a havoc demon hunter, essentially a melee DPS. Notice how he maximizes his damage at every opportunity? As the targets hes hitting are at 20% HP, hes running towards the next target he needs to destroy ASAP while still hitting the target at < 20% HP.
10 I could go on and on pointing out all of the details that makes this fight tactially, mechanically, and strategically more difficult than it seems simply by watching the video. But ill leave it here for now.

Please, post a video of a difficult EQ encounter and/or situation that is comparable to the video in complexity.

VIDEO LINK:

The OP didn't ask about WoW or comparing anything to WoW. So please go somewhere else to discuss this.

In general, i'd say EQ raids have been on a slow trend from stupidly trivial to actually hard, with a few outliers.

GoD in era at 65 was almost perfectly balanced to be appropriately hard. Then the difficulty spikes back down insanely in Omens (except OMM) until Demiplane or so. After that, it's been relatively steadily getting a little harder over time.

There have been alot of expansions that before they came out people thought were going to be super hard that turned out to be kind of meh, so i'm interested to see how Underfoot goes, assuming they actually make it beatable in era somehow.

No matter where I am in this world I always fight against disinformation. If it derails a thread, then it derails the thread.

If you build a time machine and head back to 1999 then you are all set.

Otherwise It's like every other game, after enough experience it becomes easier over-time. I mean in the beginning the raids were done via a chat window and there was no where to look up any items other than a friends notes or word of mouth.

Just enjoy EQ for what it is...

You don't measure skill in EQ by how many buttons you press but by the knowledge you have about the mechanics of the game that are not explained anywhere.

Never, if you stay on the TLPs. By the time stuff gets the least bit challenging the server will likely die out from attrition or a new TLP launch.

To the OP:

Back then, EQ was to me a chat box. sometimes skill came into play but its a place to hang out and enjoy. Live EQ is a bit difference and a bit of difference in skill could be 20% difference on a parse

It really doesn't matter.

That sounds dismissive, I don't mean it rudely. The people that want HARDness aren't going to last long in any game because familiarity = easy.

You're not going to get hard on progression as it is currently set up without striving for challenging conditions yourself (smaller #, not fully geared, etc.) until much later eras (if at all). That is not bad or wrong, it is just how it sits.

Thread 1: EQ is too easy, when does it get harder?

Thread 2: Look at how awesome the TOP guild is for beating EQ so often

How do both of these threads exist without someone being a complete fool?

Context please. Are you referring to endgame luclin raids, or grouping in Grieg's End? What class are you?