Will the Temple of Veeshan expedition be too big? (Phinny)

Way too expansive IMO

I think its just mostly cause while there droppable gear is ok... Most of the reason you'd go into WToV is for giant armor or if your a dragon lover and want the quest gear which personally I think is 100 times better then what those mobs drop

You could swap Telk and Goz with basically anyone except Mirenella and maybe Dagarn in north and the situation would not change. Their loot isn't necessarily terrible, they even have a couple handy 100hp items, it's just nothing to justify the time spent. North gets plastered in large part because it either has to be to get in or spawn Vulak or it's really simple to grab (eg triplets) once you're already there. If you could just snipe Vulak the way you currently can kill PD you can bet there'd be far more added to that list of mostly ignored dragons; Telk would probably die more than Vyemm.

I suspect that most guilds not doing open world would have the time and desire to fight all of these dragons each week (similar to how many still kill Gorenaire). I just think including ALL of this content in a single DZ is too much of a constraint with the current HP levels and clear times.

wouldnt the loot lockout prevent you from being able to get loot drops even if you can request the instance again 3 days later? really dont understand why they added all these extra loops in these expeditions

Looks like they added the 6 day Lockout only to the "Boss" mob of the expedition, so for ToV if you don't kill Vulak you could do everything else (or as much as you can complete before the timer expires) every 3 days. Once you kill Vulak, you're looking at 7 days before you can request/join another expedition.

Per the Phinigel Server FAQ:
Q: How Does Raid Instancing Work on Phinigel?
The system will allow a full raid (72 players) into an instance. You will need at least 6 players in your raid to request a raid instance, and the players in your raid need to be level 46 or higher.
When you request a raid instance, the player that requested it, and his or her entire raid, will be given an account-wide request lockout for that specific raid for 2.5 days.
Each “boss” in the zone will grant a 6.5 day account-wide lockout. For the most part, this is just the big boss (Lord Nagafen, for example) and the stuff in his/her/its immediate vicinity.
For launch, Plane of Sky is an exception to the above instancing rule. Each island will have a lockout. Kill any NPC on that island and everyone in your raid will receive a 6.5 day account-wide lockout for that island.

It was supposed to work this way, but some Kunark expeditions were giving 6.5 day lockout when zoning in before any trash dies. I haven't paid it much attention lately, but it certainly has never been something that could be relied on. ToV is a complex zone with dozens of lockouts so it'd be even harder to ensure this mechanic was working as the FAQ stated.

If they set it up similar to plane of sky, not necessarily. Each wing could have its own loot lockout.

even if it works as intended, you really wouldnt be able to reliably do all of TOV each week,

even if you did everything but North side the first day, then go back 3 days later to get north, once you offed vulak youd be hit with the 6.5 day lockout. meaning you wouldnt be able to go do west side once those lockouts roll off. youd still have the "global zone" lockout from vulak for 3 days

No reason you should get a 6.5 day lockout for the entire zone just by killing Vulak. Kill west/east, get a 7 day lockout on west/east mobs. 3 days later, kill ntov/vulak, get a 7 day lockout on ntov/vulak. Come back 4 days later, west and east are off lockout so you get an instance with only those spawned but no north mobs up. 4 days later you get an instance with only north up. And so on.

This was the idea with sky, but I've never seen it actually work. Back in classic we had done everything up through island 5 one day and went back to try 6 a day later and it wouldn't let us pull the instance.

The FAQ is wrong, I wish it worked that way, but it doesn't. Go up to hate and loot a crystallized sulfur, BAM, loot lockout for 6.5 days. Try to go back up in 3 and nothing will drop for you.

So they either totally messed up the implementation of it or that's the way they wanted it and the faq is wrong.

The only place the 3 day lockout comes into play is sky for islands you didn't do 3 days prior.

Yeah, you still have to wait out the 3 day zone lockout. So you could do part 1 of sky, wait 3 days, do part 2 of sky, wait 4 days and redo part 1, etc.

Good discussion so far, everyone. I think we're slowly moving towards a community consensus on if this DZ is too big for the current expedition lockout design. I know the devs are working on the ToV DZ for spawns and zone outs first, but hopefully we can provide them this early feedback and they can have some discussions on the lockout system for it soon. We only get 84 days of in-era ToV and I just want everyone to enjoy one of EQ's best zones.

I don't have a problem with MotM per se. I think my contention is that we've crossed a soft boundary with MotM and I am concerned with the impact it will have on 1) 72-man-capped DZ raids on Phinny, 2) Luclin raids which begin to offer mechanic-based raids compared to the preceeding heavy emphasis on tank and spank raids (classic, Kunark, Velious), and 3) the possibility that they may decide to add MotM (untested as usual, of course) to PoP raids.

Again, for the record, I did these raids on Fippy and then on Ragefire. I'm more than familiar with the problems which lead to MotM. However, these problems almost exclusively haunted 32k hp dragon/god raids, and those came to an end after Kunark. MotM prevents a shadowknight HT squad from destroying a 32k mob before it renders in-game, and it prevents mage armies from petwalling a 32k mob down. The thing is, HT squads and petwalls weren't really effective in Velious and beyond. I get that there has been power creep over the years, but it was felt most in Classic and Kunark because of programming limitations of the day. A light touch in Velious (and possibly Luclin, not sure about PoP) is understandable to me but this seems excessive.

To use an analogy, I feel like putting in MotM in Classic and Kunark is like putting in a school zone speed limit near a school because kids keep getting hit by cars. OK, good call, for sure. No one questions that, in fact nearly everyone supports it. Then you find out that, surprise, between the hours of 7am-9am and 2pm-4pm the speed limit in the entire county is 20mph. That just makes a normal person go, wtf.

Does anyone else think Jennifer Chan got to work early one morning and just starting adding MOTM to Luclin bosses and no one was willing to tell her to stop? This is the story I tell myself so I can laugh instead of cry

itd be nice to know if devs are even considering this as a problem and on their radar...before we actually get to velious and see that it is a problem

While I agree that the entire zone worth of raid worthy mobs can't be cleared in 6 hours by your average guild, I don't know if that means that the zone needs to be handled differently. Remember this is not the ONLY way to raid, you can still raid open world if you want.

The addition of instancing (as I understand it) was not to guarantee that everyone got to raid everything they wanted to when they wanted to. Rather it was to allow everyone the opportunity to raid any target without having to fight for the ability to do so against other guilds.

This intent is still in place, you have the opportunity to raid any portion of NToV that you want. Each guild would just need to prioritize what they want to kill and what they feel they are capable of killing within the time allowed.

---------Edited----------
Perhaps this would be a good inspiration for the classic NToV Rotation for the Open World version of ToV on Phinigel. Each spawn of NToV is assigned to a Guild, once the Guild kills Aaryonar they have until the end of the following day to complete everything in NToV they want. Or setup any new style of rotation that you'd like!

I don't think there's any possibility that open world turns into a rotation. Vulak has the best loot in the expansion, the idea that a dozen guilds just watch him sit open for day because someone zerged Aary first is impossible to fathom.

What I think is reasonable is to expect that Eeshan, Telk and Goz are low priority targets that sit available for any raiding guild in the open world, Lendi becomes a low priority target to many guilds partway through the expansion, and Doze sits around medium priority or so for most of it. I expect any capable guild to be able to easily get 2/3 of west early, and all of west and halls later, without needing to actually race. Guilds willing to either batphone or armor farm (semi sock) while in window will easily get these mobs.

So, IF you can manage to get Vulak down in 6 hours, I see no reason that even a scheduled-only non-competitive guild cannot very easy get the south of the zone in open world well before Luclin comes. The holdup is really more about how realistic it is to get Vulak in 6 hours.

I count 19 active raiding guilds at phinnykills.com which translates to around 1000-1500 people wanting to do Kael and Skyshrine armor quests. Open world is an option but they removed the load balancing. Even if those guilds only farmed armor 1 night per week that'd still average 150-200 people in the zone each night during prime time just farming East and West trash. Ragefire/Lockjaw had a similar situation with Plane of Hate reaching 200 players during prime time before they load balanced it. They will have to do the same with ToV, but until they do the armor drops from the instance will be very important.