Contested Need to Go

the Contested Hard Mode - and Easy Mode kills are no big deal.
any guild that can pull and kill easy mode - has just as much right to pull hard mode of something should they think they can do it - let them.
but, complaining that some guild killed easy mode - and left up hard mode, coming from a high end guild raider - just seems dumb. what high end guild say needs anything off oxdaxious? we've seen the loot, and know we can get better else where from much harder content. but better still....
so whats the loss?
a high end guild didnt get to waste thier time on easy mode - they dont even want?
call me weird, but if some guild came along, killed easy mode OX and left hard mode up - thank god. I am sick of pulling easy mode - just to work on hard mode stuff.

Kunaak wrote:

You have no idea how the HM contested work apparently. Once you kill EM, HM can't be spawned/triggered. It's EITHER OR, not kill EM, THEN HM. If a guild that can pull and kill EM wants to try HM, that's fine. But, a guild that can ONLY pull and kill EM blocking a guild that wants to fight the HM from the chance, is not.

Darkonx wrote:

Actually you have no idea how OX works.

BChizzle wrote:

In order to get loot from easymode Ox you have to despawn hardmode Ox.

Neiloch@Crushbone wrote:

We kill easymode oxdaxius when it's up during our raid time to increase our plat splits by ~30-50p each. We're not an 'uber' guild either. I agree that it's unfair that we get more plat while the other guilds can't pull progression mobs.

Although, we refuse to even try hard mode because of the lag.

Still waiting for this.

BChizzle wrote:

Once you kill EM Klaaktus HM can't be fought.
Still waiting for the change here as well.

Gaige wrote:

Just get there first IMHO.

slippery wrote:

Grats Equilibrium on killing Oxdaius Reforming (hard mode)!! BTW, I agree with you - even having a peanut gallery watching a guild kill a contested produces a ton of lag in the zone.

Let me guess at how this is gonna go. Guild capable of having a real chance at killing the hard version will kill the easy version as soon as it pops so the hard version spawns. So scrub guilds won't getting pulls on the easy version anymore. Can't say that I care one way or the other, but I just see the thread as a few people QQing because they have to compete for a mob.

Rahatmattata wrote:

Exactly. But with enough QQ I am sure they will get what they want. Even though they would just shout down a "scrub" player saying the same thing they are. Somehow its only not fair for the guilds trying hard mode...

I guess I don't really understand what's so upsetting because I always thought part of being 'the best of the best' was getting there first? Didn't guilds use to camp contesteds and call eachother at 3am to form up for raid? I mean.. if you want to be that hard core? Maybe I am not completely understanding how these fights work?

Nazreen wrote:

The truth of the matter is on *most* servers the contested were not contested at all. Hardcore people got accustomed to not truely contesting the spawns and are now sore about 'lesser' players contesting the spawn and blocking their chance to wield their awesome stick.
About all that I'd like changed about contested is a server wide message when they spawn and die (one you can turn off if you like). I don't like how guilds are rewarded running bots to detect spawns and send notifications.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

The fundamental problem here is that contesting spawns doesn't work. Having multiple raid forces in any populated zone basically kills performance utterly, and the problem's only gotten worse over time. Unless the mob is an utter joke or the server is a barren wasteland, it usually becomes effectively unkillable until one side gets disgusted with the lag and leaves.

No, the fundamental problem is they should not be the same mob. My guild has killed both the hard contested. If the lag was bad did we just kill the easy? No. We didn't care about the easy. You know how many times we've killed an easy contested this expansion? 5 or 6 times tops. What did we do then? We left them up for other guilds to kill. Everyone wants to demonize the top guilds, the top guilds that this expansion have been extremely nice and left the easy mobs they don't desire loot from up so other guilds could kill them. Yet by doing that they get punished and can't kill the hard version? That is bull. You want to contest me? Contest me, on the same mob I am pulling, not a different encounter that is a complete 2 groupable joke. I'm all for competition, if we are going to pull the same exact mob. Not you pull a dominus while I pull a mob that has a very harsh dps check. All this is considering lag aside, which if you have 2 full raids plus the people normally in the zone neither of the contested on hard is killable right now.

and I would argue that it's no different then the Avatars you 'uber' guilds had on lockdown, just a reverse of the situation of the encounter. Now correct me if I am wrong, but during an Avatar fight, you had X timelimit to kill it, or it casted a massive debuff called 'Battle weary' effectively stunting your ability to continue the fight. so what happened? guilds that couldn't kill it in X time were simply shoved aside by guilds that can.
these encounters reverse that idea. instead of the mob depowering you, it powers itself up and becomes a stronger version of itself. it's still Oxidaius, just a stronger version, that has some better loot for letting it get stronger. (though I know Avatars didn't do this, but then again avatar loots was the bar non absolute best stuff in teh game as it was)
So now the hardcore raiders are effectively 'locked out' of content by what they call thier 'lessers' becuase they get to the mob first, and kill it in EM because that's what they can kill. Now the Uber guilds know what it was like for thier 'lessers' to never get to try the Avatars becuase they'd kill it 2 minutes after it spawned. Sucks when the shoe is on the other foot.
it's a contested mob. Period. he has two modes, normal and hard. hard gives nicer loot, becuase they ramp up the risk, thus better reward. but it's still a singular contested mob. it's still Oxidaius. just like the various versions of theer, just like every other HM instance fight. it's still the same mob, it's still virtually the same fight, just the hard mode adds 1 or 2 more tricks to his arsenal. often times they are pretty nasty tricks, but that's it.
it's not like fighting Oxidaus reformed turns him from Nagafen into Quarm, to my understanding.

No, you don't understand anything about the encounters. You also completely ignored everything I said. IT IS NOT COMPETITION IF YOU ARE NOT FIGHTING THE SAME ENCOUNTER. If you want to have competition with me and fight the same mob, I encourage that. What we have now is not that. For Oxdaxius, to get to hard mode, YOU KILL THE EASY FIRST, then the Hard spawns, and you have a time limit to kill it. If that time limit expire he respawns in to a third version with a buff that wipes your raid. Period. There is no possibly kill it after the time limit, there is die. It is not Avatars, which you could live through battle weary (and combat fatigue, the buff after battle weary). The time limit on Avatars meant nothing, guilds killed them past the battle weary time limit all the time, and we had even killed some past combat fatigue when there was over 100 people in zone. It also has absolutely nothing to do with getting to the mob first. Do you really think that my guild (or other top guilds) can't show up to the easy mobs within 5 minutes of them spawning with 2 groups to kill the easy? Do you really believe that if all this was about to us was killing it so others couldn't kill it this wouldn't be exactly like the every expansion? Lag dictates when you can kill the hard mob. Hard on live also gives loot that is not an upgrade to anything, the loot is a joke. Instance loot is better, hell the set pieces you do in fact get from instance mobs. In the case of Oxdaxius Reforming the instance mob you get the set pieces from is vastly easier. Your whole post wreaks of the fact that you do not even remotely understand the encounters, or the problems with them. Nor do you understand people's problems. People are mirroring their frustrations from not being able to kill contested mobs on the top guilds. WE DO NOT CARE IF YOU KILL THE EASY, IT IS NOT THE SAME MOB. Here, I will explain the encounters to you so that you actually understand and aren't spewing out bull. Oxdaxius - Starts with easy, 73.5 million hit points. Has an effect on him that reduces damage, you kill the adds he spawns to get rid of that buff. Total each set of adds has 7 million hit points. There is absolutely nothing else to the encounter. There is no time limit, the adds have a long respawn, the ae's don't hit for anything. You can 2 group this mob because you can live forever. Oxdaxius Reforming (hard mode) - When Oxdaxius dies Reforming instantly spawns. To finish it on easy you use an item and it kills him. If you don't use the item to kill him you have the hard version. You have 225 seconds to kill this version (3 minutes 45 seconds). He has roughly 90 million hit points. Over that time limit you will get 4 sets of adds, for another 13 million hit points. The AE's hit harder. The adds mem wipe. The named mem wipes, and when he mem wipes he puts a curse on your tank that effectively makes it so another tank has to pick it up. You have to be putting out 450k dps raid wide, without deaths after 45%, to be able to kill it in the time limit. Oh, and did I mention it dispels your buffs? So forget about your dots and debuffs... The two fights are not even remotely similar. They are completely different encounters. And you know what hard Ox drops? He drops set cuffs that you get from 3M on hard mode, an encounter that you can sleep through and is basically impossible to fail to kill. This would be like me going to kill the Crab in Mara and despawning Matron. It has no business having an easy and hard on the same timer. Different difficulty levels are made for instances, not contested mobs. Klaaktus while not having a time limit is also quite different in difficulty. Easy is is quite easy. You mez one mob the whole fight, kill 3 adds, and kill the named. There are no ae's you have to worry about, not control effects, nothing. 3 adds kill named. Period. Klaaktus Unbound? Instead of mezzing the one you kill it and it turns into hard mode. On hard mode you get more control effects then we've seen on any encounter. You also get more adds to kill, ae's that slaughter you, oh and don't forget he puts a curse on your tank that erases all his hate and fears him. The adds cannot be hit by any green or blue ae's, so you generally have 4 adds up that you have to single target burn down. Did I mention he has 100 million hit points assuming he doesn't heal from people dieing? And that each of his adds has 1.6 million hit points and you get 4 every 80 seconds? Stack this on top of the fact that he is in the most highly populated zone with absolute worst performance you see in this game. My guild which is one of the top parsing in the game was reduced to 140k raid dps because of the lag and control effects last time we killed klaak. That is dps we put out 2 expansions ago. Again, you want to compete with me for the hard feel free any day. I'll gladly sit there and watch you pull it all night. The easy should be in an instance. If you really think we are losing mobs because someone "got to it first" you have no idea what is going on this expansion.

I've never experienced the problems outlined in the OP.
Contested mobs seem fine to me.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

So I should call and form up to kill a mob that drops gear no one in my raid needs and deprive others of content/gear just so I can pull the mob I'm interested in killing?
How would you guys like it if you could just hail it to turn it into HM, so you could never pull the EM? I bet you'd complain then.

slippery wrote:

Just going to Address this part of your post.
I dont think you do want competition for your content, i know you dont, you have moved your guild twice to different servers when you have had a guild competing for contested mobs in the last 2 years.
Face facts contested in EQ2 are a flawed concept, the only time they ever really worked was T5 and that was because there were that many of them it was impossible to lock them down 24/7, since that point we have had less and less of them added to the game, one guild dominates until they get lazy or lose interest, that is the only time who is killing what, changes.
No HC raider wants to compete for mobs, not a single one, and i know as i have been one for the majority of my time in EQ2, every guild that has been formed to date as a super guild has done so on a deserted server, or one where the top guild was just the best of a terrible bunch of players. not one went to a server with an already established healthy HC guild which had everything on lockdown, not a single one, you think the Devs dont know this? dont notice this?.
And as was already posted previously, something i experianced myself in EOF, Contested Mayong with 4 guilds sat in his room, for hour after hour after hour, the lag made the encounter unkillable, so we sat, and sat and sat twidling our thumbs waiting to see who would get bored enough to leave first, and i am talking from 7pm till 2am and still 2guilds and 100+ people in zone, and still waiting.
All that is going to happen with this proposed change is HC guilds will kill the easymode asap with a x2, not for the loot, but to discourage others from showing up, once the message gets around the mob is on lock to the top guild, people stop looking and once people stop looking, less lag in zones for the top guild.
This was a terrible idea, i honestly dont know what the Devs were trying to achieve with this combined system, but it has failed miserably.
Make more mobs, like hmm i dunno 10+ easy mode and 10+ HM mobs that are all seperate and have them on random, truely random spawn timers and all over norrath, so that it gets impossible for one guild to lock them down, then and only then will you see some contesting of raid mobs, when people pick and choose which they go for first, when there are multiple mobs up.