Btw scrub, I tried pulling darathar on Venser to see if they modified it on both TLE servers; and you don't have elemental cure pots!
I don't really have a problem with the 12 week expansion unlocks. I have been playing on FG for about 2 weeks now, purchased maybe 2 Vitality potions and 3 Exp potions. I am level 40 and actually really enjoying the ride. I see other posts that have the same suggestions as the OP that talk about how you need to do the same dungeon over, and over, and over again. This has NOT been the case for my leveling experience. I've run through each one 2-3 times, which you would do normally if you were doing the quests and going through as the game intended you too. I cannot speak for quest exp leveling, but from what I hear it is a bit messed up, as the player will not level fast enough for a single zone and will have to bounce around to level up, then go back to the prior zone. I expect the way the Developers expected players to do this is to run through a zone, doing all the quests until you could not pick them up anymore, then run a dungeon for an hour or two with a group, this should get you a level or two and put you back on track for your quests. I expect I will have spent about $30 on this game to level up to 50 (though I had all the Daybreak Cash saved up so it was *kinda* free). That saved me about 3-6 days of play time leveling, and running through each dungeon one more time (max 4 times). This is still within an acceptable time frame for my standards. I also cannot speak for raiding, but am actually kinda glad to hear people are struggling! It's too often that the first few guilds get to level cap and stomp all over the raid content in one swoop and discourage many others into thinking the content was far too easy, and label the game as such. If what you are saying is true though, maybe they do need to take another crack at raid balance.
haha, thats funny because i remember the last night we were raiding on sh and i was going to make everyone pots, myself included, but **** hit the fan so i just didnt make any. I was so sad that I just did all of the TS timelines including SF and yeah, lol
i think you glanced over the raid issues a little too fast. The struggle isn't hard mobs, the struggle is 3 mobs in particular are way overtuned, 2 are killable and have been killed and Darathar was made impossible. Unless you can mitigate constant 22k hits, cure detriments that are over leveled and want to fight him thru roughly 80+mil HP (2hr fight) then by all means, call it challenging lol.
You would know FAR better than I would, as I have not raided on this server yet. I am ignorant to the whole thing right now. I only speak from the perspective that it is nice to be part of a community that feels challenged, even if that challenge is currently impossible. There have been many times in the past that EQ2 server communities have steamrolled through raid content and lost subscribers because of the overall lack of challenge, even if they were not the actual ones raiding. I might not be explaining this quite right ... Do you think it might be possible once the Adventure packs come out, and the raid gear from the Splitpaw Saga comes in?
I'm curious of the gear quality of the top guild trying to raid him atm. Is the tank in full raid gear fabled? How many of the DPS are? This usually takes a few months even for hardcore raiders to farm that many pieces of gear not weeks
Umm im in full fabled tank gear (47+ and a legendary tanking bow) and he hurts my behindy too. You can get a full set of fabled from icy digs in about 1 day if you run it every 1½ hour with a channeler. Gearing in this game has not taken weeks or even been remotely challenging for at least a decade. You try to stay alive when he hits you for 22k with about 11-1.3k health and a top of 58-60% uncontested avoidance... Cuz u aint gonna get much higher than that in this expansion. If you got two channelers you might just get some decent pulls in, but thats about it. Stop making excuses or even commenting on content you havent done. Its super easy to get fabled gear on this server, especially for plate users.
Maybe if itemization really helped us, listen a mob hits for 260% of my main tanks HP. Meaning that if I had every piece of armor at fabled level 50 with the most mitigation the mob might hit for 200% of its max hp instead, not to mention this armor comes off of the mobs we basically we can't kill. We have around roughly 20k raid wide DPS sustainted at the moment, I think we could maybe get it up to around 25k if we all had best in slot armor and replaced a few people, even with that much dps it would still take an hour + to kill darathar, assuming that the large auto attacks didn't kill your tank first~. As far as communities streamrolling through content, I don't really remember being a case as long as i've played the game. Guilds have either hit walls, due to broken content and quit, exploited the broken content, then hit another wall, and quit, or they quit because mobs were simply unfun (see tov/dov). Basically this game for a very long time now has really just been who can pull the mob as soon as the patch hits. When you look at HM Drunder in DOV, people sat there and couldn't kill mobs for MONTHS because the mobs were just simply unkillable, and it wasn't just one guild, it was ten, twenty who were saying the content was just simply unkillable. As far as the adventure pack goes, unless the gear is incredibly amazing which i doubt, it will have little to no impact on our situation with darathar. Our tanks are in basically the best gear they can get with the exception of the reflect BP. The best in slot gear unfortunately falls into the same problems as the aforementioned problem of it only coming off of mobs that are unkillable, as far as hardcore raiders needing months is just wrong, typically the problem isn't gear, it's broken/poorly tested mobs.
As others have pointed out, if the gap between damage dealt and damage that can be survived was sub 30%, maybe we could argue semantics of gear, raid composition, debuff composition, etc. etc. When the mob auto's for more than 200% of the HP a tank is capable of having in this tear, nothing we can do as players is going to close that gap. We can stack everything we have and maybe get this mob down to 90% (note he complete heals several times during the fight), but at that point, every cooldown / save / emergency / whatever has been used and its game over. The way it is currently tuned, it can not and will not be killed until T6.
because raiding endgame content is fun, and some people were hoping to get their prismatic and be able to use it for a couple weeks while it was still relevant. it doesn't look like that will be happening.
Raiding is fine (supposed to need tuning/be very hard where maybe 5 to 10% of the population finishes each expansion as released) XP is not (supposed to be simple, casual, take your time and get multiple 50's) /endthread
Whoever said this server was supposed to be casual? Everyone rolling a character here knows it's going to be old school. Old school wasn't exactly casual by today's standards.
There is a big difference between very hard and unkillable. Contested Vox is hard, Darathar is unkillable. XP is exactly where they want it, it encourages buying XP pots, if you buy pots leveling is not bad at all. Several people already have multiple 50s and we aren't even halfway to DoF yet. There are some people who haven't spent money on pots that are 50 as well.
Here's my theory, not that anyone asked for it: Whatever drop in population servers like these experience can be directly attributed to the decrease in nostalgic relevance they ultimately have for those playing on it. For myself personally I'm here almost exclusively for the sake of nostalgia and the vague hope of being able to play EQ2 during a time when I actually enjoyed it. The further along the game progresses in it's timeline, the less likely I am to continue playing here (with a few noted exceptions such as Kunark and Velious). Even this server as currently constituted can be hard to swallow at times given how different it is from the game I truly want to play. From a pure game mechanics standpoint I wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for the entertainment value I get from the content itself. I am far from unique in my mindset either. There are as well others who are simply here because of the benefits that can be gained for their true mains on other servers. Again, it is highly unlikely such players will continue to be here as that cross-over game content begins to dry up. Between these two types of players I think you can find the bulk of your server attrition. No change in xp gain is going to alter those two realities. Players are either here for nostalgia which is fleeting, or they're here for the incentives this server offers to their other characters. Only an extreme minority is here for the long haul and that's just the way it is.
