I believe the EM version of this was removed. I believe it was because either: a) Gear progression\itemization would not fit in between Drunder EM -> PoW EM -> Original DoV HM or b) it would force the developers to maintain and update two sets of scripts. If either answer is the reason for closing this zone to almost the entire player base, then that's a really bad development move. You can even see on the EQ2 website advertising the GU "Take on Rallos in the Plane of War", yet no one has been there and only few ever will. Only a few guilds will see the Plane of War in probably the next year or so. If the reason for closing the zone is because itemization doesn't line up with progression (ex, the next step after Drunder EM would be Original DoV HM), then the PoW EM loot should be equivalent to Original DoV HM gear WITHOUT the yellow adornment slot. There really is no valid reason as to why clearing the three Drunder EM zones doesn’t unlock the Plane of War on EM. Also, another question, is the Plane of War (HM) unlocked per person for clearing the 3 Drunder zones on HM, or is it unlocked for the server?
It will be unlocked on a per-server basis once the three Drunder zone bosses have been killed in challenge mode.
And killing these bosses is currently impossible because of the scripts. The guilds you'd expect to be the first to kill said bosses have done repeated /feedbacks, /bugs and /petitions about this broken progression but, as usual, nothing has been fixed and we have received, as usual, zero response from SOE. Short version: don't expect to see any value from your subscription regarding Plane of War any time soon.
I have yet to read a specific post about a specific HM drunder mob, giving specific information as to what is broken on the mob. Would you mind linking that for me? (Not EQ2flames)
Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote: You dont need a post only 5 guilds WW have cleared Sullons HM only 2 other mobs has been killed a total of 7 out of 15 no one is even half way through drunder HM zones after all these months, at that rate POW wont be entered until a year from now that leaves allot of time to finish the zone which isnt done yet.
Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote: Just as SOE does not discuss Mechanics, top guilds do not discuss Strategies.
Rasttan@Unrest wrote: We are not even half way on Drunder 1 ... Content really not well balanced for casual non raid geared players (though Heroic content should be desigend for them ...)
Yeah, that was my point Feldon. At this point in the game, you're terminally stupid or hopelessly naive to assume bug reports or feedback are going to be checked whatsoever. If you're not willing to discuss the exact broken mechanic (which can be done without giving away your guilds particular win pattern) in the forums, then you're almost certainly not going to see a fix. It doesn't matter what guildprogress shows. The devs aren't checking that site and then checking the entire set of code for the unkilled mobs. They need specifics in a place where they will actually view the problems.
Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote: It's equally naive to think a developer will have an indepth conversation about a broken mechanic on a forum. If you really want something fixed, you PM.
There's no valid reason to have easymode Drunder raids. But right now the scripts are so insanely class dependant that it's just slowly killing guilds through the cycle of, "Oh Gee. We have to run through the 3 older HM zones to gear up this enchanter and bore the hell out of the raid for the night and likely have another member quit."\ Edit: Haha I just noticed. It's been a full *month* since any new progression mobs were killed. I guess that's what happens when 6 zones are released though and there's no guild to test the stuff except on live.
The mobs that have been killed in drunder still need tuning to be killable for other raid guilds, any feedback on these mobs is filed under "we'll look at it as soon as we can, hopefully soon!" That is a fair response if soon was quicker then 6 months, the longer mobs stay broken and either take hours of pulling or are completely unkillable the more people lose interest in the game. I forsee no more raid zones after PoW with the current model we are seeing. Guilds arent talking about how it is required to have 4 bards and 4 chanters to meet the dps checks or power drains, no matter what. Need four tanks for almost every encounter, 3 can do some but be prepared for tons of deaths due to mem wipes, in fact memwipes are the only reason to have more then 1-2 tanks on each encounter. Guilds arent talking about the need for brawlers because they can prevent getting 1 shotted by auto attack or the mobs AoE's that require 30 more critical mitigation to avoid then the buff package lists. Be prepared to deathsave a tank on every single AoE in drunder because if you dont, they are dead, even with 300 crit mit. I seriously have no idea how these mobs went live like this, dev's seem to be completely clueless about mobs acting this way and even with a PM dont seem to comprehend how big of a problem this is for guilds. Players got around these awful mechanics by brute force and since the mobs are dead the dev's seem to think it is ok, thats probably the saddest part. If you dont plan to support raiding anymore letting us know now would be great instead of a slow death over the next 6 months.
Shrag wrote: These discussions aren't talked about because there have been many topics about it and have been flat-out ignored by the devs. Most raiding suggestions fall upon deaf ears. Raiding progression this expansion is incredibly boring and redundant. You clear the first few boss mobs in a raid zone to get geared to clear the last couple of boss mobs. When everyone in the guild is completely geared from the first few boss mob mobs, then the last couple are killable. However, you have to clear the first few boss mobs (which the loot is now useless, because everyone is already geared) to get the new loot from the ending boss mobs each and every time you run the zone. It's a waste of time and was really poorly planned by the devs. Also, gearing new recruits so that they don't die instantly in hardmode is a horrible chore.
Let's not forget Statue of Rallos Zek either. A movement fight where random detrimentals will stifle/root/drain power if not cured in 2 seconds, But that only happens when I'm trying to do something that'll save the raid. The real annoyance is the boars that spawn have about a 25% chance to multiattack. Which means no matter how good my reflexes are, There is a 25% chance that someone is going to be oneshotted on the spawn.
plane of war is the wing 3 of DOV. its meant to be the upper tier of the game, so few guilds will ever really get in there. easy mode plane of war is just a sad concept all together. some of this game should be exceptionally hard to do.
Kunaak wrote: That, frankly, remains to be seen. It seems to be the "end" of part 1 of DoV, by many indications, true. But unless there's a total gear reset in February with the next part of Velious (allowing raids to bypass current raid content), and the next part of Velious raiding doesn't require clearing PoW to open, there's a monster problem brewing. At the current rates of progression, even the hardest core of hardcore guilds wouldn't have PoW even OPEN by February, and that assumes they even survive the next few months (we all know the various hits coming to the EQ2 playerbase have the potential to hit that crowd pretty hard). Quite honestly, this game can no longer support the kind of raiding scheme that's the current design philosophy, I'm not sure it ever could, since this many step progression path is a new one. In past expansions, if I were forced to try to put a number on it, there might have been 3, tops. The way it is now just doesn't take into account raid force atrophy.
Well, raiding in this game is being set up to implode on itself somewhere between the release of AoD and the DoV part two in Feb. The thing is, the current raid content isn't just broken, much of it is harder than it ever has been in the history of the entire game. The simple fact of the matter, is a very good chunk of the content is plain and simple too hard, even for the most hardcore guilds, regardless of what many of their players will say. A gear reset large enough to allow guilds to bypass content in February would be suicide for the game plain and simple. Instead what has to happen, which many players will disagree with to their own disadvantage, is that raids overall at the top need massive nerfs all over the place, even things that are already being killed by a select few. Now some of these nerfs could be done by doing something as simple as improving existing raid gear, fixing drop disparity on mobs, and implementing smart loot. Other nerfs on another hand tho, really would require a bit more thought. Doing things like lowering the number of aoes that one shot players. Removing percentage based damage mechanics from raids. Seriously lowering power drains all over the place. Making spawned adds passive for a few seconds after they pop. Cutting back on mem wipes on various mobs. Making significant cuts to aoe auto attack on certain things. Also lowering DPS checks various places. Doing things like adding more queues for raiders to follow on various scripts for some mob, either visual or text based in the form of red text. Making small adjustments on the tolerances for fail conditions on cures. Fixing some mechanic based things like the lack of reactives on multi attacks. Same thing can be said about reactives triggering on zero damage hits, there are various mechanical things that could afford to have some small changes made. There are also a large number of encounters that are designed around extensive use of the ACT program which is another good example of design failure. Now many people will read this like I am in favor of completely removing all the challenge from the game or something. That is hardly the case at all. I am advocating that raid content in this game be both challenging, but also at a level where the majority of dedicated raid guilds over time could actually progress instead of butting their heads against massive tower walls that content currently is. It feels like there are a couple devs in charge of designing raid content at the moment have completely lost touch with reality that most raiders are not at the absolute apex of raiding, and that all but a very small amount of the content shouldn't be centered these players. It has to be remembered, most people raid to have fun. When content becomes a brick wall of frustration, people quit and subs are lost. Even if stuff takes a bit to learn, if people feel that something is killable, they are much more inclined to keep playing.
By the time Plane of War is unlocked, Rallos Zek will either be 1) a PQ 2) a crafting instance 3) you will have to decorate his house and he gives you phat loot then. Because there will be no raiders left playing this game.
feldon30 wrote: Discussing how the encounter is broken has nothing to do with discussing strategies. And that, btw, is one thing that peeves me off about this game. Who cares if we kill it after you do?
Honestly they should just stop making hard mode progression. It is mostly wasted content that hardly anyone uses. Hard Mode statue has been out for 9 months and it has only been killed a few times. One guild has made progress recently in Tallon's drunder but that is it. Nobody has killed anything past Lichlord Hard mode in Vallons tower so no progress in there for almost a month. These are not new zones. Drunder hard mode has been out for a long time and progress is just stagnating. I mean really stagnating. There are only are handfull of guilds that can do anything but kill the trash in the hard mode drunder zones. THAT IS A PROBLEM. This stagnation is causing the game to bleed out players and for the most part it is the better players that are leaving. The ones who know the most, and should be progressing are calling it quits because they understand more than anyone else how over the top these hard modes have become. The game has just become too hard. The hard mode bosses are just too hard. The scripts that require mandatory use of ACT and guild connect are just too hard. There used to be a time when you didn't need this stuff to be a good raider. Sure it was nice to have ACT but you didn't need it like you do now. DoV hard mode raiding is like don't even bother if you don't have guild connect and custom ACT trigger pluggins. This nonsence needs to be reigned in. Stop making these over the top encounters nobody can kill and nerf the hard modes into the ground. There should only be one version of each boss. To separate hard core from the casual return back to the good old days of RoK tiered raiding or even TSO. Players completed one teir and then moved onto the next. Top guilds got their mythicals in the first week while the casuals needed months to work through the progression kills. Top guilds also had contested Avatars to camp and farm as the hardest content of the time. There was a clear path to progression and none of it was really impossibly hard. If you wanted RoK epic mythicals all you had to do was work for it. If you wanted Avatar gear all you had to do was work harder than your average raider. Fast forward to the DoV era the message is if you want Drunder mythicals well forget it you can't have them no matter how hard you try. You want to go to the plane of war. Well forget about that too. Look how many people want to get into the plane of war and how many people are actually in the plane of war. I am seeing a lot of failed expectations here. We have a problem and something needs to be done about it. Sincerely hope they don't resort to gear resets. I want to complete this content. I don't want to skip it. DoV could have been an epic raid expansion it is shame the mentality of making the goals impossibly hard has ruined it.
