Please make raids challenging, or I’m out

Fair enough for this expac, though I'm pretty certain that, for a new player, live will be significantly harder than TLE. Not saying better, just harder.

KoS was fun and was interesting way back when but was never hard - now it's about online friends, old memories and overall absorption and fun. If you are looking for a much harder game, you'll have to go find one because, as other people have said, it's not going to change any time in the near future.

So, was nice knowing you, glad you stayed till 54. Can I have your stuff?

Uggh. No, lol. I’ll probably stay long enough for the raid content, I’ve got to at least see it. I really like eq2, but endgame is so poorly tuned. The lower level dungeons were much more interesting because there were no blue stats. But you’ll probably see me kickin me around til my subscription is up at least, who knows.

I'm not overly sure it is the content - but the gear sure is weird. I used to be rabid about it, but ..meh.

I'd say harder in terms of figuring out the massive amounts of bloated features added that are just the same thing/stat just with a different name.

Plus trying to figure out all the overly complicated gimmicks (see above) done with adornments and how they pertain to the now 2-3 profession buttons that actually matter.

I laughed when I tried a wizard and 3/4 of my buttons that I was using on TLE during a timewarp/general rotation were useless and all I had to do was press the same 5-6 buttons plus ascension to win the parse. By win I also mean lose to one button classes, which also felt bad.

I'd 100% say that TSO-DoV will provide 100% more challenge than really anything on live.

T5-RoK is fairly faceroll, everything is either nerfed, or just general game mechanic changes makes it just not work.

Yeah, the difficulty isn't so much the encounters as it is maximizing gear, spells, AAs. It is a different form of challenge...

That's not really challenging, though. From DoV onward, at least when they started going crazy with adornments and reforging (and basically homogenizing gear sets), it was pretty easy to optimize your character as long as you knew what each stat was, how it affected your spells, and how to optimize your setup so it synergized with the raid group you were with. I dare say it is the same now, just way simplified due to ascension classes. Pretty sure if you put Adon, myself, and a bunch of our old friends (disclaimer: I've raided with Adon both on Live back in the day, and in TLE more recently) in a raid on Live, we'd still be on top.

The point is here we want challenge within context. I've killed everything prior to AoM a million times. All I want, is an expansion that takes more than a week to clear - even if I know the strats. I remember on FG we were trying to kill Vox contested and kept wiping - we knew the strat, we knew what to do, but it kept killing us. But, it was the camaraderie, and the determination, the knowledge that there was just that little bit more we could eke out, that would be the difference between success and failure. Yes, it was frustrating, and yes some of us quit. But being able to make progress and know that it is killable, if only for a few more upgrades, or maybe a lucky pull, or maybe even a fresh new perspective on the encounter, is what keeps us going. Even if that means turning the difficulty up to 11 versus what it was back when it was current.

Anyways, I haven't played on Kaladim for more than 6 hours total, and by the looks of it, I didn't miss much.

Trust me, i've checked a lot of specs and adornment choices. To say it's the best choices on live at the moment is questionable from "top players".

The problem is that it's not hard to maximize your character on live at the moment, but it's a hurdle to push over in terms of time gates and RNG rarity on items. It's not exactly "hard" to see what the best in slot options are. Even then, you can get by without using the most optimal things assuming that you had even a few of the better choices.

Challenge shouldn't be resolve gates, adornment gates, or mob gates. That's typically what you ran into on live for the last few years I played it. For example we did HM cruor, the issue was strictly in the fact that we didn't have enough "prismatic resistances", nothing to do with our skill (coupled with the mob being broken!).

That's the difference typically i've found between TLE and my time on live, is the fact that nothing is actually challenging script wise in either (for the most part), but the artifical gates on live are in place to extend the content for much longer typically. TLE typically just requires an entirely different ball game in terms of what you have to do to win, ward accumulation through temps if you can't stoneskin an aoe, timing aoe blockers, jousting instead of just healing the passive damage ticks from nameds.

As this game reaches the better expansions too, TSO-DoV raiding wise you get things like time warp, and you have to actually make a really fleshed out efficiency sheet instead of just a few buttons on live. Maybe i'm being outrageous in my opinions of live at the moment, but I just don't see it through the expansions i've played since AoM casually and all the streams i've watched.

I can say that the avatars on TLE were the hardest content i've done in this game since original avatars. Outside of pirate kings, 4rt, and wing 3 of UFD.

The last time I raided on live was during Kunark on a friends ranger account when he was in a top guild, I enjoyed my hawk and ascensions being all that mattered, instead of timing auto's, jousting to maximize melee damage, and actually having a cast order to maximize my quick shot procs like it was the last time I raided on a ranger. Same goes for furies at the moment, having to time howling, protective instinct around aoes, using/cancelling shell, these things are all negated when you can easily press pact and be fine for fifty seconds and mobs don't require you to actually time those things.

This has kinda turned into why live is not as challenging/fun as TLE at the moment, but it should be said that if people are going to look for "challenge" on live, they will be disappointed.

So I joined somewhat of a pick up raid tonight, and we got our ***** kicked by some trash mobs. And I'm stoked. Hope restored. It's not as easy as it sounded. And we were only missing like two spots, so. Glad to be back in EQ2!

I mean, cool. A PUG tho? And you wiped? Oof.

Yeah, half pug. Was two guilds with a combined raid force, plus some pug folks. Was awesome. Named were all easy, but there were some trash minotaurs messing us up. I'm just glad it wasn't a walk through. I'm stoked.

you must have joined the worst PUG on the server, it really is that easy.

I'm pretty sure you can 8 man poets at this point.

Don't stand in front of the minos.

They only way to wipe on kaladim is standing in front of a mob that has open wounds toggled. If you die to this, you bad mate.

The damage your raid took from those minotaurs is easily avoidable. But yeah I guess if you don't understand the content and take a pug into the hardest zone in the expansion then you might wipe once or twice. Hope restored!

We were short a couple healers.

Just ignore them. It doesn't matter what you say, they are going to find a way to find something negative in it. If you are enjoying yourself for your subscription dollar that is all that matters, not someone else's opinion.

I was playing dps mode and didn’t get a chance to tank, so it’s hard to say. I think it was a healing issue, maybe not enough healers, but who knows. I’m just glad that it wasn’t a cake walk, even with an almost full raid. I also heard yesterday that some raid bosses have been buffed to hit about 8k. Pretty cool.

Living the dream, eh!