Resolve is still terrible and getting worse.

It's worse than crit mit. Low crit mit gimped one character in the raid. Low resolve hits the whole raid.

Someone asked about resolve in the live stream.. It's definitely going to be in the expansion.
But who knows where they will go with it..

The only time it should impact your raid force from group buffs is if you are fighting the encounter shorthanded. In that case the fight will just be more difficult. We have no plans to allow being shorthanded to not affect resolve values. If you want to kill Epic X4 bosses you should be Epic X4 or close to it. Being a couple resolve short of the value the boss has will only reduce incoming damage to the boss by that percentage and make the player take that percentage more damage incoming. So, if you are 2 resolve short you are only taking 2% more damage and doing 2% less damage to the boss. Shorthanded kills are not expected to be easily obtainable on first time pulling an encounter. Shorthanded kills should be for after you have geared up and surpassed the expected values of resolve for that specific encounter.

Resolve values set on bosses for upcoming expansion are much more lenient on lower difficulty bosses than later bosses in progression meaning you can be missing more resolve and still be able to kill the boss the earlier in progression the boss is. This was tough to see in the Zek raid because it was only 4 bosses.

Gninja, I am apart of an active guild and even we struggle to maintain 24 (we have fielded 22-24 the last couple weeks). We are not the ones that are concerned about the negative impact of resolve. The concern is for casual guilds who struggle to maintain that third group much less a fourth having the ability do do content.

I think most players feel that going into an x4 fight with an x3 raid force is technically already at a 25% penalty. Going into an x4 fight with a 25% lack of players in our guild penalty , a 60% extra damage penalty and a 60% higher incoming damage penalty, seems a little excessive.

My only hope is that the resolve requirements for first tier Bosses leave wiggle room for those low end casual guilds to have the ability to struggle to meet strat checks and not resolve checks.

My only concern with this new mechanic is that guild retention does not always go the way we plan. A couple months after Kunark launches many players will go back into the woodwork (like they always do). So I fear that by penalizing a raid force like this you will inadvertently effect player retention as a whole. It's a domino effect. So a guild over recruits as a result. Now they have 6-10 players that want to raid but are benched. Those benched players will eventually quit the guild or the game. Raid spots will go to the highest parsers only. It's a lose lose for both Daybreak and the community as a whole.

Ultimately what's going to happen is you're going to reduce the amount of raid guilds on each server. You're shrinking your raiding population. It's going to cost you guys money because players will leave the game. Raiding is the only thing holding this game together. I would highly recommend you guys rethink how you proceed with resolve.

If you want encounters to take a full raid to beat, then properly design the encounter to be that difficult instead of falling back on a crutch like resolve.

Relying on something like resolve to balance your encounters tells me one of three things:

You're too short staffed to properly design an expansions' worth of raid encounters.
You're incapable of designing balanced encounters.
You just don't care anymore and you're phoning it in.

Which is it?

I didn't know it was a pedigree competition so I just addressed the history of the game we are actually discussing. Given your vast experience with guilds you really should know that the attrition you are talking about happened for over a decade before resolve and will continue to happen after resolve goes away.

Removing a game mechanic to prevent a few people from leaving the game or preventing struggling guilds from dissolving seems rather silly to me.

The point of my last post is that what you said there is how the game has worked since the beginning. Your guild was strong and now it is stronger because a weaker guild died. I've been on both sides of that situation enough times in enough games to take it as the natural way of raid guild population dynamics. A server can only support so many raid guild based on the population. When the population drops, guilds have to go away. I disagree that a bunch of people leaving the game because they don't want to play by the rules that others play by is a bad thing. If a guild doesn't have the numbers or the gear to get close enough to the mobs resolve then they don't get to raid. I think you would admit that there has to be a line. It would obviously be wrong for me to insist that I be able to solo all the raid content because I'm the only person in my guild. DB draws the line (with the mechanic they chose but this is largely irrelevant) and if they drew the line and excluded some shorthanded guilds then so be it. Let's see how the line works with kunark rather than throwing a fit about one zone, released when most people don't care enough about raiding to log in for raids anyway.

I'm guessing you'd be in the "Or Not" faction.

See ya....can I have yer stuff?

Considering that lower resolve causes the boss to do more damage to you, any plans to make resolve over the minimum to make players do additional damage to bosses?

Gninja.

you gotta undertstand us raiders dont care what you or the devs want . we pay for the game you dont we pa for you to be in a job asleast listen to the players we dont want RESOLVE its that simple.. why cant you see its going to end raiding guilds because we cant do harder bosses with x3 lol its a bit late in the game to start asking guilds to raid with a x4 to kill x4 bosses when the servers are dropping like flys and why because of crap like this.

the game is dieing getting new raiders is almost a no go its not like there is loads of new players out there wanting to join guilds and start raiding and guilds dont wanna merge with other guilds to raid they would rather quit then join another guild..

you really need to think about what your player base is saying.

If it helps you some day matter...sure.

Thats alright. You can keep it. Its probably all low resolve / high potency stuff anyway...cause resolve seems to be beyond your ability to understand. Much less use.

Hey! I have lots of low resolve, high potency stuff! But then we don't really raid much (just some x2 or maybe x3 raids once in a while and I do have some higher resolve gear to switch out then). But let him have the stuff, I'm decently set for now on potency, for a non-tanking SK.

I can't under stand what is so good on resolve? If you are lucky to have somehwat active guild and magically 20 ppl show up for raid then you are f*cked up anyway and can't go anywhere. If your guild is more serious and have some biding system with points then you can't grab random ppl and tell them you can join us but you won't loot anything. As guild leader you can't think you will have 10 ppl in reserve every day to have allways full raid ready, those 10 reserve ppl will join another guild to have more chance to raid, so your guild might colaps sooner or later.

What is reason to banish all ppl who want to short heroics or raids for a challenge and fun? If they want to kill boss 30 minutes instead of usuall 3 mins face roll so why don't you let them?

Also there will be no way to solo raids as future 120 lvl.

I can't see one positive aspect about resolve.

Lvl cap went up to 90 in Feb 2010.
Lvl cap will be 100 until at least Nov 2017.
If they keep lvl cap increases at that rate we are looking at well over a decade until lvl 120.
If we assume for the sake of it that EQ2 still exists then, over a decade of stat inflation will allow you to one shot absolutely everything in lvl 100 raid zones even if they up the resolve penalty top 99% and you go in with zero.

Anyway, only way I see players can adapt to resolve for relevant content is to form less but bigger guilds so they can afford to have people missing.

I guess I'll be the one to say it....


Devs have not been able to put out enough challenging raid content, to keep raid guilds busy/entertained long enough for the next batch of content. We all know and understand why.

Hardcore guilds take their full raids and just plow through the content, to the point that they probably only have 1 or 2 mobs left to kill after a couple weeks.
They can blow through content quickly, because almost all of it is very easy/simplistic. (I'm not asking to have all content turn into Kraletus difficulty.)

Since the devs can only do the best that they can with their limited time and staff, the players decided to take things into their own hands. One way to make content harder and slow down progression so that guilds aren't mindlessly farming the same cleared content for an entire year, is to plan to clear the content for the 20man shorthanded achievements. Raiding with 20 members increases difficulty, slows progression, and makes the small amount of content last longer. It was the perfect balance for guilds that didn't want to speed through content and end up with nothing to do...

I understand that the "easy content" will be "more lenient", it actually is easy to see with Zek's 6 encounters. First 2 are the T1's range, second 2 are T2's range, final 2 are T3. The problem is your idea of "lenient" is a bit exaggerated. The only current content that can be 3 grouped based on the obtainable resolve at that content's release, will be T1 and maybe a T2 mob or two if we're lucky.

It's simple, really.... whatever math you used to calculate your tier resolve ranges in Zek.... make Kunark Ascending more lenient.
The entry T1 amount is fine.
Lower the top end of T1 slightly.
Lower the entry T1 amount slightly.
Lower the top end of T2 slightly.
Leave T3 as is.
Make the people trying to short hand T3 wait for the next GU's batch of gear.

The hardcore guilds will burn straight through T1 and T2 regardless of how strict or lenient, because the fights are not hard at all for full raids.

Hardest T2 fight can just require all the available gear prior to that fight, plus 200 resolve buffs. (or 220 if you're planning raids to have 4 15 resolve classes)

Edit:
This game makes the claim that the players are to play the way we want to play.... but for a guild that wants to play for shorthanded achievements, we don't stand a chance based on the results from Zek. If we have to wait for future content gear, to short hand T2... or have to raid with 24 people to get the best T3 gear, to go back and short hand T2.... it won't be fun or challenging at that point...

meh tbh resolve is dumb but its a way to make the game a bit harder you can still do stuff short handed just will be harder and that is the fun of being shorthanded if i do rember right ?

They prob will never raise level cap from 100

Resolve is really bad for the game don't make us have to play wow it hurts.

Rumor has it that some who left for another game is finding the raids more challenging there...