I agree. It is sad to me that they have made progression so convoluted that it prevents the majority of their player base from ever fully experiencing the current expansion. In the past, even non raiders could at least join a pick up raid and experience those zones if they chose to do so. There is no comparison between the attainability of getting the epic 1.0 with the epic 2.0. With the epic 1.0 you could easily join a pick up raid because you didn't need god like stats to be viable or complete the raid with only specific classes etc. SMH
On the subject of anyone and everyone getting raid epic 2.0, I'd recommend holding off worrying about that for the moment. Nobody has them yet, and it's also only June. There are 4-5 more months, likely a whole summer ethereal event and perhaps another GU worth of stat inflation before another expansion comes along, that leaves pleeeenty of time for the masses to get a peek at raid content while it is still current in the storyline. The top guilds will likely be clearing before too long, and many more won't be far behind. If you're really interested in seeing raid content sooner, quit being a non raider! take a look at the top guilds' recruitment threads... Most of us are recruiting several classes and always looking for dedicated players!
This. Unless you are seriously dedicated, unemployed, or have never experienced anything more fun than watching paint dry, maintaining alts is ridiculous. It makes mainchanges to fill roster requirements near impossible unless you plan 2 or 3 months ahead. Get account wide Tithe, Significantly speed up ALT ascensions Change the Epic 2.0 Asc requirements to 1-5 (Rather than 5-10) Actually add in a feasible way of upgrading ascension other than opening your wallet Happier player base.
Cannot be overemphasized. I am dedicated, not employed, and have very low standards for entertainment, but I still wouldn't main change or even play an alt because at this point I have somewhere around $600 in total ascension spell research on my main that took me months of research, a fair amount of $$ and tens of millions of plat to accumulate.
Of all threads, we really need to stay focused on the attempts of a more transparent approach to the remaining t4 encounters that are left and better ways, well maybe not better, but more clear and precise ways of how these encounters are balanced and ways to conceivably concur them. I know many of us have been dedicating much time and focus to these last trials and a lot of progress has been made, but there are lingering issues remaining; I.E., timer on fail affect on baliath when his adds spawn and are just about dead instantly before the time he returns and adds just standing off in the distance for no reason. It would make more sense on that fight in particular (and this is with many substantially progressive fights on him) to remove the fail timer due to the uncontrollable variables such as his waves of adds getting caught up on an invisible twig in the water and just having the overcap on time be harder dmg than it would be to somehow kamikaze him down. Just my 2 cents.
Problem is they already managed to anger almost everyone - since shipping quality/long entertaining content which is also fun is not an option anymore there is only the cash-grab left - how sad: EQ2 is becoming more and more like a smartphone app - when can we buy 10 rubies for 5€ in order to level faster?
Comparing lower tier guilds with the top 10, the difference in Pot values gets even more moronic that you realize. I'm in a guild that is currently working on T3s. We are technically a casual guild that raids. Most people don't have the time to spend continually grinding tithe, but we are still killing the T3 bosses. Except for about 4 people, the entire guild is under 26K. Our normal raiders range from 17K - 25K Pot. Almost the entire guild, especially myself, have already become so completely disgusted by the absolute crap called the Proving Ground we will likely not be getting any more of that moronically OP gear than we already have. From the way I see itemization in this xpac, calling whoever is responsible for it incompetent would be a mortal insult to every other incompetent person on the face of the Earth.
Panic scripts were indeed put in place to prevent one shotting bosses due to how powerful the ascension abilities ended up being. While a lot of those have been brought under control, it is still possible to one shot these bosses using overloading of ascension spells. Casting these spells is NOT an exploit. Intentionally timing every cast to hit at the same time or within a second or two with the sole purpose of avoid the script IS an exploit. Thus the panic scripts remain. I have been messing around with alternate ways to get the same result without just blowing up the raid and you will see the first of those on Vhaksiz after Thursday's update. The reason they haven't and likely won't be removed while they are still current content is that the direct fix/adjustment to get rid of them would be to raise the hit points to compensate for the added dps or increase the combat mitigation. While this sounds like a logical move it also would pull that boss out of range of some guilds who are and have been killing it for a while. I am NOT cool with that. Thus why health or combat mitigation hasn't just been increased to compensate (though slight adjustments have been made in the past, they weren't drastic) If the "panic" script works out well for Vhaksiz then we can look at applying it to other encounters instead of the instawipe thing. I am not a fan of players having to go afk during fights etc because of DPS but I also do not like taking content away from players who are already doing the content. Its a double edged sword and in this case we chose to not remove that mechanic and make sure going forward we have built in ways of adjusting things in the case the balance gets thrown off or something.
I am not sure if guilds actually cast them all at the same time to avoid the script rather than dpsing logically. If people do it to actually skip the encounter all together, then power to them, it beats wasting the time to afk. If you look at every non-panic named encounter, I am sure you will find within the first 30seconds of the pull that the ascension abilities are all used and/or a majority of the mob's incoming damage. At the beginning of the expansion, I am sure it was the same for the current panic mobs when they were progression. If they are going to be the strongest abilities, it is obvious people will want to use their temps, etc, around them. Pre-clicks can't be used mid-fight, leaving the most optimal route for damage being at the pull and with ascension. Ascension abilities are basically a new chain rotation for all classes, giving the highest burst output. Chances are that if the mob was able to be killed within 30seconds to avoid the script, then it is probably dropping irrelevant/replaceable loot anyway. I'd suggest adding in an item, like PoW whistle or Gen'ra hm shell, that allows you to clear all the named/trash to a point. Example - Vaedenmoor Realm of Despair. Terris gives a message about an item being left near her chair when she is killed, but nothing is there. Maybe that item could be a whistle/bottle of banshee screams/insert other witty item name here that clears all the previous named up to Vhaksiz or even Terris. I would be, for the most part, happy to skip Vhaksiz. The only relevant item he drops currently is the charm. The other items are replaced by pg gear, t4 killable mobs, or a cloak that is worse than tradeskill line.
So does that mean you did not design the Anaheed the Dreamkeeper encounter? See my above post. Most of my guild's raiders have 25K or less Pot. We are a casual guild. We auto-attack the boss so we don't get 4 priests cursed at once and wipe.Then everyone makes a fist puts it on their chair with their thumb up and sits down, while we wait for the priests to run up and down that ridiculously large room just so they can get in range to kill the adds. Tell me again, how you are not a fan of players having to go afk during fights.
It is common sense for everyone to pre click charms and use all their big hitters in the beginning of an encounter, this is nothing new, it has been going on since the game has launched, temp up use ur highest spike dps. This in my eyes is not an exploit and if you truly believe it is then you should suspend/ban your entire player base. I can assure you every person who plays this game uses temps then their spike rotation, it is just common sense. If using ascension in the beginning of an encounter while temped up kills an encounter, that falls entirely on the people who developed the game, not the people who play the game. We did not make these abilities, we did not make the items/abilities to temp up with, we did not make the encounters, yet somehow it is us exploiting.
Make a way to bypass these mobs if we had kill them more than X times. We don't need the loot of these mobs anyway. We have to kill then to get access to other nameds. The extension is either afk dps or raise dps with cash for T4.
I am not a fan of players having to go afk during fights. You guys have to go afk for 1 healer to kill a creature that can nearly be one shot? Its a very short fight regardless of how skilled your raid force is. Try getting with some other guilds and ask for pointers on how to kill the encounter faster. You'll find some things you thought you had to stop dps for you might not have to.
Have you been banned for exploiting? Let me be specific... Have you been banned for exploiting this? I think not. That was the reasoning for putting in the mechanic. If the blame was on the players we would be mass banning folks and we are not. No one said the blame was on the players, we take full responsibility for the balance being off to begin with. What I was trying to get across was the reason for why we haven't removed it. That reasoning still remains valid regardless of the community's view on it.
Sorry but, no. The time investment to get to the later bosses (that you want to kill for phat lewts) is part of the calculation justifying those items being better than the items that drop earlier in the zone. We will not be adding a way to skip anything/everything you don't want to fight.
One way to solve problem would be to divide the xp for tithe. We should have been all 100 in all 3 tithes last year. The xp is insane. It take days to go from lvl 1 to 100 and YEARS to get to 100 in tithe...
yep u switch charm, u cast rising tide, switch back, mob pulled, u get your potency boost and of course you use your biggest nukes. also the sooner u use them, the sooner they'll be up again during the fight. and same, our raid guild is nowhere near a top HC guild (we cleared all T3), but we also have to afk during many fights because our dps is too high. may be Veta has a nice idea .. when u reach a certain point in the raid content, u could get an item that would let u bypass the script of T1 mobs ? at least the gating script. the more u move into raid tiers, the easier lower tiers should be. It's not the case coz of how scripts work. Hope u find a way to make those fights less annoying, less afking . U'd still have to kill them ... I mean it happens already in shrouded temple heroic, u can avoid the script of the second named if u DPS enough at the right time, so why couldn't it happen in raids ? if health drops too fast, then the script just doesn't have to trigger. why would that be exploit when we use what u gave us ? really strong spells.
It was already said, we are not doing this. Tier1 and Tier2 encounters should not have any sort of panic scripts on them at all. In most cases you are only wiped if you actually kill the boss before any part of their script starts which usually trigger within 5-10 seconds of the encounter starting and that is only on a few select encounters. By definition tier1 and tier2 fights are generally a lot easier and as you get into tier3 and tier4 those fights ARE easier to kill quickly. What encounters are you finding you need to go afk on in Tier1 and Tier2? If its a specific mechanic or something please be specific.
I remember Smedley speaking of the "fun" in the game. Where is the fun when you have to be afk 3/4 of the time in raid ? Where is the fun when you have to greed ascension xp days after days because all source of xp is nerfed one by one, so we have to xp each day instead of 2 or 3 times a week when you don't raid ? Where is the fun when I can't feed mana in my group as illu because the competence is still value base instead of % base and a warder is better than me to restore mana ? Where is the fun when I have to cast as fast as my early 40e lvl in PG because everything is nerfed but some ascension ? I greed the only loot useful for me before the nerf bat, but running 75 times the same PG is not fun at all. For the "phat lewt" people paying more in ascension gets better dps than me with several T4 pieces. Ok I am much harder to get killed. Sometimes I seems more a 15 resolve bot than a real contribution to the raid.
