Upcoming Vex Thal: Beyond the Veil [Raid] changes/fixes

The following raid issues should be addressed with next week's update. (5/25/2021) Just wanted to give a little extra warning for those wanting to see changes for progression. Let me know if you have any questions.

Vex Thal: Labyrinth of Solace [Raid]
Xerkizh the Creator should no longer need to be reset once in order for the symbols for his "Creation Reversal" ability to be seen.

Vex Thal: Beyond the Veil [Raid]

- Emperor Ssraeshza's ability "Scatterstorm" should now correctly affect only players within 15m of the targets current location, this is increased from the original 10m which was set incorrectly but was not being checked.
- Emperor Ssraeshza should no longer be permanently rooted. This was a hold over from testing that was missed and has been removed.
- Emperor Ssraeshza's "Acid Splash" frontal ability should now correctly hit all non-fighter targets in front of or flanking him when it is cast. Fighters will still show the visual hitting them but will not receive the negative effects. This ability should not be used while the barrage ability is active.
- Pets should now be able to attack High Priest Verrkara while she is using her "Occupational Hazard" ability.
- High Priest Verrkara should no longer fail to recognize specific rooms upon entering, leaving her immune to damage when she shouldn't be.
- The Emperor has grown tired of ordering the scraping of frogloks off the throne canopy and has order the flight path from Shadowed Isles: Whisper's Span diverted.
- Added distinguishing text to each of the travel crystals atop the center tower so it is less confusing where each one leads. Many directionally challenged raiders hath rejoiced.

Sorry, but the high priest used to be a challenge, before this fix. This fix literally cut 6 mins off our kill time, so it just falls into the category of meh.
The loot table needs to be bumped.. VEX challenge is dropping same quality loot and most celestial gear from quest reward chances and PQs are still better due to infusing. Need to make the high end raid loot infusable or really just do away from infusing.
The encounters have great thought put into them Gninja but the loot doesn't really match the time and effort. I know you don't handle loot, but it needs to be passed up. Maybe green adorn drops from trash, red run drops from trash, etc. It you want, make them only obtainable by those in the zone at the time of the kill if you're worried about being a farming/selling point for guilds.

Guys can you please do something about the loot in Vex 2. We continue to get level 255 gear that we already get the million repeats of doing the weeklies. Why must we suffer more? If anything you could put the 255 stuff on trash and give the 260 stuff from bosses. The loot is doing a disservice to the actual fights which are very well done. At this moment in time we just kill them for the sake of raiding with no real incentive to do so and to have this from an end game raid zone is just baffling.

The point about people selling loot and you guys not wanting that to happen then pretty much every expansion the raid currency is under utilised, why not put items for currency on the merchant instead? After all it is a million times easier to get the 265 items from cabal grind then it is from this zone.

Not sure who else we voice our concerns too with Dreamweaver now gone, does anybody even read the forums anymore?

Most guilds can't even do Vex 2 because the content by and large has been too hard. There is a rumor going around that there is going to be an even harder zone after Vex 2. Please no, this expansion is already over run with hard-modes. Expect this game to really turn into a ghost town if content just keeps getting harder and nobody can run these borderline impossible zones.

What this expansion needs is more mid range content similar in difficulty to Sol-eye from last year. Remember that SoL-eye was easier than the Ruins of Ssraeshza raid that was released in the first part of BoL. This mid range content allowed many other guilds to catch up in progression. Sol-eye was very well received and liked by the player base because it brought some measure of balance between the hard core players and everyone else.

This expansion seems to have taken things in the opposite direction. Too much vertical progression is bad for the health of the game as it leaves too much of the population in the dust and everyone ultimately ends up bored. It doesn't matter where in the progress a guild is, they end up running the same zone over and over again because everything older is obsolete and everything newer is too difficult. With horizontal progression all of the zones remain relevant for longer and there is more things to do for everyone.

Vex2 is fun and the nameds have cool scripts.

I would prefere a longer maximum duration of the zonetimer for average raidforces to kill more nameds.

At the moment the loot is not worth the efford there. This should be addressed too

Gninja clearly put in a lot of effort in designing the scripts. They really can be fun but as i said before the loot and the itemisation makes the whole experience flat and frankly a chore at the end of the day.

Difficulty in scripts are just fine except a few quirks which i suppose could be better. The major challenge for a lot of raid forces out there would be to meet the steep stat checks to overcome the hidden mitigation checks on nameds. You are most likely to fail on the timer due to low dps then to actually fail on the scripts once you figure them out.

The trash killing is still unnecessary in my view even after the changes made to reduce number of kills to open the portal. At the very least adding some 255 loot drops from it would dull the annoyance of going through them or just make them an obstacle on the way to the portal rather than requiring a set number of kills top open the portal. The portals should become active after you kill the first named without adds.

I, digress, the main frustration here is the loot coming from the nameds.

I'm not sure the content is "too hard" so much as it takes a lot of work to get access (via # of weapons) to start killing mobs in Vex 2. The zone timer is also somewhat short making the trash time take so much more raid time vs. other zones.

I don't think the problem is with the loot. My guild has seen a number of very nice 260r drops. The problem is the extraordinary amount of work it takes to get them. There is also a best in slot mount off the Emperor and some really nice celestial earring. There is what... two guilds killing Emperor. So very few people end up seeing it and then people complain that there is no loot. Well you have to kill bosses to get the drops. If you can't kill the emperor or farm the other bosses you are not going to see the loot table. Vex 2 is not the kind of zone where it can be cleared in a day and then reset. We basically spend all week slogging through the zone just for a couple drops and then the week is over.

Understand this... I am not asking for nerfs to the emperor. What I am really worried about is the up and coming Vex 3 or equivalent. It is just going to end up being too hard and destroy the raid scene and nobody is going to want to raid anymore. People are already grumbling about how it will be obsolete in November so why bother. Might as well take the next 6 months off. We don't need better loot, we need easier and quicker zones similar to Sol-Eye and PoW from last expansion.



PS: There is too much stat inflation in this game already. The last thing we need is more of it.

Part of what made Sol Eye great was the number and diversity of mobs.

There is nothing hard about Vex2, i don't understand where your perspective is coming from or if you're just using incorrect terminology. Emperor is like a welcome-mat tier boss mechanically and imaginatively, once his lame bugs are fixed - embarrassing for endboss.

• Requirements to get into Vex2, while well intentioned, are as usual a disaster in practice? For sure.
• Vex2 is a long, boring slog with unimpressive loot? You bet.
• With a couple pretty good mid-tier difficulty bosses? True, some fights are well appointed.

If you gonna complain, you should complain structurally correctly so that if on a fat chance anything does get fixed, at least they're not working off misleading complaints.

The strats aren't overly complicated or difficult to execute but mobs themselves are overtuned. Some of them do way to much damage or have too much HP. The trash is way overkill.

You must have a different definition of what constitutes unimpressive loot than I do. The loot is pretty nice. Problem is the zone is too difficult at least for most guilds. Once again I am not asking for the Emperor to be nerfed. What I am worried about is the next zone.

There is plenty of chase loot in Vex 2. No complaints there.

Agreed on the loot being lackluster for the effort/time involved. Not that 255-260 is bad, but PQ loot and heroic celestial loot is still significantly better stat wise because of infusing. Same goes for all raid loot, itemization is just a disaster this xpack.

I wouldn't consider the earring chase loot btw, it's the 1 time per server drop and it's already gone on most servers. So the chase is over. The mount is cool though.

There you go again, 100% right, up to the punch line and then blam - off the mark. It's not too difficult for guilds that can obtain the weapons, it's too LONG and unnecessarily so because of bloated trash (and yes HP on the 2 golems with Thal Xanax D is also unnecessarily way too high). But railing against the timesink aint gona do much, it's clearly there just to mask insufficient dev time for real (boss) content.

The damage can't be lower cause guards/zerkers/monks would laugh at it. Thal Xanax sux bad for crusaders no doubt. What else is new, tanks aren't balanced.

Dps checks can't be lower cause any reasonably-statted and rostered guild would laugh at them. Sure - a raid with 3 beastlords, a pally and 9 healers and most of the core missing summer etherials not gona make the checks. But i mean whatcha gonna do - stats vs combat mechanics are a non-fixable disaster cause p2w keeps the lights on, or so we're sekret-handsign led to believe. Just like previous xpacs it'll become doable with stat bloat from summer content.

I think we have seen 2 mythical drops from the last month of farming the first 4 nameds prior to the patch and after killing the 5th (High Priest) last week. We always get 255 armor that no one wants or can use in the sense of an actual upgrade. Moreover, other than the blue stats bloat on these elusive celestial items, the other effects have their spine removed after they disabled the melee side of things. I guess if you are sitting at 240% ADC, another 2.9% is not going to make or break you. Same goes with fervor overcap and CB overcap, at this stage of the game you are pretty much high on these stats anyway and the overall package looks mediocre at best.

As said before, there really is nothing difficult about it unless you equate stat checks to difficulty then your mileage may vary on this word. I scale the difficulty based on the complexity of the script and mechanics in play -- nothing out of the ordinary per se.

Raid balance and class balance don't exist in a vacuum, they are interconnected. One affects the other. If you make something challenging for a Monk / Zerker then it becomes impossible to do with Bruiser or Paladin.

In terms of DPS checks there is obviously a middle ground between something only three guilds can do and something that is a total joke. Right now it is leaning towards overly difficult dps checks and mobs having too much HP. The real problem isn't Vex 2 but the upcoming Vex 3 or equivalent zone which is going to be even harder. That is going to be a problem. There is too much vertical progression and a ramping up of everything already. Every time they up the difficulty it thins the herd and shirks the overall raid scene into a smaller and smaller circle of players. Who is going to keep buying that p2w stuff when more guilds implode? You looking forward to funding the whole game yourself twisty.

Loot quality is being reviewed against encounter difficulty to see if stats need adjusted up for some of the items at least. No ETA/Promises yet.

We are able to slot an SK to tank things in Vex 2 with no real issue as long as you give them tank-healers (i.e., Templar). That means all tanks are viable with at least 50 loyalty tokens... Best that is going to happen until the level change next expac.

I would agree that we need more raid content in general at all tiers and more reliance on loot drops than weekly quests for toon gearing. Skyfire has mostly casual guilds and they are all pretty much at creator. That's more than 2/3 of the way through the raid content at 6 months in - seems pretty consistent with prior years.

sure, sure, true, i'm not sure what you're proposing tho? everything in Vex2 is already easy for "better" tank classes if they pad HP on fights that warrant it. make it even easier for them is not a solution. we have alts with short histories tanking these, i can only imagine how laughable these are for long-experienced zerkers say

heh i have constant cognitive dissonance with your posts. agree with everything you say and then you conclude something totally opposite of my experience. the "three guilds" you referring to has to be regarding Emp and there is zero, zilch dps-pressure on that fight... it's just bugged. there are 17guilds that killed 2+ mobs in Vex2

Currently there are effectively no dps checks in Vex2 for a reasonable raid force - the HighPriest one was very tight pre-nerf - but even then (minority opinion) it wasn't a problem; there is objectively no implicit understanding or historical precedent that Vex2 should be clearable right now by top-20 guilds. actually, if anything, that usually happens at next influx of mudflation, not before. Thall Xanax is not a dps check since timer stops, but his golems do have too much HP without good reason - we agree here, but that's the only point where our views overlap i'm afraid

That's the thing... Vex3 *has to be* harder cause Vex2 is not a challenge at all for any top guild. I'd propose that it's also below normal eq2 challenge levels for any mid-tier guild, it just looks more daunting due to how long it takes to meat-grind thru the trash to actually take progression pulls. And yes, if you're running with poorly optimized raid-setup the extra fat on the trash will hurt disproportionately more, i feel for you, no /sarc. With roughly constant ~10hr raid week for most guilds a boost to trash HP results in disproportionally massive hits to available progression time.

No i don't want to gatekeep any mid-tier guild from enjoying the game, and if we relied on my p2w funding anything i'm afraid we'd only have a scrawny goat in Uganda to show for it. But Vex2 is just not the Mt Kilimanjaro you're presenting it to be. With bad tank classes, with bad setup for raidwide dps - yes it is sure - and the way stats are amplifying these problems (due combat formulas) it's hitting those with these problems harder than in say even Planes of Power. But that's no justification for how easy Vex2 is objectively and your compaigning to make Vex3 even easier is born out of that skewed perception

Agree with a lot of things you say but what I am proposing is that Vex 3 or other mid expansion raids be in line with Sol-eye difficulty. By all means make the scripts complex and intricate but there no reason to keep upping the damage output and dps checks. It is already ridiculous in Vex 2.

Emperor is definitely a DPS fight. Not spoiling too much here but if the DPS can't blow it up at 20% then it is going to be a wipe. Only 3 guilds can make that dps check right now.

High Priest pre-nerf was really the most fun fight in Vex 2. Yeah it was a dps check but there were ways to cheese the fight with faster runspeed and having all groups burn the named in the middle at the end. Getting around the dps check with technical execution and out-thinking the mob is what made it fun. Sure most guilds probably just burned it, but there were ways to defeat High priest pre-nerf without relying entirely on DPS. Emperor is another story.

Thall Xanax (Xundraux Diabo) is just a disaster and half that not only does it have way too much HP but it hits way too hard with insane auto-attacks. Maybe people call it Thall Xanax because you need to pop a Xanax after doing that ridiculous fight. Tanking that with Bruiser makes Thall one of the hardest encounters I have ever had to contend with all my 16 years of playing Eq2. Forget Kilimanjaro, it is bloody Everest.

Why does Vex 3 have to be harder than Vex 2? That is not the way it worked last expansion. In BoL we went from Ssaeshza's hallowed halls which was hard, to Sol-eye which was mid tier difficult. It was the right decision which most guilds ended up enjoying even though the top guilds cleared both Sol-eye and PoW in a two days.

Is it intentional for Xakra Fu'un to have a raid-wide curse that kills the raid before most healers have a chance *TO REACT* to cure it? A 1.5 second curse that has to be cured in 1.0 seconds from everyone. That margin of reaction is way to small.