Venril Sathir - unfair roadblock for some classes - Page 5

Sedenten · 01-29-2009, 06:28 PM

One of the reasons I hate this fight is because I play a main tank shaman and would love to get the update for my conjuror. We only ever do this fight if we have a new applicant that needs the update for mythical, and that's it. The problem with that is no one wants to play an alt healer for this fight and none of the non-MT group healers want to be in that group for the fight. I have absolutely no issues dealing with the mechanics of the fight, and have only screwed up once (where I simply didn't get my group noxious cure quickly enough back when we were learning the fight). At this point I'll end up just paying one of the farm guilds to let my conjuror die and get the flag that way (though I have no issues legitimately playing him for the update, if anyone would have him along for it!)

Another reason is that due to us only doing this fight when new people need a mythical update, we inevitably have people who have never done the fight before, never played the character they play as their main on the fight or are a bit rusty on the mechanics. I rarely screw up during the fight, but I cringe when someone makes a tiny mistake (doesn't get noxious cured in time, flubs sprint and doesn't toggle it off while they are feared, someone doesn't click the cube or statues) or the statues bug out and go active.

It is a great training encounter and I think it was well done, but I do agree they went way overboard with the amount of failure conditions. Is it really necessary to have one person be dedicated to clicking statues the entire time while someone is ready to hit the cube at the correct time along with everything else that is built into this fight? There's no skill or challenge involved in making someone click those statues or even click the orb at the right time. If those two facets were removed completely, some bugginess would be removed from the encounter altogether. If those mechanics must remain in some way as part of the lore, just make it so the cube needs to be clicked before anyone is able to hurt him or something.

Aldelbert · 01-29-2009, 11:00 PM

Barakuz wrote:

Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression.
After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones.
We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid :
Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one.
All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low.
Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem.
Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression.
TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this.
Bara

So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0

Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight.

Mirdo · 01-30-2009, 04:44 AM

Aldelbert wrote:

Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote:
Errolflynn@Befallen wrote:
The more I think about it the less I have a problem with how difficult VS, still haven't killed him but have cleared over half of VP and have my Myth.
What I do have a problem with is that about 1/3 of classes are heavily penalised because they need VS for their Myth.
IMHO it should be a case of all or nothing.
How about classes that need mobs deep in VP? You could equally argue that it's unfair on them. I played a Ranger when RoK released and our guild was progressing towards Phara Dar (Ranger Mythical update) when the goalposts were moved with Druushk and Nex being made much harder. I waited weeks longer than some guildies. It truly sucked to be me. I didn't like it much but until those changes VP was a joke. Virtually every fight was a variation on tank and spank so overall, despite my personal frustration, the changes were for the better (imo).
There are many instances of 'unfairness' like this in the game but Dev's have to set lines somewhere. Some people will be better off, some will have a frustrating time of it. No disrespect to you or your raid but there are pickup raids killing VS now (albeit led by experienced players) and the OP had the mob to 20%. VS has no additional tricks so if you can get him to 20% you can kill him.
Also, 1/3 of the classes is hardly a low minority that are 'penalised'. That's quite a few classes requiring a kill on that mob.
I also find it sad that some people are expressing how difficult it is to get guild members to go to VS or other zones to get updates for other members. Those same members are going to hate TSO raid mobs with a passion should those guilds have raiding aspirations in this expansion. You will almost certainly see guild rifts and splits if VS gives this much trouble.
It's difficult to get people to go to VS because he's not a fun fight and there's no reward in it outside of a mythical update for a few people. Sure you can argue that most TSO fights are heavily scripted with failure conditions of their own that is similar to fighting VS but the difference is: TSO's raid encounters are mostly fun, challenging and have a good reward attached to it. My guild loves TSO for the reasons I listed but you have to virtually beg them to log on to raid VS. The #1 guild on our server, who I won't name, helps new members with mythical updates unless it requires VS. Those people either have their mythical when they come in or they don't get an invite. Those guys down Avatars.
Again, it doesn't have anything to do with people being unable to kill VS, it's just a horribly designed fight that's not fun. They need to offer more carrot on the bait to encourage people to go fight him or make him a non-requirement for Mythicals and sub him with another mob. The VS encounter is rapidly becoming like "backflagging" used to be in Planes of Power in EQ1. Guilds who were in Plane of Time didn't want to go back through the raid zones to flag new members for all of them so they'd only invite others who were flagged up to them or they were just screwed. It took EQ1 nearly 4 years to "fix" backflagging but now it's population is nearly gone to WoW. With people actually planning their alts to see if they'll require VS for their mythical, something needs to be done now.

Getting the update for new guild members or alts seems to a be a guild culture thing. In our guild, if a new member comes in with no mythical, it's a given that, fairly quickly, they will get the updates needed, no matter what the mobs. The only RoK instance we do now is SoH so even a VP clear is not something we do by choice but by need. It's boring for us and there is absolutely no gain whatsoever except that Mythical update. Yet we still do it.

As to back flagging, well VS is a single mob with no access conditons, hardly comparable to backflagging for the original EQ1 PoT. If you tag on 'having' to clear VP for some classes then you start to have a point, however, VS is still level appropriate content. If we move on another tier and the Epics remain the weapon of choice for many , then I would agree we are into a painful backflag exercise (please no!).

You say this not about people being unable to beat VS. For the OP and many posters this thread is all about people being unable to kill VS. It might not be for you but re-read the thread; the majority of posts are from people that cannot kill this mob.

I would agree VS is not much fun to fight for many - this and other threads shows that; and his loot is not worth killing him for in isolation. I still wouldn't like to see him changed. It was incredibly painful learning to kill him because he is very straightforward yet still difficult. I think that's one of the things I like about him

One final point, this one is personal with little basis in logic but it's no different to many other points in this thread in that respect:

My guild and many others had to kill this thing with worse equipment than the TSO shard gear at launch. Pickup raids are killing it. Why should anyone else get it easier than we had it when they already have better/comparable gear. He is no longer a roadblock to VP, we HAD to kill him to get there. Why should anyone have it easier? How 'fair' is that to all the guilds that have gone before?

Edited in the last paragraph because some of arguments in here just reek of people wanting something for the minimum effort and it annoyed me SMILEY

SinIsLaw · 01-30-2009, 07:48 AM

Imho, SoE should once again add an Access critera to Levi! That way every character has to beat VS to get their Mythical ...

It has been that way in the beginning of RoK, and more then enough guilds beat him, even before the Fable versions were released, and before he was nerfed to hit like a new born!

Really all it takes is to have people awake in the raid and understand the encounter! I went back with a stacked alt raid a few weeks ago, and we did beat him with little effort ... did we whipe, sure did a few times, but what does it matter ?!?!

Where is it written down that everything "has to be first pulled" ...

VS has been nerfed down serveral times already, and now with more AA and Shard gear there shouldn't be any excuse that he is to hard anymore!

The only thing is left, is to learn the script and execute it, if your guild cant adjust to it - then you better prepare to raid another year in ROK, cause TSO is packed with heavily scripted encounters with several failcondidtions.

Mirdo · 01-30-2009, 08:23 AM

Durancer@Runnyeye wrote:

Imho, SoE should once again add an Access critera to Levi! That way every character has to beat VS to get their Mythical ...
It has been that way in the beginning of RoK, and more then enough guilds beat him, even before the Fable versions were released, and before he was nerfed to hit like a new born!
Really all it takes is to have people awake in the raid and understand the encounter! I went back with a stacked alt raid a few weeks ago, and we did beat him with little effort ... did we whipe, sure did a few times, but what does it matter ?!?!
Where is it written down that everything "has to be first pulled" ...
VS has been nerfed down serveral times already, and now with more AA and Shard gear there shouldn't be any excuse that he is to hard anymore!
The only thing is left, is to learn the script and execute it, if your guild cant adjust to it - then you better prepare to raid another year in ROK, cause TSO is packed with heavily scripted encounters with several failcondidtions.

I doubt that guilds struggling with VS have made it to the TSO encounters with multiple. scripted fail conditions yet but yes, eventually they will get there so need to be prepared. As mentioned previously, VS really is a good 'training dummy' for those encounters in terms of getting people out of their tank and spank comfort zone.

To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to. Things might not be perfect but anything that requires more thought than 'turn mob, joust aoe, off-tank, burn' is progress imo. Those things are still important ingredients but they don't really make a fight interesting or require much more than basic button pushing skills to beat.

Adding fail conditions and events that random raid members have to deal with in addition to the mundane raid tasks increases involvement and adds to the individual and shared satisfaction in the first kill of a new mob imo.

Malaqai · 01-30-2009, 10:51 AM

Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote:

To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to.

Nex is a horribly thought out fight.

Anything that limits you playing your class is pathetic. When you kill blobs in a few seconds and then just stand there so you don't over-DPS = /lose.

Other than that, fail-effects are always gonna be a pain in an unstable game such as EQ2. We had 6 people booted out of the zone on a Switchmaster fight.

Maybe if they had people sorting out lag and random LDs due to server lackings instead of Station Cash...

EoF mobs were pretty much as good as it got on raids, balancing script VS alternate strategy. Cheldrak etc. All fun.

Fail-effects and staring at your detrimental bar = meh.

That said, that's the way they decided to go and I live with it. And Venril Sathir is fine. Every guild that killed him wiped a few times. So will every new guild that comes up to him.

No reason to nerf him or change him.

Mirdo · 01-30-2009, 11:09 AM

Malaqai wrote:

Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote:
To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to.
Nex is a horribly thought out fight.
Anything that limits you playing your class is pathetic. When you kill blobs in a few seconds and then just stand there so you don't over-DPS = /lose.
Other than that, fail-effects are always gonna be a pain in an unstable game such as EQ2. We had 6 people booted out of the zone on a Switchmaster fight.
Maybe if they had people sorting out lag and random LDs due to server lackings instead of Station Cash...
EoF mobs were pretty much as good as it got on raids, balancing script VS alternate strategy. Cheldrak etc. All fun.
Fail-effects and staring at your detrimental bar = meh.
That said, that's the way they decided to go and I live with it. And Venril Sathir is fine. Every guild that killed him wiped a few times. So will every new guild that comes up to him.
No reason to nerf him or change him.

You'll note that I said I liked the 'new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to' - not necessarily Nex etc. I agree that DPS limiting and having 4 people doing nothing but static clicking are boring mechanics.

We must be lucky but in the guild I belong to, people going LD in the new zones can *usually* be traced to problems at the players end, be it ISP or just garbage / poorly setup hardware and software. I do agree that the palace seems to have some problems. We've still not found any fights where it's caused us the same level of problems you seem to be experiencing though.

What's different from 'staring' at the Dets bar than staring at any other part of the screen for information? As a healer I 'stare' at the group and raid windows to target heals. Glancing at the effects bar when you know one is potentially due is hardly more onerous than any other visual cue that has to monitored.

Many of the EoF mobs were aoe, adds and dps fights. Nothing more than that. Chel'drak was not an EoF mob but I agree it was a very good fight.

We do at least agree that poor old venril should be left in peace SMILEY

glowsintheda · 01-30-2009, 01:59 PM

VS is fine where he is, as he is. As a ranger I had been dreading/anticipating this fight for a very long time, on tuesday the raid alliance that I am in went and took him out. We had 5 people that were what you would call really experienced at this fight, most of the rest of the raid force had never even been in the zone before. It took us 5 pulls to kill him, 3 of which were bugged in some way (2 with statues randomly showing up and one where VS proced his mana drain that is supposed to just be single target on the entire MT group and ate all their mana). Maybe the group that I raid with is just composed of more disciplined people, maybe we just got lucky, whatever the case he really isn't that hard at all. A lot of people got myth updates that night. After VS we went and destroyed overking and then SoH up to sisters. The only thing I can really think of that might seperate us from you, is that every person in that raid really wanted to be there and to win. With how many people needed VS for myth updates and how much our force supports each other we didn't really go in there dreading it, we went in there expecting to beat him down and get people their updates and that is exactly what happened.

Barakuz · 01-30-2009, 05:45 PM

Aldelbert wrote:

Barakuz wrote:
Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression.
After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones.
We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid :
Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one.
All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low.
Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem.
Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression.
TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this.
Bara
So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0
Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight.

Sorry it's so confusing for you, I'll make it simpler this time...

I think the script is ok, and can be viewed as a good "learning / training tool". However, I do believe the fail conditions are overblown, especially if you consider where this mob is in raid progression.

The aspect of this mob I wouldn't have changed, would be the requirement for every member of the raid force having killed this mob before being able to attempt Levi...and thererfore gain access to VP. However, thats a moot point as this change has been in place for ages.

Wouldn't the insane prices for the VS update, potentially limit the amount of people purchasing Mythical updates ?

Bara

Xil · 01-31-2009, 07:43 AM

Barakuz wrote:

Aldelbert wrote:
Barakuz wrote:
Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression.
After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones.
We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid :
Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one.
All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low.
Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem.
Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression.
TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this.
Bara
So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0
Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight.
Sorry it's so confusing for you, I'll make it simpler this time...
I think the script is ok, and can be viewed as a good "learning / training tool". However, I do believe the fail conditions are overblown, especially if you consider where this mob is in raid progression.
The aspect of this mob I wouldn't have changed, would be the requirement for every member of the raid force having killed this mob before being able to attempt Levi...and thererfore gain access to VP. However, thats a moot point as this change has been in place for ages.
Wouldn't the insane prices for the VS update, potentially limit the amount of people purchasing Mythical updates ?
Bara

There's really not much in the way of fail conditions to him. You click statues /check. You cure nox /check. You manage power /check. If blue hit X stand and wait /check.

Most people fail VS because they Power Tap him and make the fight 100x harder than it needs to be. Hell even if people do screw up as long as you don't power tap him yer tank can hold a power level add pretty safely and even two of them for a bit if yer in the last 20% just finish him off.

It's really an easy fight already. All it does is weed out people who can listen and pay attention from people who can't. And like the buying of mythical update comment mentioned. You can just leave those people dead.

Hell you can kill VS with 15 people. And it's actually easier than with 24. I don't really think a gatekeeper raid mob that you can kill with half a raid should be any easier than it already is.

Raiders that want to progress need to learn how to deal with VS type encounters or they'll never be able to do VP and they sure as hell won't be clearing TSO. It's all stages of things you need to learn. From Thuuga, Paw, and PR to Leviathan. Each one has a piece of the VP puzzle.

It just kinda happens that VS is the listen and pay attention piece. And that's the absolute hardest part of raiding for most players. Learning to listen and pay attention. It's a hard lesson. But if you want to raid top teir content you absolutley have to learn it.

TrinomialTheory · 02-02-2009, 12:37 PM

a lot of you are just plain a-holes in your responses. "I did it so it's easy and should be easy to everyone". That's the general response here. Yes I am a coercer that needs him for an update. No my guild has not killed him. Yes my guild has taken out every other tier mob and into VP.

I truely find this mob to be competely rediculous and out of place. Some of you say that he's a mob that teaches you something or gets you ready for upcoming zones but I can't see this at all. Sure I haven't cleared VP yet and probably won't for a few months but to the people that say this guy teaches you something is complete B.S.! Like I said I haven't seen many of the encounters in VP but I'm pretty sure not a single one of the t3-VP encounters require the degree of perfection you must put forth on this guy. What I mean is that no mob after VS will require you to keep your power at a certain range. This is supposed to teach a raid force something? Teach them what? Certainly not power management because no other fight in the game requires you to NOT be at 100% or as high as possible amount of power. Power consumption is from 100%-0 and no other time will you ever need to keep your power halfway...

This fight though..for some reason wants you to only be at half power and then maintain it. Oh, and you also get all these dots on you that will more than likely hinder you from keeping your power at this range. This really isn't the issue with this fight that I see though. The fear that hits us isn't that bad either, only when it comes right before the noxious is when it gets worrisome. The #1 thing that gets us is the random power draining of people. I have been one of these people. I or someone in the raid will have NO dots on them whatsoever and all of a sudden they get their power drained to 10%ish and boom, adds pop and it's a wipe. This happens to our tank a lot. We know the strategy. We have competent people, we have gear, we have everything that is required. What we don't have is the insane amount of luck that is needed in this fight.

To address some other things that relate to this is the statements saying "If you have someone in your GUILDED raidforce that wipes the raid a few times, kick them from guild.".. Whoah who the F are you to kick someone out of a guild because they aren't as competent as you are? I hear this all the time from Elitests(yes you know who you jackholes are) who are hardcore and think everything is too easy and everyone else should suffer just so they can brag about their syt they have. This is all too true for many guilds on my server (LDL). There are only 3 or 4 guilds on my server that can kill VS and/or everything in VP,Avatars,blah blah. These guilds are mainly comprised of A-holes that would rather flame you in level chat than to give any sort of help and or directional advice for you to take. "We did it in 10 mins, 1st pull, easy." Yah that's cause you kicked everyone out of guild that didn't match your a-hole attitude about playing this game. There is a very small niche of players that find everything easy and they are the ones whining about things being too easy. They are also the ones that get their 4 or 5 alts all their mythicals before they'd let a begging individual that is willing to pay a boatload get in on an update. There is no working together at all, it's just all for one and one for me me me.

Do I want VS nerfed just a little? No. I want him moved and/or removed. His tactics don't teach jack about upcoming mobs other than teaching your guild that you have to be an a-hole drill sergeant to raid and this just isn't what my idea of having fun in a game is about. Someone even mentioned that this game is fun because it's not as easy as wow, which is sorta true but when you look at it, which game is more popular and dominates the MMO front?? No guesses? Oh that's right that would be world of warcraft. I also play that game and I don't do much raiding in it but i'm pretty damned sure their raid zones aren't just walk in tank 'n spank and leave either. They also have 40 man raids which I can only imagine the hassles of finding 40 competent players for that. This leads to the fact also that many of the 'competent' players on a server already belong to another guild and will not go back to that zone to help you because they are VP geared, mythical'd, blah blah and they usually say FU if you ask them if they want to come to VS. "FU buddy i'm in VP or a TSO raid and i'll never go back to VS because I don't want to have to pay for repairs." That's a typical response for my server. I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull.

Bah I'm tired of typing, all ya'll are gonna do is tell everyone they suck cause they can't kill em. To you I say go suck an egg cause you aren't as special as you think you are. BTW, You do need VS to progress into Leviathan. Killing Overking alone will not let you zone in CoD, I know because as of 3 days ago I just got VP flagged. I could NOT zone into CoD even though I killed Overking and Leviathan. We can only get into Leviathan because our guild leader, who was a part of one the elitest guilds, already killed levi and had his mythical and could zone us in. Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access.

Gaige · 02-02-2009, 12:58 PM

TrinomialTheory wrote:

Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access.

Which they changed due to whining. The entire raid used to have to be flagged, which is how it should've stayed; so that people like you can't go OMG I KILLED A MOB IN VP, VS IS TOO HARD; like they do now.

Good luck with Trakanon, I'm sure you'll do amazing there since it doesn't have strict fail conditions, oh wait.

RafaelSmith · 02-02-2009, 04:32 PM

TrinomialTheory wrote:

Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access.

Which is stupid and really bad progression design.

Killing VS/Overking should be required by EVERYONE to get into CoD.

Lord Montague · 02-02-2009, 04:43 PM

Annoying and frustrating I will agree with, but not impossible. Even on the last time my guild took him we had some folks that were new and slow on the uptake but we still beat him - WITHOUT getting crappy or condescending to those who were mucking it up. Mind you we do have one or two people who keep an eye on everyone's power levels and we firmly remind them if they start getting out of range (along with using power feeds from others to help when necessary, so there IS some teamwork there). It doesn't take a hardcore mindset at all, just 6 to 8 minutes of complete focus and unfortunately a degree of luck too.

Xil · 02-02-2009, 06:06 PM

TrinomialTheory wrote:

a lot of you are just plain a-holes in your responses. "I did it so it's easy and should be easy to everyone". That's the general response here. Yes I am a coercer that needs him for an update. No my guild has not killed him. Yes my guild has taken out every other tier mob and into VP.
"Same old song and dance /snip"

Sounds more like no one on your raid force understands the encounter enough to explain it to your people.

Asif · 02-02-2009, 08:07 PM

Gaylon@Mistmoore wrote:

TrinomialTheory wrote:
Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access.
Which is stupid and really bad progression design.
Killing VS/Overking should be required by EVERYONE to get into CoD.

/ Nods

Tasnus · 02-02-2009, 08:20 PM

TrinomialTheory wrote:

I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull.

I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both.

As for the encounter..

His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions.

Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players.

Thanon · 02-03-2009, 03:41 AM

Tasnus wrote:

TrinomialTheory wrote:
I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull.
I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both.
As for the encounter..
His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions.
Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players.

QFT

I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game.

It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years.

A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following:

Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead.

That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring.

They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid.

This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game.

Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids.

For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes.

Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE...

You get the picture.

Scripting FTW

Dasein · 02-04-2009, 11:35 AM

Thanon@Runnyeye wrote:

Tasnus wrote:
TrinomialTheory wrote:
I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull.
I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both.
As for the encounter..
His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions.
Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players.
QFT
I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game.
It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years.
A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following:
Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead.
That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring.
They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid.
This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game.
Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids.
For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes.
Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE...
You get the picture.
Scripting FTW

There are scripted elements in DOF and even some of the initial T5 raids, although it's not so obvious as it is in RoK and TSO.

Also, Nexona is a much better designed encounter than Venril, as Nexona requires solid teamwork, with everyone working together in the raid to fill different roles. Venril is simly 24 individuals who do not need to cooperate in any substantial manner, but simply need to not make a mistake.

Rayche · 02-04-2009, 02:38 PM

Venril is a broken encounter and can fail even when you do it right. That's the problem.

Well, that and they changed the script 3 or 4 times and broke it a few times, wasting months of peoples lives.

So if they're going to create scripted encounters, tune it in beta and STOP F'ing with it once it goes live.

If you follow the script to the letter, you should win. That's not the case for VS... now, we've taken VS down in less than 6 minutes before...and beaten him many times, but it still requires the "Luck" of not having the script bug out.

P.S.

I call BS on WoW's raid encounters.. my son plays a raiding hunter in WoW and I (Or he) have never seen anything in WoW that complicated or convoluted. (As Venril)

Nexona event? Perfection... loved it.

Oh, and in support of the original posters complaint, Venril being an unfair roadblock for some classes? Yes... Templars have to kill a heroic mob (Drussela Sathir) as one of their Mythical updates... that's pretyt lopsided.

Defilers get the OPTION of Venril or Overking. That should be for everyone.

CoLD MeTaL · 02-04-2009, 02:59 PM

Dasein wrote:

VP really isn't all that hard, and with the exception of Nexona, no encounter has as many outright fail conditions as Venril, nor any conditions so easy for anyone to activate. 1. Power to Low = Fail.1b. Mana Sacrifice serves to complicate power management, and will take effect instantly.2. Failed cure = Fail. 2b. The fear and spell reflect effects can make getting off cures in time challenging. 3. Missed Statue Click - Fail.4. Moving beyond Venril's eash point = Fail (not merely a reset, either). 4b. The fear effect can ake this more likely to occur depending on pull location.5. Power too high = Massive Venril Heal. Not a direct fail, but pretty close, especially if it happens multiple times. I am not aware of any other encounter in VP with this many fail conditions or where any and every member of the raid could potentially cause a wipe. Even Nexona is more forgiving in this regards - while the fight overall is very challenging, one or two people could have a lag spike or get distracted for a moment, and probably not cause a wipe. The same is not true of Venril. So, let's drop this idea that if you cannot take down Venril, you won't do well in VP. Of the T1-T4 encounters, Venril is arguably second only to Nexona in difficulty and frustration.

I found this in another thread, someone said low power was the only fail condition, yet this guy posted 5. (maybe 4.5)

People I know that need venril, pay a raid guild 300p for the update or they are screwed, no one even goes down there to try and get the upate any more.

I personally have tried about 50 times to take him down, and always there is 1 person who screws up. Since I am not in a raid guild i have to take what I can get down there, and since TSO is out and u high powered peeps gotother things to do, it is time for him to be nerfed.

this encounter was built for hard core raiders. not raid alliances that are still trying to work through the content.

Keeping my power between 30 and 60, self cure with a pot, seems plenty easy to me, but someone always f-es it up. to my friends that need VS for their mythical updates, I just say "Pay for it or your screwed"

GangleG · 02-04-2009, 03:06 PM

Nexona is not a "well designed encounter." Punishing a raid for too much DPS is a ridiculous concept, as is making people click statues or harvest for the entire fight.

wullailhuit · 02-04-2009, 04:21 PM

We just re-did VS with a raid consisting of many alts , not all of whom were well geared...

We wiped on the first pull due to someone getting a massive power drain , 2nd time we killed it with little or no problems , it's all about paying attention and bringing lots of cure nox pots.

feldon30 · 02-04-2009, 05:48 PM

CoLD MeTaL wrote:

I personally have tried about 50 times to take him down, and always there is 1 person who screws up. Since I am not in a raid guild i have to take what I can get down there, and since TSO is out and u high powered peeps gotother things to do, it is time for him to be nerfed.
Keeping my power between 30 and 60, self cure with a pot, seems plenty easy to me, but someone always f-es it up. to my friends that need VS for their mythical updates, I just say "Pay for it or your screwed"

What I am hearing from this thread is that VS can be killed by as few as 12-15 people.

If you really died 50 times, and the same person had trouble more than 3 times, I would ask them to just stay dead. They will get the update regardless.

It comes down the maturity of the folks in your raid. If their response to "Since we are having some troubles with VS and we really want to get it done tonight, we're going to try it with a core group. Do you mind staying down?" is F-U and they ragequit or get all mad and start bleating in the guild chat, well then maybe they should not be in your raid force.

From everything I have read about VS, yes, it forces your raid force to pay attention to what they are doing, break out their their standard routine and think for a moment. But that is really the only beneficial aspect of this fight as far as I can tell. After that it comes down to dumb luck, nobody going LD, lagging, getting feared at the wrong time, etc. so in that regard, I have no problem with trying it a few times and then asking folks to just stay down. If we succeed and get 24 folks flagged for VS and they are truly upset that they couldn't participate in the whole fight and want to take another stab at him later on, we can do that when are flagging guild alts. Holding up the whole guild so all 24 people can feel like they did their 1/24th of the fight seems a poor choice. The fact that raid guilds broke up over this fight due to hurt feelings is still alarming to me.

I think most guilds who are selling mythical updates just have outsiders play dead during this fight. I could be wrong...

Iled · 02-04-2009, 09:43 PM

Rayche@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Nexona event? Perfection... loved it.
Oh, and in support of the original posters complaint, Venril being an unfair roadblock for some classes? Yes... Templars have to kill a heroic mob (Drussela Sathir) as one of their Mythical updates... that's pretyt lopsided.
Defilers get the OPTION of Venril or Overking. That should be for everyone.

Yep, my thoughts exactly. I quite enjoy the Nex fights. Everyone has to work really hard, lots of stuff to watch out for...but fun and rewarding. VS quite the opposite; nervewracking chance and luck.

I didn't realise some classes actually get an option of VS or something else... [Removed for Content] LOL

Wilde_Night · 02-04-2009, 10:01 PM

So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.*

*We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers.

Dasein · 02-04-2009, 10:08 PM

Aeviel@Venekor wrote:

So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.*
*We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers.

I think you're confusing the Pawbuster stifle effect with Venril. Venril's fear is reactive, so it doesn't matter how many people are in the raid.

Malaqai · 02-05-2009, 05:12 AM

Thanon@Runnyeye wrote:

QFT
I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game.
It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years.
A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following:
Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead.
That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring.
They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid.
This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game.
Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids.
For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes.
Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE...
You get the picture.
Scripting FTW

You're so right!Best part of those scripted fights is not only do you have to do everything EXACTLY on a already decided linear line, which makes it, guess what.... Much more boring that stuff where you can improvise like Rumbler, Wuoshi, etc.

Also, it's also great, and I'll say this again, since EQ is so stable and then you fight Switchmaster or someone and 6 of your raiders get booted, get the yellow screen, you wipe.

FUN!

wullailhuit · 02-05-2009, 06:51 AM

Aeviel@Venekor wrote:

So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.*
*We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers.

The only way to proc VS's fear is to attack him....just make sure your healers don't attack him at all and they won't receive the fear , if your healers are being feared , remind them they're healers not DPS on this fight.

feldon30 · 02-05-2009, 12:42 PM

Aeviel@Venekor wrote:

So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.

That is not how the fight works to my knowledge.

He has an 8% chance to fear anyone who does damage to him. Healers should not be doing ANY dps to him.

Every 38 seconds he does his AoE nox which must be cured immediately.

Add the two together and you get this loop:

When Toxic Infusion nox occurs, cure it.
DPS for 30 seconds.
Stop DPS for the last 8 seconds before the next Toxic Infusion fires. That way if any fears happen, they have expired by the time TI happens and everyone can cure it.

01-29-2009, 11:00 PM	#122
Aldelbert Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 44	Barakuz wrote: Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression. After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones. We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid : Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one. All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low. Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem. Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression. TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this. Bara So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0 Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight.

01-30-2009, 04:44 AM	#123
Mirdo Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: UK Posts: 395	Aldelbert wrote: Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote: Errolflynn@Befallen wrote: The more I think about it the less I have a problem with how difficult VS, still haven't killed him but have cleared over half of VP and have my Myth. What I do have a problem with is that about 1/3 of classes are heavily penalised because they need VS for their Myth. IMHO it should be a case of all or nothing. How about classes that need mobs deep in VP? You could equally argue that it's unfair on them. I played a Ranger when RoK released and our guild was progressing towards Phara Dar (Ranger Mythical update) when the goalposts were moved with Druushk and Nex being made much harder. I waited weeks longer than some guildies. It truly sucked to be me. I didn't like it much but until those changes VP was a joke. Virtually every fight was a variation on tank and spank so overall, despite my personal frustration, the changes were for the better (imo). There are many instances of 'unfairness' like this in the game but Dev's have to set lines somewhere. Some people will be better off, some will have a frustrating time of it. No disrespect to you or your raid but there are pickup raids killing VS now (albeit led by experienced players) and the OP had the mob to 20%. VS has no additional tricks so if you can get him to 20% you can kill him. Also, 1/3 of the classes is hardly a low minority that are 'penalised'. That's quite a few classes requiring a kill on that mob. I also find it sad that some people are expressing how difficult it is to get guild members to go to VS or other zones to get updates for other members. Those same members are going to hate TSO raid mobs with a passion should those guilds have raiding aspirations in this expansion. You will almost certainly see guild rifts and splits if VS gives this much trouble. It's difficult to get people to go to VS because he's not a fun fight and there's no reward in it outside of a mythical update for a few people. Sure you can argue that most TSO fights are heavily scripted with failure conditions of their own that is similar to fighting VS but the difference is: TSO's raid encounters are mostly fun, challenging and have a good reward attached to it. My guild loves TSO for the reasons I listed but you have to virtually beg them to log on to raid VS. The #1 guild on our server, who I won't name, helps new members with mythical updates unless it requires VS. Those people either have their mythical when they come in or they don't get an invite. Those guys down Avatars. Again, it doesn't have anything to do with people being unable to kill VS, it's just a horribly designed fight that's not fun. They need to offer more carrot on the bait to encourage people to go fight him or make him a non-requirement for Mythicals and sub him with another mob. The VS encounter is rapidly becoming like "backflagging" used to be in Planes of Power in EQ1. Guilds who were in Plane of Time didn't want to go back through the raid zones to flag new members for all of them so they'd only invite others who were flagged up to them or they were just screwed. It took EQ1 nearly 4 years to "fix" backflagging but now it's population is nearly gone to WoW. With people actually planning their alts to see if they'll require VS for their mythical, something needs to be done now. Getting the update for new guild members or alts seems to a be a guild culture thing. In our guild, if a new member comes in with no mythical, it's a given that, fairly quickly, they will get the updates needed, no matter what the mobs. The only RoK instance we do now is SoH so even a VP clear is not something we do by choice but by need. It's boring for us and there is absolutely no gain whatsoever except that Mythical update. Yet we still do it. As to back flagging, well VS is a single mob with no access conditons, hardly comparable to backflagging for the original EQ1 PoT. If you tag on 'having' to clear VP for some classes then you start to have a point, however, VS is still level appropriate content. If we move on another tier and the Epics remain the weapon of choice for many , then I would agree we are into a painful backflag exercise (please no!). You say this not about people being unable to beat VS. For the OP and many posters this thread is all about people being unable to kill VS. It might not be for you but re-read the thread; the majority of posts are from people that cannot kill this mob. I would agree VS is not much fun to fight for many - this and other threads shows that; and his loot is not worth killing him for in isolation. I still wouldn't like to see him changed. It was incredibly painful learning to kill him because he is very straightforward yet still difficult. I think that's one of the things I like about him One final point, this one is personal with little basis in logic but it's no different to many other points in this thread in that respect: My guild and many others had to kill this thing with worse equipment than the TSO shard gear at launch. Pickup raids are killing it. Why should anyone else get it easier than we had it when they already have better/comparable gear. He is no longer a roadblock to VP, we HAD to kill him to get there. Why should anyone have it easier? How 'fair' is that to all the guilds that have gone before? Edited in the last paragraph because some of arguments in here just reek of people wanting something for the minimum effort and it annoyed me

01-30-2009, 07:48 AM	#124
SinIsLaw Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 357	Imho, SoE should once again add an Access critera to Levi! That way every character has to beat VS to get their Mythical ... It has been that way in the beginning of RoK, and more then enough guilds beat him, even before the Fable versions were released, and before he was nerfed to hit like a new born! Really all it takes is to have people awake in the raid and understand the encounter! I went back with a stacked alt raid a few weeks ago, and we did beat him with little effort ... did we whipe, sure did a few times, but what does it matter ?!?! Where is it written down that everything "has to be first pulled" ... VS has been nerfed down serveral times already, and now with more AA and Shard gear there shouldn't be any excuse that he is to hard anymore! The only thing is left, is to learn the script and execute it, if your guild cant adjust to it - then you better prepare to raid another year in ROK, cause TSO is packed with heavily scripted encounters with several failcondidtions. __________________

01-30-2009, 08:23 AM	#125
Mirdo Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: UK Posts: 395	Durancer@Runnyeye wrote: Imho, SoE should once again add an Access critera to Levi! That way every character has to beat VS to get their Mythical ... It has been that way in the beginning of RoK, and more then enough guilds beat him, even before the Fable versions were released, and before he was nerfed to hit like a new born! Really all it takes is to have people awake in the raid and understand the encounter! I went back with a stacked alt raid a few weeks ago, and we did beat him with little effort ... did we whipe, sure did a few times, but what does it matter ?!?! Where is it written down that everything "has to be first pulled" ... VS has been nerfed down serveral times already, and now with more AA and Shard gear there shouldn't be any excuse that he is to hard anymore! The only thing is left, is to learn the script and execute it, if your guild cant adjust to it - then you better prepare to raid another year in ROK, cause TSO is packed with heavily scripted encounters with several failcondidtions. I doubt that guilds struggling with VS have made it to the TSO encounters with multiple. scripted fail conditions yet but yes, eventually they will get there so need to be prepared. As mentioned previously, VS really is a good 'training dummy' for those encounters in terms of getting people out of their tank and spank comfort zone. To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to. Things might not be perfect but anything that requires more thought than 'turn mob, joust aoe, off-tank, burn' is progress imo. Those things are still important ingredients but they don't really make a fight interesting or require much more than basic button pushing skills to beat. Adding fail conditions and events that random raid members have to deal with in addition to the mundane raid tasks increases involvement and adds to the individual and shared satisfaction in the first kill of a new mob imo.

01-30-2009, 10:51 AM	#126
Malaqai Loremaster Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 70	Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote: To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to. Nex is a horribly thought out fight. Anything that limits you playing your class is pathetic. When you kill blobs in a few seconds and then just stand there so you don't over-DPS = /lose. Other than that, fail-effects are always gonna be a pain in an unstable game such as EQ2. We had 6 people booted out of the zone on a Switchmaster fight. Maybe if they had people sorting out lag and random LDs due to server lackings instead of Station Cash... EoF mobs were pretty much as good as it got on raids, balancing script VS alternate strategy. Cheldrak etc. All fun. Fail-effects and staring at your detrimental bar = meh. That said, that's the way they decided to go and I live with it. And Venril Sathir is fine. Every guild that killed him wiped a few times. So will every new guild that comes up to him. No reason to nerf him or change him.

01-29-2009, 06:28 PM	#121
Sedenten Loremaster Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 680	One of the reasons I hate this fight is because I play a main tank shaman and would love to get the update for my conjuror. We only ever do this fight if we have a new applicant that needs the update for mythical, and that's it. The problem with that is no one wants to play an alt healer for this fight and none of the non-MT group healers want to be in that group for the fight. I have absolutely no issues dealing with the mechanics of the fight, and have only screwed up once (where I simply didn't get my group noxious cure quickly enough back when we were learning the fight). At this point I'll end up just paying one of the farm guilds to let my conjuror die and get the flag that way (though I have no issues legitimately playing him for the update, if anyone would have him along for it!) Another reason is that due to us only doing this fight when new people need a mythical update, we inevitably have people who have never done the fight before, never played the character they play as their main on the fight or are a bit rusty on the mechanics. I rarely screw up during the fight, but I cringe when someone makes a tiny mistake (doesn't get noxious cured in time, flubs sprint and doesn't toggle it off while they are feared, someone doesn't click the cube or statues) or the statues bug out and go active. It is a great training encounter and I think it was well done, but I do agree they went way overboard with the amount of failure conditions. Is it really necessary to have one person be dedicated to clicking statues the entire time while someone is ready to hit the cube at the correct time along with everything else that is built into this fight? There's no skill or challenge involved in making someone click those statues or even click the orb at the right time. If those two facets were removed completely, some bugginess would be removed from the encounter altogether. If those mechanics must remain in some way as part of the lore, just make it so the cube needs to be clicked before anyone is able to hurt him or something.

01-30-2009, 11:09 AM	#127
Mirdo Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: UK Posts: 395	Malaqai wrote: Mirdo@Runnyeye wrote: To me, tank and spank raiding is boring and unfulfilling. I'm much preferring the added complexity of the new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to. Nex is a horribly thought out fight. Anything that limits you playing your class is pathetic. When you kill blobs in a few seconds and then just stand there so you don't over-DPS = /lose. Other than that, fail-effects are always gonna be a pain in an unstable game such as EQ2. We had 6 people booted out of the zone on a Switchmaster fight. Maybe if they had people sorting out lag and random LDs due to server lackings instead of Station Cash... EoF mobs were pretty much as good as it got on raids, balancing script VS alternate strategy. Cheldrak etc. All fun. Fail-effects and staring at your detrimental bar = meh. That said, that's the way they decided to go and I live with it. And Venril Sathir is fine. Every guild that killed him wiped a few times. So will every new guild that comes up to him. No reason to nerf him or change him. You'll note that I said I liked the 'new style of raids that mobs like VS, Nex and Druushk were the fore-runners to' - not necessarily Nex etc. I agree that DPS limiting and having 4 people doing nothing but static clicking are boring mechanics. We must be lucky but in the guild I belong to, people going LD in the new zones can usually be traced to problems at the players end, be it ISP or just garbage / poorly setup hardware and software. I do agree that the palace seems to have some problems. We've still not found any fights where it's caused us the same level of problems you seem to be experiencing though. What's different from 'staring' at the Dets bar than staring at any other part of the screen for information? As a healer I 'stare' at the group and raid windows to target heals. Glancing at the effects bar when you know one is potentially due is hardly more onerous than any other visual cue that has to monitored. Many of the EoF mobs were aoe, adds and dps fights. Nothing more than that. Chel'drak was not an EoF mob but I agree it was a very good fight. We do at least agree that poor old venril should be left in peace

01-30-2009, 01:59 PM	#128
glowsintheda General Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 448	VS is fine where he is, as he is. As a ranger I had been dreading/anticipating this fight for a very long time, on tuesday the raid alliance that I am in went and took him out. We had 5 people that were what you would call really experienced at this fight, most of the rest of the raid force had never even been in the zone before. It took us 5 pulls to kill him, 3 of which were bugged in some way (2 with statues randomly showing up and one where VS proced his mana drain that is supposed to just be single target on the entire MT group and ate all their mana). Maybe the group that I raid with is just composed of more disciplined people, maybe we just got lucky, whatever the case he really isn't that hard at all. A lot of people got myth updates that night. After VS we went and destroyed overking and then SoH up to sisters. The only thing I can really think of that might seperate us from you, is that every person in that raid really wanted to be there and to win. With how many people needed VS for myth updates and how much our force supports each other we didn't really go in there dreading it, we went in there expecting to beat him down and get people their updates and that is exactly what happened.

01-30-2009, 05:45 PM	#129
Barakuz Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 136	Aldelbert wrote: Barakuz wrote: Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression. After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones. We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid : Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one. All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low. Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem. Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression. TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this. Bara So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0 Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight. Sorry it's so confusing for you, I'll make it simpler this time... I think the script is ok, and can be viewed as a good "learning / training tool". However, I do believe the fail conditions are overblown, especially if you consider where this mob is in raid progression. The aspect of this mob I wouldn't have changed, would be the requirement for every member of the raid force having killed this mob before being able to attempt Levi...and thererfore gain access to VP. However, thats a moot point as this change has been in place for ages. Wouldn't the insane prices for the VS update, potentially limit the amount of people purchasing Mythical updates ? Bara __________________

01-31-2009, 07:43 AM	#130
Xil Loremaster Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 341	Barakuz wrote: Aldelbert wrote: Barakuz wrote: Another way to look at it would be - a load of encounters have been changed in VP...months after the release, why cant this encounter be changed to bring it more inline with progression. After reading this post, I decided to run our raid force through VS last nite. Our raid force can blow through VP single pulling everything, and is progressing nicely through the TSO raid zones. We ran VS with 3 grps...It took our raid force a good 9-10 pulls to get the mob down (it would have been less pulls, but we havent done this mob in months...so it took us a few pulls to remember all the details). The issue I see with this mob are the incredible number of failure conditions that can wipe the raid : Not clicking statues (even if you do they may bug out and you end up with an add), Not curing Nox, Not getting the cube in on VS...then you hit the power watch phase...maintaining dps, while manageing power, watching for Mana Sacrifice...all it takes is one person hitting sprint to bring power down and getting simultaneously feared /or/ feared and unable to cure nox /or/ hit sprint while Mana Sacrifice is on /or/ Misses the Mana Sacrifice and burn through power too fast. Combine all this with the constant fear (even with anti-fear gear) and arcance stun - makes this fight a tough one. All you need is one [Removed for Content], someone LD or any of the issues in RL that can cause someone on your raid to loose focus and its a wipe. None of the failure conditions are recoverable...except if you get an add, when VS's HP is pretty low. Also, this fight is easier with crappy gear...excess power regen can be a real problem. Basically, my point is this "VS is a fun fight, the mechanics of the encounter are good as well as a fantastic learning experience for fights that you will encounter moving forward". However, the failure conditions are way way overdone. My suggestion would be to make some of the failure conditions survivable or cut down on the frequency of the fear. Bring this mob more inline with the intended progression. TBH I would rather this mob wasnt changed...but the requirement to kill him before you can access VP was still in place. IMHO this would have shut down the buying of Mythicals to a large extent. But thats another topic and I am sure a lot of people wouldnt agree with me on this. Bara So your point is he's a great encounter for learning but he's got too many failure conditions so you want to change those but you wish the mob wasn't changed? o.0 Putting VS back in as a roadblock mobs for VP would matter little in terms of stopping people from obtaining Mythicals. The very few guilds that I used to see who would sell VS Mythical updates, often for insane prices compared to normal updates, would just let VS kill the person who needed the update early on in the fight and not rez him until after. It at least eliminates one problem if the person is unfamiliar with the fight. Sorry it's so confusing for you, I'll make it simpler this time... I think the script is ok, and can be viewed as a good "learning / training tool". However, I do believe the fail conditions are overblown, especially if you consider where this mob is in raid progression. The aspect of this mob I wouldn't have changed, would be the requirement for every member of the raid force having killed this mob before being able to attempt Levi...and thererfore gain access to VP. However, thats a moot point as this change has been in place for ages. Wouldn't the insane prices for the VS update, potentially limit the amount of people purchasing Mythical updates ? Bara There's really not much in the way of fail conditions to him. You click statues /check. You cure nox /check. You manage power /check. If blue hit X stand and wait /check. Most people fail VS because they Power Tap him and make the fight 100x harder than it needs to be. Hell even if people do screw up as long as you don't power tap him yer tank can hold a power level add pretty safely and even two of them for a bit if yer in the last 20% just finish him off. It's really an easy fight already. All it does is weed out people who can listen and pay attention from people who can't. And like the buying of mythical update comment mentioned. You can just leave those people dead. Hell you can kill VS with 15 people. And it's actually easier than with 24. I don't really think a gatekeeper raid mob that you can kill with half a raid should be any easier than it already is. Raiders that want to progress need to learn how to deal with VS type encounters or they'll never be able to do VP and they sure as hell won't be clearing TSO. It's all stages of things you need to learn. From Thuuga, Paw, and PR to Leviathan. Each one has a piece of the VP puzzle. It just kinda happens that VS is the listen and pay attention piece. And that's the absolute hardest part of raiding for most players. Learning to listen and pay attention. It's a hard lesson. But if you want to raid top teir content you absolutley have to learn it. __________________ I had a momentary lapse in perfection...

02-02-2009, 12:37 PM	#131
TrinomialTheory Loremaster Join Date: Dec 2005 Posts: 9	a lot of you are just plain a-holes in your responses. "I did it so it's easy and should be easy to everyone". That's the general response here. Yes I am a coercer that needs him for an update. No my guild has not killed him. Yes my guild has taken out every other tier mob and into VP. I truely find this mob to be competely rediculous and out of place. Some of you say that he's a mob that teaches you something or gets you ready for upcoming zones but I can't see this at all. Sure I haven't cleared VP yet and probably won't for a few months but to the people that say this guy teaches you something is complete B.S.! Like I said I haven't seen many of the encounters in VP but I'm pretty sure not a single one of the t3-VP encounters require the degree of perfection you must put forth on this guy. What I mean is that no mob after VS will require you to keep your power at a certain range. This is supposed to teach a raid force something? Teach them what? Certainly not power management because no other fight in the game requires you to NOT be at 100% or as high as possible amount of power. Power consumption is from 100%-0 and no other time will you ever need to keep your power halfway... This fight though..for some reason wants you to only be at half power and then maintain it. Oh, and you also get all these dots on you that will more than likely hinder you from keeping your power at this range. This really isn't the issue with this fight that I see though. The fear that hits us isn't that bad either, only when it comes right before the noxious is when it gets worrisome. The #1 thing that gets us is the random power draining of people. I have been one of these people. I or someone in the raid will have NO dots on them whatsoever and all of a sudden they get their power drained to 10%ish and boom, adds pop and it's a wipe. This happens to our tank a lot. We know the strategy. We have competent people, we have gear, we have everything that is required. What we don't have is the insane amount of luck that is needed in this fight. To address some other things that relate to this is the statements saying "If you have someone in your GUILDED raidforce that wipes the raid a few times, kick them from guild.".. Whoah who the F are you to kick someone out of a guild because they aren't as competent as you are? I hear this all the time from Elitests(yes you know who you jackholes are) who are hardcore and think everything is too easy and everyone else should suffer just so they can brag about their syt they have. This is all too true for many guilds on my server (LDL). There are only 3 or 4 guilds on my server that can kill VS and/or everything in VP,Avatars,blah blah. These guilds are mainly comprised of A-holes that would rather flame you in level chat than to give any sort of help and or directional advice for you to take. "We did it in 10 mins, 1st pull, easy." Yah that's cause you kicked everyone out of guild that didn't match your a-hole attitude about playing this game. There is a very small niche of players that find everything easy and they are the ones whining about things being too easy. They are also the ones that get their 4 or 5 alts all their mythicals before they'd let a begging individual that is willing to pay a boatload get in on an update. There is no working together at all, it's just all for one and one for me me me. Do I want VS nerfed just a little? No. I want him moved and/or removed. His tactics don't teach jack about upcoming mobs other than teaching your guild that you have to be an a-hole drill sergeant to raid and this just isn't what my idea of having fun in a game is about. Someone even mentioned that this game is fun because it's not as easy as wow, which is sorta true but when you look at it, which game is more popular and dominates the MMO front?? No guesses? Oh that's right that would be world of warcraft. I also play that game and I don't do much raiding in it but i'm pretty damned sure their raid zones aren't just walk in tank 'n spank and leave either. They also have 40 man raids which I can only imagine the hassles of finding 40 competent players for that. This leads to the fact also that many of the 'competent' players on a server already belong to another guild and will not go back to that zone to help you because they are VP geared, mythical'd, blah blah and they usually say FU if you ask them if they want to come to VS. "FU buddy i'm in VP or a TSO raid and i'll never go back to VS because I don't want to have to pay for repairs." That's a typical response for my server. I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull. Bah I'm tired of typing, all ya'll are gonna do is tell everyone they suck cause they can't kill em. To you I say go suck an egg cause you aren't as special as you think you are. BTW, You do need VS to progress into Leviathan. Killing Overking alone will not let you zone in CoD, I know because as of 3 days ago I just got VP flagged. I could NOT zone into CoD even though I killed Overking and Leviathan. We can only get into Leviathan because our guild leader, who was a part of one the elitest guilds, already killed levi and had his mythical and could zone us in. Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access.

02-02-2009, 12:58 PM	#132
Gaige Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Arizona Posts: 9,500	TrinomialTheory wrote: Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access. Which they changed due to whining. The entire raid used to have to be flagged, which is how it should've stayed; so that people like you can't go OMG I KILLED A MOB IN VP, VS IS TOO HARD; like they do now. Good luck with Trakanon, I'm sure you'll do amazing there since it doesn't have strict fail conditions, oh wait. __________________

02-02-2009, 04:32 PM	#133
RafaelSmith Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 1,808	TrinomialTheory wrote: Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access. Which is stupid and really bad progression design. Killing VS/Overking should be required by EVERYONE to get into CoD. __________________

02-02-2009, 04:43 PM	#134
Lord Montague Loremaster Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 541	Annoying and frustrating I will agree with, but not impossible. Even on the last time my guild took him we had some folks that were new and slow on the uptake but we still beat him - WITHOUT getting crappy or condescending to those who were mucking it up. Mind you we do have one or two people who keep an eye on everyone's power levels and we firmly remind them if they start getting out of range (along with using power feeds from others to help when necessary, so there IS some teamwork there). It doesn't take a hardcore mindset at all, just 6 to 8 minutes of complete focus and unfortunately a degree of luck too.

02-02-2009, 06:06 PM	#135
Xil Loremaster Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 341	TrinomialTheory wrote: a lot of you are just plain a-holes in your responses. "I did it so it's easy and should be easy to everyone". That's the general response here. Yes I am a coercer that needs him for an update. No my guild has not killed him. Yes my guild has taken out every other tier mob and into VP. "Same old song and dance /snip" Sounds more like no one on your raid force understands the encounter enough to explain it to your people. __________________ I had a momentary lapse in perfection...

02-02-2009, 08:07 PM	#136
Asif Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 391	Gaylon@Mistmoore wrote: TrinomialTheory wrote: Anyone can zone into CoD so long as one person in the raid has access. Which is stupid and really bad progression design. Killing VS/Overking should be required by EVERYONE to get into CoD. / Nods

02-02-2009, 08:20 PM	#137
Tasnus Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 80	TrinomialTheory wrote: I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull. I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both. As for the encounter.. His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions. Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players. __________________ Stuff Guild Bane

02-03-2009, 03:41 AM	#138
Thanon Server: Runnyeye Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 51	Tasnus wrote: TrinomialTheory wrote: I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull. I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both. As for the encounter.. His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions. Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players. QFT I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game. It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years. A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following: Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead. That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring. They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid. This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game. Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids. For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes. Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE... You get the picture. Scripting FTW

02-04-2009, 11:35 AM	#139
Dasein Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 2,847	Thanon@Runnyeye wrote: Tasnus wrote: TrinomialTheory wrote: I've offered 300p for just a VS quick kill from the more elite guilds on my server and not one of them will do it. If he's tha easy an uber leet guild should be all on that for 300p(12p+ per person for what, a 20min cakewalk?). These guilds will not go back to this guy for a reason, and that's because they will fail many times before a lucky break pull. I'd pay 300p just to watch 'elite' guilds who are clearing TSO content fail on VS, considering TSO scripts have 3x the complexity that VS does. They don't do it because they either a) rather work on the new xpac, or b) already made a million plat doing it during RoK, or both. As for the encounter.. His spot in progression is meaningless. The beauty about this fight is that gear means nothing, so it doesn't matter if you fight him as a T2 mob or in Trak's lair when half your force already has their mythicals, since the only difference would be a slight advantage in DPS. If you don't execute the script you'll die either way.Mythicals aren't suppose to be easy to get, in fact there's nothing better from TSO and nothing is expected to come out that will rival them for the rest of this xpac, at least as far as I know. Progression is designed for raids of 24 people, and while I can sympathize with those in very casual guilds who have difficulty fielding a full force consistently, I'd rather not see this fight nerfed just because guilds with lack of personnel cannot beat it. In fact like many have already said, a smaller force would probably help more than hinder new guilds working on him.It took too long for EQ2 to get with the program in terms of creating complex raid encounters. While they may be annoying to learn at first, they're infintely more prefereable (and more rewarding) to beat than copy and paste tank/spank mobs, or worse, gimmicky mobs with random abilities that you have little control over (like mem wipe)... since during the first couple years of EQ2 that was the only way to make anything difficult. It's funny how it took the same amount of time in EQ2 as it did in EQ1 for the learning curve to get higher, although EQ2 shouldn't have taken 3-4 expansions. Everyone in a raid being responsible for playing their best > a few people carrying raids. There's really no reason for this not to be the case in every raid, especially when the player limit is only 24 players. QFT I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game. It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years. A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following: Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead. That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring. They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid. This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game. Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids. For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes. Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE... You get the picture. Scripting FTW There are scripted elements in DOF and even some of the initial T5 raids, although it's not so obvious as it is in RoK and TSO. Also, Nexona is a much better designed encounter than Venril, as Nexona requires solid teamwork, with everyone working together in the raid to fill different roles. Venril is simly 24 individuals who do not need to cooperate in any substantial manner, but simply need to not make a mistake. __________________ Troll Lord Casywdian

02-04-2009, 02:38 PM	#140
Rayche Server: Antonia Bayle Guild: Mayhem Rank: Alts Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 519	Venril is a broken encounter and can fail even when you do it right. That's the problem. Well, that and they changed the script 3 or 4 times and broke it a few times, wasting months of peoples lives. So if they're going to create scripted encounters, tune it in beta and STOP F'ing with it once it goes live. If you follow the script to the letter, you should win. That's not the case for VS... now, we've taken VS down in less than 6 minutes before...and beaten him many times, but it still requires the "Luck" of not having the script bug out. P.S. I call BS on WoW's raid encounters.. my son plays a raiding hunter in WoW and I (Or he) have never seen anything in WoW that complicated or convoluted. (As Venril) Nexona event? Perfection... loved it. Oh, and in support of the original posters complaint, Venril being an unfair roadblock for some classes? Yes... Templars have to kill a heroic mob (Drussela Sathir) as one of their Mythical updates... that's pretyt lopsided. Defilers get the OPTION of Venril or Overking. That should be for everyone. __________________ Rhandy Rhoades ~ 90 Troubador Kasey ~ 90 Bruiser Cometus ~ 82 Conjuror / 90 Master Sage Rayche ~ 81 Mystic / 90 Master Alchemist / 450 Adorning Tungar ~ 64 Necromancer / 80 Master Tailor Antonia Bayle Server

02-04-2009, 02:59 PM	#141
CoLD MeTaL Loremaster Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 3,217	*Dasein wrote:* VP really isn't all that hard, and with the exception of Nexona, no encounter has as many outright fail conditions as Venril, nor any conditions so easy for anyone to activate. 1. Power to Low = Fail.1b. Mana Sacrifice serves to complicate power management, and will take effect instantly.2. Failed cure = Fail. 2b. The fear and spell reflect effects can make getting off cures in time challenging. 3. Missed Statue Click - Fail.4. Moving beyond Venril's eash point = Fail (not merely a reset, either). 4b. The fear effect can ake this more likely to occur depending on pull location.5. Power too high = Massive Venril Heal. Not a direct fail, but pretty close, especially if it happens multiple times. I am not aware of any other encounter in VP with this many fail conditions or where any and every member of the raid could potentially cause a wipe. Even Nexona is more forgiving in this regards - while the fight overall is very challenging, one or two people could have a lag spike or get distracted for a moment, and probably not cause a wipe. The same is not true of Venril. So, let's drop this idea that if you cannot take down Venril, you won't do well in VP. Of the T1-T4 encounters, Venril is arguably second only to Nexona in difficulty and frustration. I found this in another thread, someone said low power was the only fail condition, yet this guy posted 5. (maybe 4.5) People I know that need venril, pay a raid guild 300p for the update or they are screwed, no one even goes down there to try and get the upate any more. I personally have tried about 50 times to take him down, and always there is 1 person who screws up. Since I am not in a raid guild i have to take what I can get down there, and since TSO is out and u high powered peeps gotother things to do, it is time for him to be nerfed. this encounter was built for hard core raiders. not raid alliances that are still trying to work through the content. Keeping my power between 30 and 60, self cure with a pot, seems plenty easy to me, but someone always f-es it up. to my friends that need VS for their mythical updates, I just say "Pay for it or your screwed" __________________

02-04-2009, 03:06 PM	#142
GangleG Loremaster Join Date: Aug 2006 Posts: 210	Nexona is not a "well designed encounter." Punishing a raid for too much DPS is a ridiculous concept, as is making people click statues or harvest for the entire fight.

02-04-2009, 04:21 PM	#143
wullailhuit Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 1,007	We just re-did VS with a raid consisting of many alts , not all of whom were well geared... We wiped on the first pull due to someone getting a massive power drain , 2nd time we killed it with little or no problems , it's all about paying attention and bringing lots of cure nox pots. __________________

02-04-2009, 05:48 PM	#144
feldon30 Fansite Staff Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 5,424	CoLD MeTaL wrote: I personally have tried about 50 times to take him down, and always there is 1 person who screws up. Since I am not in a raid guild i have to take what I can get down there, and since TSO is out and u high powered peeps gotother things to do, it is time for him to be nerfed. Keeping my power between 30 and 60, self cure with a pot, seems plenty easy to me, but someone always f-es it up. to my friends that need VS for their mythical updates, I just say "Pay for it or your screwed" What I am hearing from this thread is that VS can be killed by as few as 12-15 people. If you really died 50 times, and the same person had trouble more than 3 times, I would ask them to just stay dead. They will get the update regardless. It comes down the maturity of the folks in your raid. If their response to "Since we are having some troubles with VS and we really want to get it done tonight, we're going to try it with a core group. Do you mind staying down?" is F-U and they ragequit or get all mad and start bleating in the guild chat, well then maybe they should not be in your raid force. From everything I have read about VS, yes, it forces your raid force to pay attention to what they are doing, break out their their standard routine and think for a moment. But that is really the only beneficial aspect of this fight as far as I can tell. After that it comes down to dumb luck, nobody going LD, lagging, getting feared at the wrong time, etc. so in that regard, I have no problem with trying it a few times and then asking folks to just stay down. If we succeed and get 24 folks flagged for VS and they are truly upset that they couldn't participate in the whole fight and want to take another stab at him later on, we can do that when are flagging guild alts. Holding up the whole guild so all 24 people can feel like they did their 1/24th of the fight seems a poor choice. The fact that raid guilds broke up over this fight due to hurt feelings is still alarming to me. I think most guilds who are selling mythical updates just have outsiders play dead during this fight. I could be wrong... __________________ .. EQ2Wire.com \| EQ2U - Character, Item, Spell, and Guild Data

02-04-2009, 09:43 PM	#145
Iled Server: Befallen Guild: Lunar Dawn Rank: Raid Force 1 Mains Loremaster Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 26	Rayche@Antonia Bayle wrote: Nexona event? Perfection... loved it. Oh, and in support of the original posters complaint, Venril being an unfair roadblock for some classes? Yes... Templars have to kill a heroic mob (Drussela Sathir) as one of their Mythical updates... that's pretyt lopsided. Defilers get the OPTION of Venril or Overking. That should be for everyone. Yep, my thoughts exactly. I quite enjoy the Nex fights. Everyone has to work really hard, lots of stuff to watch out for...but fun and rewarding. VS quite the opposite; nervewracking chance and luck. I didn't realise some classes actually get an option of VS or something else... [Removed for Content] LOL

02-04-2009, 10:01 PM	#146
Wilde_Night Loremaster Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Kenosha, Wisconsin Posts: 1,127	So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.* *We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers. __________________

02-04-2009, 10:08 PM	#147
Dasein Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 2,847	Aeviel@Venekor wrote: So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.* *We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers. I think you're confusing the Pawbuster stifle effect with Venril. Venril's fear is reactive, so it doesn't matter how many people are in the raid. __________________ Troll Lord Casywdian

02-05-2009, 05:12 AM	#148
Malaqai Loremaster Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 70	Thanon@Runnyeye wrote: QFT I've been saying this for years. A lot of people like to hate on WoW (don't ask me why...jealousy maybe?) but after having played it alongside of EQ2 I can honestly say that WoW is years ahead of EQ2 when it comes to the complexity of their raid encounters. Since the very beginning when WoW released, Blizzard has included scripted content, all they way from the ground up. Solo quests, group dungeons, all the way to raids, are heavily scripted in their game. It took Sony nearly 5 years to introduce scripting into their game. Their players have gotten so used to ezmode raiding that--for the most part--the average EQ2 player is unable to cope with it. Why? Because they got used to the ezmode raiding over the years. A typical raid mob in EQ2 (until TSO) is the following: Knockback. AoE. DoT. The strategy is the same. Pull mob to corner. Avoid KB. Joust AoE. Cure the DoT. DPS till dead. That's it. That was EQ2 raiding up until late RoK/TSO. The HARDEST part about these fights was dealing with some mobs who might do a mem-wipe. Simple. Easy. Boring. They started to add scripting to fights in late-tier RoK and especially in TSO. I, for one, love it. No longer do a few select people carry the raid. (The tank, a couple of healers, your highest DPS...pre TSO EQ2 raids were literally beatable so long as you had a good tank and good healers. The rest of it was just piling enough DPS on the mobs to kill them) Now you need to have not only a balanced makeup of classes, but you MUST have EVERY person on the raid paying attention, because now EVERY person on the raid is important. It's not just about planting a mob in the corner, jousting his AoE, and curing DoTs. Now it's about flipping switches, clicking shinies, changing mob positioning multiple times during the fight, watching your power consumption, triggering specific effects, having set time limits to cure detrimental...ALL occuring at the same time which requires an effort of coordination on the part of EVERY member of the raid. This is child's play in WoW. Seriously. There's a reason 11 million people play that game, and it ain't cuz it's "ezmode" like everyone says. It's because it's FUN. The raids are CHALLENGING. The scripting makes it a FAR better game, and it's sad that EQ2 took this long to add it to their game. Now, that being said, I prefer EQ2 to WoW. Why? I can't stand the cartoony graphics, and I grew up on EQ1, so I'm naturally particular to EQ2. And while I admire and complement Blizzard on what they are doing with their game, it can't change the fact that they also have a lot of detrimental things in their game, such as welfare epics (which TSO shard armor is bordering on). But at the end of the day the one thing they have that Sony is JUST NOW adding to the game is heavily scripted encounters that start at the solo level and go all the way up to the raids. For people who can't get past VS, you are in for a rude awakening when you get to TSO. If your guild can't focus for the 8-10 minutes that it takes to kill VS, you are never going to be able to break past the first named or two in TOMC, because it requires more than just a few minutes of concentration. Hell, our guild had our first pull on Nexona last week (yeah we are behind the times) and we were looking at the fail restrictions on her and figured out that it's going to be a MINIMUM of a 15 minute fight with our non-mythical DPS, probably more like 20 minutes. Our guild is PSYCHED to be up against a challenge that requires us to focus for 20 minutes, for each person needing to do something different and unique, to be important, rather than standing in a corner and healing...joust AoE....dps...joust AoE....heal....joust AoE...dps...joust AoE... You get the picture. Scripting FTW You're so right!Best part of those scripted fights is not only do you have to do everything EXACTLY on a already decided linear line, which makes it, guess what.... Much more boring that stuff where you can improvise like Rumbler, Wuoshi, etc. Also, it's also great, and I'll say this again, since EQ is so stable and then you fight Switchmaster or someone and 6 of your raiders get booted, get the yellow screen, you wipe. FUN!

02-05-2009, 06:51 AM	#149
wullailhuit Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 1,007	Aeviel@Venekor wrote: So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect.* *We also had bug issues with the statues and decided to quit after a few extra "training" pulls to train new statue watchers. The only way to proc VS's fear is to attack him....just make sure your healers don't attack him at all and they won't receive the fear , if your healers are being feared , remind them they're healers not DPS on this fight. __________________

02-05-2009, 12:42 PM	#150
feldon30 Fansite Staff Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 5,424	Aeviel@Venekor wrote: So how can a raid of 12-15 kill Venril? I am a bit curious as we tried it with 17 the other week and was unable to do it because most of the raid was hit with his fear/stun. I was under the impression that there needed to be 15 people between him and the healers to protect the healers from this effect. That is not how the fight works to my knowledge. He has an 8% chance to fear anyone who does damage to him. Healers should not be doing ANY dps to him. Every 38 seconds he does his AoE nox which must be cured immediately. Add the two together and you get this loop: When Toxic Infusion nox occurs, cure it. DPS for 30 seconds. Stop DPS for the last 8 seconds before the next Toxic Infusion fires. That way if any fears happen, they have expired by the time TI happens and everyone can cure it. __________________ .. EQ2Wire.com \| EQ2U - Character, Item, Spell, and Guild Data