Raiding is too hard

[slippery]

Of all the people to come from, most people would find this coming from me to be a surprise. I'm a realist though, and I tend to think I shoot pretty straight.

Honestly, content is too hard. lt isn't that the scripts are too hard, it's the requirement they put on raids are too tough. That's why people aren't killing things. You look at HM Drunder, HM Skyshrine, Plane of War, these things all take a ton of power regen (something that has been getting nerfed from players, as we basically get 0 from items now unless we wear non current stuff). A lot of these fights if you don't have 3 Coercers you can pretty much forget about it. Then you add to that the tank situation. There was a time raid encounters took 1-2 tanks and the second tank didn't need more then one healer, you could bring a third to add a little stability but it wasn't really necessary. Raids got by with 5 healers. Now? Pretty much every encounter mandates at least 3 tanks, and often 4. On top of that tanks pretty much always need 2 healers to stay alive. 1 might be able to handle it, but something random is bound to take them out of the fight which would cause the tank to die, so you need 2. It's pretty much the same story over and over again. Adds constantly mem wipe, adds aren't linked, everything hits so hard that if it isn't on a tank it is just running around wrecking the raid, mem wipes that not only mem wipe but take tanks out of the fight for 8-10 seconds. Then you stack on that the requirement that a lot of these still have a fairly large dps check on top of that. It isn't that the encounters are any easier or any harder, it is can you bring the absurd right balance of classes. 

What happened to encounters like Mayong (any version)? Everything in FTH. Mutagenic Outcast, Three Princes, the two Hot/Cold dragons I can't remember the names too in AoAx4 during RoK, most of the Palace of the Awakened One encounters, most Avatars, Pumpkinhead, Harla Dar, Vilucidae. Encounters that you didn't need a ridiculous raid for, you just needed to pay attention. Kind of like Rhoen Theer, which although you needed 4 tanks for you didn't need a special raid. Everything was in your control. The only thing out of your control was possibly getting stuck in a corner, and you could control that too. Encounters now just do too much, requiring too strict requirements on your raid. Not only that, there wasn't a strict point of failure. In fact, it was pretty much assumed that people where going to fail. Basically guaranteed. It was about reacting and keeping things together while minimizing that fail. 

Skyshrine was too easy, fights still need soemthing. They all pretty much did absolutely nothing but stand there and die. Sevalak was a good encounter. More people probably don't kill it because of the speed at which the adds explode (or the death touch on the OT, could be both). No Death Touch on the OT and a little longer before the adds explode and I think a lot more people would be killing it. Vyskudra is a pretty unique encounter concept. However it fails from the same problems, too many tanks, mem wiping mobs, and a script that is piled on top of itself. Change how it functions a little so that when you kill both the little adds the big add spawns, and everyone in the raid gets the damage proc buff for a certain duration (this way you don't get screwed by having to have magical positioning on where people stand so they don't get the buff twice causing you not to kill the big add). Take the mem wipe off the little adds. If you get a second set of little adds while the first is up you could kill the raid, because there is plenty of time between it. 

Dozekar? Again, tanks. 4. Too many, plus healers. It's just a long fight that causes too much too potentially go wrong. The assassins are inevitably going to kill people, because you can't effectively kill them easily. Especially because all too often you are trying to kill them while you are killing adds, adds that if you don't kill fast enough causes the raid to get wrecked. This encounter also suffers from a different trend in EQ2. Big mobs. More big mobs, mobs need to be big. Huge even. Monstrous in size. Massive. Absolutely Massive. You're a spec of dust next to this mob, a flea. Never seen anything so massive. That's cool and all if you stop doing range based AE's instead reverting to one damage regardless of range. Big mobs are fine, when the ae doesn't slaughter you at close range, a close range that your healers can't get out of and still heal the tanks because of how big the mob is. 

PoW just gets worse. Glokus is actually a good encounter, except the knockback that really shouldn't be there. Maybe a little too high a dps check, and Glokus himself has too much hp. Boar is fine. Berik is pretty much all on the shoulders of your tanks, which is okay. But the mem wipe/can't do anything lining up with the blood effects shouldn't happen ever. 

Eriak is meh. He shouldn't go immune to tanks, and the fight probably speeds up too fast after 50%.

Tagrin is an overwhelmingly great example of the tank situation. It does pretty much every single thing mentioned above, plus there is a charm that can hit the tanks as well. Takes a tank out of the fight for like 8 seconds plus mem wiping off him (which by the way can line up with the red text, causing it to either hit someone random in the raid killing them, or causing the tank to not be able to move and get killed by the red text). Plus a group of 4 mem wiping adds. Plus another mem wiping add. Plus a bunch of ae's that make you unable to cast hostile, meaning you can't even taunt or use snaps or dps. Oh, and ridiculous zone geometry that can create line of sight problems since you are on the other side of a pebble on the ground. With a pretty high dps check or you wipe. Pretty cool.

What exactly are we doing? There was nothing wrong with the problem that raids got built for dps. People actually had fun like that, and every class can dps in todays game. Encounters just require too much now, putting too strict requirements on what the raid has to have. 

[Vinyard]

I'm going to blame Destiny of Velious.

Worst. Expansion. Ever.

It was a mess, and it still is a mess. So many bad things went into it, and so many players/guilds have left/broken up because of it.

Well said Slippery.

[Novusod]

This thread is not a suprise because it needed to be said. I am just glad that is being said by Equilibrium the only guild to have cleared all the content. It would not be listened to if said by someone else and that is part of the problem. I agree with everything Slippery said 100% though nothing he said has not been said before.

I said this over a year ago but DoV should really be called Gates of Velious because this whole expansion is the Eq2 version Gates of Discord. For those that don't remember Gates of Discord was when Everquest 1 jumped the shark. Basically every encounter is on par with DMP or harder. It shouldn't take a whole year to clear content. PoW of war is a year old now and only one guild has clear it and I doubt more than 5 guilds will clear it before it becomes obsolete. About 99% of the player base will never see this zone and it is not because they don't want to go there it is because as slippery said IT IS TOO HARD. I don't want to skip content I want to clear it and I think most people are in the same boat.

I agree skyshrine was too Easy as well. There needs to be ballance. I think EoF, RoK, and TSO did it best. Some guilds cleared the raids fast and others cleared it slow but everyone eventually cleared it. That is the way it should be and Eq2 needs to go back to those days if it is to survive.

[Wookin]

Drumstixx@Blackburrow wrote:

They're not only missing the balance between what makes an encounter hard or easy, the current content devs seem to lack knowledge of how fights actually go with real players.

This.

The fights described above aren't the satisfying kind of difficult, the kind where you are elated to win because you feel like you've played at the top of your game.  They are artificially hard, because too much is out of the players' hands.  Too many fights you can't do because two people are on vacation and too much random bad luck wiping.

[Twyxx]

I like a challenge and think that's what seperates raiding in eq2 from other games.  But it should be done right.  Progression should be tough, but fair. Aim to build fights with less luck factor.  The charm in Tagrin is a perfect example.  Allowing tanks to get the charm puts too much luck into the fight.  Make us earn the kills, not luck out.

Agreed also on the raid requirements.  There's another thread about this, but the demand for utility right now is too high.  3 coercers on the Commanders fight isn't even enough.  8 spots in the raid shouldn't be taken up by four classes.  Dps checks are fun, but not reasonable when you can only afford to bring 3-5 dps classes.

Nothing is more demoralizing than wiping all night to a mob you've killed before. Whether it's due to luck or not having fully optimal force that day.  Others have suggested putting loot in a mobs table that helps you kill it in the future.  I think that's a great idea.  Have Eriak drop some fear immunity items.  Have Tagrin drop power proc'ing items.  Have Glokus drop in-combat run speed pieces, etc.  Nothing over-powering but itemization that is unique and makes farm actually farm and not re-progression.

I would love it if fights were released at the beginnning of the expansion and nerfs weren't needed.  It seems like everything is released too difficult or broken then you just ease up on it when you want people to kill it.  Release it in a challenging, but working condition from the start and have everyone progress with the mobs at the same difficulty.  PoW being broken and poorly itemized when it took a year to get in there was a huge disappointment.  There was plenty of time to get that dialed in.

It feels like you can't make content fast enough so you have to hold on to broken/over-tuned mobs to slow people down.  It shouldn't be that way. 

I really want to be blown away by the next expansion.  Address class balance...plenty of threads on that.  And then give us fun, challenging, working encounters that provide interesting, desirable loot which is proportionate to the difficulty of the fight.  You can breathe life back into this game and win people back if you do it right.

[Boduar69]

Nothing says fun like when any couple of people(that 3rd/4th tank, shaman, bard/chanter, key t1 dps(since you normally only have room for a handful in a raid guild now)) are missing your raid can no longer do fights because you dont have the right balance.

[daray]

My biggest pet peeve has been the way that artificial difficulty has been implemented in most encounters. Preventing players from playing their toons by throwing umpteen control effects at them, removes much the enjoyment from the raiding game. Whilst this may be tolerable in small doses, it has fast become the standard.

You should instead be looking to require people to be proactive to win - 4 Rune Theer was a great example of this sort of positive encounter design (and it retained a high level of difficulty). Shame that you fired the dev that designed it.

Really, I could go on for quite a while on the topic of raiding in general, but I'll just leave it there.

[Te'ana]

I am in agreement with the OP.

I absolutely detest forced inactivity, etc. due to stuns and forced targeting because it removes any possibility of playing my toon to the best of my ability. I am just the hostage of fate and not in control of my fate.

[Haciv]

Hammasaurusrex@Nagafen wrote:

*Please do not quote forum violations*

It's fine as it is, stop being bad.  This content doesn't even matter.

[Hammieee]

Haciv wrote:

Hammasaurusrex@Nagafen wrote:

*Please do not quote forum violations*

It's fine as it is, stop being bad.  This content doesn't even matter.

Weren't you the guy crying about a shadowknight outparsing you or something? Idr, regardless end game content (Not Skyshrine easy mode because its a joke) has been just completely horrible.

[Tigerr]

Remember though, you do NOT want them to get the idea that everyone wants stuff like EM skyshrine. That was the result of people saying that stuff is hard. I agree with Slippery all the way, fights should NOT be luck based. It should be completely dependent on your skill, not if the tank is going to get a random death shot ( 1-2 fights like that are fine but, every other one is just annoying). Devs, noone is asking for content to be facerollable easy, just keep that in mind and don't think "OHZ THEY SAID HARDZ?? WE DO LIKE SKYSHRINE" . Encounters (specially in HM) NEED to be hard but, there is a fine line between annoying and "hard". The lag in some of the Drunder zones and PoW is not helping either. Some of the encounters specially in Drunder are sort of fun but, some of them are just annoying and are 0% dependent on player skill. It def should be "random" but, not annoying. Playing your best and knowing your class in and out is one thing, having RANDOM ( like i said, once in awhile its fine but majority of the fights its annoying as hell). Devs, take note... Not one person here wants facerollable content. Make it EXTREMELY difficult (HM of course) but don't make it all luck based. Last time players asked for something like this, you guys introduced skyshrine which pretty much catered to the casuals and left the people who want a challenge to seek "fun" in Drunder/PoW. I will admit I love some of the fights in Drunder, don't want anyone to take it the wrong way but, def needs just abit more in the "ok, someone is going to get deathtouched, is it going to be the MT or the OT or the MT group priest". (1-2 fights fine, but not every other fight, thats not difficult, thats just annoying)

[Tigerr]

Yknow, I'm worried that they will read this, get the wrong idea and completely screw up the new stuff. Sometimes I feel its better to keep quiet about stuff because it will most likely lead to either a) class balance issues or b) pure horribad design. The reason you see stuff like skyshrine and what not tuned the way that it is now is pretty much because they do NOT play the game anywhere over level 80ish. You tell them stuff is too hard, they get the wrong idea and roll SS.. You tell them its wayyy too easy, they roll Drunder Hardhardhardhardhardmode with random curses and just stupid mechanics. I really don't think that they will EVER get it right. Nobody wants content that every single guild can just slap with no challenge. Honestly, i'd rather them just leave it alone than make it like Skyshrine.

[Davngr1]

Haciv wrote:

Hammasaurusrex@Nagafen wrote:

*Please do not quote forum violations*

It's fine as it is, stop being bad.  This content doesn't even matter.

LOL

 you beat me to it!

  but on a serious note.  i do agree that control effects are terrible and that either giving raid forces more access to needed buffs or at least removing the need to have multiple classes that deliver these buffs thru raidwide/cross group buffs is what raiding needs.

  also three was an amazing encounter and even the old school stuff was hard but fun.      zoning into pow with out the right set up spells death.  not because the determination and desire isn't there but because it's ridiculous to expect 10-20 raid forces in each server to have access to that many bodies and have them play the right class to boot.

[Davngr1]

Tigerr wrote:

Yknow, I'm worried that they will read this, get the wrong idea and completely screw up the new stuff. Sometimes I feel its better to keep quiet about stuff because it will most likely lead to either a) class balance issues or b) pure horribad design. The reason you see stuff like skyshrine and what not tuned the way that it is now is pretty much because they do NOT play the game anywhere over level 80ish. You tell them stuff is too hard, they get the wrong idea and roll SS.. You tell them its wayyy too easy, they roll Drunder Hardhardhardhardhardmode with random curses and just stupid mechanics. I really don't think that they will EVER get it right. Nobody wants content that every single guild can just slap with no challenge. Honestly, i'd rather them just leave it alone than make it like Skyshrine.

they have got it right before. 

 raiding started going the wrong direction with TSO and massive gear checks (crti mitt) and gateway mobs that challenged the raiders rabits foot not their skill ie. too much luck based( who gets the "effect" how many times, lag, 9 healers,did tank gear drop).

   i think they were headed the right direction with fights like VS in ROK.  that fight was not hard (i one grouped it plenty of times selling updates while current).   the thing about it was that you had to pay attention and time abilities.   i cried when they nerfed that fight because it was the best possible gateway mob ever.   granted it should have been somewhere in VP not right after the face roll content but..  it was still a great encounter.

[Hennyo]

I think there is one large general issue in this thread, most people in here agreeing with the slippery seem to think that raid content is hard because of luck based scripts or other things outside of the players control. Which of course really for the most part isn't the issue if you really understood the encounters, for the most part if you build your raid right, and understand exactly how the encounters work, and everyone does exactly what they are supposed to do, there is almost no "luck" at all to these encounters. I really don't know even with my own guild, how many times I have seen a wipe on an encounter that was chocked up to bad luck, when I was thinking it through, either at the time, or much latter and thought, "oh, I know what could have been done to deal with that". The point of this is, players need to understand that these fights have lots of things that can happen with them, but almost NEVER just straight come down to "luck" if you kill them or not, and that if your having trouble with something, most likely your doing something wrong, or not doing something well enough, or even just flat out under geared, or even just not using the right classes for the job. The original post was about the fact that these encounters are just flat out HARD, and frankly, most guilds lack the players with the skill to kill the encounters, or the class make up that is needed to kill something. Sorry this post seems like a rant, but while slippery went over a lot of various encounters and things that make them hard, I just wanted to point out that the idea that people are wiping because of "luck" is just a myth that people keep posting and the reason they fail is just because they are not good enough.

[slippery]

Hennyo wrote:

I think there is one large general issue in this thread, most people in here agreeing with the slippery seem to think that raid content is hard because of luck based scripts or other things outside of the players control. Which of course really for the most part isn't the issue if you really understood the encounters, for the most part if you build your raid right, and understand exactly how the encounters work, and everyone does exactly what they are supposed to do, there is almost no "luck" at all to these encounters. I really don't know even with my own guild, how many times I have seen a wipe on an encounter that was chocked up to bad luck, when I was thinking it through, either at the time, or much latter and thought, "oh, I know what could have been done to deal with that". The point of this is, players need to understand that these fights have lots of things that can happen with them, but almost NEVER just straight come down to "luck" if you kill them or not, and that if your having trouble with something, most likely your doing something wrong, or not doing something well enough, or even just flat out under geared, or even just not using the right classes for the job. The original post was about the fact that these encounters are just flat out HARD, and frankly, most guilds lack the players with the skill to kill the encounters, or the class make up that is needed to kill something. Sorry this post seems like a rant, but while slippery went over a lot of various encounters and things that make them hard, I just wanted to point out that the idea that people are wiping because of "luck" is just a myth that people keep posting and the reason they fail is just because they are not good enough.

It isn't all bad players. I don't talk about luck, because for the most part on thse encounters you can mitigate that luck factor by changing something in your raid setup. Tagrin for example, with 3 tanks you do kind of have to get lucky, because you can get royally screwed if something goes wrong. That isn't to say there wouldn't have been anything that could have been done better or a point of failure somewhere that might have been fixable, because in some cases you could definitely look back and say if person a had done this, and person b done that, we might have been able to recover. We've killed it multiple times when I only had 3 tanks available, it's just a much more realistic fight with 4. 

But then, you look at that same encounter with 4 tanks, and that isn't a problem.  Those things that are going to go wrong are covered by that extra tank. An add sticking on the MT, a tank getting charmed, a tank dieing. It's all covered by the extra tank. Which is what I address in my initial post when I talk about the requirements on raids and how the different mechanics bump that up. A lot of the encounters can be done without one thing or another, but then you start to see the luck thing pop it's head. To them without things  you start to need certain other things to not go wrong, or not line up. I think in the case of all the encounters I talked about earlier, for the most part all the changes don't really change the feel or inherent difficulty of the encounter, they just away certain aspects that put extra requirements on the raid build. Sure, people could say it is nerfing encounters or making them easier, but I don't really view it through that prism. It's about allowing more flexibility in the way you build your raid, making it so you don't need a certain specific thing to succeed. 

A lot of the encounters in the past I talked about didn't have those requirements. If you where short it didn't mean someone had to play something else or your raid stopped there. Everything through RoK, even contested, got done by the top guilds with less than 4 groups if everyone wasn't on, because you didn't have the requirements on the raid. That meant the best could do it with a little less than others required. 

The theme for the game since Smokejumper took over (just calling it like I see it) has been what's next. It's not about polish or quality, but about what is next in the pipeline. What's that next thing I can say got done on my watch to use in performance report to get a promotion. I saw it all the time in the military, and it sticks out here. It's definitely how the players feel, pretty much across the entire game. It is no different in raiding. It always feels like something is getting worked on while we wait for cahnges that you'd hope we wouldn't have needed in the first place. 

[Twyxx]

Hennyo wrote:

I just wanted to point out that the idea that people are wiping because of "luck" is just a myth that people keep posting and the reason they fail is just because they are not good enough.

Yes, there are ways to counter some of the extreme pieces in these fights.  You can add another tank just in case the tank gets charmed.  You can run five chanters to deal with the power drains.  The question is whether or not it's reasonable to require these measures based on the current raiding population. 

A lot of good players have left the game and raids are forced to take on lesser players than they would have in the past.  A healthy population of quality players and the scripts might be more doable.  But there aren't enough good tanks for everyone to have four.  There aren't enough good chanters for everyone to have five.  There aren't enough quality healers for everyone to have 7-8.  It becomes more "can you recruit enough of the classes that are over-represented?" instead of "can your players execute the best?"

[DarkelfOften]

After doing the king slayer thing in WoW back in wrath, I gave up raiding. ICC was the penical of my raiding career, and it was really the straw that broke the camles back. I'm not putting myself through anything like that again. Raiding has always been high presher, blame is asigned often rashly, loot is ninjaed, corrupt things done with its distrabution, and it turns ordanarly nice people into jerks by nicesesity. That was my exsperence in WoW raiding. I dont want to ruin eq2 for myself on consideration. I will do group dungeons but thats as far as it gos.

Edit:

My apoliges, just a comment, related to raiding though off topic. No need to get hostle. *Leaves thread*

[DarkelfOften]

My apoliges, just a comment, related to raiding though off topic. No need to get hostle. *Leaves thread*

[resiler]

And the power-up on X deaths or the really fun heal the mob on death mechanic so you can get that goodgood feeling of a Verdict coming, lose a group, "Lol, I'm at 50% again".  My guild is casual and that was the worst part of the last couple of years (though EM SS is spoiling us now by not having it).  Sometimes could recover, sometimes not, but it always added time and frustration to feel THAT punished by an artificial mechanic that basically said, "No, you can't kill the mob however you can do it, hanging by your fingernails maybe, you have to kill it while totally alive." 

[Boli32]

Raiding isn't hard... its annoying... Moreso because of the disparity of "work" needed in a raid.

Fighters and Healers draw the short straw in this as they pretty much have to do 90% of the work between them.

Lets take an "average" bend over and take it fight:

3 unlinked constantly memwiping adds spawn with co-operative strike spawn on anyone in the raid.  every 30s and need to be killed in 30s or they upgrade to 1 ubbah epic which wipes the raid.

1 add pops every 5min and needs to be killed, it power drains whoever it attacks to 0%

red text which needs to be blocked or the MT dies  - every 20s (even if other effects happening as well).

Named has 25% strikethough, 300% Multiattack and a disarm attack.

Named has an AoE which everyone has to joust away (including MT Group) 0-20m you die 20-30m you are perma rooted for 20s. this happens once every 40s.

Named has an elemental AoE which KBs and interupts everyone; the effect needs to be cured within 3 seconds or you get perma stunned for 10s

Random curse which if not cured within 2s charms target - this is every 10s.

Add pops every 10% which a random fighter has to pull away into a pit within 30s or the raid wipes. Both the add the the fighter die during this.

I don't think any encounter has *all* of these effects in but there are many fights with a selection of those... nearly every one really *really* annoying to deal with.

But the most annoying thing about the entire thing: is if a mob had ALL of those effects is Fighters and Healers have to deal with almost every one of them; and all DPS classes need to do is DPS adds/named - joust out occasionally and try not to get agro on mobs.

I've known people in progression fights where I'm working my behind off dealing with stuns/charms/ports/repositions/memwipes and oneshots to "toggle autoattack and go to the toilet or answer the door". I mean a "brb phone" from the MT dirge is *not* something you want to see when you're fighting for your life.

Some of the best encounters have been ones which needed the ENTIRE raid working as a team and not just 3 or 4 exceptional players having mini-heart attacks each raid whilst the other half of the raid put their feet up open a few beers and spend most of some fight chatting away in group or in /tells.

Move away from the constant "cure this NOW"; memwipe inc NOW; red text NOW and include the rest of the raidforce for a change. Quite frankly I'm still annoyed at one of the mobs in TSF Hole where the script almost required that the MT wil die every 30s; so when he was finally beaten without a death (burn before first effect) no achivement for flawless was never given.

[Boethius_Permafrost]

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

Named has ... and a disarm attack.

Just out of curiosity, does disarm still make all non-brawlers unable to use avoidance?

And a pow named does that?  Nasty.

[hoosierdaddy]

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

Some of the best encounters have been ones which needed the ENTIRE raid working as a team and not just 3 or 4 exceptional players having mini-heart attacks each raid whilst the other half of the raid put their feet up open a few beers and spend most of some fight chatting away in group or in /tells.

Move away from the constant "cure this NOW"; memwipe inc NOW; red text NOW and include the rest of the raidforce for a change. Quite frankly I'm still annoyed at one of the mobs in TSF Hole where the script almost required that the MT wil die every 30s; so when he was finally beaten without a death (burn before first effect) no achivement for flawless was never given.

These two points along with the whole randomness/uncertainty/luck factor have made this game far more stressful than fun for hardcore raiders (and especially tanks and healers). I can't count how many times I've said to myself while tanking an encounter and responding to triggers, "This just plain sucks," meaning it is not enjoyable in any way, shape, or form.

Also, when the game got to be more about a guild's or player's skill at programming ACT timers/triggers than in actually playing the game, things started going downhill. This leaves me throwing my hands up in frustration at the end of most raid nights--knowing that in many cases the RNG and ACT are as much responsible for our victories and defeats as actual player skill.

An ACT workshop should not be required for all new guild applicants to learn how to import triggers and setup timers, but that is where we currently are.

[SpineDoc]

What's interesting about this premise is there is a huge factor affecting raiding from the bottom up, and that's the games very fast evolution towards soloing and incredibly easy group content, then blam you are catapulted into the harder raids and realize it's a completely different game.

Most new players log in, solo ALL the way to level 92/320 (maybe a zerg or 2 in there) and don't really pick up the nuances or the hand/eye coordination for difficult groups/raids.  So you would expect them to pick this up when they start grouping, but very soon after ROK (and to some extent ROK) grouping became progressively easier and easier.  Fast forward to today and you have the skyshrine zones which at most require you to just zerg through them with DPS.  Really you don't find any level of difficulty until you hit the challenge modes.  Same with raiding, it's just a zergfest which doesn't require much thought.  The level of difficulty from regular raids to the HM raids, in particular the drunder HM is just astounding, and there really isn't much to get the player ready for that other than pounding their head against the HM raids until you get the coordination down.

This also has the byproduct of producing less quality players and a general lessening of the pool of players a good raid force can choose from.  Besides the general population downturn, the population that is left is less capable of being good raiders.

[SpineDoc]

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

Move away from the constant "cure this NOW"; memwipe inc NOW; red text NOW and include the rest of the raidforce for a change. Quite frankly I'm still annoyed at one of the mobs in TSF Hole where the script almost required that the MT wil die every 30s; so when he was finally beaten without a death (burn before first effect) no achivement for flawless was never given.

This.  The whole curefest turned me off as a healer so much, suddenly healing didn't matter anymore.  Where is the creativity in raid encounters?  Is the dev laziness really that bad?  It was bad enough when they automated itemization, I'm surprised they haven't automated raid encounters with just cure scripts.

[Boli32]

hoosierdaddy wrote:

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

Some of the best encounters have been ones which needed the ENTIRE raid working as a team and not just 3 or 4 exceptional players having mini-heart attacks each raid whilst the other half of the raid put their feet up open a few beers and spend most of some fight chatting away in group or in /tells.

Move away from the constant "cure this NOW"; memwipe inc NOW; red text NOW and include the rest of the raidforce for a change. Quite frankly I'm still annoyed at one of the mobs in TSF Hole where the script almost required that the MT wil die every 30s; so when he was finally beaten without a death (burn before first effect) no achivement for flawless was never given.

These two points along with the whole randomness/uncertainty/luck factor have made this game far more stressful than fun for hardcore raiders (and especially tanks and healers). I can't count how many times I've said to myself while tanking an encounter and responding to triggers, "This just plain sucks," meaning it is not enjoyable in any way, shape, or form.

Also, when the game got to be more about a guild's or player's skill at programming ACT timers/triggers than in actually playing the game, things started going downhill. This leaves me throwing my hands up in frustration at the end of most raid nights--knowing that in many cases the RNG and ACT are as much responsible for our victories and defeats as actual player skill.

An ACT workshop should not be required for all new guild applicants to learn how to import triggers and setup timers, but that is where we currently are.

Needing 24 players to click/use an item at exactly the right time BAD.Asking Mages/Scouts to perform vital actions in the raid script instead of the Fighters/Healers GOOD.

You don't want to KNOW how many times we failed on a fight due to a mage or scout debuff not being in. Fighters are stressed; healers are crying in a corner somewhere but debuff rotation almost never failed; but as soon as the DPS need to do something other than DPS they collaspe into bickering children.

[Drupal]

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

hoosierdaddy wrote:

Boli@Splitpaw wrote:

Some of the best encounters have been ones which needed the ENTIRE raid working as a team and not just 3 or 4 exceptional players having mini-heart attacks each raid whilst the other half of the raid put their feet up open a few beers and spend most of some fight chatting away in group or in /tells.

Move away from the constant "cure this NOW"; memwipe inc NOW; red text NOW and include the rest of the raidforce for a change. Quite frankly I'm still annoyed at one of the mobs in TSF Hole where the script almost required that the MT wil die every 30s; so when he was finally beaten without a death (burn before first effect) no achivement for flawless was never given.

These two points along with the whole randomness/uncertainty/luck factor have made this game far more stressful than fun for hardcore raiders (and especially tanks and healers). I can't count how many times I've said to myself while tanking an encounter and responding to triggers, "This just plain sucks," meaning it is not enjoyable in any way, shape, or form.

Also, when the game got to be more about a guild's or player's skill at programming ACT timers/triggers than in actually playing the game, things started going downhill. This leaves me throwing my hands up in frustration at the end of most raid nights--knowing that in many cases the RNG and ACT are as much responsible for our victories and defeats as actual player skill.

An ACT workshop should not be required for all new guild applicants to learn how to import triggers and setup timers, but that is where we currently are.

Needing 24 players to click/use an item at exactly the right time BAD.Asking Mages/Scouts to perform vital actions in the raid script instead of the Fighters/Healers GOOD.

You don't want to KNOW how many times we failed on a fight due to a mage or scout debuff not being in. Fighters are stressed; healers are crying in a corner somewhere but debuff rotation almost never failed; but as soon as the DPS need to do something other than DPS they collaspe into bickering children.

Haha, so true.

[kalanon]

As a raid tank, I have to agree that scripted effects that don't allow you to do anything for a period of time are quite possibly the worst piece of encounter design ever invented.  There is nothing I could be doing in game that would not be more fun than staring at my screen waiting for an uncurable debuff to fall off or the chanter to feed me power after the 100% power drain.  You see it on fights like Sullon, but it was worst on Eireen back in drunder 1.0, where I would literally tab out of the game while waiting to be unstunned.  No idea who thought that fight would be fun to tank.

Usually they do this to force a tank switch, but there are so many other ways to do this.  Put a stacking debuff on the tank that means you need someone else to snap the mob off after a certain period of time.  Port the tank to a pocket dimension and make the fight their way out.  Spawn an add that the current MT gets a buff to kill, but lowers mitigation vs. the primary mob.  Anything that actually allows me to actively participate in the fight instead of unpausing netflix for 10 seconds.

[Rageincarnate]

ty slippery.  Raiding has gone soo far out of it's way to ruin the fun, it's not funny. 

When i remember having fun raiding, i remember .. theer, i remember ykesha, switchmaster..(god stupid yellow vision while kb'd used to freak me out getting to the portal),last dude in mad crusaders,  salting people , heh  nexona the FIRST time, venril,  hah even levi was at least interesting.. haha zarrakon... which one's the red pool????

SS is mindnumbing. I can tank while reading the news with my fingers on the number pad, waiting for the act triggers to fire.

a normal night in ss is this .. 456 789  oh.. noes act trigger push 1,   456 789   ohh noes act trigger push 1, 456 789  oh noes act trigger push 1,  456 789

Make the whole raid coordinate again, don't just stress out tank's and healers.  And if you are going to stress out healers.. make em push healers and not cures.. I'd bet you most of them forgot how.

[Rhita]

The biggest thing I can't stand in PoW is these delayed death touch. The 4 second delay was bad enough where you can't cast any hostile/beneficial + it mem wipes. Its irritating to force a tank to die over and over to such a bad mechanic. Then it gets worse, Commanders having a 7 second delayed death touch where you can do nothing but hope you have enough damage reduction, or your stoneskin won't get chewed up by an AE. Vallon had a nice DT, even Tyrax wasn't bad, but these new types in PoW are just not fun.