mono

Mobs are only as hard as the skill of your raid force unless ofc its unkillable.

I think the problem with EQ2 is the sense of achievement for some is not there for others it is.

its Human nature that if you repeat a process thousands of times such as HC raiding your naturally going to get bored and loose interest.

Rokkual

Well, when you have the most skilled / best geared guilds in the game testing the raid content and providing feedback to make raid encounters harder to "them", it in turn makes those encounters exponentially harder to the rest of the players. The question really should be, where does the hard/fun ratio even out for the benefit of the most players? Many find "hard" raid content fun, but many other find no fun at all in pulling the same mob 30-40 times and dealing with random one shots while ironing out a strat.

Also, there is the fact that most hardcore guilds don't care about friendships in the normal sense, only the skill/class off the toon. Guilds who want to play with their friends get put into the tough situation of deciding if they are going to kick Joe Schmoe (who they've been gaming with for years) from the raid because he dropped his power too low when venril sathir was at 4% health a couple of times in one night. (This encounter is just one example, not the entire basis of my comment.)

The decision is easy for the most hardcore, they don't give a fuck about Joe, boot his ass and recruit a new brigand or whatever. But the other guys, who have real friendships with Joe can't possibly come to grips with booting him and live with the fact that they will have to waste countless hours fighting the mob, and yet still may never progress past tier 2.

In my opinion, the fun factor is losing out in the ratio of fun/hard in EQ2 right now. Some people like to raid, but also value their friendships with the people behind the toons as well. Much to the dismay of many of the hardcore elite, this isn't an olympic level competition, this isn't professional level gaming, this is just some ol' mmo, and it would be nice to be able to bring a couple of 'tards along on raids and still have a shot at beating the content.

When it comes to severing real life friendships over a game, the game will lose out every time for me. Friends are few and far between, but there are a metric shitton of games out there. (If none of your friends are tards, more power to ya!)

firamas

ah yeah, EQ1, good stuff. i remember the nights of pulls we took on AoW, with another guild on our server sitting around that corner in Kael Drakkal peeping around to see how we were doing. that mob wasn't really about your raids DPS, it was about healing through a complete facesmasher of a mob (wasn't that the first serious introduction of the flurry mechanic?). i was so happy the day i got those flayed barbarian skin pants for my monk =)

i remember the progression through Ssraeshzra Temple, finally getting to the emperor, and dying to it over and over as we'd either get unlucky on the pull or one of the adds would kill an offtank and start doing heinous things. my guild WW1'st that version of the emperor after they changed the mob that summer; talk about adrenaline man, that was great stuff.

plus, the Caen's Bo Staff of Fury that dropped off emperor was my item idea (like, literally, no stat was changed) that i had PM'd to a dev after complaining that there were no good monk 2h'ers in game at the time. looting that 2 weeks later was a personal victory. ahhh, a game where dev's actually listened and seemed to be in touch with what the players wanted.... i miss it so...