Nardaak

id have to agree, sweet lets make it take even longer to kill with the same retarded script....

LFG

What's even dumber is you thought I was serious.

__________________

"Bottom line: we're not all being honest with ourselves here." Become, Kraken forums

Gilgame

VP sucks and anyone whos been through there at least once knows it. the encounters take no skill, there is trash everywhere (people dont raid to kill trash with lots of HP) and the worst part of it all is that the loot sucks.

so what do you end up getting?

you kill 95% of the zone and get no loot,

the 5% that gives you loot is not challenging and annoying

the loot that you get is neither nessesary nor overly desirable.

VP is a complete and utter failure, some people raid for the challenge, but guess what? vp is not challenging. it is stupid, uncreative and unrewarding.

VP would need a complete and total revamp in order to be worth a damn, as a zone that was marketed as a big zone with mostly bosses in it, i thought that progression would play a huge part in VP, unfortunately the only 2 challenging fights are in Tier 2, once those 2 are dead, it is inevitable that you will clear the rest of the expansion in a short period of time.

im not a raid designer so i cant say exactly what i want, but i want something that is a challenge, something people need skill, gear and patience to complete so when you finally do, it is a cause of celebration.

there is nothing worth celebrating about any of the mobs in VP. i sum the whole zone up as an epic failure, and a weak attempt to salvage their memberbase when AoC and WAR come out. i would have at least continued to play eq2 to raid in it, but i suppose raids will never be as they should be in this game.

The best sony could do now is update the loot tables so its worth wasting your night in there for the loot at least.

__________________

Narkle

I agree...Even though VP looks amazing it is an epic fail...I had 100x more fun in EH and had 100x more of a sense of accomplishment when clearing it...Maybe it's cuz I did it pre-persistant /shrug

Pitty

Ive seen that guys other videos, and damn he has to be the best salesman in the world, i just hope WAR lives up to his hype

__________________

LFG

Raiders have been complaining about this annoyance continuously since the T'Haen encounter in T5.

Raid designers, please, grab a pen and a notebook, and jot down this point before it's too late.

__________________

"Bottom line: we're not all being honest with ourselves here." Become, Kraken forums

Niber

If they took out trash how much content would there be for raiders? Two hours a week? I agree, in a perfect world there would be a 100 unique raid mobs but that's not going to happen.

The real issue is that EQ2 is grossly understaffed and management is more concerned with the current bottom line instead of potential earnings. How many people design raid content? 3 or 4 maybe? That's obviously not enough. How many people design items, 2? That's not enough. I realize EQ2 isn't a smashing success like WoW and maybe it's too late but in order to keep their existing customers they need to invest more money into the game. More designers, longer betas, and more accountability from management to release a polished product. Until these things happen EQ2 will continue the downward spiral.

__________________

Pinski

I see people complaining about trash, but is there really that much trash in VP?

I mean up to the Circle Room, there are a total of 4 Raptors, 1 Drake, and 6 Blobs.

In the Circle Room itself, there are 8 Raptors, and 1 annoyingly respawning Drake.

In the West Wing we have Drake, Wurm, 6 Blobs, Wurm, 2 Raptors, Wurm, Named, Named, 4 Drakes, Raptor, 2 Wurms, Named, 2 Raptors, Books, Droag, 3 groups of Books, Named.

Then in the North Wing we have 10 Droags, Named, 2 Droags, 2 Elemental Dudes, 3 Golems, Wyvern, Named, Drake, Wyvern, Golem, Wyvern, Named, Wyvern, Wyvern, Named, Wyvern, Wyvern, Named.

Then in the East Wing we have 3 Raptors, 2 Golems, 5 Droags, 2 Golems, 4 Drakes, Named, 4 Golems, Named, 1 Golem, 5 Blobs, Named.

Total of 99 trash, and 12 Named, giving us 10.8% of the zone giving loot. Which honestly is about right, considering just look at Tomb of Thuuga(12? trash mobs), Execution Throne Room(12? trash mobs), Chamber of Destiny(8? trash mobs), and Temple of Kor-Sha(4 Named, 22 Trash Mobs). Protector's Realm is the only zone that is all named and look at how fast it is to clear it.

There's just not that much trash, the only problem spots are up to the first named in each Wings. With the amount of trash from Zone-in to the Kluzken a bit on the high side, same with the trash on the way from Druushk to Taskmaster, and from Hoshkar to Skygazer. Other than those 3 problem spots, the trash is very limited. And honestly, I like a bit of trash to have fun trying to get sick parses. I mean, EH was fun once the lag went away because of all the trash and how high you could end up parsing in there. VP isn't as much fun because of the shitty hit-rates and you can't parse really high because of that problem.

There's "fun" trash, and then there's "dumb" trash. EH after the lag and anything that didn't do anything dumb had "fun" trash, while VP has "dumb" trash which hits too hard and can barely be hit by auto-attack. More "fun" trash = less people complaining about trash.

__________________

Gilgame

all trash is dumb, all it is is something to delay you from getting to a boss. i wouldent mind having SOME trash, maybe 3 encounters between every named, but breaking into VP you gotta kill about 25-30 encounters of trash before you hit the first named, its all 'dumb' trash.

for the record, im not a fan of EH either, i thought clearing 3rd floor trash was the lowest point in raiding ive ever seen.

so what makes a good raid then? trash on a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 ratio to the named with about equal difficulty to what we got now with named being the truly difficult encounter which delay your progress through a zone.

i saw VP originally as a single zone with lots of progression potential, the first floor should have taken months to clear with loot worth raiding for, instead, first floor takes about 2 days to figure out.

not only that, but you can tell how clueless sony is by making mobs like tangrin and trakanon impossible to kill and i mean impossible like not even possible in 100 years with the best gear currently in the game. in eq1, mobs were not impossible, only incredibily unlikely, people spent months gearing their guild out before they were finally ready to take down the boss of an expansion and that was part of the whole appeal of raiding.

now? well lets just say we cleared the entirety VP without the loot from VP. ill say it before and ill say it again, SoE dropped the ball so hard on this one. why even bother making a raid if it is going to suck so badly.

__________________

Yargnit

Is VP really a challenge? Not if the entire raid was filled with legitimately great players. But the fact is, this is never really the case. You have a few great players, and the rest are just average to good. This is all that really makes and raid a challenge except for learning the initial script. Once you know what the fuck to do for the encounter, it's simply a question of who is going to fuck it up this time - this is where the not 'great' players come in. And this is a perfect example of why my friends and I love the Venril fight. It calls out in no questionable terms who is being an idiot. and oddly enough, it's almost always the same few people. Every once in a while someone legitimately good will get hit with an unlucky string of events and get tagged, but for the most part the pattern is quite obvious.

Back to VP however, even on the so-called harder fights these people are all that make it hard. We all agree that Silverwing should not by any means be a hard fight, yet someone usually finds a way to screw up and wipe us a couple times. You gotta love the idiot whom forgets where the orb clicky is and makes you send a second person to show them. (Or the real good one we had where the dumbass actually canceled the ultra-vision on them and just screwed us over right there because there was no way for him to see it anymore) Although them doing so proved my idiot point about as perfectly as one could ever hope.

When we finished up Silverwing/Phara today, the only time I ever saw the MT get insta-poped even was while we still had the majority of the raid on the shade so heals and debuffs were light on Phara. Sure I think we lost one of the off tanks a time or 2 to a large burst when we had to transition off the MT for the heal buff, but the actual MT never got poped by her once the entire raid was together. (in fact one time we were actually trying to let Phara kill him because he had the heal buff on him & the other tanks couldn't grab aggro off but in the probably good 15+ seconds it took someone to finally get it off him he was tanking her with no heals at all.

For the most part, the double attacks are just a matter of getting everyone used to dealing with them. Rarely anymore do they cause a problem for the MT.

On the other note though, personally at least VP is probably one of the most fun zones. Even if the named aren't all super-challenging on their own, I actually enjoy how almost all of them are unique fights. And the setting in VP is beautiful also. In fact, the only place I was really disappointed with the visuals in the zone was actually at Phara. IMO the room she was in should have been some grand display of lava and fire with her on a pedestal rising high from the center that you have to circle to climb to her with drakota (non-mob) flying around the room battling in the background. Basically something grand and epic looking. I would like just stepping into Phara'a lair for the 1st time to be visually breathtaking like stepping out of the initial hall in VP or into the circular room where the wings branch from was for the 1st time. That (and a large chunk of the loot of course) Is my only real gripe with VP.

I don't have a problem with VP not being an 'only 1 guild on the server will ever be able to clear it' zone, that is what contested are for. I think someone posted a list of how many guilds had cleared VP like a week or so ago and the number was in the mid-upper 20's I believe. Basically averaging a bit over 1 per server. At least to me that doesn't scream 'way too easy!'. If they were to make encounters that were legitimately hard for a group of 24 of the best players in the game, we would be lucky if more than half a dozen guilds worldwide could ever kill it. There just isn't enough population in the 'truly outstanding player' category to warrant it. The best guilds in the game probably have at most 50% of their roster that actually would fit into this category, and for most of the rest of the guilds that have cleared VP it probably ranges between 3-4 & maybe 7-8.

That's really about all this game has in the way of outstanding players unfortunately. And the reality is that just isn't enough to warrant creating encounters for their skill level. The best we can really archive in terms of difficulty is; 1: the initial pulls when you don't know the script and have to adapt on the fly. and 2: that one or multiple of the rest of the not outstanding members of your guild will play bad enough to create artificial difficulty in the encounter. Other than that, freak streaks on the RNG dice that will rarely turn an easy encounter into a certain wipe no matter your skill level is the only means of difficulty we will likely ever see.

Personally I've just decided to enjoy VP for the mobs uniqueness & visual appeal that the zone has & rely on someones stupidity to create the difficulty for us. And tbh, so far that philosophy has worked fairly well. There's nothing like having Silverwing heal for 10% because someone mis-timed and AE when you are trying to burn him before the adds overwhelm your mezzers to add a little excitement of anticipation of frustration to what should have been an east clean pull. And when that doesn't work you can always have the resident idiot Zerker get himself killed almost instantly over and over whenever he decides to try and pick something up and off tank it.

__________________