Narkle

Kraken had to use god abilities lololololololol9looooooooooooooooooooooool

Gilgame

im all for hard encounters, nexona is a hard encounter but beatable, especially if you load up on god abilities and burn the mob down from 45% cuz thats the only way your guild can beat it, but nexona AND druushk are both difficult and 'dumb'. nexona is definately beatable, as is druushk, however, too much of the encounter relies on luck and chance, druushk is badly bugged and the adds on about a 40 second spawn time have 750,000 hp. now this encounter would be hard and possible if the mobs didnt take 20 seconds just to tag and position because of how bugged they are, but alas, they are bugged, they do spawn under the world, and they do suck.

god wasent a bad expansion to raid in when everything was fixed, but at launch, god was impossible, all of the mobs, even the trash hit for much more than the previous expansion, even players in potime gear couldent handle it, its the same situation here to a lesser degree.

the devs shouldent look to put shit on live and have raids tell you it is impossible before you know something is wrong.

Euron Greyjoy

Just to note, people asked for hard and got Planes of Power. I don't think it's possible to say one bad thing about that expansion, and its progression.

__________________

Grozmok :: Rallos Zek :: Shadowknight :: Wudan
Mazrim :: Guk :: Defiler :: Ne Plus Ultra
Euron :: Nagafen :: Mystic :: The Kraken, Onyx, Vae Victus
??? :: Red Eye Mountain :: Bright Wizard :: ???

LFG

Only thing I'd criticize POP for is endless, repetitive backflagging, but they eventually mitigated that.

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Laxx

On top of everything else. If you were in one of the guilds who had the shit stupid luck to be the last of the guilds that got to sploit druu 2.0 Every single day that goes by you pull farther and farther ahead of everyone else. What this means is most likely most of the avatars will be yours till the next expansion. Because a guild was a day late on their schedule fuck em forever ? ghay..

Mestrel

Ahh the rose tinted glasses of time passed.

There was the SAME LEVEL OF OUTCRY about the RATHE COUNCIL encounter in Planes of Power as there is about Druuusk. Here's a particularly good quote about it from the multitude of threads that still exist on at fohguild.org

(I can say all I have to say in a couple quick words

To the world: The Rathe Event sucks. It is not fun. It will never be fun. (At its current state) It requires too much time and too much effort to ever be fun.

To the designers: Whichever one of you designed this zone.... You are an asshole. To the designers who designed PoEarth (A and B), this stupid event, and who actually let this zone go live, you all are motherfucking assholes

To the Event: You are beatable. You will be beaten. But know that you will not be beaten while people are going "oh, cool, that event was sooo fun and awesome" You will be beaten with agonizing looks, as people leave you and go to the Plane of Time.

to the GM's: Fix the zone, NOW. If you dont, I'm sure you wont see many more lights of the next day.)

Gee. Replace Rathe with Druuusk, or Avatar of X, or Tangrin. History repeats itself as usual, and Planes of Power is heralded as one of the greatest expansions in the history of Everquest. Just fucking LOL. Clearing Plane of Air to get to bouncy tits was fun? Lagging like hell in the water for Coirnav was fun? Cockblocking Rallos Zek to prevent Elemental planes access was fun? haha hahaha hahahahaha. WAS IT FUCK.

Davram

I understand that my position isn't a popular one and that's fine. Again, I'm not endorsing buggy mobs. I'm saying that genuinely difficult encounters might be the shock therapy that this game needs. Enough with the EoF grab-bags, the majority of so-called high-end guilds out there right now would disband if they faced mobs like Rathe, Xegony, or Mata Muram from EQ1. EQ2 has a, for the most part, excellent newbie and leveling experience, let's gradually get something in the game to really shoot for.

I want accomplishment. But I also want to be careful of my criticism of Nexona/Druushk in a way that encourages difficulty but disencourages bad game mechanics. I want hard fights that don't have miscellaneous bullshit such as lag/pathing/rendering problems providing artificial difficulty. That said, we have also seen fights where people had non-combat roles that were actually engaging and fun (see Djinn Master and Splitpaw for prime examples). More of this please and less mindless clicking. We shouldn't be asking for the dev responsible for the most compelling content in EQ2 to be fired, we should be making our feedback clear about what exactly is and is not acceptable as customers concerning raid design.

Druushk is killable as-is with luck, and fixing the game-intrinsic issues will bring down the luck factor, in my opinion, to an acceptable margin.

Kraken might be scrubs but at least we cleared VP first lockout. It took Onyx more than THIRTY days in zone to get it clear.

We have a hard enough time with the DPS cap. I take it though from Onyx's complaints about trash mobs taking 6-7+ minutes that this has never been an issue for you.

Pett

Ooo, you cleared VP 1.0 first lockout. Now everyone in this thread will respect your opinion on these revamped encounters, which you still don't understand.

I do believe it was you and Istaril, who said you would kill Leviathan 2.0 and talked it up forever against other guilds without ever pulling the encounter.

If you didn't get the hint then, you sure as hell didn't get it now.

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Aeralik my balls.

firamas

i fully support every VP named being increased to the level of difficulty represented by the nexona/druushk watermark. after the first few months of RoK raiding being so mindlessly easy/boring, i was so fucking disgruntled with the state of the endgame in EQ2 that i was ready to quit. i knew epic quests were coming, and i knew the devs have been listening to our complaints about this stuff, so i gave it a chance. and i'll say now that they're on their way to correcting some of these design issues. but they're still far from providing us with the progression that we expect. half the avatars are either easy or moderately difficult, half of them are stupidly hard. i see the avatars as THE pinnacle of raid encounters, and ALL of them should be hard (but beatable, with the right level of gear and player skill).

making the first two dragons in VP incredibly hard and then leaving the rest of the zone untouched is also retarded... you now have a few guilds that have "unlocked" the first wing, received all their mythicals, and are strongly positioned to dominate VP when everything else gets upgraded. meanwhile everyone else is now struggling with buggy and nearly unbeatable encounters. ALL OF THE VP NAMED UPGRADES SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE SIMULTANEOUSLY.

with that said, i will reiterate my previous point about the nexona/druushk fights: the hardcore raiders in this game never, ever, ever want to do encounters that forcibly remove a portion of your raid force from the fight to do menial tasks like repeatedly clicking a statue. change this part of those fights so the adds spawn automatically somewhere in the room, slightly increase the difficulty of the encounter through some other mechanic to account for the fact that the raid now has those 2-4 people available again to fight, and you'll have a difficult and exciting encounter. and for fucks sake, if your idea of making the fight harder is to implement mechanics that forcibly remove people from the raid to click something, they need to be placed in some kind of immunity from AE's/aggro so you dont need EVEN MORE support attention to keep them alive.

please, for the love of god, don't approach the retuning of raid mobs with the same kneejerk "fixes" that we have historically seen. this stuff goes from being mindlessly easy (and not fun) to retardedly bugged/difficult (and not fun). there is a middle ground where the encounter is engaging, exciting and difficult, and you're not that far off if you'd just hold off on implementing some of these asinine mechanics.

Euron Greyjoy

I have no idea what you're talking about, I loved the Rathe event.

And I was on mez duty.

__________________

Grozmok :: Rallos Zek :: Shadowknight :: Wudan
Mazrim :: Guk :: Defiler :: Ne Plus Ultra
Euron :: Nagafen :: Mystic :: The Kraken, Onyx, Vae Victus
??? :: Red Eye Mountain :: Bright Wizard :: ???