Stoic

The scripts were tested heavily, but the people testing don't write the changes. They just test, give input and then wait like the rest of ya hoping they fix it before making it live. The zone is more of an annoyance than it is fun. SOE is scrapping the bottom of the barrel right now when it comes to being creative with raid strats. Thats prolly why the Plane of Fear will be heroic cause coming up with viable end game raid strats that aren't just point and click kills seems to be beyond them. I would love to design a zone for SOE that would be both challenging and FUN, cause i don't know about you but I rather enjoy having FUN in a game. Anyone else enjoy having FUN in a game? Novel idea I know.

Making raid content for T7 is worthless, when everyone has a fully fabled out toon, and then bitches and moans cause the content isn't difficult enough. Don't blame SOE blame yourselves for being too god damn effective at what you do. They don't design the game around casuals or Hardcores... its the middle group they want to keep happy. The people who experience a little of everything. If you make a zone ridiculously hard that only a fully fabled out raid with military style discipline can defeat, then why the fuck are you playing this game? Yeah we all want a challenge, and things like Chel Drak were back in the day, I still enjoy that fight and its simple quick and fun. The loot was on par as well.

When ya have beaten the game and killed every encounter in it, gotten every bit of loot you can get, of course the fucking game is gonna seem easy to you, you spent fucking over a year raiding nonstop to be where ya are! Lighten up just a tad and look at it from a FUN games point of view. Frankly though in contrast to my previous paragraph I would not hesitate to cheer for a "Hardcores Only Apply" raid zone. A Benchmark if you will. It could be something like this.

Example:

A large zone roughly the size of Labs, not super huge but enough room for plenty of names. The zone would have multiple ways to the end boss. Each passage would require a different set of "skills" to pass it.

1st Passage: Named with very large number of add pops, the adds would be random in type could range from 10 heroics to 1 x4. 1 Minute timer on adds so if your raid wasn't on the ball you would be overwhelmed very quickly, the named itself would have relatively low HP but EXTREMELY resistant to damage making it hard to just burn down

2nd Passage: A "puzzle" of sorts requiring your raid to move as a team through a passage, Everyone would need to follow close together with 1 "scout" in front testing the area. If you made a wrong move 2 x4 Epic Mobs would spawn that you then had to kill similar to Pedastle of Sky or AE would wipe your raid and you had to start over. But you couldn't start over till you killed the mobs you spawned. The puzzle would have a random set of variables every time you zoned in from a list of say 10 or 20 presets. Giving it the "easiest passage" but potentially harder than all the rest if you can't figure it out.

3rd Passage: Mob with unpredictable AE's, the AE timers would range from 30 seconds to 1 minute, and it would have a total of at least 2 or 3 of these. The AE's would all detriment a part of your raid differently, 1 Would prevent all Spells from being cast, another would prevent all CA's being able to be cast. 1 of the AE's could be a sort of tail swipe that instead of it knocking players "back" it instead knocked them down the corridor regardless of where they are facing. If Your raid could not defeat it before you were knocked too far back you would be knocked into an abyss and have to start over. The side Corridors leading into this one would all be blocked off and once the event was started you had no choice but to burn this mob down before the rolling ball in indiana jones knocked ya into nothingness.

Another thing. NONE of the normal Nameds would drop a single bit of loot, no trash loot or anything. HOWEVER the zone would determine which nameds you have killed when the end mob goes active. When you kill the end mob IF you could kill the end mob then you would get a box accumulating to how many nameds you killed throughout the zone. The Loot table for the end mob would be somewhere around 40 to 60 items and each named in the zone would give you 1 more piece of loot in his drop. Roughly say 10 Named in the whole zone including the Passage mobs, All of them of varying difficulty, The End mob would then drop 12 items (2 for itself and 1 for each named killed). If you could NOT beat the zone you gained no reward. Only through completing the zone do you actually obtain ANY loot, and the named would not give any AA, cause if you still need AA's going in there then well your not hardcore enough. Also Level Limit would require that NO ONE under level 70 allowed into the zone. The end boss, well I could give ideas for him but frankly, getting to him is the hard part, and he would have to be twice as hard as the rest of the zone combined. So just cause you might be able to look on its face, doesn't mean he is gonna roll over and just throw loot at you.


Least thats my idea for a raid zone for hardcore people. A zone that even if you know every conceivable strat, will still beat you cause of the whole "luck" factor of not being able to anticipate exactly when everything is gonna happen. You add in that random element and suddenly hard core raid guilds have a challenge. If you think this zone is too hard for you, eh fuck off, not my fault your a pussy.

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Laodaron

Oh God, inc another Nizara. Fun hard zone to start, shitty easymode sleepfest now.

Blanka

For one some people like a challenge. I think it would be enough for the vamps to drop the same loot chests again if you got them and perhaps the werewolfs to drop maybe something fun that didn't throw balance out the window that only a few could get it. Maybe something silly like a destroyer of mayong title or something.

Ballads

That would be exactly what it would take. There would have to be something more for doing it. Atm there is not. So there is nothing to motivate you to do it. Its kinda like the Nightblood in hos he has the same loot table as the rest of the zone yet twice as hard. (or a least used to be he is kinda a joke now.) Even more then that his amour destroy makes it so that if you fight him, get his best drop, and then you sell it for a great price on broker, you still fucking lose money as a guild in repair cost.

Ishbu

Anything that is remotely close to being cleared in the first week is a god damn joke of a zone.

A zone doesnt have to take 10 hours to be a good, hard zone. What makes it good is if the boss of the zone is just barely possible to be killed if your raid really understands the encounter and doesnt make any mistakes. Only once you have defeated the encounter should you ever be able to defeat it with mistakes or whatever else.

I repeate, barely possible. That means most servers do NOT have a guild capable of defeating it for a month or 2 of tries. Sucks to be them, someday they will be farming it but they arent the best, they dont deserve to be kililng it from day 1.

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"We are looking into ways to reduce the feeling that you must always be pressing a button to contribute to the group or raid" - Aeralik, aka Chris Kozak.

"So standing around doing nothing makes you a better player and for a more satisfying game experience you dumb fucking idiot?" - Me

LFG

I'd like to throw my 2 cents in and say when I think of "hard" plus "game", I don't think fondly of zones with 500+ mobs that have 1 million hp each that must all be cleared before loot can be obtained. To me, fun "hard" requires challenge based on skill and gear, the type that requires a guild working together like a Rolex to beat, even if someone told you the strat.

Thanks

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Anomaly

Hmm, I tried getting people to post suggestions like this in the hopes of giving SOE a stroke of inspiration. Personally, I think if the raiders tried making their own ideal mobs/zones, then SOE might get the picture and actually create something unique. Doubt it will happen, but Archonix has asked for input on epic weapons from people on this board so you never know if someone else will follow his lead.

MysidiaDrakkenbane

If they make a PoF in this game, they better make it 20 times harder than anything they had before. Either that or get someone who designed the original PoF on the team.

When my guild says "Hey, we're gonna raid PoF this week", I want to feel that fear of raiding the hardest zone in the game. At most, people only "groan" over what they consider "hard".

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Xanoth

knowing our luck the zone will just have a load of trash with a reactive frea proc and mages will all be running into adds every 10s. thus making the zone hard in the same way TNT is hard.

orange, and annoying

except ofc SOE will make it harder... thus red mobs, with even more annoying trash.

i hope i'm being overly cynical as always, but i have no expectations that PoF will be an actual challenge in skill as it will be in patience and frustration.

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Wump

Actually what made the origional EQ1 PoF fun for me was killing the common mobs in the hopes your class armor would drop. The Draco battle is still one of my favorite raid battles of all time (dunno why I just loved killing that thing).

Then add the Death Touch here and there to a random person.

The best raid zones IMO aren't nessessarily uber difficult. There are a few things that totally make a raid zone for me.

1. It needs to be a zone that keeps you on your toes. Add a nice loot table to even the common mobs like EQ1 PoF.

2. The zone no forgiveness with idiots that wander off in the wrong direction.

3. Takes some skill in pulling mobs in the zone. (OK maybe I'm wanting this to make it so bruisers / monks have significant raid value again).

4. Zone mobs have different tactics to handle effectively. This allows the chance for each class to have a real value in the encounter. Maybe it's mezz or snare or just a properly timed FD. Again this keeps everyone interested and on there toes.

5. replay ability. Let's face it ...no DEV no matter how good can create a zone that will be a challenge for thse guilds who play extreme hardcore. They will gang bang it non stop until they get there WW1st and then complain at how lame it is and ask why the other n00b guilds can't defeat such a meager task.

The way to work around this is to create a zone that people just love to do (Eq1 PoF for example). Make the zone less of a time sink.

Make people leave it and say, "Well we cleared it but man that zone fucking rocked!" "Let's hit it up again next week!".

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FEEL the WUMP