Raina

if they would actually fix repair bots so you have to have the timer on em that would make somewhat of a difference. I dont know about other guilds, but mine has like 4+ people who have repair bots so we would have plenty if we ever needed em and fixing them wouldnt make that big of a difference. Right now though just having one is like having an endless supply.

Cochy

Been said in this thread already but the only real way to make content challenging is to abandon the coveted lets make raiders 5% better than non raiders so we can make everyone happy philosophy. Raiders should be 50% better or more than non-raiders and then the raids can be truly difficult. With top end raiders being so much better than non raiders gear wise you can achieve progression by making mobs that can 1 shot raiders that are just starting out but do a respectable amount of damage to a properly geared raid force. The easiest way to do this is just to remove the mit/avoidance caps and the mit/avoidance curve while making the stat caps not start to see diminishing returns until much later, 800+ str or so being the start of the curve. The greatest problem right now to keeping people almost equivalent is that the diminishing returns curve is set so low that mitigation becomes meaningless. With the removal of the curve then you are able to let a raider with 7000 mit be significantly harder to kill than a raider with just 5000 mit and you can let the mobs show this.

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Shaggis

I agree with Kaif, with a slight twist... that its designed to support x guilds per server. The problem they have right now is if they make a zone that you need a fully contested loot geared raid force to defeat they are going to be making a zone for 1-2 guilds per server. Thats just not very cost effective. Yes I understand many other guilds will be striving to take out those 1-2 guilds but in reality it becomes a cockblocking exercise once you get there. I would be ok with this, but I doubt the majority of paying customers would be. In order to lessen this issue there would need to be enough contesteds that no guild could possibly lock them all down at the same time with a single raid force. Running multiple raid forces presents its own challenges. Furthermore contested mobs need to be in hard to reach places! I'm sorry but the Avatar in the greyed out zone that someone can just park an alt in and wait for it to spawn... is weak. If contested mobs had multiple simultaneous spawns, say sister mobs that spawned at the same time, in distant geographic locations with trash clearing to get to them and no safe areas around them, then you'd have some competition. I'd bet some guilds would still dominate their server, but it would take a larger effort. If each contested had unique loot then it would become a decision of which one they needed to go after. Make them think! Then maybe you'd be able to justify a zone that required contested loot to challenge it, hell maybe it would still kick your ass a tier later if you had normal raid acquired gear, giving it more longevity.

As for trash, its needed. They must have minions. And no matter how many alternate scripts you give a mob, over time people will figure them out and some of them will undoubtedly be gimp or buggy. You know what makes mobs less predictable... ask the PVPers... let a human control them. That would fuck your shit up. Imagine they gave a *highly qualified GM* a RTS type setup to control the raid zone and challenge you or if that is too much work to implement, just allow them to pick mobs and control them 1 by 1. Yes difficulty would be variable and no it wouldn't be every instance and no it wouldn't be totally fair... deal with it. But how much would you be looking forward to it if it happened 1x a month. As you enter the zone you see an emote "GM-Aeralik is here to kick your care bear ass!" ok sure it'd be more Teen friendly... but man I'd pay to be the guy controlling the zone. Sure its slightly utopian but there are alternatives.

And I don't know if you've noticed but more and more guilds are raiding these days. The more guilds raiding the more customers paying for raid content, the better chances at more complex raid encounters and systems. It should be encouraged.

Oh yeah and make gear flagged so that if you don't kill the mob you don't get to wear it. Stop all this raid whoring going on, if you really want progression.. um don't sell the little bit of progression that is there?! I'd love to see something like the guild tribute system from EQ1 implemented, so unwanted loot could be used to make the guild that beat the mob more powerful even if they've exhausted the loot table. Dieties are personal, I'm talking guild tributes.

/signs the remove mendor bots and repair kits petition

Thelounge

Back to what Ishbu said, there is no reason to be one of us, as the time spent to be a tiny margin better if better at all is not worth it. Why would anyone want to be a hardcore raider if you get nothing for it. One way to fix this, imo, is to have zones that require larger raiding forces which would hopefully allow for larger raiding guilds, making it less of an elitist type society of people.

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kyros

but then what's the point of playing, and then raiding? to make your character stronger and better. if raiding isn't going to make you much stronger than you are because there's no progression and no "OMG uber", then there's no draw for people to even reach the end-game. and even when they get there, without the progression to draw them along, what's the point in doing it? oh, it's fun to go kill the same encounters for 6 months and MAYBE get loot that makes you A FRACTION better... get real. they want players, and prefer players that stick around for more than one subscription term. if you're not working toward anything, then why log in? if you don't want to log in, then why pay?

needing a consumable item from one zone to do another zone does not equal progression. making zones of increasing difficulty, with each requiring better gear that can be obtained from the zone(s) of lesser difficulty, is progression. that is how things should be done. and yes, all of your uber gear now should be useless in the next tier's raids.

and honestly... for that to happen, i think they need another round of serious, game-altering combat changes.

Thundaarr

I was thinking a great and unique method of progression would be to use the new loot checker. They are implementing a system for loot drops that actually checks what armor is present on the raid. Why couldn't they use this system to scale encounters?

Raid zones in, they have the entire guild fitted with at least 3 peices of EoF armor per person, some avatar loot (which they could check for using the same program I would imagine) etc. This raid, due to the armor it has on, is zoned into an instance that is much more difficult in scale than a starting guild would be. Basically like when DoF was introduced and you had the option to choose easy, medium, or hard instances.

The only way for that to work properly is to actually have the instance be harder, and have the gear dropped from a harder instance be better than a normal instance.

I agree the repair bots are a little overpowering if you have more than one tinkerer along on your raid, perhaps a limit on how many can be summoned in a particular time period, or even how many can be summoned on a run in an instance.

As far as the line between raiders and non-raiders.. EoF has blurred that somewhat. The legendary EoF set is VERY nice. For pretty much any class but tanks, it is prefferable to many raid drops out there. They could solve both problems with the "gear checker", because then for RoK they could make the legendary set MUCH less powerful than the fabled set, and still keep heroic instances challenging for even raiders.

My basic concept is sound I believe, but even if they didn't want to automatically "check" for gear with game mechanics, they could still have a hard setting with greater rewards. Look at Ldon expansion in eq1, for example. If you chose the hard setting, it actually meant something, and the rewards were measurably greater than you would hope to recieve doing an easy instance.

Lopann

I agree with what ishbu said about gear, making better gear obtainable only for the hardcore player. More items like the SoD would be nice (quest was not difficult) but 80% of the raiders game wide cannot take down Mayong making their reward Legendary and insignificant compared to the fabled version.

If there were raid drops that dropped maybe off a first name in a zone (easier name) that was a so-so piece, and was then later upgraded or empowered by killing the end mob in the zone (extremely hard encounter) to be such a better item than what it was that it would be almost a tier higher comparably. Sets were a fun idea but soe obviously missed that mark repeatedly.

Would like to see-
-Harder Encounters for endmob bosses, as hard as most current contested would be nice (if not harder)
-Upgradable loot with a large difference in the upgraded and non upgraded versions
-More scripting, zones where its trash, trash, name, repeat bores the hell out of me.

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Lopann======================Eggshin

Lithin

i would like to actually have a epic quest reward with no solo/heroic questing but only raiding for you to obtain the items

kaif

I like the idea of repair bots on a 5 hour timer or removed entirely from the game.

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