544k in Serpents :)

[Lytta]

Or as I said you can spec immo and almost hit 600k when they don't huddle up and don't have 50% healers.

[scintal]

Originally Posted by Mippo

Heh I've been liked and hated for a long, long time. In the end though, people like the information, they just hate my style of getting it across. It's been this way long before AoC though as a lot of people know me from Everquest and the 6 years I spent in Afterlife.

So, you were in AL?

Now you just brought down the conjugate image and respect they have in EQ.

Raining RoF over and over is good?

If you are *that* good, go play a SM and top-dmg in every scenario, that way, we'll be truly amazed.

I (and sure there will be others) don't like your post. You are just an epeen-stroker. Kindly stop ego-masturbating in the forum.

[Apolyon07]

I was on Mithaniel Marr ... afterlife was not an active guild for 6 years. They bailed during gates of discord.

Thott and Hobben (and a few others) were very good players and organizers. At least one of them was an EQ developer, though, so it's really not surprising that they managed to progress faster than the rest of the nerdlings. The average AL player wasn't anything special unfortunately.

[scintal]

Originally Posted by Apolyon07

I was on Mithaniel Marr ... afterlife was not an active guild for 6 years. They bailed during gates of discord.

Thott and Hobben (and a few others) were very good players and organizers. At least one of them was an EQ developer, though, so it's really not surprising that they managed to progress faster than the rest of the nerdlings. The average AL player wasn't anything special unfortunately.

Well, to be fair, most fights in EQ doesn't require much. If you are semi-playing attentions, you should be fine. (although playing a cleric/chanter is just lame, cleric more lame..)
non stop watching cycle msg for 20 mins is just absurd. .. .. ..

[PaZZo]

500k+ dmg and so low DBs is terrible, if you ask me, sounds like your side really forgot to ever target their healers and just stayed there deto-RoFing their frontlines. And looks like the destroguys were really dumb enough to be so close togheter for you to deal that 1.7k dps for the whole scenario.

I prefear much more the "eliminate key targets" way, specced immo/inci. Not to mention the usefullness of having sdar and pwf, they can change a battle along with choking smoke.


Impressive numbers of course, just not my playstyle, and i tend to think that when there are huge numbers floating around, both sides played just meh.

edit. from the data you parsed about your immo spec, one thing that really caught my attention is the impressive avg damage of detonate. Seeing as best crit is lower than mine, and your crit% is roughly the same as mine, i really think people on your server are just plain dumb and still believes to the story that resists weren't working.

edit 2. i agree AOEs in this game are really OP tho, they should do way lower damage than the single target abilities, in mass rvr this game is just plain stupid due to this, one side going RoF RoF RoF, the other PoS PoS PoS or more likely a buncha marauders chargin in spamming demolition all the way.

[Apolyon07]

Originally Posted by scintal

Well, to be fair, most fights in EQ doesn't require much. If you are semi-playing attentions, you should be fine. (although playing a cleric/chanter is just lame, cleric more lame..)
non stop watching cycle msg for 20 mins is just absurd. .. .. ..

Meh of all the MMOs I ever played EQ had some of the hardest and most complex PVE encounters. The PvP sucked balls, but the game was pretty hard. Early on it was mostly tank_n_spank tactics, but towards the end of my playtime (Secrets of Faydwer) the encounters were actually pretty difficult.

[scintal]

Originally Posted by Apolyon07

Meh of all the MMOs I ever played EQ had some of the hardest and most complex PVE encounters. The PvP sucked balls, but the game was pretty hard. Early on it was mostly tank_n_spank tactics, but towards the end of my playtime (Secrets of Faydwer) the encounters were actually pretty difficult.

Complex? May be.

But not difficult.

Complex just mean there are alot of things to figured out.
Let's put it this way, if all EQ's boss's abilities are known to you prior to the encounter, it'll be at least 70% less difficult.
Like boss does X at Y time.

After all those are figured out, it's alot like a script. Like the last boss in PoTime, Quarm(?) forgot exact name now, been awhile.

Was complex, with different ae doing different things. But ones you figured out his abilities, it's just becomes a routine. (same with most MMO, i should add)

A more "fun/difficult" boss is the 1st boss of Sunwell in Wow. Pick up spear, throw @ boss. And corordinate so people don't die on that caused ae.
Or that akama fight in WoW. You becomes a ghost afterward.
Or my personal favorite, Sapphirion(SP?). That's a fun fight.

(more fun, although it's somewhat scripted after the first few times, but less than EQ. )

A random comment, I like the dungeon design of WoW over WAR. Fast respawn with much time lost and EQ-like dungeon design needs to be updated.

[Apolyon07]

With all due respect Scintal, but where did your experience with EQ end? You quote Quarm, but Planes of Power is really really really obsolete. The complexity and difficulty of cutting edge EQ typically got harder as time went on. If you haven't played/raided the game both recently and on the cutting edge, then you really don't know what you're talking about.

WoW over the last few years has always been a step behind EQ in PvE complexity/difficulty. On the whole EQ is probably one of the hardest and most time consuming MMOs out there which is probably why they've had such a difficult time expanding their slowly shrinking playerbase. It's ultimately why I had to quit it a little over half a year ago ... I simply didn't have the 30+ hours a week it took to keep up with the cutting edge content.

The one thing EQ could never do is balance it's PvP ... so in some ways WoW and Warhammer will be hard that EQ could never be.

[scintal]

for others not interested in a discussion of EQ, kindly skip my post

Originally Posted by Apolyon07

With all due respect Scintal, but where did your experience with EQ end? You quote Quarm, but Planes of Power is really really really obsolete. The complexity and difficulty of cutting edge EQ typically got harder as time went on. If you haven't played/raided the game both recently and on the cutting edge, then you really don't know what you're talking about.

WoW over the last few years has always been a step behind EQ in PvE complexity/difficulty. On the whole EQ is probably one of the hardest and most time consuming MMOs out there which is probably why they've had such a difficult time expanding their slowly shrinking playerbase. It's ultimately why I had to quit it a little over half a year ago ... I simply didn't have the 30+ hours a week it took to keep up with the cutting edge content.

The one thing EQ could never do is balance it's PvP ... so in some ways WoW and Warhammer will be hard that EQ could never be.

Time consuming is the key word there IMO.
I've play EQ form the start to end of OoW.(Omen of war? thank that's what it's called)

Could it improved *that* much? I doubt it.

You make it sound like it has, I have to ask, did you raid the old content back then to compare?

Did you raid the SoL bosses at SoL time )just for example, could be saying for Tunare at PoGrowth's open)? In order for you to make that conclusion that new content is *that much* more *difficult*, I think that's a pre-requisite that you raid the old content back at that content's release time. (i.e. without the new OP weapon/armor to make old encounters easier).

Let me ask you this, did you know what you need to do in Kael to spawn that special giant?
What's something that you couldn't do that you normally could in PoAir?

Again, I don't think (i can be wrong, but you didn't give any deatil except "you are just wrong!!") it has improve that much.
I at least give a little example of WoW's encounter.

If EQ did improve that much, I am interested to know what they did. Prehaps you can give an exmaple fight that you found "interesting yet difficult".

for others not interested in EQ, kindly ignore my post

[Apolyon07]

Let's just put it this way, I pickup raided nagafen and vox back when the entire process took 3-4 hours. I raided the original VP (granted after AL was done with the zone). My account had 8 years on it before I quit, and I spent the last 3ish of them raiding the relative cutting edge. At the time I quit I had the highest armor class of any raiding warrior. So yes ... I raided enough to watch things progress from relatively simple to complex. You want to quiz me about the manor/tormax/AoW? Spare me.

No PvE encounter is difficult with a good team once you figure it out. Figuring out the puzzle and fielding a dedicated force night after night is the only hard part about it.

Anywho I'm currently typing on my phone from work so I'll get you some specific examples when I get home. The biggest reason for the shift to hardmode was to slow down the rate of progression amongst the leading edge. It wasn't uncommon to spend weeks on. Am encounter night after night to get through some gatekeeper mobs.

[scintal]

lol you sounded offended.

How would I know what kind of fights you have seen to deem the recent EQ's encounters "difficult"? Kindly don't take it personally. =P

To give a little detail on the fun fight I've found in WoW. Like Sapphiron, even if you knwo the fight, you can still wipe. I found it more dynamic than most other games.

I eagerly awaits your sharing of the new "difficult" encounters though.

[Mippo]

Originally Posted by Apolyon07

I was on Mithaniel Marr ... afterlife was not an active guild for 6 years. They bailed during gates of discord.

Thott and Hobben (and a few others) were very good players and organizers. At least one of them was an EQ developer, though, so it's really not surprising that they managed to progress faster than the rest of the nerdlings. The average AL player wasn't anything special unfortunately.

1) The guild has been active for a lot longer then 6 years. Want to take a guess at who runs Thottbot?

2) We did not get "information" before other guilds nor did we have an EQ developer in our guild.

3) Our players sucked now? I'm sure you were much better then all of us right?

Unless you WERE cutting edge, you don't know what you are talking about. Everquest was notorious for nerfing encounters after the original guilds beat them. It's quite likely on a lot of the content we beat, you never fought the same encounter.

The main difference between Everquest and World of Warcraft is not the difficulty, it's that WoW made certain encounters revolve around certain classes and skills that ONLY those classes had as opposed to Everquest which generally had a lot more classes that could fill in the roles. If you had a strong core of players, you would always have your best players performing the necessary jobs on the encounters whereas in WoW, an encounter might revolve around a specific class or even everyone so what holds you back is not how good your best players are, but how good your worst players are.

Basically, Everquest challenged the BEST players of a guild whereas WoW challenges the WORST players of a guild. The WoW encounters are actually easier since a lot of them require everyone to do something for success. How can you make something hard to do if everyone has to do it? It's got to be easy enough that the bad players can pull it off, which ends up not challenging the good players at all.

If you had an EQ guild with 20 really good players and 20 average players, the 20 really good players could easily carry the 20 average players. In WoW, that's not the case. Even if you have the best 20 players, you can't beat some encounters until the lesser skilled players learn it but it also keeps the difficulty of the encounters down tremendously. That was my issue with WoW raiding. I was never challenged in WoW like I was in Everquest and I got bored. Everything was easy and we typically had to wait on the back end of the guild to learn it before we could progress. I'd rather have the encounters that challenge the best players, not the worst.

[Apolyon07]

Originally Posted by Mippo

1) The guild has been active for a lot longer then 6 years. Want to take a guess at who runs Thottbot?

In everquest for over 6 years? No. I would rarely see an afterlife ghost floating around after the GoD Exodus, but to say AL was active in EQ beyond that is disingenuous.

2) We did not get "information" before other guilds nor did we have an EQ developer in our guild.

AL was indeed privvy to information under the table. Whether you were aware of it or whether you're willing to admit it, it did happen. Falsely (or wrongly if you really didn't know) denying it doesn't change anything. On more than one occasion that I was made aware of AL was almost used as a live-server beta-test guild. Information was received and kinks were ironed out for the rest of us slobs who were lagging at the time. AL was probably the most famous guild EQ ever had. They were a good guild, and had I been in their situation dealing with a GoD expansion bugged to hell I probably would have quit too.

3) Our players sucked now? I'm sure you were much better then all of us right?

Point to me where I said AL players sucked. I said the average AL player was nothing special. I don't recall ever coming across someone from AL who sucked. Truthfully, the only thing AL required from a player was that they:

a) didn't suck
b) had enormous amounts of time to invest in the guild

The rest, as usual, will always fall into place in MMO guilds. AL was one of the few guilds that I could actually say didn't have any sucky players, which is part of the reason they were a cut above the rest. I'm not trying to diss AL, I actually had (and have) a great deal of respect for them.

Unless you WERE cutting edge, you don't know what you are talking about. Everquest was notorious for nerfing encounters after the original guilds beat them. It's quite likely on a lot of the content we beat, you never fought the same encounter.

I'm well aware Mippo. AL was the guild that fought the pre-nerf encounters prior to GoD. I wasn't hardcore enough to be fighting buggy/overpowered content until several expansions later.

The main difference between Everquest and World of Warcraft is not the difficulty, it's that WoW made certain encounters revolve around certain classes and skills that ONLY those classes had as opposed to Everquest which generally had a lot more classes that could fill in the roles.

Mostly true yes, but there were exceptions.

Basically, Everquest challenged the BEST players of a guild whereas WoW challenges the WORST players of a guild.

EQ changed a lot since AL's collapse. I can't tell you how many times entire raids would wipe/fail because one person failed to pay attention. The glory days of tank 'n spank ended long ago. A core of people can still carry a guild in EQ, but no more so than in any other MMO I've seen.

Originally Posted by Scintal

lol you sounded offended.

I wasn't too keen on you thinking yourself in a position to quiz my knowledge on the inner dynamics of Kael. Offended? No. Annoyed? Perhaps a smidge, and your borderline sarcasm doesn't help.

I eagerly awaits your sharing of the new "difficult" encounters though.

You quoted quarm ... a mob that hit hard and had a few aes corresponding to how many of his heads you'd cut off. For his day he was relatively epic. He was only borderline difficult because of his damage output and the sheer volume of players required at the time (for that given level of progression).

When I get home I can provide more if you'd like but here's just the quickest one I could think of --> Commodus in Solteris. Ring event with one central boss. At the start 4 giants targettable 4 not. At all points during the event every giant must be kept with 5% health of the rest or you wipe. Every so often, for each giant active, a random player is silently cursed. Said curse must be cured within a few seconds or the person dies. Once the first few giants are brought down to a certain level, all giants become active (more dots tossed into the mix) requiring tanks/healers/dps for each. HP balance must still be maintained. Throughout the entire encounter adds are spawned that must be dealt with by unconventional methods. Once all giants are brought to zero you get to fight the main boss who is relatively straightforward ... but still juggling all of the aformentioned spices.

When the entire strategy is put in your lap, it doesn't seem terribly bad ... but then again nothing in PvE really is once you figure out the puzzle. EQ didn't get harder by just raising the DB/DM (hit values) and aoes of boss mobs, it took a different route in becoming increasingly complex. This particular event didn't have a terrible raid wipe' mechanic whereby one person could easily insta-frig the entire raid, but many events these days do. Commodus isn't the hardest thing in 'recent' EQ by far, but it was a quick example I could use to demonstrate how far EQ has come. There are plenty of fights where it wasn't hard to wipe even after you had the script comitted to memory and had a raid full of appropriately geared characters. Some expansions were harder than others ... some boss fights harder than others, but EQ was ever trending towards increasingly complex and difficult events with retard-filters.

EQ was always hard because of the sheer volume of time you had to invest to get anywhere worthwhile. That improved somewhat with instanced content in GoD and beyond (fewer player-made cockblocks and less competition), but they maintained the time-investment requirement by putting steep learning curves (on top of raw gear requirements) to succeed.

[Mippo]

Originally Posted by Apolyon07

In everquest for over 6 years? No. I would rarely see an afterlife ghost floating around after the GoD Exodus, but to say AL was active in EQ beyond that is disingenuous.

You're the only person who claimed this.

AL was indeed privvy to information under the table. Whether you were aware of it or whether you're willing to admit it, it did happen. Falsely (or wrongly if you really didn't know) denying it doesn't change anything. On more than one occasion that I was made aware of AL was almost used as a live-server beta-test guild. Information was received and kinks were ironed out for the rest of us slobs who were lagging at the time. AL was probably the most famous guild EQ ever had. They were a good guild, and had I been in their situation dealing with a GoD expansion bugged to hell I probably would have quit too.

The day we quit was because it was the day our entire guild had been given access to the WoW beta. Initially only a small handful of us were given beta accounts and since it would be unfair to the rest of the players, we kept raiding until everyone got their beta accounts.

We were occasionally in contact with GM's, but we were not privy to information that would help us beat the encounters. When we were involved with GM's was typically when the content was BROKEN and we provided feedback to get it fixed. I'm one of the only people to ever meet Thott in real life, and was constantly in contact with him on almost every raid so I'm pretty sure between the two of us, I would be the one in the position to know if we were getting information or not. Some of these encounters we spent weeks of raiding trying to figure out and it's kind of a slap in the face when people like you discount all the effort we put in by saying we were "given" the information which is a complete fabrication.

Why would you think they WANT us to beat their game quickly? It makes no sense whatsoever and they look bad if players go through their content too quickly..... logic should win out here.

For the most part when people are talking about the information they are referring to the people that beta test the encounters BEFORE they are released on live. For example, I was a raid leader for the testers in the GoD expansion which doesn't really help much because it's very hard to make progress in anything with people you don't normally raid with and the majority of the stuff is changed by the time you finally see the encounters on the live servers. Typically the only information obtained was the abilities of some of the entry level bosses which really isn't much of an advantage, if any at all since all it takes is 1 attempt from anyone to learn that information, or you could've checked spell databases and likely obtained the same information anyway. The more difficult stuff was typically off limits and went untested which is why we ended up having to test stuff on the live servers.

[scintal]

Originally Posted by Mippo

The main difference between Everquest and World of Warcraft is not the difficulty, it's that WoW made certain encounters revolve around certain classes and skills that ONLY those classes had as opposed to Everquest which generally had a lot more classes that could fill in the roles.

...

.... That was my issue with WoW raiding. I was never challenged in WoW like I was in Everquest and I got bored. Everything was easy and we typically had to wait on the back end of the guild to learn it before we could progress. I'd rather have the encounters that challenge the best players, not the worst.

The only thing, dear epeen stroker. WTH are you smoking.
EQ was about clerics CH cycle. If anything, it requires classes more than anything. (hi chanter/cleric/war)
Not sure what game you were playing. And remember mod-rods?
name me a substitute for that to fill in the roles. Necro-pump? An emergency substitute at best.

Your comment only works for *DPS*. You can more or less change 1 DPS over the others. (pendulum swing at which one is better at different era)
Did you ever see they substitute all clerics with druids? Do you think you could like kill Tunare, Inny, ssra...whatnot back then if they use druid?

So, your comments aren't very accurate. The rest isn't far off. (since some of them are opinions).
OH besides, Wow's raid is 25 people now. If you can find 20 good people, I am sure you can find 4 more to pass that encounter.