EQ Never

It really is funny that the secret to the council fight was in the manual that came with the game. We probably could have beaten it much earlier.

The wait was because SoE didn't tune it properly and popular opinion was because PoTime was not finished. We had the strat down months before (fight half of them to a few %hp then mez, fight down the other half to low HP and offtank, then proceed to kill everything). The problem with version 1.0 was it had some completely random component, which escapes me. But you could basically be two hours+ into the encounter executing flawlessly and this RNG event would basically wipe the raid.

Well it was winnable. We beat it the night before the fix patch.

We spent a long time trying to figure the fight out. I thought it had something to do with those drums that started up at 4am game time, and then we had wacky theories of killing them in a certain order like hands on a clock etc.

Kharza-kzad_sl said:

Well it was winnable. We beat it the night before the fix patch.

We spent a long time trying to figure the fight out. I thought it had something to do with those drums that started up at 4am game time, and then we had wacky theories of killing them in a certain order like hands on a clock etc.

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Oh, no doubt. As I said, it was RNG. We (Darkwind) were VERY close once pre-patch. Super lucky on the RNG.. until we weren't lucky. I wish I remembered exactly what the effect was. The patch removed / corrected it.

We were 3rd to defeat it worldwide behind Afterlife and Township Rebellion.

Thinking back, it's quite possible the leaders knew what was going on and just didn't tell anyone. I was just a peon.

Kharza-kzad_sl said:

and then we had wacky theories of killing them in a certain order like hands on a clock etc.

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We referenced them in clock position as well but only because every other one could be snared. We pulled all of those first. Snare, run, COTH to drop agro and pull the snared single back to get locked down.

The only thing I remember enjoying during PoP was exploiting the fuck out of the faction bug in Plane of Tactics for money and AAs.

Jysin_sl said:

The wait was because SoE didn't tune it properly and popular opinion was because PoTime was not finished. We had the strat down months before (fight half of them to a few %hp then mez, fight down the other half to low HP and offtank, then proceed to kill everything). The problem with version 1.0 was it had some completely random component, which escapes me. But you could basically be two hours+ into the encounter executing flawlessly and this RNG event would basically wipe the raid.

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it was warping. Dealt with this on Al'Kabor

Fight_sl said:

Epic quests were a good draw to keep people coming back to older content, but places like Velious & Luclin were ghost towns except for people farming items for alt accounts. That is just the way MMO's are. I have yet to play one that people continue to use the old world when new expansions come out. There is no progression to be made there, so there is no point.

From a developer standpoint, Elidroth even said that they felt the need to create and open new worlds, otherwise people wouldn't buy their expansions. /shrug

I think PoP was one of the best expansions for a couple reasons. The convoluted Flagging system aside, PoP provided an amazing path of progression. The zone tiers, the armor quests, the spell parchments... they just nailed it. Next, it was a serious challenge. You had to have a large, max level guild, filled with a deep-roster of classes and talent. Finally and most importantly, the zones were an MMO masterpiece. The atmospheres were amazing, the music was a grand slam. You take gods that are known for one thing and you formulate a fully realized vision around it. It is simple and the pulled it off beautifully. The gods were truly legendary in EQ lore and they delivered on the epic, grand-scale everyone was hoping for.

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I agree with you about PoP. It was one of my favorite expansions. Unfortunately, it was the last good expansion Sony did. GoD (or OOW, can't remember the order anymore) came out next and all of a sudden it was like starting over again. Even in full PoT gear, my wizard was getting ass raped in two hits in the new areas and it was just frustrating as hell. I tried to come back a few times, but eventually gave up for good and moved on to WoW full time.

But like Flobee said, I would've liked it if they would've given some of the original world an upgrade to make it usable again. The Hole or Veeshan's Peak with new loot and tougher mobs? Yes please!

etchazz_sl said:

GoD (or OOW, can't remember the order anymore) came out next and all of a sudden it was like starting over again. Even in full PoT gear, my wizard was getting ass raped in two hits in the new areas and it was just frustrating as hell.

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Problem that we had in GOD was, the level cap was supposed to increase to 58 (iirc) but it wasn't going to happen until a subsequent patch after the release. So the last couple of zones in that expansion ended up being over-tuned and impossible to do without the level cap increase. Unfortunately there were delays in getting that level cap in, and it took more than a few patches to finally up the levels. Because of that, the expansion ended up being un-popular. Additionally, the difficulty tuning seemed like an over-reaction that was being done because the last real raid/challenging content was 2 years old with POP. We tried to make raids in LDON work, but sadly it was tacked on after the zone geo had been built and most zones were mostly completed.

Couple those issues with WOW coming out around the same time and things went poorly in terms of player retention.

Also, side note, my first real content work on EQ was revamping Veeshan's Peak to Plane of Air/Fire/Water tier difficulty, with new scripted raids (using the same dragons) and new itemization loot. I was pretty proud of that revamp - plus it seems like players took to it well.

Zajeer_sl said:

Problem that we had in GOD was, the level cap was supposed to increase to 58 (iirc)

Also, side note, my first real content work on EQ was revamping Veeshan's Peak to Plane of Air/Fire/Water tier difficulty, with new scripted raids (using the same dragons) and new itemization loot. I was pretty proud of that revamp - plus it seems like players took to it well.

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Please tell me that was a massive typo, and you didn't really think EQ used random numbers in their level caps, or didn't know that 60 was the cap in Spring of 2 fucking thousand, a full 4 years before Gates. Otherwise thank you yet again for showing how massively out of touch and moronic the people working on EQ past PoP were.

5 8, 7 0. Yeah, definitely a typo. And GoD didn't increase the level cap beyond 65, not 70, which was the actual level cap of the expansion. That was 6months later with OoW.

It was a typo yeah. The decision during GOD was to increase the level cap by 3 (to 68), but it was supposed to be a few patches after and then we scrapped the increase and rolled it into OOW instead (to 70). The high level expansion content in GOD had to be re-tuned because of it. Unfortunately by then the damage was done.

PS. I haven't worked there in nearly a decade, so the exact numbers were off by 10, sorry to offend you Jait!

Aw eq next.

Every time I thought of

All I could think of was Pam talking to Cheryl:


I'll Miss you. I was going to create archer characters and run around..oh well.

Lana - Erudite
Pam - Barbarian
Kreiger - Crazy Gnome
Archer - Iksar (Archersarus)
Cyril - Halfling (Hello!)
Ray - Froglock with bum leg
Mallory - Crazy human

Merlin_sl said:

See, I hear this a lot and its totally bunk. The POP flagging system was accessible toEVERYONE, but it wasn't handed over on a silver platter, yes,you did have to work for it. Effort was required. The game was what, four years old, and the majority of the player base was 65, so it only made sense to make an expansion that catered to the higher level players. The POJ trials were a frikkin breeze and actually required very little effort as they had groups running people through 12 hours a day. Not just guild groups, just whoever was there. I was in an upper tier guild but didn't even need to group with guild mates because another guild was just running anyone who showed up through a cue, so I put in my name and an hour later they jammed me in with a bunch of total strangers and we breezed through it. I actually got a few lower tier flags (Disease, Nightmare, Storms, Torment) just running through with pick up groups because I was working a lot of nights and missed a few guild raids.

My point is, if you tried, you could conceivably join pick up raids for all but Time, and later in the expansion, there were even pick up raids in Time. It was possible if you tried, and those who didn't and just complained, well honestly, the flagging system was great because it filtered out the crap, immature, annoying players, so if you zoned into say, POF, the only groups there were serious, dedicated players and the game became ten times more enjoyable as you didn't have to deal with garbage players, KS'ing, that idiot who will run in circles around the group jumping every 10 feet while waiting for pulls, arguing in OOC or SHOUT, none of the usual crap one has to put up with in the "open" zones.

Besides, the "casuals" were not even capable of grouping in the higher level Luclin zones, most casuals were still hanging in Chardok, KC, and Sebilis. They are called casuals for a reason.

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Well, first of all, when PoP released, players were level 60, not 65. To level up players had access to some zones. Justice, Nightmare, Innovation, Disease. So called tier 1.
Plane of Justice trials were the first, albeit little, cockblock for many casuals. The rest required a raid to clear content and flag a maximum of 54 people for each kill.
In Justice you had to pass the trials, in Innovation you had to kill the Behemoth, in Disease there was Grummus, in Nightmare the Therris Thule event.
This gave access to the T2 planes: Valor, Storms, Decay and Torment. These were also exp zones, especially Valor and Storms. After clearing these tier 2 raids, you could access Tier 3: Thunder, Honor and Tactics.
Eventually guilds reached Solusek Ro, which required to have everything completed in the previous tiers and then accessed the 4 elemental planes.

I used to play on The 7th Hammer, we were extremely successfull even with reduced numbers (our largest raid was 39 characters, played by about 25-27 people), because we had good players, on average better gear (easier and faster to equip less people) and we were playing fairly often (3 or 4 nights per week of raids was standard), but not too much. We helped bigger guilds with some backflagging and they helped us back, so everyone was happy.
When 90% of my guild decided to quit due to an unresolved bug and gigantic petition from my whole guild that fell on deaf ears, I gave up on raiding and played casually for a few more months before saying my goodbyes to EQ forever.
In the last few months, when top guilds were starting to clear the elemental planes, the first pugs emerged: CCPP (Community Coalition for Planar Progression, it's funny I still remember that name), that brought an insane amount of players on fights to zerg them, even if they made clear that only 54 would be flagged and so they repeated certain bosses week after week.
They even made a video, not so common practice back then, where they showed 200 and something people vs Bertoxxulous, the lag was atrocious even in the video. Bert killed the tank during its enrage and turned back, riposting to death a ton of people in a few seconds, but they got the kill anyway.

I remember the first time stepping into GoD and getting just fucking wrecked and thinking "how are we supposed to beat this?"

It was literally just ramming your head against a fucking wall, now I know why. It was tuned to 70? I fucking hate you SOE.

Uqua was literally the fucking worst. Also, what the fuck was with all those names?

Fight_sl said:

I think PoP was one of the best expansions for a couple reasons. The convoluted Flagging system aside, PoP provided an amazing path of progression. The zone tiers, the armor quests, the spell parchments... they just nailed it. Next, it was a serious challenge. You had to have a large, max level guild, filled with a deep-roster of classes and talent. Finally and most importantly, the zones were an MMO masterpiece. The atmospheres were amazing, the music was a grand slam. You take gods that are known for one thing and you formulate a fully realized vision around it. It is simple and the pulled it off beautifully. The gods were truly legendary in EQ lore and they delivered on the epic, grand-scale everyone was hoping for.

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It was fantastic, it really was the next progression from Velious with that annoying LON stuck in the middle. Its reputation was destroyed by the initial bugs, then the backflagging, then the WOW hype and after that expansion and everyone bailed. (I retired LITERALLY when Quarm fell. Logged in twice for a few minutes since).

Itlan_sl said:

Uqua was literally the fucking worst. Also, what the fuck was with all those names?

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Keyboard Cat was head of lore at the time.

couldnt possibly imagine how much of a clusterfuck a pug cornaiv or council raid would be

Zajeer_sl said:

Problem that we had in GOD was, the level cap was supposed to increase to 58 (iirc) but it wasn't going to happen until a subsequent patch after the release. So the last couple of zones in that expansion ended up being over-tuned and impossible to do without the level cap increase. Unfortunately there were delays in getting that level cap in, and it took more than a few patches to finally up the levels. Because of that, the expansion ended up being un-popular. Additionally, the difficulty tuning seemed like an over-reaction that was being done because the last real raid/challenging content was 2 years old with POP. We tried to make raids in LDON work, but sadly it was tacked on after the zone geo had been built and most zones were mostly completed.

Couple those issues with WOW coming out around the same time and things went poorly in terms of player retention.

Also, side note, my first real content work on EQ was revamping Veeshan's Peak to Plane of Air/Fire/Water tier difficulty, with new scripted raids (using the same dragons) and new itemization loot. I was pretty proud of that revamp - plus it seems like players took to it well.

Click to expand...

Jait_sl said:

Please tell me that was a massive typo, and you didn't really think EQ used random numbers in their level caps, or didn't know that 60 was the cap in Spring of 2 fucking thousand, a full 4 years before Gates. Otherwise thank you yet again for showing how massively out of touch and moronic the people working on EQ past PoP were.

Click to expand...

Rezz_sl said:

5 8, 7 0. Yeah, definitely a typo. And GoD didn't increase the level cap beyond 65, not 70, which was the actual level cap of the expansion. That was 6months later with OoW.

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Sorry, Zajeer. The whole fucking expac had to be re-tuned. GoD and OoW were supposed to be one expansion with a level cap increase to 70. SoE rushed the thing out the door by splitting it in two and GoD was released with no level increase. EVERYTHING from trash mobs in the first zones to raids were broken. Our guild had a level 1 GM Dev rolling in our raids taking tuning notes to try and fix the broken content. I still have screenshots of this. Even Smedly himself was quoted that GoD was the biggest mistake in the history of EQ.

Combine that shit show with WoW Beta being opened up (and EQ2 release to a lesser extent) and EQ subs just plummeted.