EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

It's not surprising you get a few noobs to raiding, at least with different roles. Often guilds are forced to split without a good enough roster to support it. Just a few clerics being new to the class will fuck up every pull and transition leading to wipe after wipe with no gear to fall back on to add more time to the clock.

Wouldn't be the first time I've heard of guilds using ch rots in classic.

Hell just watching tunnel chat for an hour I saw almost a full indi set sold.

That's why I think it's just a lack of experience in key roles.

The fat needs to be trimmed.

There is usually a wild disparity on any new tlp, both skill and knowledge. People who have killed naggy 800 times vs people who havent seen motm before. Good players vs absolute dogshits who think some eq classes are high apm. Leaders kinda need to walk people through like they're special needs, but generally nobody wants to do that (or even can) and your best players certainly don't want tutorial mode naggy just fucking go this is easy.

As for dkp, if you give out time dkp for slow shit splits, you give it to the finished ones too like welfare so they get the same dkp even though they got to spend 2 hours not sucking. If you do only kill dkp you will get a LOT of negative outcomes especially burnout on lost races and people being shitty about inefficient targets.

Kithani said:

Why would you get extra DKP just because you suck and take 3 hours to kill a 20 year old 10 pixel dragon? Seems fair to me

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It's a failure of leadership if the two raids are that uneven in skill or gear. Higher split time discrepancy leads to disillusionment and people bailing, especially if they're in the shit raid but it's not their fault.

They shouldn't get more DKP than the good raid but some adjustments for each based on time spent could mollify the situation.

DickTrickle said:

It's a failure of leadership if the two raids are that uneven in skill or gear. Higher split time discrepancy leads to disillusionment and people bailing, especially if they're in the shit raid but it's not their fault.

They shouldn't get more DKP than the good raid but some adjustments for each based on time spent could mollify the situation.

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One split eating dirt is a thing that happens. It doesn't automatically indicate they were set up poorly. If the winner/loser dynamic persists than that'll indicate they're some bias going in to dividing up the force.

Zaide said:

How are they wiping to Nagafen? Is it like a class composition issue? Numbers? I just don’t see how you wipe to scheduled dragon raids 2 weeks into the server.

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Not sure how much it effects difficulty, but it was dual wielding tash sticks.

Why would you get extra DKP just because you suck and take 3 hours to kill a 20 year old 10 pixel dragon? Seems fair to me

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Closer to 25 years ? No

I used to specifically put the one of the best raid leaders and myself with the worst split. Most of the time we'd end up finishing first with lesser geared/skilled players and everyone would try to say I hand picked the best people or some shit. A lot of times guilds do stack too much power in one split, but even when you do it evens stevens sometimes the good people have breakdowns and you just fall off. People's egos not getting stroked or patience wearing thin, ESPECIALLY if you're "racing" the other splits.

Now if they fully stack a A team split and a "the rest" split then that's just retard leadership and I'd move to a new guild.

You also have situations where one split is generally faster but when they fuck up dear god is it an issue. You can have shit like a high dps 6boxer had to log early and now its wildly uneven. Punishing everyone will cause people to funnel to the "winning" splits no differently than how people congregate to the "winning" raid guilds early on. You don't want that internally.

By the time I logged on my other char to go get in their DZ and see wtf happened they had already wiped once.

A couple of their tanks were uh, pathetic? Like multiple empty gear slots + several other slots of mesh armor. How a dude has like nearly a full suit of indicolite and has no neck/face/back armor on at all is beyond me. My 47 paladin alt had more AC that every tank they were trying to use in to their tank order. Just swapped to an SK with actual gear on and suddenly the tank stopped exploding constantly and moving the dragon out of position.

Feels like almost no one is used to to the head in wall/tank behind pillar setup and there's been a lot of shenanigans getting people to understand how that is supposed to work. I'd have preferred to just bail on it entirely and kill the dragon in the stairs and joust like men, but I think they've mostly got it down now so meh.

Dual wielding naggy didn't help but it wasn't the actual problem

ronne said:

Feels like almost no one is used to to the head in wall/tank behind pillar setup and there's been a lot of shenanigans getting people to understand how that is supposed to work. I'd have preferred to just bail on it entirely and kill the dragon in the stairs and joust like men, but I think they've mostly got it down now so meh.

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Not a lot of people put any effort in to gearing outside of planes loot, and it's just weird.

McQueen said:

Not a lot of people put any effort in to gearing outside of planes loot, and it's just weird.

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With casters there's not always anything all that amazing in a particular slot pre-raid but with tanks AC is their best stat. Empty slot versus bronze and dudes are choosing to save the cash knowing they'll be splitting Nagafen later in the day.

I apped to the "top" guild on Mangler during Velious, inspected a couple of other apps and one caster had 5 or 6 empty slots, like how hard is it to buy cloth from a vendor, newbie zone merchants are generally loaded up with it, to at least give the appearance of being "geared".

Putting a primary focus on gear and gear checks is such an antiquated way of thinking in regards to TLP raiding that I'm still often shocked and surprised that after this many TLP's that guilds still fall in to this trap. Gear is a crutch. If you are a guild struggling or even just your average guild looking to be more efficient, gear should not be your primary, secondary, or even your tertiary concern. There are SOOO many things you can focus on that improve your efficiency and clear time at a much higher margin than putting your energy in to checking gear. Guilds who put a primary focus on gear checking people in Classic-Luclin is basically that guild leadership and raid leaders saying "I actually have no clue on how to make the raids better, faster, more efficient. I have no clue about all the nuances that can make these raids trivial or even why some of the common ways people set up their raids are done that way, so in order to make up for our lack of knowledge and experience we will concern ourselves with the players gear in hopes it will in some way make up for all of that."

From my experience, every guild I have ever raided with or seen over the years that put a primary focus on gear in Classic through Luclin, have absolutely no clue on how to run raids efficiently. They hope that gear will carry them. The guilds that I have raided with or seen that do know how to run raids efficiently, make gear one of their last concerns. I've also found that guilds who put gear as a primary concern, when trying to improve raids in other ways outside of gear tend to look at things completely wrong due their lack of understanding of why things are done the way they are done. Their lack of understanding is what causes gear to be a concern for them in the first place. When things go wrong, people who don't understand efficient raiding always without fail look at gear as the issue.

A good example that I can give from my experience was GIG on Mischief who I raided with in velious/luclin. They took gear checking to the highest extreme of any guild I had ever been in or heard of. It appeared to me to be their primary focus and concern, yet raids there were the slowest and most inefficient raids I had seen since phinny when motm was new and no one knew what they were doing. The lack of knowledge and understanding the leadership from the top, down to the raid leaders down to the class leaders had of raiding early era's was insane compared to your average guild. This is why they concerned themselves with gear checking so much. And as I pointed out above, guilds who care about gear also tend to look at things completely wrong outside of gear. Almost every way they looked at things outside of gear on raids in terms of efficiency was completely and utterly wrong, they didn't even have a good understanding of basics such as how and why you use a CH rot efficiently. I'm not trying to dig at the leadership there, I understand that most of them had not played anything outside of later era/live EQ in a long time. I just think that GIG is a great example of how when guilds have a lack of understanding of the era in which they are playing, tend to resort to antiquated ways of thinking such as putting gearing as a primary concern.

In terms of splits finishing at dramatically different rates of time and one being successful and some not, this problem does not fall on the members. This is issues with the person doing the splits and the raid leaders running the raids. Kubat and I always found it quit interesting how we could simply change something very small in TEB's split builder algorithm and then could see in real time how that small change would effect the splits in terms of clear time and how much time raids finished within each other. We tested a lot of different things over the expansions and it always played a huge role in how the raids would turn out that day. For example, we had one part of the algorithm that required an update each expansion, and would often run the split builder for a few weeks of each expansion launch before updating it. The day we would update that 1 small part of the algorithm out of many things it checked, the raids would finish anywhere from an hour to hour and half faster, and start finishing withing 5-15 minutes of each other. I understand no one is going to have a automated splitbuilder as advanced as what Kubat created, but there are a lot of simple tricks to doing splits manually that increase clear time efficiency and decrease the amount of time raids finish apart from each other to a higher extreme than what you probably think.

Lastly, heard mentions of warriors? If you are not exclusively using SK's as main tanks in classic while the warriors just there to take DT's, that's in itself is a huge issue.

tl;dr If you are making gear one of your primary concerns when trying to fix your raids, just stop. Learn and fix all the other things first that actually matter. Once you fix all of that, then you can start emphasizing gear. If you are currently in a guild that splits on DZ nights is taking longer than 2 hours max in classic, regardless of what you are raiding that night, then gearing is the last thing they should be harping on and using as an excuse. Longer than 2 hour dz raid nights in classic, naked or not, is a clear indication that your guild leadership/raid leaders are obviously lacking in experience and knowledge.

I certainly wouldn't say the leadership in GiG was amazing and they definitely had an overemphasis on gear checks, even beyond tanks, though I think at least some of that was driven from not liking krono leeches versus it being all about raid efficiency.

However, in the short time that I saw you raiding, no one missed more turns in the CH rotation than you. Maybe you were just blitzed on Baja blast but you don't have much to talk about when it comes to your performance on that server.

DickTrickle said:

I definitely wouldn't say the leadership in GiG was amazing and they definitely had an overemphasis on gear checks, even beyond tanks, though I think at least some of that was driven from not liking krono leeches versus it being all about raid efficiency.

However, in the short time that I saw you raiding, no one missed more turns in the CH rotation than you. Maybe you were just blitzed on Baja blast but you don't have much to talk about when it comes to your performance on that server.

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If you want to do gear checks in order to keep krono leeches out of a GDKP guild, that is perfectly fine. However, if that's all you are going to do and then constantly complain about peoples gear in voice as the "clear" reason raids are taking longer while simultaneously leading raids completely wrong, that is what I'm referring to in my above post.

hah I was just waiting and anticipating some noob to try and bring heal parses/ch rots from GIG up considering all of the main people in GIG who I am referring to that have no understanding of early era raiding liked to bring this up, which is why I didn't elaborate further in the above post to what I meant by not understanding basics cause I knew I'd have a chance to elaborate in a future post. I'll respond to that the same way I responded to Krim and a couple other officers from GIG when they initially brought up my heal parses. I'm not going to play incorrectly just because the raid leaders and officers have no clue what they are doing and what they should be looking at, and are making the raid as slow as possible due to their lack of understanding. I also don't care enough to correct them mainly due to their attitude and ego. So if they want to continue running raids this way and have the ignorance to msg me about heal parses, I'm not going to care and every CH rot I'm put in I'm just going to run my CH Rot python script and go afk because the CH rot is completely pointless in the way it is being used.

I'll give an example from an OW ToV full clear that I initially received comments about from leadership regarding my heal parse, and is a good example because this is how all raids were ran that I at least were a part of and just shows clearly the lack of understanding of efficient EQ raiding basics.

In an OW ToV full clear raid, we had 12 clerics. The cleric lead with the permission of the raid leader decided to make a 10 cleric CH rot for the raid and have 2 clerics splashing. This was common practice in most GIG raids that I was on. First of all, you NEVER run more than a 5 cleric CH rot, especially with that many clerics left over to splash. The primary reason you run a CH rot is for efficiency. It's so you don't need med breaks before or after boss fights. In that situation with 12 clerics, there should NEVER be a med break. There are other reasons you run CH rots depending on the situation, but in general that is the primary goal of a CH rot in a long clear raid. Due to the raid leaders and officers in gig ONLY caring about the total healing line in the parse for clerics, all of the clerics in the CH rots were basically forced to just duck 99% of their CH's and chain spam heal in hopes that they get in enough healing to not get scolded by the leadership. The result of this was that even with 12 clerics, they were all going OOM or under half mana on every single boss fight. So GIG was literally taking 5-10 min med breaks after every boss AND before every boss. So what the fuck was the actual point of the CH rot? It was doing absolutely nothing. Every cleric was just splashing on every boss fight and only putting out their CH rot text lines to make it appear as if that is what they were doing. The entire CH rot, how GIG ran it, was completely pointless. I hadn't seen a guild take that many med breaks before and after bosses because of cleric mana in a long time, especially when you have 100+ people there.

The raid leaders and officers, in terms of the people in the CH rot, SHOULD have only had 5 clerics in the rot and should have ONLY been looking at their overhealing to determine if they were properly ducking or not to save mana. Their TOTAL healing in a CH rot is completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of having 12 clerics. The total overheal and total healing should have only been looked at in terms of splash clerics outside of the rot. Instead, leadership was only concerned about the total healing parse line regardless if you were in the rot or not, leading ALL clerics to have to try and use up all of their mana in boss fights. The result: OOM and low mana clerics leading to long med breaks before and after boss fights and insane amounts of overhealing by everyone. This ONE failure to simply understand such a basic thing as running your clerics in a raid efficiently, led to GIG raids taking an hour or more time than what they should have. They could have literally just fixed this ONE problem and significantly reduced their raid times. Maybe they fixed this issue later on, but not while I was in it. The target in CH rot clerics text lines could have been on a gdam pet and it would not have made one difference, since the way clerics were ran only incentivized competing with everyone else to try and get a splash heal in even for 1% of a tanks health.

AtabishiRetired said:

If you want to do gear checks in order to keep krono leeches out of a GDKP guild, that is perfectly fine. However, if that's all you are going to do and then constantly complain about peoples gear in voice as the "clear" reason raids are taking longer while simultaneously leading raids completely wrong, that is what I'm referring to in my above post.

hah I was just waiting and anticipating some noob to try and bring heal parses/ch rots from GIG up considering all of the main people in GIG who I am referring to that have no understanding of early era raiding liked to bring this up, which is why I didn't elaborate further in the above post to what I meant by not understanding basics cause I knew I'd have a chance to elaborate in a future post. I'll respond to that the same way I responded to Krim and a couple other officers from GIG when they initially brought up my heal parses. I'm not going to play incorrectly just because the raid leaders and officers have no clue what they are doing and what they should be looking at, and are making the raid as slow as possible due to their lack of understanding. I also don't care enough to correct them mainly due to their attitude and ego. So if they want to continue running raids this way and have the ignorance to msg me about heal parses, I'm not going to care and every CH rot I'm put in I'm just going to run my CH Rot python script and go afk because the CH rot is completely pointless in the way it is being used.

I'll give an example from an OW ToV full clear that I initially received comments about from leadership regarding my heal parse, and is a good example because this is how all raids were ran that I at least were a part of and just shows clearly the lack of understanding of efficient EQ raiding basics.

In an OW ToV full clear raid, we had 12 clerics. The cleric lead with the permission of the raid leader decided to make a 10 cleric CH rot for the raid and have 2 clerics splashing. This was common practice in most GIG raids that I was on. First of all, you NEVER run more than a 5 cleric CH rot, especially with that many clerics left over to splash. The primary reason you run a CH rot is for efficiency. It's so you don't need med breaks before or after boss fights. In that situation with 12 clerics, there should NEVER be a med break. There are other reasons you run CH rots depending on the situation, but in general that is the primary goal of a CH rot in a long clear raid. Due to the raid leaders and officers in gig ONLY caring about the total healing line in the parse for clerics, all of the clerics in the CH rots were basically forced to just duck 99% of their CH's and chain spam heal in hopes that they get in enough healing to not get scolded by the leadership. The result of this was that even with 12 clerics, they were all going OOM or under half mana on every single boss fight. So GIG was literally taking 5-10 min med breaks after every boss AND before every boss. So what the fuck was the actual point of the CH rot? It was doing absolutely nothing. Every cleric was just splashing on every boss fight and only putting out their CH rot text lines to make it appear as if that is what they were doing. The entire CH rot, how GIG ran it, was completely pointless. I hadn't seen a guild take that many med breaks before and after bosses because of cleric mana in a long time, especially when you have 100+ people there.

The raid leaders and officers, in terms of the people in the CH rot, SHOULD have only had 5 clerics in the rot and should have ONLY been looking at their overhealing to determine if they were properly ducking or not to save mana. Their TOTAL healing in a CH rot is completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of having 12 clerics. The total overheal and total healing should have only been looked at in terms of splash clerics outside of the rot. Instead, leadership was only concerned about the total healing parse line regardless if you were in the rot or not, leading ALL clerics to have to try and use up all of their mana in boss fights. The result: OOM and low mana clerics leading to long med breaks before and after boss fights and insane amounts of overhealing by everyone. This ONE failure to simply understand such a basic thing as running your clerics in a raid efficiently, led to GIG raids taking an hour or more time than what they should have. They could have literally just fixed this ONE problem and significantly reduced their raid times.

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So you were shitty on purpose, got it.

Ambiturner said:

So you were shitty on purpose, got it.

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Don't worry ambiturner, maybe after a few years when your brain has developed a little bit more, you might say something at least once on here of any substance.

I didn't play "shitty" on purpose or because I wanted to, I played shitty because that is how THEY wanted me to play, as well as how they wanted EVERY cleric to play. Ultimately, I just started blowing all of my mana healing any person with a pulse regardless of who they were as long as they were taking some dmg, in order to up my total healing numbers up while my python script just hit the macro every time I was called regardless of who I had on target, so no one would say anything because they only looked at total healing lines. The CH rot was irrelevant and pointless how they ran it, as if the text lines going out were an illusion. You could have set up no CH rot and the end result would have been the exact same.

While I know Ambiturner's, and I'm sure several other peoples here, brains are too small to comprehend any advice I gave on the last few long-form posts above, hopefully some people were able to take away something of substance from it.