EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

AtabishiRetired · Jun 8, 2023

yerm said:
To get back to your original point though... gear checking IS useful. Gear checking is not for the gear, it's to determine who doesn't give a shit, because not giving a shit is the #1 cause of slow raids.

I think it can be useful in certain context. I've never been big with harping on gear in raids I've ran across servers. In TEB gear was never a requirement. There were some members who would complain about undergeared people joining, but I would just try to explain the bigger picture to them and hope that they could at least understand my view point, even if they didn't think it was correct.

My thought process was always that there is already a dozen+ other things I'm harping about and trying to get people to do in order to increase speed and efficiency that I felt was more holistically important, that at some point it becomes too much for your average EQ player. Adding in gear requirements or complaining about peoples gear was just always something I felt was too much of a net negative to pursue. You not only have to take raid speed and efficiency in to consideration, you have to take attrition and longevity in to consideration. Sometimes those people who join undergeared or with missing slots that you are looking at as "not giving a shit" end up being loyal, long term net positive gains for the guild. There is actually 2 people still raiding in TEB to this day that when they joined were so shit geared for the era in which they joined that tons of people complained and asked me to boot them. But where are those people that complained now? Not raiding anymore, quit a long time ago. Gear isn't ALWAYS an indication of a shit player who doesn't care. Sure if you have a guy in your raid who is afk all the time, plays like he doesn't care, doesn't pay attention, AND has shit gear, then that is when you can use gear as one of the determining factors of deciding if a person is shit or not. But if a person joins with shit gear, missing slots, BUT knows wtf they are doing and is try harding with that gear, who cares? He'll get gear over time.

AtabishiRetired · Jun 8, 2023

either way, was a fun back and forth with ya

yerm about something that is actually EQ related outside of the normal shitposting that goes on here. reminds me of the 3-4 hour back and forth debates in discord/bumble over EQ raiding theories that I used to take part in or listen to.
Have to head out for a bit. Enjoy your night.

Tuco · Jun 8, 2023

AtabishiRetired said:
I think it can be useful in certain context. I've never been big with harping on gear in raids I've ran across servers. In TEB gear was never a requirement. There were some members who would complain about undergeared people joining, but I would just try to explain the bigger picture to them and hope that they could at least understand my view point, even if they didn't think it was correct.

My thought process was always that there is already a dozen+ other things I'm harping about and trying to get people to do in order to increase speed and efficiency that I felt was more holistically important, that at some point it becomes too much for your average EQ player. Adding in gear requirements or complaining about peoples gear was just always something I felt was too much of a net negative to pursue. You not only have to take raid speed and efficiency in to consideration, you have to take attrition and longevity in to consideration. Sometimes those people who join undergeared or with missing slots that you are looking at as "not giving a shit" end up being loyal, long term net positive gains for the guild. There is actually 2 people still raiding in TEB to this day that when they joined were so shit geared for the era in which they joined that tons of people complained and asked me to boot them. But where are those people that complained now? Not raiding anymore, quit a long time ago. Gear isn't ALWAYS an indication of a shit player who doesn't care. Sure if you have a guy in your raid who is afk all the time, plays like he doesn't care, doesn't pay attention, AND has shit gear, then that is when you can use gear as one of the determining factors of deciding if a person is shit or not. But if a person joins with shit gear, missing slots, BUT knows wtf they are doing and is try harding with that gear, who cares? He'll get gear over time.

I'm with Atabishi here on gear checks, with the addendum that often gear is sort of one of the base levels of a hierarchy of player lethality.

Where when you have an elite force with high morale, a concentration of high-level play in your team and celebrate performance, stuff like gear mostly gets taken care of by the players themselves. When those higher-level ideas aren't an option to mobilize a raiding force, gear checks are a convenient but dour metric.

And Atabishi's point on low-geared players joining and rising to the top is a key factor. You see so many stalwart members of a raiding community grow from eager but modest beginnings while watching the fully-formed players join, perform and quit within weeks that it becomes easy to ignore the state of players at the start of their journey in your raiding force.

Fuck I miss raiding.

xmod2 · Jun 8, 2023

With the removal of focus effects until Luclin, gearing for all but a few important classes is mostly wgas. Especially so in classic.

Pharone · Jun 8, 2023

Hate that I missed opening weekend and the bonus experience while on vacation. I hit level 37 on my monk last night.

yerm · Jun 8, 2023

Tuco said:
I'm with Atabishi here on gear checks, with the addendum that often gear is sort of one of the base levels of a hierarchy of player lethality.

Where when you have an elite force with high morale, a concentration of high-level play in your team and celebrate performance, stuff like gear mostly gets taken care of by the players themselves. When those higher-level ideas aren't an option to mobilize a raiding force, gear checks are a convenient but dour metric.

And Atabishi's point on low-geared players joining and rising to the top is a key factor. You see so many stalwart members of a raiding community grow from eager but modest beginnings while watching the fully-formed players join, perform and quit within weeks that it becomes easy to ignore the state of players at the start of their journey in your raiding force.

Fuck I miss raiding.

Poorly geared or undergeared is a totally different animal than literally nothing in half a dozen slots, and on a tank no less. I realize this took a wild ride, but it started with a split being unable to kill shit and someone thinking it was because the tanks being used had numerous literally empty armor slots, and were just getting facerolled. It then went full length novel, but that's the starting point I was trying to work off of.

As you say, people with gear problems tend to get it worked out and not be a long term problem. I agree. That's the thing though - BECAUSE that shit works itself out if people give a shit, perpetually undergeared (on a free trade server too) indicates a strong potential lack of givingashitness from the player. If you show up to a raid and line up to be the tank and you didn't even equip banded? Slacking.

Arbitrary · Jun 8, 2023

This was so many words. Don't show up to raids with empty slots two weeks in.

DickTrickle · Jun 8, 2023

All these pages of text to try and explain his horrible play.

Atabishi says he mostly did OW and yet he complains about mass CH chains. There were never any 8-10-12 cleric CH rotations on an OW kill. I didn't really start doing the DZ raids until very late Velious/early Luclin, but they also never had that many clerics in a single split.

[Mon Oct 04 09:53:26 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Vindi - Pause 25) 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Eshmun 4.) Atabishiz -- use raid chat'
[Mon Oct 04 09:58:00 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Statue - Pause 35) 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Eshmun 4.) Atabishiz 5.) Lana 6.) Blattos -- use raid chat'
[Mon Oct 04 11:17:04 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 11:37:49 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax 6.) Koada -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 12:49:31 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax 6.) Koada 7.) Eshmun -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 15:26:03 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Lady Nev -- Pause 35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Zheals 4.) Atabishiz 5.) Tunntun 6.) Eshmun -- use rsay'
[Tue Oct 05 09:21:09 2021] Lana tells the raid, '1. Lana 2. Tunntun 3. Eshmun 4. Treble 5. Alexis 6. Atabishiz --- Pause 18, use /rsay'
[Tue Oct 05 12:38:57 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Vindi - Pause 20) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Unhara 5.) Aliciaa 6.) Calorie -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 18 15:00:52 2021] Heavenleigh tells the guild, '1) Atabishi 2) Eshmun 3) Alexis 4) Calorie 5) Bama 6) Treble'
[Tue Oct 19 10:00:58 2021] Calorie tells the guild, '1 alexis 2 calorie 3 atabishiz pause 35? '
[Fri Oct 22 13:20:39 2021] Lana tells the raid, '1. Lana 2. Tunntun 3. Calorie 4. Atabishiz - pause 20, Alexis - spot /ramp heal.'
[Fri Oct 29 10:06:54 2021] Aliciaa tells the raid, 'Atabishiz / Alexis / Eshmun Spot Heals / DI / Rezz'

Pretty sure these were all OW stuff (so everyone who was there got in, usually) and worth keeping in mind GiG used a ton of boxes. I definitely don't see the "common practice" of 10 cleric rotations; they couldn't have done that even if they wanted to. If I wanted to pull the logs from when I did more DZs, I guarantee there would be no 10 cleric rotations or even close to that either. It's just a total lie.

I guess I wasn't logging then but I fondly remember a solid two minutes of one kill where people were telling Atabishi to switch his rotation because he wasn't on the current MT anymore but he kept casting CH on the old tank. They were saying it in guild chat and in coms but he kept plugging away on the old tank until he snapped out of his Baja Blast coma. I don't see how that fits his meta splash anyone damaged protocol he was doing like everyone else was supposedly doing. Guess the Python script had a bug.

Look, I get you weren't invested in the server and probably didn't care, but all this talk just to cover up the fact you played like shit at times is sad.

I will say that Qelyn was much more conservative with his splits than I've seen elsewhere (like, for example, Adventure Dogs on Mangler), but getting more than six clerics in a split was quite rare. Maybe there was a bunch on an expansion launch push, but that'd be about it.

Sieger · Jun 8, 2023

Gear checks I think are reasonable as long as they don't become obsessive or stupid. I think like having people regularly scan every raiders gear to make sure it is up to par is annoying, often seems to just produce guild drama, and isn't very productive. I also think a lot of individuals who "tattle" to guild leadership (and I get these tells all the time in my TLP past) about someone having a "bad" item are not good guild members--those are people seeking to undermine the guild. That may not be their conscious intention, but that is what their personality is.

On the flip side there are some extremes, right? Like on a normal TLP if you're a month into Classic and you find out a guy who bought a Cloak of Flames for DKP now has a naked backslot item, that may need addressed because many guilds (rightly) have rules against just selling high end raid loot right off your back in era. Some of the GDKP guilds may have been fine with it though, but that's a different scenario.

Or if you're a few expansions in and people have like egregious nonsense like 1ac cloth armor in PoP, again, I don't think it's worth having a regime of obsessively looking into it--because as others have said gearing just isn't that important. But if it "comes to the attention" of leadership that someone is very very massively not gearing it could warrant addressing. But in my experience, a huge % of the time "gear checks" are unproductive drama shit and often used to stir up nonsense in the guild.

Korzax Stonehammer · Jun 8, 2023

AtabishiRetired said:
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.

Yeah, but your way sounds like a lot of work and coordination, and chaos is fun.

ronne · Jun 8, 2023

Sieger said:
Gear checks I think are reasonable as long as they don't become obsessive or stupid. I think like having people regularly scan every raiders gear to make sure it is up to par is annoying, often seems to just produce guild drama, and isn't very productive. I also think a lot of individuals who "tattle" to guild leadership (and I get these tells all the time in my TLP past) about someone having a "bad" item are not good guild members--those are people seeking to undermine the guild. That may not be their conscious intention, but that is what their personality is.

On the flip side there are some extremes, right? Like on a normal TLP if you're a month into Classic and you find out a guy who bought a Cloak of Flames for DKP now has a naked backslot item, that may need addressed because many guilds (rightly) have rules against just selling high end raid loot right off your back in era. Some of the GDKP guilds may have been fine with it though, but that's a different scenario.

Or if you're a few expansions in and people have like egregious nonsense like 1ac cloth armor in PoP, again, I don't think it's worth having a regime of obsessively looking into it--because as others have said gearing just isn't that important. But if it "comes to the attention" of leadership that someone is very very massively not gearing it could warrant addressing. But in my experience, a huge % of the time "gear checks" are unproductive drama shit and often used to stir up nonsense in the guild.

Yea I don't think trying to enforce some kind of standard on your entire raid force is worth anyones time at all.

But when I got in to this problem raid I had the leader do a tank AC check to determine the tank order and two of the warriors they had been using came in at around ~240ac, which is just complete nonsense trying to tank a dual wielding naggy in a low healer split like that.

Using warriors in the first place was also a mistake, but that's more to do with p99 brain than anything I think.

AtabishiRetired · Jun 8, 2023

DickTrickle said:
All these pages of text to try and explain his horrible play.

Atabishi says he mostly did OW and yet he complains about mass CH chains. There were never any 8-10-12 cleric CH rotations on an OW kill. I didn't really start doing the DZ raids until very late Velious/early Luclin, but they also never had that many clerics in a single split.

[Mon Oct 04 09:53:26 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Vindi - Pause 25) 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Eshmun 4.) Atabishiz -- use raid chat'
[Mon Oct 04 09:58:00 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Statue - Pause 35) 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Eshmun 4.) Atabishiz 5.) Lana 6.) Blattos -- use raid chat'
[Mon Oct 04 11:17:04 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 11:37:49 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax 6.) Koada -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 12:49:31 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Pause 20/35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Blattos 5.) Hippojax 6.) Koada 7.) Eshmun -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 04 15:26:03 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Lady Nev -- Pause 35) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Lana 3.) Zheals 4.) Atabishiz 5.) Tunntun 6.) Eshmun -- use rsay'
[Tue Oct 05 09:21:09 2021] Lana tells the raid, '1. Lana 2. Tunntun 3. Eshmun 4. Treble 5. Alexis 6. Atabishiz --- Pause 18, use /rsay'
[Tue Oct 05 12:38:57 2021] Vexcid tells the raid, 'CH Rot (Vindi - Pause 20) -- 1.) Vexcid 2.) Tunntun 3.) Atabishiz 4.) Unhara 5.) Aliciaa 6.) Calorie -- use rsay'
[Mon Oct 18 15:00:52 2021] Heavenleigh tells the guild, '1) Atabishi 2) Eshmun 3) Alexis 4) Calorie 5) Bama 6) Treble'
[Tue Oct 19 10:00:58 2021] Calorie tells the guild, '1 alexis 2 calorie 3 atabishiz pause 35? '
[Fri Oct 22 13:20:39 2021] Lana tells the raid, '1. Lana 2. Tunntun 3. Calorie 4. Atabishiz - pause 20, Alexis - spot /ramp heal.'
[Fri Oct 29 10:06:54 2021] Aliciaa tells the raid, 'Atabishiz / Alexis / Eshmun Spot Heals / DI / Rezz'

Pretty sure these were all OW stuff and worth keeping in mind GiG used a ton of boxes. I definitely don't see the "common practice" of 10 cleric rotations; they couldn't have done that even if they wanted to. If I wanted to pull the logs from when I did more DZs, I guarantee there would be no 10 cleric rotations or even close to that either. It's just a total lie.

I guess I wasn't logging then but I fondly remember a solid two minutes of one kill where people were telling Atabishi to switch his rotation because he wasn't on the current MT anymore but he kept casting CH on the old tank. They were saying it in guild chat and in coms but he kept plugging away on the old tank until he snapped out of his Baja Blast coma. I don't see how that fits his meta splash anyone damaged protocol he was doing like everyone else was supposedly doing. Guess the Python script had a bug.

Look, I get you weren't invested in the server and probably didn't care, but all this talk just to cover up the fact you played like shit at times is sad.

I will say that Qelyn was much more conservative with his splits than I've seen elsewhere (like, for example, Adventure Dogs on Mangler), but getting more than six clerics in a split was quite rare. Maybe there was a bunch on an expansion launch push, but that'd be about it.

Daaaaaam bro, how many raids did you have to search through to find some stuff that was 7 clerics and less and then actually think this was in any way proof of what I said being completely false and untrue?

Forced me to go back through discord conversations as I know i brought up several times to people about how fucked up it was to run such huge CH chains and also asking people why was I asked to play a cleric when raids have way more than they need. Decided to share some from conversations with Krim since that would be the most credible ones to use and doesn't really put anyone's name on blast that might not want the messages shared.

It was actually worse than I thought. TBH I actually specifically remembered a 12 CH cleric chain being used, but I was thinking that's so ridiculous that I MUST BE remembering wrong. There is NO WAY I would be remembering that correctly. So I went with saying 10 just to underexaggerate and play it safe, since I knew it was at least 10 at a bare minimum. Little did i know, the actual raid I was talking about actually had FOURTEEN CLERICS IN THE CH CHAIN. Yes, you are reading that, ONE FOUR, 14!.

I also complained in conversation about how every raid I'm in has 8-14 man ch chains, which establishes what I said about it being "common practice"

Me pointing out that clerics 3-13 are all virtually the same, the outliers only being the top 2 (the two people I mentioned here who were 2 of the main people the raid was waiting on to get to full mana every fuckin 10 minutes) and the clerics #14 and below, and that the constant running of 8-14 man CH chains is pointless due to the long ass med breaks.

Pointing out that what the clerics are doing is not being punished because the pace of the raid is so incredibly slow and they are given so many med breaks before and after boss fights, which also makes the CH rot pointless.

You can go sit down now Mr. Dicktrickle while you not only reflect on your stupid post, but also contemplate how to defend a guild running a 14 cleric CH chain. Not even

yerm would defend that nonsense !!!!!

Metalhead · Jun 8, 2023

The people that cannot be bothered to fill empty slots in classic, replace aging gear, or camp augments as the game ages drives me insane. These are usually the same people who save all their DKP so they always get the shiniest new weapon that drops, but nevermind they are still wearing velious gear while in omens of war.

AtabishiRetired · Jun 8, 2023

Metalhead said:
The people that cannot be bothered to fill empty slots in classic, replace aging gear, or camp augments as the game ages drives me insane. These are usually the same people who save all their DKP so they always get the shiniest new weapon that drops, but nevermind they are still wearing velious gear while in omens of war.

Funny enough and obviously this is an exception, but we used to have someone, he was either a wizard or necro cant remember, who intentionally wore shit gear permanently, even shit gear from prior expansions that woulda been considered shit even in the era they were from, just to see how high up on the parse he could get through pure skill and determination. Said he no longer wanted to be carried by his gear lol. He had played classic-pop so many times and just wanted a new type of challenge. I respected the hustle, allowed it.

Ambiturner · Jun 8, 2023

AtabishiRetired said:
Daaaaaam bro, how many raids did you have to search through to find some stuff that was 7 clerics and less and then actually think this was in any way proof of what I said being completely false and untrue?

Forced me to go back through discord conversations as I know i brought up several times to people about how fucked up it was to run such huge CH chains and also asking people why was I asked to play a cleric when raids have way more than they need. Decided to share some from conversations with Krim since that would be the most credible ones to use and doesn't really put anyone's name on blast that might not want the messages shared.

It was actually worse than I thought. TBH I actually specifically remembered a 12 CH cleric chain being used, but I was thinking that's so ridiculous that I MUST BE remembering wrong. There is NO WAY I would be remembering that correctly. So I went with saying 10 just to underexaggerate and play it safe, since I knew it was at least 10 at a bare minimum. Little did i know, the actual raid I was talking about actually had FOURTEEN CLERICS IN THE CH CHAIN. Yes, you are reading that, ONE FOUR, 14!.

I also complained in conversation about how every raid I'm in has 8-14 man ch chains, which establishes what I said about it being "common practice"

View attachment 477147

Me pointing out that clerics 3-13 are all virtually the same, the outliers only being the top 2 (the two people I mentioned here who were 2 of the main people the raid was waiting on to get to full mana every fuckin 10 minutes) and the clerics #14 and below, and that the constant running of 8-14 man CH chains is pointless due to the long ass med breaks.

View attachment 477151

Pointing out that what the clerics are doing is not being punished because the pace of the raid is so incredibly slow and they are given so many med breaks before and after boss fights, which also makes the CH rot pointless.

You can go sit down now Mr. Dicktrickle while you not only reflect on your stupid post, but also contemplate how to defend a guild running a 14 cleric CH chain. Not even yerm would defend that nonsense !!!!!

It's impressive that you got people arguing about number of people in a ch rot and parses when you're actually being called out for retarded shit like casting ch on the wrong person for several minutes straight.

How many Navy SEALs were you curb stomping to make you do some shit like that?

DickTrickle · Jun 8, 2023

AtabishiRetired said:
Daaaaaam bro, how many raids did you have to search through to find some stuff that was 7 clerics and less and then actually think this was in any way proof of what I said being completely false and untrue?

Forced me to go back through discord conversations as I know i brought up several times to people about how fucked up it was to run such huge CH chains and also asking people why was I asked to play a cleric when raids have way more than they need. Decided to share some from conversations with Krim since that would be the most credible ones to use and doesn't really put anyone's name on blast that might not want the messages shared.

It was actually worse than I thought. TBH I actually specifically remembered a 12 CH cleric chain being used, but I was thinking that's so ridiculous that I MUST BE remembering wrong. There is NO WAY I would be remembering that correctly. So I went with saying 10 just to underexaggerate and play it safe, since I knew it was at least 10 at a bare minimum. Little did i know, the actual raid I was talking about actually had FOURTEEN CLERICS IN THE CH CHAIN. Yes, you are reading that, ONE FOUR, 14!.

I also complained in conversation about how every raid I'm in has 8-14 man ch chains, which establishes what I said about it being "common practice"

View attachment 477147

Me pointing out that clerics 3-13 are all virtually the same, the outliers only being the top 2 (the two people I mentioned here who were 2 of the main people the raid was waiting on to get to full mana every fuckin 10 minutes) and the clerics #14 and below, and that the constant running of 8-14 man CH chains is pointless due to the long ass med breaks.

View attachment 477151

Pointing out that what the clerics are doing is not being punished because the pace of the raid is so incredibly slow and they are given so many med breaks before and after boss fights, which also makes the CH rot pointless.

You can go sit down now Mr. Dicktrickle while you contemplate how to defend a guild running a 14 cleric CH chain. Not even YERM would defend that nonsense !!!!!

I literally copied every CH rotation that I had with your name that wasn't a duplicate. I didn't leave any out that I have. From what I recall you didn't play a lot and left early into Luclin and apparently we weren't often awake on the same bat phones, but I'm happy to provide the screenshot from the parser that shows I'm not cutting anything out.

Why don't you show the actual logs/parse instead of your comment referencing it? I'm sorry if I don't believe your hyperbole that there were 14 cleric rotations (in a split, even?), let alone that they were regular. Hell, even someone else saying there is that many clerics in a CH rotation would probably be enough. Maybe this was a DZ only thing since I didn't really do those until Luclin (but when I did, there was certainly never that many in a rot).

Early October Velious parses would be just before Luclin launch so that seems even more dubious to have that many clerics in a rotation.

I'm willing to believe but it's gotta be more than your own words when I never saw anything like that. Any other GiG players in here? If there was ever a 14 or even 12 cleric rotation under any circumstances, then yes, that is completely ludicrous. Even if you had that many clerics, it'd be better for them to be nuking or doing something else.

Still, it seems like at best it probably happened a few times at the beginning of an expansion, not a common practice. Here's some AoW/Vulak kills that I was at (sadly none earlier than two weeks after launch) and none were above 8. HOWEVER, in your defense, I did find an Emp Ssra kill that had ten clerics in the rotation, but then a week after they did it with five. Still, the norm for almost all the high DPS mobs in my logs for Velious/Luclin was 6-7 clerics in the rot. Maybe overkill but far from regular double digits.

Sept 3rd AoW kill:

8 CH rot clerics.

Sept 2nd AoW:

7 CH rot clerics.

Sept 14th Aow:

6 CH rot clerics

Sept 24th AoW

7 CH rot clerics

Oct 4th Vulak:

7 CH rot clerics.

Sept 24th Aow:

7 CH rot clerics.

Oct 26 Emp Srra (two weeks after launch)

10 CH rot clerics

Nov 3 Emp Ssra

5 CH rot clerics

DickTrickle · Jun 8, 2023

"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."

This is for 12 AoW fights from the clerics with the most usage.

Sure doesn't seem like they were just splashing and skipping the CH rot.

Not even really the case on an easy kill like KT:

Cupcaek · Jun 8, 2023

One of my biggest pet peaves is when people try and make a CH rot and put all the mains in and keep all the boxes out.
Like that makes no sense. Its much easier on a box to press 1 button when you hear your CH gina go off than it is to spam cast heals and duck etc...If you cant do a CH chain as a box cleric, gtfo of the raid.

Mrniceguy · Jun 8, 2023

Neat a multi page argument about CH chains from 2 years ago.

Rajaah · Jun 8, 2023

AtabishiRetired said:
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.

Gear can be a crutch yes, I've seen top end guilds beat content basically in the nude (for current gear) between Selo and short-turnaround expansions on Phinny.

That said there's still no excuse for people having empty slots weeks into a server. Having some store-bought bronze pauldrons on isn't gonna make or break a Nagafen fight but it sure is a lot less lazy.

EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

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