Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

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There should be no raiding at all imo. The problem is, it makes all the other content obsolete, and yet it is super boring and too easy. So there is no point doing many long challenging groups in Seb, Chardok, HS, etc. when you can just tag along with a raid guild and get best in slot gear from Trakanon, VS, Naggy, Vox, Cazic, etc. And then pretty soon people start vanishing and only logging in when the guild is raiding Fear/Hate for them to get their last pieces or that super rare Bone Clasped Girdle or whatever.

It is at that point the game becomes boring as fuck and I want to quit. The actual 1-50 is always really fun, and doing the depths of somewhere like Seb at low level 50's with non-raid gear is super challenging and the most fun I ever had in EQ. I have raided hardcore too, all the way up to and including PoP and a bit beyond that, and it was always a chore and never fun.

It wasn't so bad when there was just Naggy and Vox because at least they only had a few secondary items. You still needed to go to different dungeons in groups for all the rest of your gear. But I think group content should be instead of raiding. Just have some harder group zones at the top end which average groups struggle to even survive. Have scripted bosses etc. It would be like raid content but much more fun.
 
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zzeris

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Screenshots or it didn't happen. What kind of craft beer guy is Brad?

fatbastard.jpg
 
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Mur

Trakanon Raider
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Short of making every item in game No Drop or Heirloom I don't see how you can fight RMT. I personally would have zero problem with any special drops being either. Drops of named, zone boss, raid loot; I'm good with tying them to an account at a minimum. But then again I don't play games to make money IRL.

One thing on raiding; they need to have more loot drop. Getting 25+ people together to raid, and only having 5 people get anything remotely worth while, from the yard trash to the boss, sucks. It's having to do the same damn raid over and over and over that eventually soured me on raiding.
 

Vinjin

Lord Nagafen Raider
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One thing on raiding; they need to have more loot drop. Getting 25+ people together to raid, and only having 5 people get anything remotely worth while, from the yard trash to the boss, sucks. It's having to do the same damn raid over and over and over that eventually soured me on raiding.

That ratio percentage really isn't any different though than the 6 person group doing a 2 hour dungeon run and only 1 person getting the boss loot.

I don't recall how much loot there was on the behemoth looking boss in the ice cave in last week's stream. I know Cohh looted something but was there anything else on the corpse? That might be an indicator of what they are planning.
 

Identikit

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There should be no raiding at all imo. The problem is, it makes all the other content obsolete, and yet it is super boring and too easy. So there is no point doing many long challenging groups in Seb, Chardok, HS, etc. when you can just tag along with a raid guild and get best in slot gear from Trakanon, VS, Naggy, Vox, Cazic, etc. And then pretty soon people start vanishing and only logging in when the guild is raiding Fear/Hate for them to get their last pieces or that super rare Bone Clasped Girdle or whatever.

It is at that point the game becomes boring as fuck and I want to quit. The actual 1-50 is always really fun, and doing the depths of somewhere like Seb at low level 50's with non-raid gear is super challenging and the most fun I ever had in EQ. I have raided hardcore too, all the way up to and including PoP and a bit beyond that, and it was always a chore and never fun.

It wasn't so bad when there was just Naggy and Vox because at least they only had a few secondary items. You still needed to go to different dungeons in groups for all the rest of your gear. But I think group content should be instead of raiding. Just have some harder group zones at the top end which average groups struggle to even survive. Have scripted bosses etc. It would be like raid content but much more fun.
aww, its retarded. Poor snowflake.
 
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Mur

Trakanon Raider
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That ratio percentage really isn't any different though than the 6 person group doing a 2 hour dungeon run and only 1 person getting the boss loot.

I don't recall how much loot there was on the behemoth looking boss in the ice cave in last week's stream. I know Cohh looted something but was there anything else on the corpse? That might be an indicator of what they are planning.

The difference lies in the time and effort required to complete a dungeon run, vs a raid. Doing LGuk run, even camping spawns for a few hours, is nothing like getting a raid force together, and breaking into Fear, and potentially wiping multiple times.
 

BoozeCube

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I don't know I think loot being rare is what makes it coveted. I have to admit I preferred the older EQ style of keeping items for a long time giving you time to appreciate and value them vs the current WoW style of here is the best loot in the game because you sifted through some squirrel shit, which we will invalidate the next patch just because.
 
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Mur

Trakanon Raider
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I don't know I think loot being rare is what makes it coveted. I have to admit I preferred the older EQ style of keeping items for a long time giving you time to appreciate and value them vs the current WoW style of here is the best loot in the game because you sifted through some squirrel shit, which we will invalidate the next patch just because.

Oh I agree with the point about gear being good for a long time, I want to always be excited about upgrades, not just be totally jaded about then because I get 5 upgrades per slot a week. My point was more about the sheer amount of time it took in EQ to gear a raid force/guild. I was one of two SK's in my guild, so I got class drops fairly quickly, but we had a ton of Clerics, and some of them went seemingly forever without any drops because the others had seniority, were part of the leaders clique, or had better random 100's. (this is pre-DKP). I'm not sure even people playing an old school niche game like this would want to go back to that.
 

2002User

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Raiding was actually the worst part of EverQuest, the only difficult stuff was 1 manning hard camps.
 
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They were just so boring. It started with Fear and Hate but nobody knew how to do it, so there were horrific wipes that took HOURS to recover from. Fear was the worst because the aggro range was massive so as soon as someone zones in, about 5 or 6 tough mobs aggro and then if they go to west wall, it is more like 15. Raiding back then was a total chore and it was also not even worthwhile. The loot was really bad, there were mistakes with the items like cleric gear with int etc, and generally it just wasn't very good anyway, and it was rare to drop, and if you have to share it with 10 other people on a raid, it was just tedious as hell.

Also, although it was too brutal at first, it became far too easy later on. With Hate people started porting up and then instantly evaccing to a safe spot and breaking in from there which was really easy. And Fear you just have everyone run to the safe spot and die and then rez people in. Clearing the zones from these safe spots was actually really easy. A single group could easy clear the whole zone minus bosses and after Kunark, that would drop to just 2 people clearing the zone safely. It ends up where a guild would just raid it every few days and it gets so boring and repetitive. There are no surprises and nothing is random or varied, it is just the exact same boring routine every time. And then when epics were added, we had to raid these places constantly, not just for the loots but for the epic components.

Sky was a more interesting zone but it still amounted to the same repetition but was far more tedious because it required so much clearing every time you raided. Ridiculous several hour raids to reach the top levels of sky. I did like that the bosses on each tier were quite interesting though. Naggy and Vox were better I think because they didn't take that long, although there wasn't much loot either. Just a few items on the journey and then a few items from the dragon.

The most challenging thing I've ever done in EQ was soloing bosses that I shouldn't have been able to kill. I used to solo the AM and GL in Lower Guk at level 50 which I don't think anyone else could ever do. It was hard work and dangerous but v exciting. The next best thing was grouping in dungeons, doing Chardok or Seb was really dangerous at a certain point. It got too easy in the later 50's and once you had lots of raid gear, but when Kunark was new and people were going to those places, it was extremely tough. I've never seen any other game before or since that had combat that tough and rewarding.

Also in later expansions there were more great group dungeons. A highlight for me was Ssra temple, but also on a custom server there was an amazing dungeon under Mistmoore which had scripted bosses that were more fun than any raid. A massive spider that spawned 2 unmezzable adds every 20% life it lost. So if you tried to kill it fast you would end up 8 really tough mobs on you and wipe. And if you go too slow everyone starts running out of mana. It took real tactics to win that.

Group content is the best by far. Also Vanguard had more tech for dungeons, like the one that had minerals growing out of the walls that would drain a group's mana if they stood near it. So the group had to huddle together and rush into groups of mobs or end up fighting in an area that drained their mana. Also more interesting mobs that did more like mobs that would die and then respawn as a ghost, mobs that would go invis, flying drakes that would swoop down to 'add', etc. Basically if they make it with EQ's challenge and balance, but with Vanguard's better classes and more advanced dungeon mechanics, this game will be awesome. Then just don't ruin it with raids..

Casual trash fag confirmed.
You know nothing about me eh?
 
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Ukerric

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There should be no raiding at all imo.
Raiding has its place. There's basically two very different way you can approach raiding.

The first is tightly tuned, hard-as-ass content that gives grand prizes. Heroic/Mythic raiding in WoW.

(and before you call heroic raiding easy and trivial, think about how many people have actually finished heroic TOV)

The second is casual, social-oriented raid, fully scalable raid.

The second model is raiding done for the purpose of playing together. An occasion to play with everyone online of your guild/group of friends/forum mates, spend a couple hours doing stuff instead of being broken in small single group cliques.

In the first model, you make a guild to tackle content (and you have the silliness of ultra-highend mythic progression guild that requires you to take holidays to be available to run the content).

In the second model, loot isn't better or more abundant than dungeons; the reason you run the raid is because you're in a guild.

(note that both of those models have no place for the abomination that is LFR. Normal raiding should be basically LFR level of complexity, with ilvl that is comparable to the WQ cap, and LFR shouldn't even exist)
 
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Not convinced. You don't really get to socialise more on a raid with a guild than you do just in guild chat anyway. And if there are people you really like, you can just group with them. I had regular groups with different people in my last guild and it was good because there were people from different timezones which suited me for playing at different times of the day, and they also wanted to do different things. So I had one guy who needed Tranix Crown so we did SolB regularly until we both got one, and then we did other stuff. And then I had a guy who wanted the monk epic so we grinded the mob in Karnor that dropped the pipe and we got a lot of exp doing that. And many more groups, and it was always more fun doing that than just being on a raid which wasn't even good for chatting anyway because everyone is busy travelling, buffing, clearing, etc.

Also the raid loot in EQ did make everything else obsolete. Everyone wanted a full set of planes armor from Hate and Fear, and once you had that, there was no reason to go anywhere else in the game. Sky had the best gear by far too, haste item that wouldn't get upgraded until sometime around Velious, uber rings and other quest items that were better than anything by far. Kunark was the same, the BP from Trak was the best, the legs from VS, and the raid haste was the best haste. So regular raiders had no reason to go to places like Seb or Chardok unless they just wanted to grind some exp. And dungeons are a lot more boring when people are only there to grind. And people wanted the shortcut, so they would join a raid guild and then do regular raids to Trak, the dragons for haste belts and spells and stuff, VS for legs and some other uber items, Chardok royals etc. And would often run older raid content too like Fear golems for the BCG, Aon, etc. Pretty soon the game becomes nothing but raiding because that is where all the best gear is.

Imo raiding should just be replaced by tuned dungeons. They should have some normal nameds and some that are heavily scripted, and could require similar effort to WoW mythic for some nameds. But if you do it as 6 people rather than trying to organise 50 zergers, it is much better, less of a chore, more chatting and actual playing. The problem with EQ raids especially is that the clearing was a boring chore, and then for bosses it was a good 10+ minutes of just buffing. If you were a buff class like a chanter or shammy, you had to buff 10+ people, then med, and do another 10+ people. Then someone pulls the raid mob and you gank it down in a few minutes. Group content can be just as challenging but without all the boring admin.

I would be all for raiding as the top end content, if it was really fun and challenging. But it isn't. Also some of the challenge that people think raiding has, isn't really challenging. It is a test of heal and dps output, tank mitigation etc. It is just a gear check. And nowadays there is some dance dance revolution line dancing around red blobs or whatever. The actual interesting mechanics could all be done in group content and would be more fun.
 
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Ravishing

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I like the idea of GW2 raids where they were huge global encounters that you could attend casually. You just hop around to wherever the big bad boss was going to spawn, join 200 other people and kill it, get loots and leave.

Guild Raiding was cool for us college no-lifers back in the day but holy hell is it a time sink and can't fly anymore. People don't have time for that shit.

Problem with GW2 is it's way too casual. No gear advancement. But the massive raid encounters should be used by others in a true MMO with gear progression imo.
 

Vinjin

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Too many of you are equating what raiding should be in a game such as Pantheon with raiding as you know it from 5, 10 and even 15 years ago. While some of us love to relive the glory/awfulness/greatness of Fear or Hate break ins, I'm not sure that's what the devs have in mind. That's not to suggest it won't and shouldn't be hard or even that there won't be tough break-ins. In fact, I noticed in the latest stream that one of the dungeons they zoned into (not the ice one) early on in the stream had roamers as soon as the group zoned in, which I thought was great.

But as pointed out, the dynamics of those old raids years ago led to scenarios requiring hours upon hours upon hours of time by the player, and that's something I don't think the devs want to re-create again. Whether it's better tuning or lesser penalties or something else, I just have a hard time believing it makes sense to them to design and tune content for groups around a 2 hour window yet do the same thing for raids around a 8-10 hour window.

In terms of loot quality, again, forget what EQ did 15 years ago and focus on what makes sense today. Raid loot should be the best in game but don't make it so ridiculously better that that is the only loot players strive to attain. Find a decent balance between raid loot and group loot and it should work fine.
 

Text

Trakanon Raider
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I don't remember if it was during one of the streams or in a Q&A, but Brad talked about raiding as being a pretty minor part of the game by design at some point.

That shit could be meaningless talk at this point of course, but it seems like they are aiming toward a group focused game.

I'm kind of fine with that since raiding has been done to death as an endgame concept over the years.
 

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
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They were just so boring. It started with Fear and Hate but nobody knew how to do it, so there were horrific wipes that took HOURS to recover from. Fear was the worst because the aggro range was massive so as soon as someone zones in, about 5 or 6 tough mobs aggro and then if they go to west wall, it is more like 15. Raiding back then was a total chore and it was also not even worthwhile. The loot was really bad, there were mistakes with the items like cleric gear with int etc, and generally it just wasn't very good anyway, and it was rare to drop, and if you have to share it with 10 other people on a raid, it was just tedious as hell.

Also, although it was too brutal at first, it became far too easy later on. With Hate people started porting up and then instantly evaccing to a safe spot and breaking in from there which was really easy. And Fear you just have everyone run to the safe spot and die and then rez people in. Clearing the zones from these safe spots was actually really easy. A single group could easy clear the whole zone minus bosses and after Kunark, that would drop to just 2 people clearing the zone safely. It ends up where a guild would just raid it every few days and it gets so boring and repetitive. There are no surprises and nothing is random or varied, it is just the exact same boring routine every time. And then when epics were added, we had to raid these places constantly, not just for the loots but for the epic components.

Sky was a more interesting zone but it still amounted to the same repetition but was far more tedious because it required so much clearing every time you raided. Ridiculous several hour raids to reach the top levels of sky. I did like that the bosses on each tier were quite interesting though. Naggy and Vox were better I think because they didn't take that long, although there wasn't much loot either. Just a few items on the journey and then a few items from the dragon.

The most challenging thing I've ever done in EQ was soloing bosses that I shouldn't have been able to kill. I used to solo the AM and GL in Lower Guk at level 50 which I don't think anyone else could ever do. It was hard work and dangerous but v exciting. The next best thing was grouping in dungeons, doing Chardok or Seb was really dangerous at a certain point. It got too easy in the later 50's and once you had lots of raid gear, but when Kunark was new and people were going to those places, it was extremely tough. I've never seen any other game before or since that had combat that tough and rewarding.

Also in later expansions there were more great group dungeons. A highlight for me was Ssra temple, but also on a custom server there was an amazing dungeon under Mistmoore which had scripted bosses that were more fun than any raid. A massive spider that spawned 2 unmezzable adds every 20% life it lost. So if you tried to kill it fast you would end up 8 really tough mobs on you and wipe. And if you go too slow everyone starts running out of mana. It took real tactics to win that.

Group content is the best by far. Also Vanguard had more tech for dungeons, like the one that had minerals growing out of the walls that would drain a group's mana if they stood near it. So the group had to huddle together and rush into groups of mobs or end up fighting in an area that drained their mana. Also more interesting mobs that did more like mobs that would die and then respawn as a ghost, mobs that would go invis, flying drakes that would swoop down to 'add', etc. Basically if they make it with EQ's challenge and balance, but with Vanguard's better classes and more advanced dungeon mechanics, this game will be awesome. Then just don't ruin it with raids..


You know nothing about me eh?

All this stuff I miss and would love to see Plane-like raids come back into play. I think you can do it without making it hours long but there's bound to be a way to make it challenge to get into the zone, a chore to get to the boss, and then a strategy that must be executed to ultimately win the final battle. Honestly, I think people are still the primary problem. There's no reason why people have to raid 3-5 times a week or rush to get a certain level. I understand the competitive aspect and lived it for years in EQ but looking back, it was completely unnecessary. We could taken our time, did things a month later, and enjoyed the content more. I remember every expansion there would be so much pressure to get max level in 1-3 days, hit so many AA's within week 2 or 3 and within 30 days, you are essentially done unless SoE cockblocked with something like the Rathe Council. I know it would probably be a horrible gameplay idea but I would like to see raids like the planes open only so often to force players to feel less pressured and if RL isn't their thing, explore a more content rich world and community. I'm not a big fan of instances but if you make 5, 6, or even 10 raids a once a month thing, you probably couldn't have the zones become competitive unless the guilds worked out their locations each month in advance.

I really think there's a happy middle ground out there but I don't think any game will risk it and I'm not sure people would even accept it. However, if you made the world something more substantial and created raid encounters that were more anticipated with high risk/reward, it might work.
 
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