Why were we so bad during live?
 

It took a whole year for the AoW to legitimately die. Mallets, Soulfires, these things all all existed then, and guilds definitely knew how to use mechanics to their advantage. Why didn't any guilds just grab 4-5 level 50 giants, charm em, and chain CHs or Soulfires on em?

Because Furor was a dick.

Going to make fun of me... but my guild just got a bunch of warriors and a bunch of clerics.....

Took us about 5 warriors in before he died.

This would never work due to player hate mechanics. Charmed mobs could certainly add DPS, but as a viable tank the clerics, or players, healing the giants would get murdered. Correct me if I am wrong, but AoW is beast cause its unslowable, rampages, quads and flurries. You need solid tanks, a rampage tank, and a solid CH chain to sustain the duration of the fight. I faintly remember tanks having to swap in to rotate defensive stance as well (without it, the mana consumption and timing on CH chain was too intensive).

Running out of mana was commonplace during this fight and once that happens... Loading, please wait.

The Frozen Jesus/Moses kills were in an era where charmed pets ranked extremely high on the aggro list. With enough giants & aggro generating weapons, you could have charmed tanks with many thousands of HP generating sufficient aggro so that the clerics could easily keep them up.

The percentage of people who were 60 was far lower. People hadn't farmed as much gear, the content prior hadn't been so dominated. They didn't know about all the strats or spawn chains. Etc...

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like guilds of yesteryears gave a shit about their reputation

LOL YOU FAGGOTS KILLED AOW WITH SOULFIRES AND CHARMED GIANTS WHAT A LOSER ZERG SHIT GUILD

-the EQ community

And to be honest I don't recall the rampant use of Soulfires and mallets in live.. maybe they were known but I certainly don't recall seeing any of them being used except for the rare instance I'd run into a Paladin with the Soulfire.

Fuck, I don't even remember seeing warriors with proc weapons all that much. I remember dual lammies being the standard. Maybe a CSS in the offhand.

Chalk it up to a bunch of ignorance perhaps.

even frozen jesus could not kill the AoW

Also, we weren't nearly as organized as a playerbase. Consider Everlore and similar sites. They were so full of misinformation and rumor that it prevented the creation and use of certain strategies. Also, parsing and such had only just come into its infancy later in the game. True and powerful knowledge was a rare and jealously guarded thing back then. Now days people can't wait to update the wiki for the latest game as soon as they uncover something new.

Every uber guild had only level 60 players at the start of Velious basically. Come partway through everyone was 60.

Aow quadded and flurried for iirc 1154 per hit, giving him a max damage of 1154 x 6 a round, definitely low enough for a charmed giant to survive a single max round.

Even if you used PC tanks, mallets would have made aggro transition easy, and a defensive warrior can always survive an AoW max round (also the odds of a max, no miss, + flurry round weren't very high).

Frozen moses/jesus were early Velious and used dictate to put out hella dps from what I understand (but I wasn't 100% on that), but FoH didn't manage to kill AoW with him before they got nerfed (but they got him quite low). LoS used charmed giants to tank while PCs were in range, for the month they switched pet aggro (summer 2001), and killed him.

Regardless, 5 charmed level 50 giants should put out a few hundred dps and should have been able to drop AoW after 10-15 minutes, even without melee in there. Just consistatly /assist AoW to switch targets on any given charm break.