plane of sky and velious?
 

Plane of Sky is a rite of passage, and a good gateway to raiding. IMO, if you can't run your guild through PoS, you can't eq yet, plus you miss one of the early high points of the quirky game design that makes classic eq unmatched for fun, learning strats, and learning not to aggro NPC's.

Does Sky still retain it's value after Velious? I hope so, for the reasons I mentioned. It is, truly, a great "gateway" raiding zone for guilds.

Will it still be valuable? I know some epics are associated with it, but is PoS still gonna be a gateway raid zone for up and coming guilds on p99? Would be a damn shame for Velious to make PoS obsolete -- it should be on everyone's "must do" list.

on a blue server? keeper of souls is the only thing that comes to mind as staying relevant unless you really give a shit about stuff like.. shaman fd ring

on a red server, most of the zone stays relevant

I am sure 41% haste belts are always appreciated. Also just speaking from experience most of the rogue stuff is still quality gear in Velious. I suspect the same is true for other classes as well

a good question to ask yourself is, "does this have irreplacable items?"

hate/fear - not so much. farming these for armor is much less valuable use of time when Velious is released

sky - plenty of items that are not replaced in Velious come from sky. ranger cloak, shaman ring, haste belts, so forth. People want the loot, so it will die, although it'll likely slow down for a period til the novelty dies down a bit.

CH Neck, FD ring, ranger cloak, necro epic cloak, magician epic crown. Then the gear with all the stats. I can't see myself wanting to do sky each week after raiding velious is the problem.

This. Add to it the 41% Haste belts for Tanks, Monks and Rogues(sort of). Each class also gets about 1 really solid stat item that is difficult to replace in Velious. Druids get the shoulders for example that are tough to replace.

The problem becomes the sky rotation I think. I'm guessing a large chunk of the guilds on the current rotation will cease raiding Sky for the beginning of Velious. Some may stop raiding sky entirely. Some may return at a reduced capacity of once a month or less.

However Sky isn't friendly to that sort of reduced raiding amount. You would have to rekey your corpses 2-3 times before you raid it again, and trying to do it without preexisting keys limits you to 24 characters or just lots of corpse summoning.

I'll be intrigued to see what each guild elects to do regarding Sky.

In my Daldaen-approved-Utopian view, the sky rotation will cease to exist but guilds will have a dialogue of their intentions with sky. This would allow a more classic raiding experience. So Taken may suggest, "Hey we are looking to raid Sky from Tuesday-Thursday during PMs", and other guilds would respect that and not raid sky during those 3 days that month. We would be able to camp up there and keep our keys for 2 days while we farm. Then not come back for another month or two and do it again. It saves port stones up and down and the need to key corpse, which is basically how all guild's did sky back in the day.

Good luck with ANY high end raiding in Kunark zones the first 3 months when Velious hits. :p

I don't think it's guilds per se that want to stop, just people sick of doing it every week reducing numbers because they think they'll be camping Lodi for a shield (lol) or otherwise cashing in on Velious camps (lol).

Not that I fully disagree, but Hate and Fear can be cleared very fast (especially Fear) and you can get valuable resist gear from the armor dropped. Since they are pretty much cake to clear, I think they are VERY relevant in order to build stats and resists so you are not a hindrance for some raid mobs in Velious.

Velious (with the exception of NTOV) is mostly MR, FR and CR important. There are a few dragons in NTOV which are PR or DR or both based. Those...suck.

I'd say Velious is more like, no resist at all. The era of AoE dodging

anyhow, hate and fear will still die, but point remains: sky has irreplaceable gear, hate/fear do not, thus once things settle I expect sky to be a part of our lives forever, sadly. I think if this game has proven anything, it is that if it drops loot, people will kill it. forever.