Planes of Power is what killed it for me. I was a raid leader in a progression guild on Morell Thule, and the flagging process of POP damn near destroyed our guild. Ultimately they survived and still raid on live to this day, but there is no one left from the original guild that stuck together through Vox / Naggy Classic Planes, Sky, VP, NToV / AoW / ST, Emp / Seru / VT and all the way to PoTime Phase 3.
The PoP raid progression system was the absolute worst mistake EQ ever made. It was so frustrating because the way the planar progression worked you inevitably ended up with a large number of veteran raiders that were twiddling their thumbs while we waited for the more casual elements to catch up. A number of the veterans that were ready for Elemental Gods or PoTime would quit or jump ship because they were tired of waiting, forcing us to recruit, forcing us to backflag and re-gear new recruits, which lead to more veterans getting burnt out, which lead to... you see how this went? We did this for about a year, just back and forth between being on the verge of breaking PoTime Phase 4 and having to go back to killing Grummus and Terris Thule.
Although it is my personal favorite fight, ultimately I think it was Xegony that killed my gaming days in EQ. I spent more time and energy trying to bring that bitch down and every failure would frustrate our team that much more. The more people left, and new people had to fill the ranks, the harder she became. She was the pinnacle of raid content in my opinion. Her event was perfection in my eyes. Anyone that has fought her knows just how intense that raid can be, especially in the early days before CoTH bots at the rainbow and most of your raid in full elemental / time equipment. All the other gods were a joke compared to her.
Rathe Council was difficult, don't get me wrong, but it was difficult because it was either bugged or so highly over tuned (I forget which) that I think only 1 or 2 guilds managed to down them before the nerfs. Even after the nerfs, they were a significant hurdle... but if you could down Xegony cleanly, then the nerfed version of Rathe Council was actually quite easy by comparison. It was just tedious and most of what caused wipes were small mistakes piling up as the event slogged on. We only had two kinds of wipes on Rathe Council. We either fucked it up within the first 10 minutes with bad pulls or it was right at the end when the last 1 or 2 were being brought down. By that point you were spread so thin that even the smallest mistake could snowball out of control. However, with Xegony every moment was on the verge of disaster no matter how well things were going. Any one small thing could quickly end an otherwise perfect execution.
But yea, for me, it was Planes of Power and their progression system that cashed in my chips. I think POP is both the best expansion in terms of how raids were tuned to be mechanical and not just HP sponges like VT / Seru, and also the worst expansion thanks to flagging.
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