Was raiding easier in era on Live? Yes, but not because P99 devs have intentionally made things harder across the board. It's almost entirely because P99 is run on 3rd party code (EQEMU) which has to be able to support EVERY EQ EXPANSION RELEASED. Why does that matter? I quit live in the middle of Luclin, but from what I've seen on other EQEMU (non-p99) servers that have more expansions enabled, it's pretty clear there was a revamp or rewrite of some of the base NPC behavior and resistance code.
After rewatching the linked videos (which I'm literally in), the main difference is that p99 does not handle spell resistance properly for the era. It was rare for dragon fear to last the full duration, even without 255 MR. You'll note how often it breaks early in Lowlo's videos. It was easier to resist dragon AEs - hence why Sontalak isn't instamelting our MT Grudgebringer who, yes, is sporting some crafted armor. Most noteworthy is probably how this affects charm on p99 - it broke a hell of a lot more often on Live, enough to make the feats p99 enchanters are capable of either not worthwhile or impossible. (caveat: p99 either removed or public knowledge never knew about the undercon Kael giant capable of allowing enchanters to solo KDT)
So it's mostly that they're trying to create an experience that is as accurate as possible but due to software changes (and having no alternative emulator software) they are stuck using something designed for later expansions. There's also many small inaccuracies of information, but those don't affect things as much as the fundamental code differences.
And uh, yes, uber guilds did clear expansions in era. You can't claim to have been following the 'top guilds' across servers and not know about FoH, AL, LoS, or even our little Povar's wannabe, Triton. They all had websites regularly being updated with their raid accomplishments, and things were definitely being killed in era, so stop talking out of your ass. Even in our case, Povar, my guild, Rising Ascension, was not anything resembling a hardcore raiding guild - we had maybe 2 dozen players you could consider 'dedicated' enough to compare to P99's current raid atmosphere - the rest were mixed casual "warmbodies" - and even we cleared Vulak and Tunare unassisted, in era, before Luclin.
EQ is not a difficult or complex game. The mechanics of it have been known and minmaxed for 20 years.
P99 is harder than Live because it's being run on imperfect emulator software with imperfect/inaccurate game database knowledge. That's it. They've done their best. Without access to legacy server/client code, it's not going to get much better.
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