Quote:
Originally Posted by Troxx
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I can’t remember the name of the trial but think that run in Gates of Discord you has to do with a single group with the ass-beater mob that could and would trash a defensive warrior that wasn’t raid geared to the 9s. Having a charmed dog thingy meant you only had to survive the brutality for a few short seconds because the hasted dog would rip it in half.
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Probably talking about Tipt or Vxed. Though charm was certainly abused in other zones, those two had a big safety net.
To piggyback on the rest of your points, the majority of even the raiding playerbase was not 60 / level-capped until Luclin. Even the hardcore guilds were mostly composed of sub60s in Velious. Let alone 60s with their rare Kunark spells. Level differences make a huge difference in terms of landing spells, attacks, etc.
Take a look at the original casters realm epic guides, you'll see guides recommending multiple groups of players for low to mid 50s epic mobs that easily are soloable/duoable/trioable in Kunark era.
Project1999 is going on 13 years old. To put that into the timeline of EQ Live, EQ would be well into it's 18th expansion: Veil of Alaris. And even with P1999, there was years of optimization/metagaming that carried into 2009. We knew bards could AE kite and outlevel anyone despite a large exp penalty. We knew 3 50 mages and a cleric could kill Nagafen. We knew whirl was broken. We knew you could just use hoops to trivialize any 32K HP mob. We knew you could use mallets in lieu of waiting for a tank to establish aggro. Take all that and add 13 more years of people figuring shit out.
1999-2001 was a completely different era of gaming. The vast majority of players were terrible in comparison to private servers. You won't get the genie back in the bottle here. You're playing an emulator of something 20 years old with mostly people who have a decade or more experience. Give these same people countless guides, videos, wikis/spoilers, whatever. Contrast that with a player base of varying levels of engagement (i.e. more casuals checking out what their friends are playing), a max of 1-2 years experience, and prima strategy guides.
This isn't anything unique to P99/Everquest. The same shit occurred with World of Warcraft. You had optimized players doing 300% of what they were doing in 2004-2006. Several years past the infamous Science of War (~2003) rant expressing nostalgia for the era of EQ before the powergaming/optimization.