The difference was that the expansions before GoD had something to do for everyone. When Luclin released, Emp and LIS where considered nearly unbeatable encounters, but there was a ton of raid content that was easier: Shei Vinitras, Greig, THO, etc. Even the very first introductory raids of GoD: Ikkinz 3&4 were hard as fuck. Whereas a low end guild could complete the first few tiers of PoP progression, even Time guilds could easily wipe in Ikkinz. Shit, I remember near-wipes just clearing trash to get to the zone ins. And the next tier, Uqua, was infamously about 10x more difficult than anything before it. To make things worse, you were pretty much stuck in elemental/Time gear until you beat Uqua and unlocked Qvic. Things actually got a little bit easier once you gained Qvic access and began farming that gear. But very few guilds could get that far in the first place.
Not to mention the style of the expansions really hurt a lot of classes. The game completely switched from calculated, marathon raiding to fast and furious fights. As a shaman, I felt more useless than I ever had before. If a mob miraculously wasn't immune to slow, it was at 25% before you could even land a slow anyways. And forget dots. Anything that wasn't melee dps, heals, or buffs was basically useless.
So 95% of the playerbase that purchased GoD either a) couldn't utilize anything in the expansion or b) wiped repeatedly to every raid encounter they came across. Pissing off 95% of your playerbase 9 months before the release of WoW wasn't the best move on SoE's part. Especially considering the large amount of players who read FoH daily at this time. Furor was on his mission to get everyone to leave EQ for WoW during the end of PoP, which was a way more popular expansion than GoD.
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