Why were we so bad during live?

[feanan]

I don't remember half the cheese dick "strats" that are used on this server to kill shit,
but...eh. Maybe EQ just seemed more magical back at that time.

[Loly Taa]

Originally Posted by Auvdar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Because Furor was a dick.

back when I was in TMO on Live I used to chat with Furor in the FoH IRC channel and he was a pretty cool guy; wasn't afraid of anything.


Thing is, back in the day noone shared strats. I did however talk to a few people here and there and they were happy to share them- eventually all strats became public because with the advent of new expansions no one gave a fuck about older ones so they gave it all away.

If you knew how to use IRC though and knew how to bullshit with people, you'd get the strats fed to you with a silver spoon.

That was before they were all known.

And now? well, we all spilled it because it was no longer tactically advantageous.

[Reguiy]

Originally Posted by feanan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't remember half the cheese dick "strats" that are used on this server to kill shit,
but...eh. Maybe EQ just seemed more magical back at that time.

They were around, but we were just all too noob to realize it.

[Hamahakki]

There are a number of reasons it took so long. While I do think he will be killed much faster on p99 than he was on live, the fight is really hard. AoW hits so hard that the fight can spiral out of control very easily. If a tank dies or loses agro, the raid can get killed VERY quickly. The fight is also really long, you are 4-5 seconds away from losing the fight the whole time, so keeping it stable long enough to drop him is very difficult. The fight is also long enough that you can run out of mana if DPS isn't high enough.

My guild had the world-first AoW kill in live; here are a handful of reasons why I think it took us so long:

- Players were worse than they are now. Part of that is because the game was less than 2 years old then, but now there are people who have been playing Everquest for 15 years. Also, the web was also much more limited back then. You couldn't look up a strat online; everything we tried was something we came up with and we failed a LOT.

- We weren't ready for raiding in Velious. When EQ first came out, there was a technical limitation that no mob could have more than 32000 HP. The game was tuned so that the toughest mobs in the game (Nagafen/Vox) had exactly 32k, and everything else had less. For Kunark, this didn't change. Mobs did much nastier things: Trakanon did a huge amount of damage, VS can lifesteal back his entire health bar, and later mobs like Gorenaire or Hoshkar were even harder, but they all had 32k HP. The strategy was to bring a critical mass of players and just blow them up. The guild composition was also very different than what you see on P99. The most popular caster class, by far, was Wizard, and we had a ton of them. Wizards were awesome in Kunark as they could take 5% health off of the toughest mobs in the game with one spell. All of this changed in Velious. They fixed the 32k HP limitation and all of a sudden there were mobs with over a million HP. Wizards and Druids now sucked and Rogues, which we had very few of, were the best raid DPS in the game. The adjustment to 20 minute fights took a long time for us to get used to, a lot of the casters (myself included) rerolled into melee characters.

- There was no VOIP. All of our raids were conducted through in-game chat. This was fine when most of the raid setup was about making sure everyone's buffs were good and the pull was good then throwing yourselves at the mob, but not for a fight like Avatar of War. We didn't use any cheese, we set up a CH rotation for clerics and one for the tanks so that he was always tanked with disciplines on. With this strategy you are 4-5 seconds away from losing the fight the whole time, and there is very little time to adjust if something goes wrong. He hits so hard that the fight can spiral out of control very easily. If a tank dies or loses agro, the raid can get killed VERY quickly. The fight is also very long, so keeping it stable long enough to drop him is very difficult.

- There was a huge lack of urgency for killing the tough Velious mobs. The early parts of the expansion were spent exploring, with only occasional guild events in Velious. We also spent a ton of time killing classic and Kunark targets, excited by how much the competition for them had thinned out. There was also a lot of indecision about what the guild goals were. After the faction system of Velious was discovered, we decided to align ourselves with the giants because the gear had slightly higher AC which the guild tanks thought would be a key to progression and because "we are a guild which kills dragons." I remember being pissed because I had spent some time getting Kline to be non-KoS in Skyshrine. For a while, we had a number of guild members permanently in Plane of Mischief trying to progress there as well. We also had a number of growing pains killing Velious raid targets as well, either getting our ass handed to us, or killing some very difficult targets which ended up not being mobs which drop useful loot. It was hard to drag people away from the Plane of Growth farmfest to get killed all night by mobs which may not even drop anything.

[Treats]

Avatar of War has the potential to do 1152 x 8 -- 9216 damage in one single round (and thats excluding two kicks and bashes or one kick and one bash -- Its around 9700 without defensive.

With Defensive I think his max hit is around 750 or something, I forgot how to do the calculation with DB/DI. 750 x 8 -- 6000 + kick and bash again (2).

Max damage of around 6400 with defensive on in ONE round. If you thought Bzzt in Plane of Sky was hard quadding, AoW makes the bee look like a chump. You have absolutely no chance of tanking him without Defensive or a similar disc. If your tank dies anytime where it is not preplanned for your clerics to switch your raidforce is fucked and you will die. Ideally you need three to four warriors who are decked out in NTOV shit and all of your melee DPS equipped with Primals.

Half the fight is keeping your tanks alive and actually performing a good transition to the next Warrior without a mishap. The other half is how many times you need to transition and making sure your clerics do not run out of mana. This depends mostly on your melee DPS. This could be as many as three to four if your raid force is not geared in the best velious shit.

I just don't understand how everyone here can think he will die so fast. This guy can drop an entire raid in 30 seconds. He will run your shit over and not look back.

[Durothil Skyreaver]

Originally Posted by Treats [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Avatar of War has the potential to do 1152 x 8 -- 9216 damage in one single round (and thats excluding two kicks and bashes or one kick and one bash -- Its around 9700 without defensive.

With Defensive I think his max hit is around 750 or something, I forgot how to do the calculation with DB/DI. 750 x 8 -- 6000 + kick and bash again (2).

Max damage of around 6400 with defensive on in ONE round. If you thought Bzzt in Plane of Sky was hard quadding, AoW makes the bee look like a chump. You have absolutely no chance of tanking him without Defensive or a similar disc. If your tank dies anytime where it is not preplanned for your clerics to switch your raidforce is fucked and you will die. Ideally you need three to four warriors who are decked out in NTOV shit and all of your melee DPS equipped with Primals.

Half the fight is keeping your tanks alive and actually performing a good transition to the next Warrior without a mishap. The other half is how many times you need to transition and making sure your clerics do not run out of mana. This depends mostly on your melee DPS. This could be as many as three to four if your raid force is not geared in the best velious shit.

I just don't understand how everyone here can think he will die so fast. This guy can drop an entire raid in 30 seconds. He will run your shit over and not look back.

Not to mention that it was Legacy of Steel AND Shock of Swords combining forces to take him down. I'll have to ask just how many were involved all together.

[Spitty]

Dialup was a significant problem.

By a year into Velious, I'd say a lot of people invested in a better connection if they were raiding alot.

Starting out, though - it's alot like what Kline said, people's connections weren't ready for 20 minute fights with 36+ people. Not to mention the hellish latency if another guild was racing for the spawn, or decided to bring their entire online force plus their bots and hang out in the arena.

I remember disconnecting and dialing until I got a decent connection before every raid, or bringing my entire tower PC over to a friend's spot, until they ran highspeed to our place.

[webrunner5]

Raids on here are a joke. They last about 3 minutes. I know that is the way it is in Kunark with the gear and knowledge we have here.. I was a Cleric in a big guild and man trying to chain heal for 20 minutes or more was some damn stressful crap I can tell you. Trying to time it right for that long of time was intense. Velious raids can pucker your butthole up. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Indoor ones to me are the worse.

[Nyrod]

man, i need to find all my velious screenshots mmmm juuicy

[falkun]

Internet and computers were slower, broadband an i5's didn't exist, so there was less margin for error. As a bard, its pretty easy to see: keeping 4 songs up is easy on P99, but look through all the old bard websites on how "pro" it was to maintain 4 songs even keeping 3 up was considered "good". That's not a player limitation, that's a hardware limitation. That's just one reason.