Why were we so bad during live?

[koros]

Every uber guild had only level 60 players at the start of Velious basically. Come partway through everyone was 60.

Aow quadded and flurried for iirc 1154 per hit, giving him a max damage of 1154 x 6 a round, definitely low enough for a charmed giant to survive a single max round.

Even if you used PC tanks, mallets would have made aggro transition easy, and a defensive warrior can always survive an AoW max round (also the odds of a max, no miss, + flurry round weren't very high).

Frozen moses/jesus were early Velious and used dictate to put out hella dps from what I understand (but I wasn't 100% on that), but FoH didn't manage to kill AoW with him before they got nerfed (but they got him quite low). LoS used charmed giants to tank while PCs were in range, for the month they switched pet aggro (summer 2001), and killed him.

Regardless, 5 charmed level 50 giants should put out a few hundred dps and should have been able to drop AoW after 10-15 minutes, even without melee in there. Just consistatly /assist AoW to switch targets on any given charm break.

[Layze]

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

Every uber guild had only level 60 players at the start of Velious basically. Come partway through everyone was 60.

Aow quadded and flurried for iirc 1154 per hit, giving him a max damage of 1154 x 6 a round, definitely low enough for a charmed giant to survive a single max round.

Even if you used PC tanks, mallets would have made aggro transition easy, and a defensive warrior can always survive an AoW max round (also the odds of a max, no miss, + flurry round weren't very high).

Frozen moses/jesus were early Velious and used dictate to put out hella dps from what I understand (but I wasn't 100% on that), but FoH didn't manage to kill AoW with him before they got nerfed (but they got him quite low). LoS used charmed giants to tank while PCs were in range, for the month they switched pet aggro (summer 2001), and killed him.

Regardless, 5 charmed level 50 giants should put out a few hundred dps and should have been able to drop AoW after 10-15 minutes, even without melee in there. Just consistatly /assist AoW to switch targets on any given charm break.

The problem was the giants would die even through CH chains. It took a while to find a charmable giant that could survive a whole fight and sustainably be CH'd through it. You have to rememberer the giants don't have disciplines like warrior do, so they drop quite quickly. Their AC is relatively terrible also so they take big hits constantly.

[khanable]

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like guilds of yesteryears gave a shit about their reputation

LOL YOU FAGGOTS KILLED AOW WITH SOULFIRES AND CHARMED GIANTS WHAT A LOSER ZERG SHIT GUILD

-the EQ community

And to be honest I don't recall the rampant use of Soulfires and mallets in live.. maybe they were known but I certainly don't recall seeing any of them being used except for the rare instance I'd run into a Paladin with the Soulfire.

Fuck, I don't even remember seeing warriors with proc weapons all that much. I remember dual lammies being the standard. Maybe a CSS in the offhand.

Chalk it up to a bunch of ignorance perhaps.

[Ruenaros]

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

Fuck, I don't even remember seeing warriors with proc weapons all that much. I remember dual lammies being the standard. Maybe a CSS in the offhand.

I remember being shocked when I started on P99 at how ineffective fast, good ratio weapons were for holding agro. The regular ole white damage on live was giving way more threat for tanks than it does here... that's how they got away with it.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

even frozen jesus could not kill the AoW

[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.

[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.