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LuckyCat posted:I miss buffing classes. buff classes are some of the first microtransactions of mmos
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Aug 19, 2021 15:33
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it's not that they make design "a pain" its that they are either stupidly insane overpowered or complete terrible with no in-between possible. even right now on everquest TLP the enchanter is the most powerful class in the game by a goddamned mile. bards were the strongest class for a good portion of everquest's life and would be if not for enchanters being even better. rift's support classes used to be absolutely necessary in raids, with the one that cost $30 to unlock being the most powerful of all on the opposite end of the spectrum you have stuff like everquest druids, which were hot garbage for a good 12-15 years until everquest gave them decent damage I like support classes and have played them extensively but it is exceedingly difficult to keep them fair
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Aug 19, 2021 15:43
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I've been wondering lately whether an MMO actually needs the classes to be all that balanced. On P99 the classes are unbalanced as poo poo, yet not everyone is an enchanter. There are people playing every class just because they like the flavor of that class. There are probably arguments to be made that pure melee could be given more skills to make them more interactive, rangers and paladins could be tuned a bit to be better at something, but ultimately none of those things will ever make them as powerful as an enchanter. Is that okay? Like, pen and paper D&D, not all the classes are balanced, and yet millions of people have still been loving playing that game for decades. Can we have an MMO where each class is fun and has its own genuinely unique capabilities, it's own flavor and niche, and forgive the fact that maybe not every class will be equally powerful as a result? Are we just taking it for granted that MMOs need to be balanced like a competitive game when that may not be the case? I start thinking about WoW, and how its approach to balance has been to make all the classes kind of samey. I think that's a pity. If I were to start my own kickstarter scam MMO, I would want bard swarm kiting to be a thing, necro and enchanter charm soloing to be a thing. I think it's really cool when you have all these unique approaches to playing the game come out of people figuring out what they can do with the tools they've been given, when those tools are actually powerful, and when class selection actually has weight and really feels like a unique identity.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:37
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retpocileh posted:I've been wondering lately whether an MMO actually needs the classes to be all that balanced. Just my 2 cents but i think if classes are interesting and varied, they don’t need to be balanced. I guess PVP MMOs are different but this discussion is about PVE MMOs anyways.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:42
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Yeah there's no reason classes need to be balanced. I'm gonna play a tank because I like tanking but OP classes (and the most interesting ones) are almost always casters of some kind.retpocileh posted:If I were to start my own kickstarter scam MMO, I would want bard swarm kiting to be a thing, necro and enchanter charm soloing to be a thing. I think it's really cool when you have all these unique approaches to playing the game come out of people figuring out what they can do with the tools they've been given, when those tools are actually powerful, and when class selection actually has weight and really feels like a unique identity. Hell yeah.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:44
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Orc Priest posted:drat! That's not good. I wish Brad hadn't hosed up Vanguard Saga of Heroes. Imagine if Vanguard stayed alive it got a steam re-release nowadays? Oooh what could have been... Sure didn't help them back in 2012: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/9138 Also the comments on that video are loving sad as poo poo, unbelievably sad. Who in the name of Rasputin's hairy balls would ever describe that as "I'm hoping Pantheon is as immersive as it looks, I need a game to get lost in."
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Aug 19, 2021 19:10
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retpocileh posted:I've been wondering lately whether an MMO actually needs the classes to be all that balanced. Absolutely, and it seems like EQ had enough interesting basic mechanics that emergent behaviour like swarm kiting was possible. And I think the EQ dev team did a great job permitting some of the weirder stuff while smoothing out some of the obvious exploits. For example, stuff like shrunken races being able to see through walls, I don't think that was ever intended but they never really patched it either. Except for when they did, for zones like Vex Thal (last dungeon of Luclin) where they doubled up all of the walls to prevent exactly that. They were really good at rolling with the punches with things like that. I feel like the best thing to do is "simply" have a separate set of stats / balance numbers for PvP combat vs PvE. It's twice as much work, but simpler than trying to water down PvE to make PvP totally balanced.
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Aug 19, 2021 19:46
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You're going to start caring about balance the moment your favorite class can't do basic content.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:17
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retpocileh posted:I've been wondering lately whether an MMO actually needs the classes to be all that balanced. They don't if you don't care about PvP. Just never actually say you don't care about PvP or else you'll upset the 12 people on P99 Red. RagnarokZ posted:Who in the name of Rasputin's hairy balls would ever describe that as "I'm hoping Pantheon is as immersive as it looks, I need a game to get lost in." FWIW classic EQ is ugly as sin but immersive as hell since you actually need to pay attention to where you're going and learn to navigate by landmarks instead of GPS maps. Or if you don't you're gonna megadie and that corpse run will suck a lot. Pantheon isn't going to be nearly as good at those things though so it'll just be ugly and not immersive, probably.
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Aug 19, 2021 22:16
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They fuckin hired that dipshit Minus to be their inhouse content creator. 
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Aug 20, 2021 10:36
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hobocrunch posted:They fuckin hired that dipshit Minus to be their inhouse content creator. Gross. Dude's an actual sociopath.
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Aug 20, 2021 15:56
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Who is this person? I love a good trainwreck, which is why I love Brad McQuaid's Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
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Aug 20, 2021 22:26
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FrostyPox posted:Who is this person? I love a good trainwreck, which is why I love Brad McQuaid's Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen PantheonPlus guy. He and VR's awful CM Kilsin ousted the only good moderator on the game's subreddit (Nick) in the most underhanded and passive aggressive way imaginable: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3852635&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=47#post513778773 Most of it is removed but archived: https://www.removeddit.com/r/PantheonMMO/comments/ml76qr/mod_update_an_unfortunate_incident_to_report/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210406085030/https://i.imgur.com/BXC9Vvp.png http://web.archive.org/web/20210406085029/https://i.imgur.com/wi1gPHy.png (guess who he "got that bit of feedback" from) There's a summary earlier in the thread under where I linked. Also just a generally insufferable person on Pantheon's discord. Pretty much the exact kind of person the game deserves.
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Aug 20, 2021 23:19
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FrostyPox posted:Who is this person? I love a good trainwreck, which is why I love Brad McQuaid's Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen He's essentially a parasite, he does what he does for clout and money. It's a bit hard to paint a picture for this but PantheonPlus used to be called WoWPlus. The guy clearly wanted to make it big with a website that has guides and other stuff- But he's mislabeled him self as a power gamer (min maxxer, hardcore w/e you call it) but in actual fact he's at best just average. Anyhow WoWPlus was a completely failed venture because he's unlikable and his guides are literally just noob tutorials (You can go back and watch it on the PantheonPlus youtube it's still there). I don't know why he stopped with making WoW guides, I think he caught this game and saw he could make a quick buck because the current audience of the game is essentially "Brad McQuaid fanboys". Anyhow, PantheonPlus comes around and his entire idea is basically to get people who know more about things to do his hardwork for him- "Community matters" he spouts, to justify it. https://pantheon.plus/ You can see this website is run by a 2 year old. Anyhow, it seems commonplace in his podcasts for him to be arguing with this poor dude Therek, who's actually a nice fellow and very open to opinions about how the game is missing all these features that WoW had (Transmog, Minimap, Group Finder) and sure I'm not saying those features can't be fun in other games but that's never what Pantheon has been about. He fundamentally doesn't understand what Pantheon is trying to do (more immersive eq-like mmo). All the while he interjects with these long rants about "how he's not tooting his own horn" but then tells you about his "top WoW guild" (Which guaranteed was not top just based on how he talks about WoW in general) and how his playerskill alone caused the Rogue to get nerfed in the Alpha (But what they don't tell you is Minus turned down the reveal of the Enchanter to watch more Rogue gameplay which we'd seen before). Then you add all that Sachant has said on top. Also if you're wondering how I listened to so many podcasts when I dislike him this much, it's because I didn't realise it at the time- Sometimes parasitic poo poo like this doesn't click with you until you start putting things together.
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Aug 22, 2021 03:19
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hobocrunch posted:https://pantheon.plus/ You can see this website is run by a 2 year old.  Hey that took a weirdly long time to load, what's up wi- [url]https://www.pantheonmmo.com/wp-content/uploads/pan-media/live/screenshots/[030]20200729_Amberfaet_033(FULL).png[/url] Oh nooooooo
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Aug 23, 2021 07:24
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hobocrunch posted:It's a bit hard to paint a picture for this but PantheonPlus used to be called WoWPlus. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/8ytwj6/hello_rwow_we_are_wowplusorg He made the video private but the responses paint enough of a picture.
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Aug 23, 2021 14:06
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Guys I'm starting to think that the Pantheon team is not very competent and the game might not ever come out
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Aug 23, 2021 23:24
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FrostyPox posted:Guys I'm starting to think that the Pantheon team is not very competent and the game might not ever come out They just need money. Make sure to pledge and it'll accelerate development!
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Aug 23, 2021 23:29
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I should learn how to use unity and start a kickstarter for an old school mmo, I'm tired of working
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Aug 24, 2021 00:06
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https://twitter.com/ConceptLost/with_replies?lang=en I found his oldish~ Twitter. He keeps retweeting Funko Pop poo poo.. 
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Aug 30, 2021 06:16
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This doesn't matter because it'll never release, but, something about the way this game looks just makes it look like absolute poo poo. I mean, it looks like an attempt at 2005-2008 era "WoW Killer" and the graphic style is muddied enough that it is both not charming (like EQ1) or texturally-good-looking (I'm sure I'll get poo poo for this, but, say, FF14). If the intent was to remake EQ, just .. remake EQ. Why make launch-ESO with literal EQ sound effects and text? e: lol I posted the same thing in 2019, gently caress me
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Sep 3, 2021 21:05
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When you're right you're right.
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Sep 3, 2021 21:17
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suuma posted:This doesn't matter because it'll never release, but, something about the way this game looks just makes it look like absolute poo poo. I mean, it looks like an attempt at 2005-2008 era "WoW Killer" and the graphic style is muddied enough that it is both not charming (like EQ1) or texturally-good-looking (I'm sure I'll get poo poo for this, but, say, FF14). I don't think it was ever supposed to be much of a game. At first it was about milking a bunch of EQ addicts, and once that was done they moved on to milking investors who needed to be reeled in with those 'wow killer' features. Now that brad killed himself with those funds you have a few developers left who never got the message about it being a grift. Although, that is the kind read on things since they are probably just milking what little is left.
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Sep 3, 2021 22:52
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I think everybody in this thread needs to (re)donate to the Pantheon forums so we can keep this amazing project going forward! Cheers!
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Sep 4, 2021 01:29
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Node posted:I think everybody in this thread needs to (re)donate to the Pantheon forums so we can keep this amazing project going forward! Cheers! Maybe if I donate and promote them enough, they'll hire me for pennies to work on this amazing MMO with them!
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Sep 4, 2021 02:35
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Sachant posted:Maybe if I donate and promote them enough, they'll hire me for pennies to work on this amazing MMO with them! There's no way they're actually paying that Community manager a full wage- right? He's essentially a forum/discord moderator who puts out a Youtube video once a month where he just reads off a bunch of questions... If I had donated to this MMO and found out they'd paid this gently caress 7 years of full time wages I'd be actually livid. Now they basically have 2 of these people as well...
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Sep 4, 2021 15:14
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cmdrk posted:Absolutely, and it seems like EQ had enough interesting basic mechanics that emergent behaviour like swarm kiting was possible. And I think the EQ dev team did a great job permitting some of the weirder stuff while smoothing out some of the obvious exploits. For example, stuff like shrunken races being able to see through walls, I don't think that was ever intended but they never really patched it either. Except for when they did, for zones like Vex Thal (last dungeon of Luclin) where they doubled up all of the walls to prevent exactly that. They were really good at rolling with the punches with things like that. iirc the double-walled vex thal served another purpose too, some dudes managed to get into the zone before it was done (it's hard to find any information about this thanks to super-dead old guild forums, but the key quest was originally unobtaniable-by-obfuscation as opposed to just not being implemented) and if you were mounted, your horses rear end or beak clipping through a wall would aggro stuff from wherever they felt like aggroing from, which the devs only cared about because it made mounts look like stupid garbage during the expansion that introduced those mounts (I assume the horse aggro is fixed now, I actually haven't played a horse-medding class in a loooong time) this highlights my favorite thing about EQ though: they kept releasing expansions with clearly unfinished content and just made it a bitch to access, hoping that hard mobs in the poopsocker MMO would keep the poopsocker crowd out of the hard mob zones. like velious had an insanely unfinished plane of mischief that went through a ton of changes before it became the "original PoM" that people remember though this wasn't really a traditional endgame zone, luclin had janky vex thal and an atrociously designed acrylia caverns, planes of power had super-broken plane of time with super-quarm etc. they kept failing to hobble players enough to pull off their dumb scheme of "make it too hard to get to the unfinshed poo poo so we have time to finish the poo poo" but they just kept doing it I realize this isn't entirely on topic but I jump at any chance to talk about everquest with people who might have the chance of knowing what the heck i'm talking about
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Sep 5, 2021 07:27
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blatman posted:iirc the double-walled vex thal served another purpose too, some dudes managed to get into the zone before it was done (it's hard to find any information about this thanks to super-dead old guild forums, but the key quest was originally unobtaniable-by-obfuscation as opposed to just not being implemented) and if you were mounted, your horses rear end or beak clipping through a wall would aggro stuff from wherever they felt like aggroing from, which the devs only cared about because it made mounts look like stupid garbage during the expansion that introduced those mounts (I assume the horse aggro is fixed now, I actually haven't played a horse-medding class in a loooong time) Wasn’t the rathe council (???) or whatever in the plane of earth also janky as a delay tactic as well? God I hated that encounter.
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Sep 5, 2021 08:06
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Maguoob posted:Wasn’t the rathe council (???) or whatever in the plane of earth also janky as a delay tactic as well? God I hated that encounter. Whats wrong with having 10-20 enchanters on mez duty for hours at a time?
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Sep 5, 2021 17:13
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Gates of Discord and Omens of War were one expansion they had to split up and you couldn't finish the first without poo poo from the second if I remember right.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:18
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Groovelord Neato posted:Gates of Discord and Omens of War were one expansion they had to split up and you couldn't finish the first without poo poo from the second if I remember right. Kinda, Gates was designed with there being a level cap increase, but the cap wasn't increased till Omens. So poo poo was way overtuned.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:28
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That's even funnier lol
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Sep 5, 2021 17:51
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blatman posted:iirc the double-walled vex thal served another purpose too, some dudes managed to get into the zone before it was done (it's hard to find any information about this thanks to super-dead old guild forums, but the key quest was originally unobtaniable-by-obfuscation as opposed to just not being implemented) and if you were mounted, your horses rear end or beak clipping through a wall would aggro stuff from wherever they felt like aggroing from, which the devs only cared about because it made mounts look like stupid garbage during the expansion that introduced those mounts (I assume the horse aggro is fixed now, I actually haven't played a horse-medding class in a loooong time) that's actually super awesome and i'm glad you posted this.
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Sep 5, 2021 18:02
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gates and omens was originally supposed to only be one expansion yeah the final zone of gates was not cleared until after omens came out, thats also true the final boss of gates was a neat concept where it was supposed to be a long fight where you strategically timed when you killed certain adds because they gave your clerics their mana back but we players figured out a way to kill it completely ignoring all those gimmicks and so thats what we did every time after that
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Sep 5, 2021 18:28
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After playing on Al'Kabor for years I could go on an absolute screed about all the broken poo poo that existed in PoP at launch and how it was clearly rushed out the door. Especially PoEa, PoEb, Xegony, and PoTime which were definitely not playtested or finished. In spite of that, AK was the best time I ever had playing EQ and sometimes the broken/rushed stuff was significantly more enjoyable than what it turned into after patching.
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Sep 5, 2021 21:18
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Vinestalk posted:After playing on Al'Kabor for years I could go on an absolute screed about all the broken poo poo that existed in PoP at launch and how it was clearly rushed out the door. Especially PoEa, PoEb, Xegony, and PoTime which were definitely not playtested or finished. In spite of that, AK was the best time I ever had playing EQ and sometimes the broken/rushed stuff was significantly more enjoyable than what it turned into after patching. I really want to read what you've got rattling around in your brain about busted rear end early-version PoP because this sort of thing is absolutely my kind of thing, and I have a huge gap in knowledge about that era
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Sep 6, 2021 14:13
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Their lead environment artist left. lmao...
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Sep 7, 2021 07:42
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hobocrunch posted:Their lead environment artist left. lmao... I guess he/she wanted what is called a paying job
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Sep 7, 2021 08:00
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Dope. Graveyard shift is good for posting about EQ. Preface: Al'Kabor was stuck at the earliest release of PoP without any patching. PoP content was only mildly adjusted after almost a decade of people playing in it, and the majority of the changes were QoL with a couple exceptions. AK is where the majority of my raiding experience was, but I played on PC servers from Kunark to OoW. Ancient History: Everybody remembers the Furor ultimatum rant when FoH got into PoTime after beating Rathe Council (sidenote: every old EQ head knew furor was a piece of poo poo before the blizzard lawsuit dropped, he made the culture at the FoH boards and everybody remembers what it was like over there). A lot of that angst, which was shared in Tigole's rant, came from how utterly broken both PoEa and PoEb were. PoEa: Kill a specific group of mobs in the big open part of PoEa before the first one repops and a raid mob will pop. Kill all four raid mobs and you spawn the Mystical Arbitor of Earth which gives PoEb access. To spawn MAoE in the original version, all four have to be killed before the first raid boss is able to repop. If you fail to kill one of the raid bosses, no big deal, it's just like Cursed cycle in Ssra where the next attempt yields no loot. Problem is the original version of PoEa spawned invisible mobs after a failure which prevented MAoE from spawning. Fun fact about the first version of PoEa is that the Stone Ring that spawns Peregrin Rockskull was broken, to the point where your raid of 40+ people could do everything right and the failure invisible mob would pop instead of Peregrin or the No Loot Version. So on AK, prior to getting PoEa patched to an updated version, the only way to spawn Peregrin and then subsequently spawn MAoE was to petition a GM to witness you kill the trigger mobs in the allotted time and then manually spawn both. This was the first roadblock guilds on PC servers saw back in 2002-2003. PoEb: So your guild kills MAoE and gets access to PoEb. The first area is a small section with some weird buildings in it filled with trash mobs that were difficult to split. I forget the specifics, but I think there was something like 30ish mobs. And these were way harder than the Hraquis/Regrua near Coirnav, so not really something a raid could blitz through. To unlock the next area, the raid has to kill all the trash before the first mob repops. The problem was the original PoEb had the default PoEa trash repop time of 18 minutes. So you either AEd and prayed you didn't wipe or you got lucky with how well you were able to pull and burn that night. This mechanic was so unmanageable to consistently pull off in era that the repop was adjusted to the ORIGINALLY INTENDED 30mins. In the next area, you kill trash to spawn the Warlords on their little ziggurats. No big deal with the trash there and the majority of the Warlords are straightforward fights with little adjustments. They were called loot pinatas. Gintolaken, on the other hand, was a loving travesty on release. Super frequent AE rampage with a shitload of damage, disease immune and almost totally magic resistant (IE no shaman or enchanter slow), your tank is hit with an unresistable slow using curse counters, and Ginto has a memblur that could proc off of any hit (including rampages). This metaphorical speedbump on the way to the Rathe Council had all the same requirements needed as Fennin Ro or Xegony (more about Xegony in a later post) with the added randomness of dealing with a memblur. Your entire raid is fighting this ranged and an unlucky memblur proc while taunt is on cool down would lead to a domino of dead raiders. After release, while FoH/LoS/etc.. are doing this, this encounter is constantly being tuned. This fight and the next one are when the high end guilds started yelling about how they felt like they were paying to beta test PoP. Rathe Council: Your guild has defied the odds in early PoP or yelled enough at SOE to fix these broken mechanics. You have made it to what was rightly considered the final and biggest roadblock to PoTime. 12 Rathe Council Members. They are on top of this large dais with a pedestal in the middle, surrounded by a giant muddy moat that goes completely around the dais to the edge of their room. All flurry but the combat text says rampage. All have a near unresistable slow+dot+1k dd AE they cast every 60secs. All cast a single target shadow step every 60secs with unlimited range on a random person on their agro list which almost always drops you into the moat. 6 mezzable. 6 unmezzable. The unmezzable hit like loving dump trucks, equivalent to unslowed magmaton (more on this guy in a later post), with the mezzable hitting slightly softer. They all have a gently caress load of HP. Because this is the first draft of the zone, the pathing is un-loving-believably bad (more on this, too). The dais is on this little island with a bunch of weird rocks and dead trees on it where the Rathe members zig-zag over, get stuck on, and eventually warp on top of whoever pulled them. By the way, all must be killed within 7 minutes of each other (they have a 7 minute repop time, you see!). This will spawn the Avatar of Earth who is honestly a loving anticlimactic pushover. This version of the encounter was nerfed into oblivion before it was ever beat. On PC servers, they had their HP decreased twice, their pathing fixed, a mechanic added called "flecking," (lowered HP decreased DPS output), and these fuckers still weren't killed until LoY launched with the addition of more spells and after the infamous "Tank Summit." It took our guild, stuck in PoP era, 80 characters two hours to finally beat it. The PoP era EQ raid window could only hold 60. We still needed an updated zone file that included flecking. We had so many attempts against the original but, for all intents and purposes, it was completely unbeatable. I wouldn't be surprised if it was intentionally made that way because PoTime was a mess too. One final note on the Rathe: One of the defining quests of late game PoP, and a quest that gives access to arguably some of the best items in the expansion, is called the Essences of Power. When you kill an elemental god (Coirnav, Fennin, Xegony, Avatar of Earth), they are guaranteed to drop exactly one Essence of Water/Fire/Air/Earth. If you are lucky enough to get all 4, you turn them in to Aid Eino in PoK and you get your dope item. The obvious bottleneck, even after all the nerfs, was Rathe Council. First draft Avatar of Earth dropped a cloth cap instead of Essence of Earth, lmao
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Sep 7, 2021 09:59
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I miss the EQMac server. It was such a special place.
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Sep 7, 2021 22:31
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