More Akkurate raids?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by sowislifesowislove, Aug 26, 2020.

  1. sowislifesowislove

    sowislifesowislove People Like Me

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    Figured I’d start a discussion on this and see where it goes. Our Devs have made changes to the server that aren’t exactly Akkurate, but for the “health” of the server these changes were made. Well with POP on the horizon but still far away, maybe the devs would consider some very minor changes that are Akkurate events but on this server are just not viable for a guild to dedicate the time of their members to.

    For me what comes to mind, and some of those AK peeps can weigh in here, is Ring of Fire and the Grimling War. I wasn’t at the ROF when our guild hit that up, but from what I understand is we did it for 3 hours with nothing to show from it. The Grimling War I was there and we spent 2 hours of constant, boring work and had nothing to show for it, I remember almost falling asleep at the end. Our server population has been really increasing lately and the more and more guilds adding into our very well maintained raid rotation (thank you all the various guild officers and devs? for making that work). It would be great to add some viable raid content. From what I understand, not a lot is known about the events I mentioned. Perhaps for the sake adding raid content that is still Akkurate, the devs could perhaps tweak the spawn rates of the bosses of these events to make them an option for a raid.

    I don’t think we’d be asking for a lot here, but 2 to 3 hours of doing these and nothing to show for it, they just will never be done by the guilds here. And it’s a damn shame because from what I understand is that Ring of Fire is not on any other server, I think that’s really neat that we have it, but it’s not practical to do right now. However, I think a 2 or 3 hour event, and the chance for 4 loots, give or take, would be very viable raid content, especially now that our rotations sometimes have 2 weeks of nothing on the roster. Was the Khati Sha event ever a thing on AK, from what I understand it doesn’t work here, or was it not Akkurate at all? Or maybe it’s like the ROF and Grimling war where the chance of anything of value is so null that no one will do it. Anyway, thoughts from the devs and the hardcore Akkurate players would be beneficial here in either for or against this. Thanks for your time.
     
  2. solar

    solar Administrator Staff Member

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    The grimling war works fine, I've personally done it on TAKP and the named do spawn. Not sure what you're expecting, but you probably spend more than 3 hours doing tradeskills or grinding exp before you give up. If anything, a lower spawn rate would be more "healthy" since it would keep you engaged longer, right? Seriously though, nobody thinks that a crushbone belt is a great rare item, but an item from Emp Ssra is special because it's rare and it requires a large time investment to earn. People spend months preparing their character to even be able to engage the emperor, and that's what creates the social interactions in this game. The more rare something is the more special. If it was made less rare then you'd get it right away and be done and move on. There was a thread about some people killing tens of thousands of mobs for a blam stick - should that be a guaranteed spawn after 3 hours of effort? I'm not trying to pick on you but I think you have it backwards - the more common/easy something is the less interesting it is, especially to people here who have spent nearly 2 decades grinding out everything already. Something that is both rare AND pointless is the ultimate chase item because people won't go after it until after they've exhausted the useful/easy options. The grimling war does have a rare chase item which is useful and if it were quick and easy to get it, then everybody would have one. As it stands it isn't something that you can even attempt to trio, it requires a large force, and personally I think that makes this a great event and having that tricked out weapon is that much more special.
     
  3. Mokli

    Mokli I Feel Loved

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    I think he's saying that personal time invested should be looked at differently than combined time of 30+ humans. I can't disagree with that, but some of todays raids may become tomorrows group events anyway. Working fine vs worth the time are two different things.

    He's probably asking for a more guaranteed rare spawn from RoF vs what it is now over the couse of 3 hours.
    Its unfortunate that devs spent so much time on RoF, because guilds will do it literally once or twice and never again. Its just abysmal for time vs reward for the player numbers that are required.
     
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  4. sowislifesowislove

    sowislifesowislove People Like Me

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    Yea exactly what Mokli said pretty much. I’m realizing the title of my post might have been a terrible choice, I’m not saying raids right now are inakkurate, but that they probably are akkurate, and I would like to see them potentially tweaked. I hear you Solar. Trio type things and tradekills or whatever is one thing but guild leaders asking 30+ people to dedicate time for a raid that will more than likely not produce anything is a tough sell. That’s a shame to hear that the grimling war is working better than it did on AK. Like I said, our whole guild spent 2+ Hours at it with nothing happening. It’s hard for raid leaders to schedule that and sell it to the guild as time well spent.
     
  5. solar

    solar Administrator Staff Member

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    I feel like it's in the same category as something like the paladin epic. It's an optional thing you do for the achievement, for sport.
     
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  6. Mokli

    Mokli I Feel Loved

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    Can always look at them as if they are bugged, like Quarm was. They were retuned after PoP. Slippery slope though.
     
  7. Pithy

    Pithy I Feel Loved

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    I think the main inAKuracy on the TAKP raid scene stems from the fact that boxing is so prevalent. For most of AK's history, boxing just wasn't very common. Accounts cost monthly fees, and only a few computers could run more than one instance of EQ reliably. A lot of folks single-boxed, some two-boxed, and a few weirdos with quad-core PowerMacs boxed three. Hardly anyone boxed more than that before the Intel client was released and the server went free to play. The upshot was that many tough raids were significant numbers checks for most guilds. Temerity often planned break-through progression raids months in advance, and even then it was a gamble as to whether we'd get the numbers to win.

    The raid scene is different here -- meaning long rotations and many sparse resets -- primarily because boxing makes raiding on TAKP a lot easier than it was on AK. If raids were tougher, guilds would find challenges at different levels of content, leading to shorter rotations for most mobs.

    All that aside, I agree that a hard event, or series of hard events, deep in Inner Acrylia would be super cool. Not AKurate, and maybe not the best use of dev time, but super cool!

    A minor but cool short-term fix might be to let Foreman Gworknop be chain spawned. A while back we brought a DPS-heavy raid to Inner Acrylia with the hopes of hunkering down for a few hours, honing our strat for the ring event, then beating the ring and killing the Foreman repeatedly until an FT4 ring dropped. It was pretty disappointing to find out that he could only be triggered once. That was six months or so ago. We haven't been back since.
     
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  8. Haynar

    Haynar Administrator

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    I would rather have pop be the focus.

    Not debating on revamp of unplayed/underutilized content.

    But thats just me.
     
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  9. robregen

    robregen Administrator Staff Member

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    This contents with Grimling War and AC events is generally aim at AK preserve. There is no other server that has this.
     
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  10. Loraen

    Loraen Well-Known Member

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    My opinion is irrelevant, but I agree with Haynar. That being said, it seems like every time I read these forums I see a new balance suggestion, and I wonder if the problem is that there is neither an explicit standard for what is 'too' imbalanced/broken nor a process for evaluating it. Maybe it would actually require less dev time in the end to create one, although I have no idea what it would look like.
     
  11. sowislifesowislove

    sowislifesowislove People Like Me

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    Thats exactly what one of my points is. Such cool unique potential raid content but as Mokli and Pithy said. It’s just not going to be done because of the current chances/mechanics. We have these really neat, unique aspects but they remain shriveled and unused which brings me to the other point of potentially tweaking them so they could be viable raid content.
    Totally, I hear you. My vote too when it comes down to it. But pop seems pretty heavy on Torven’s plate. Could this be looked into by another dev if it even got to a point of being viable. Or would it just add more to Torven?
     
  12. robregen

    robregen Administrator Staff Member

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    I've been back into doing static pathing in PoP zone. Currently I'm working on Plane of Tactics which is next to be opened. I say I'm about 85-90% done with pathing. Not sure how far along Torven is as he is doing stats and parsing for resist, etc.
     
  13. Devour_Souls

    Devour_Souls People Like Me

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    I was trying to think today of all of the people that I knew on AK that didn't box and the only person that I can remember that didn't was Miztig. Pompeii, Karpan, Strong, Tarkon, Zamiel, Fanglore, Echofinder, Happy, Hammie, Dire, Carry, July, Pithy....Every name that comes to mind, paid for multiple accounts and boxed toons. I guess the point I'm trying to make, is from where I was sitting, everybody boxed 3 and paid for 3 accounts. I never played after FTP, I may have logged in a few times, but nothing remotely serious.
     
  14. Ravenwing

    Ravenwing I Feel Loved

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    I think you're both sort of right.

    Plenty of people (I'd guess half?) on Al'Kabor paid for at least a second account before the advent of the Intel client and free-to-play. On the other hand, I just took a look at the first elemental god kill on Al'Kabor, which was Fennin Ro in July of 2009. There were 51 real people present, and 53 characters in the zone.
     
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  15. Darchon

    Darchon I Feel Loved

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    I respect the desire for some challenging raid content when it feels like the current content is extremely easy after having 2+ years farming gear, AAs and improving on your strategies for the same content.

    Pithy brings up a very valid point however. The raids we have on TAKP are very easily carried by the abundant cleric boxes and DPS boxes people bring to raids. If people were boxing less, some raids would be harder for sure due to less flexibility in your CH chains and less depth in other areas of the raid. However, due to the design of Luclin content, the effect on many raids wouldn't be any sort of difficulty shift, it would just be a longer kill. With the current mana regen values on raids, a 5-man CH chain can last more or less indefinitely and that is sufficient for most slowable bosses. So as long as you have enough clerics for that on your no-box raid, all you would notice change on a no-box raid is that your kill now takes 20 minutes instead of 10.

    Speaking for my guild only, I think a no-box raid we probably could still kill all the same targets we do, but some of them would be extremely close. Our last emperor had 2 enchanters, 3 knights, 3 warriors, 2 shamans, 4 druids, 3 clerics, 2 bards and 14 DPS. That would've been extremely close on the healing but probably doable with perfect execution. It probably would be a really fun thing to try out! Until one of the Druid CHs lands does less than a full round, tank dies and we have to spend the rest of the night corpse summoning. To prevent this often times people would need to get asked to park their main character in favor of their alt cleric just to meet the healing threshold required for events, which is less than fun to be forced into playing a character you didn't prefer to play in the first place just so that the raid can go forward. So I understand why people don't force themselves into more difficult situations by banning boxes on raids with our server population.

    In the end though, I'd really just prefer to see all attention from the powers that be goes into PoP. PoP will provide challenging content for all raids from a 72-character raid in Time, to plenty of mini encounters for a 3-boxer or 6-12 characters.
     
  16. Haynar

    Haynar Administrator

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    I don’t mind single boxing on raids. Sometimes it is what I prefer.

    H
     
  17. thucydides

    thucydides I Feel Loved

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    Not to detract from your point Darchon, but just something I’ve been wondering about - what sort of 3 to 12 character PoP content is going to be attractive, either from loot or from a fun encounter, to players that have farmed Luclin into a dust bowl?
     
  18. solar

    solar Administrator Staff Member

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    Unfortunately we can only have 60 people in a raid, not 72. I don't know exactly how that's going to work but I am kind of hoping that it results in trimming some extra boxes and better gameplay from the 1-2 boxers.
     
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  19. Yarnee

    Yarnee People Like Me

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    I kind of think the opposite would be more fun. Increase the box limit so people are challenged to do harder targets with more boxes. Eg able to be your own CH chain, just like it was like on AK.
     
  20. Torven

    Torven I Feel Loved

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    Ring of Fire and Grimling war are very accurate. I can't know what exactly the loot drop and boss spawn chances were, but they shouldn't be wildly off. The events are endlessly repeatable so it makes sense for Sony to have made them kind of stingy.

    Ring of Fire does have guaranteed boss spawns. There are several boss types and the ones with the worst loot spawn more often. Grimling war's boss spawn is random like the other events in the zone, so you could end up with one in 5 minutes or 3 hours. I think I made the spawn chance for that something like 45 minutes, average.

    EQ's risk vs. reward was always kind of not done well
     
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  21. showstring

    showstring I Feel Loved

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    NAG spent cumulatively around 5 hours on Grimling War over two long raids, and spawned 1 grimling high commander. As such, this isn't a raid we'll ever do again, which is a shame.

    Seems silly to favor 'accuracy' over making unique content actually something people might consume, but hey I'm not the one that spent months researching, coding and tweaking the encounter.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2020
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  22. Darchon

    Darchon I Feel Loved

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    So I am assuming people who are VT geared, but likely not best in slot VT for all of their characters:

    Plane of Innovation - 3x Prototypes - A solid trio can do it with a charmed pet and luck. Without you need about 2 groups~ with a few different tanks. They drop a 20% Beneficial haste shoulder and 20% heal headpiece for priests.

    Plane of Nightmare - Vhaskiz / Untel Dak / Mujaki - The first two can be trio or grouped pretty effectively. Vhaskiz drops a solid 31 AC tank shoulderpiece and a piece for Secrets of the Planes. Untel Dak drops a 25% afflicition Efficiency focus for casters. Mujaki 2 groups can probably do the event legit. I think you can just sort of ignore the entire script and then split Mujaki from the trash at the end and likely 1 group could do this (unsure on this though, Torven may have set the assist raidus on the horses pretty high)

    Plane of Storms - All 6 of the BoT key mobs are doable with a trio/group if you want to backflag alts with BoT. Also Dromok Tok Vo'Lok, the frog boss int he center is doable with a group or two if you are good at CCing the add spawns. It drops a very good priest alternative to the Ceramic War Sword (Extended Range focus) for priests.

    CoDecay - Overlord Paffa is easily doable legit by a group with 1 charmed pet and 1 tank or 2 charmed pets or 2 balanced groups without chanters. Drops a FT2 mask for casters/priests or a 25% affliction efficiency earring for Necromancers.

    BoThunder - 4 Wing bosses are doable with a solid Trio or group, 6 hour respawn. 4 Tower bosses are doable with a group or two, 2-3 day respawn?. The wing bosses drop Ornate Legs rarely and other random items like FT2 belt. Tower bosses drop Ornate BPs and some solid 100 HP/Mana gear with some FT items, focuses etc.

    Tactics - Diaku Overseer / Glykus Helmir / Tagrin Maldric + 3 Wing Named (Anival the Blade, Hinvat Deathbringer, Shadow Master Vinta). The first three drop Ornate BPs molds and various other good items. A trio would be hard pressed to kill them but a solid 1-2 groups can kill em. They are fixed spawns with no PHers, multi-day respawn. The 3 wing named drop Ornate legs as well as other drops, these are normal named and are relatively common but their placeholders are the hard wing mobs so you want a solid group to even try these.

    Tower of Solusek Ro - Several of the wing named, Xuzl / Arlyxir / Rizlona are doable with a 2 solid group setup. The crawl to them would suck but there are places you can park cleric bots to rez and skip the crawls in several of the wings. Jiva and Dresolik I think would be tough to do with 2 groups due to the adds/multiple mobs. Arlyxir drops a 25% beneficial haste for priest, they all drop Ornate BPs.

    Elemental Planes - Any group named here drops solid 100 HP/Mana gear with FT/Regen/Focuses. All of the Fire, Water, EarthA named can be 1 grouped easily by EP geared groups. PoAir named take probably 2 groups with a very slow crawl or with well placed cleric rez bots + rogue draggers.

    Plane of Time Phase 1 - Several of the Phase 1 trials are doable with 2-3 solid groups, respawn every 12 hours and drop 1 140~ HME item each of 5 total.

    Also with level 65, Luclin and Velious content gets opened up further to smaller groups. 2 Groups can do AoW/KT. I think Ring War is probably 2 groupable by a solid 2 groups and solid strategy at 65 with EP Gear/PoP AAs. Dain / Yelinak and maybe some of NToV. Luclin wise.... Rhags, maybe XTC, maybe Seru doable with 2 groups at 65. Though these would be tests of patience / not falling asleep.
     
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  23. sowislifesowislove

    sowislifesowislove People Like Me

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    Damn, if nothing else comes from this post that was a fine read Darchon. Right, like Rimi said it’s just not going to be done by guilds the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. And with Grimling War you might not get any juice at all. But anyway, like I mentioned in first post, for the health of the server and for the sake of doing/“enjoying” the content. If Devs are hard pressed on these matters to keep them super Akkurate then is what it is. And they won’t be raided, it’s a shame but understandable.
     
  24. necra

    necra People Like Me

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    They weren’t raided on ak more than a handful of times so pretty akurate
     
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  25. Pithy

    Pithy I Feel Loved

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    Nice examples, Darch! I think two groups of well-geared and well-played characters could also do several armor-dropping EP minis and a handful of pre-EP gods. Most PoP zones have decent charmpets, so a two-group raid of MT, RT, shaman, six clerics and three chanters could do a helluva lot.
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2020
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  26. Tesadar

    Tesadar Active Member

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    I didn't box and knew lots of others who didn't as well. Most of us in Dark Conquest didnt. After joining Destiny I did play with a few people with multiboxing. After AK went free I made 2 more chars and started using spaces on the mac. But mainly just singled boxed Tesadar.
    I think most boxers were the l33t players who literally never logged off.
     
  27. Jugo!

    Jugo! People Like Me

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    Pathfinders did do XTC/Seru with roughly 2 groups of 65's. Maybe it was 13 characters? Did KT with 3 clerics, as well, iirc (gogo MindWrack). I have screenies somewhere. Was fun stuff, some of the perks of being in a smaller guild.
    *Edit, but to answer Thucy's question, with good research, about 1/4 of Darchon's list has legit upgrades (mostly focii) for a 3boxer that's VT'ed out.
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2020
  28. Tesadar

    Tesadar Active Member

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    miss ya fang <3