How will LDoN affect Time/Elemental Guilds?

[Tsaotsao]

How do you see LDoN affecting the Time and Elemental capable guilds?

Will 40-player L65 LDoN raids (augments,etc) significantly improve your capabilities in Time?

Will LDoN become an alternative location or regular location for guild raids?

[Khumak]

I doubt it'll be a primary raid target but I could definitely see it being something to do on offnights or when you have a scheduled raid and not enough people show up for your usual targets.

[Khumak]

By the way, how do the points/rewards for LDoN raids compare to single group adventures? I've only tried the single group stuff so far.

[Timmok]

We havent had our first LDoN raid yet because it was our turn on rotation in time. But I am sure it will be a gigantic pain in the butt deciding who gets to be among the first 36 that gets to raid.

While we do raid with 72 in time, I dont think we realistically can field 2 viable 36 person raids. Typically we are short on clerics or shamans, or both.

So I imagine when the time comes for our first LDoN raid, that we will make 1 good 36 person raid, and have the rest either twiddle thumbs or do single group adventures(but then again, we will probably have hogged most of the healers for the raid, so not much left).

[Tima]

For us the LDoN raids will be something to do on nights when we're light on healing or targets. It irks the hell outta me that a guild goes to the trouble of outfitting and doing raids for 72 people for almost 11 months, then are forced to slice that raid force in half for the LDoN raids. Like the above poster, splitting our normal 72 person raid force into two 36 person raids isnt really an option, it would end up too out of balance.

I beta tested a couple of the raids and boss encounters and they are pretty fun and not overly easy, Id want to take a strong group for the first time we did these as a guild. If that means half the guild sits out while the other half experiments and learns, well, blame it on the expansion rules.

[Thorbadin]

Well I think the only way to do that with a guild and not piss everyone is to split the team in 2. It might lead to 2 not optimal team but they can be good enough, at least in my guild.

You take 2 captains that want to win, and split the classes in 2 for each raid.

Anything else will leave, at least in my guild, massive suckage and chaos. Having people sit out on early phase of when we have over 72 is bad enough as it is.

Thorbadin
Triton

[Frax]

To all those Time guild people who are whining about LDON 'forcing' them to break down itno 36 person raids... IT"S NOT JUST YOU, there are not many guilds at 65th level that are 36 people exactly in size, and you don't need 36 people to do a raid. Raids can be done with I believe 18 or more people.

In addition PoTime equipment has its own, special augmentations, that are far better than anyone else can obtain or utilize on their equipment.

[Brodda Thep]

I would be very interested to hear of other peoples experiences with LDoN raids. We did a normal mistmoore raid and it was hard. These aren't pushovers. THe mobs are all as hard or harder than tier 3 time trash. The mini-named during the raid hit for 1-2k (1k being min hit) The mini-named had quite a bit of hp too. The rewards were actually pretty good. elemental quality ring/earring (about 130mana/hp FT5/Speed of Mithaniel) with two slots (type 2 and 3). Also a 25ac chain class augment. /cheer 68 ac bidilis sleeves!

Anyone do a raid with 18 people yet? Or try a raid with pre elemental raiders? I can't imagine hard getting much harder, and you sure as hell won't have an easy time doing two of the raids we had at the same time.

[Tima]

*sorta raid spoiler, well, not really a spoiler, just a basic overview*










I participated in a few raids and boss encounters during beta. One i thought was fun took place in Deepest Guk. (hopefully too much hasnt changed since it went live)

The object of the adventure was to stop this frog fella from becoming a god more or less. There were 2 Froggy Scouts at the zone in. You divide the raid into 2 parts, 3 groups in each. When you start the event, one Scout asks for you to follow him to the execution chamber and starts walking. Three groups follow and protect him from the mobs in the way

Eventually the first frog reaches the exeuction chamber. Once the first scout makes it to this point the Scout at the zone starts walking. The 3 remaining groups follow him to a chamber with a Cauldron in it. The same deal applies, kill adds, protect frog.

The object is to get both groups of raiders to their respective rooms, in which they have to do things within a certain amount of time to get the easy version of the boss. They tested the hard version of the boss later and from what i heard he was damn hard for 36 people.

The beta raids were more or less pick up raids of Time level people all decked out in the best gear Time had to offer, and didnt always go as smooth as raid with people that you know and trust would. Raids like this though make me think that straight up halfing your raid force would still eventually lead to problems if you didnt get enough of the classes necessary to win.

[Brodda Thep]

After doing live raids I don't think you can really compare it to beta raids. The same idea might be there, but they certainly did a ton of tweaking.

[Splaktar]

We're still focused on killing Quarm. Stuck around 45% or so.

We'll be doing LDoN raids early in the afternoon and late at night. If we're done with Time and still have plenty of people, we'll keep farming Elemental planes and VT.

[Tsaotsao]

I've noticed that some of the top tier guilds might have to leave a few un-flagged members (apps/probates/casuals) out of a raid due to not having enough flagged folks to cover them.

And most of those guilds can be pretty competitive with each other. (It's the nature of the planes.) So some might not like this idea.

Do you think joint raids in LDoN of folks left out of raids might be a workable option? Have an agreed on meeting place for those folks to at least get some play time in when they can't join the guild raid?

[Superchum]

I'm pretty curious to see how Triton deals with the raids in LDoN Thorbadin.

Because right now I've no clue what Tal has planned for us in Utopian. All we're really doing is single group adventures and having fun with it as it's the shiny new toy in the toybox.

[Promethis]

For us the LDoN raids will be something to do on nights when we're light on healing

Newsflash kids, LDON raids are NOT gimp events you do in off hours.

We tried Ruj raids tonight on NORMAL (N O R M A L difficulty I tell you!) and got both our raids asses competely and utterly kicked.

We have cleared Time including Quarm.

Sony did a shitty ass job tuning these events. They used beta buffed characters with free time loot to the point where ENCHANTERS were hitting close to 10k fully buffed. Hello, get a fucking clue, k?

You cannot possibly expect the encounters to be tuned for live servers using testing raids like that. Plain and simple, the encounters are tuned horribly, and need to be looked at before any progress is made in a majority of them.

Some of them (like MM) are stupidly easy. I don't know where they get off on setting the conditions for how difficult or easy they will be.

Oh well, back to PoTime for 5 months of farming before we can progress in LODN raids.

[Magon]

Maybe its a good thing that you all did not win the event. If you could beat everthing first shot would EQ be fun. I am betting that yall did not beat Quarm the first time well there ya go. I personally think that its good for time guilds to have other challenges other than just time.

[Shakkha]

Newsflash kids, LDON raids are NOT gimp events you do in off hours.


yes they are unless you want half of your guild acting as cheerleaders outside the dungeon watching the other one fight inside...

[Raaj]

yes they are unless you want half of your guild acting as cheerleaders outside the dungeon watching the other one fight inside...


So if 36 is half, that means there's 36 not doing anything. Start another raid and do 2 at once.

[Promethis]

My point is you aren't going to win a RAID with random people who stay online after the main guild raids most of the time.

LDON raids are on par with Time phase 3 imo, or even harder. Try doing Phase 3 with 36 people and see how far you get before timer runs out or you wipe.

[Shakkha]

So if 36 is half, that means there's 36 not doing anything. Start another raid and do 2 at once.

I don't know any guild that is able to put up two equilibrated raid force of 36 at once...

maybe your guild can, i know mine cannot...

These raids are no joke, so you need a powerfull team of 36 members...

Come on you know that in a 72 guild roster there are member more skilled than other, you have a puller, a raid leader etc... it is not simple numbers. Ence it is mostly a thing to do on low turnout days when the core of hardcore gamers are on and not the rest of the guild...

[Barshalot Zek]

This is all funny stuff.
***Disclaimer: I havnt raided and I love the expansion this is NOT a whine***

The raids are Time level(ish) as far as difficulty, yet the gear you gain is.. well Elemental at best. Now thats most peoples arguement but Look at what just off the top of my head we as warrior can gain.
40hp anyslot augs 1150 Rugi points, fit on 5 armor types for a total of 200 extra HPs.
Proc augs to increase our agro for ~760 Dguk points
I havnt seen any of the high end plate armor but I see people listing vendor trash up to 1400ish points already and while its not elemental/time quality with its aug slots it could be made that level, I cant imagine what the next few tiers of equipment are looking like.

My guild is not Time yet, and we are looking forward to the LDON raids for the small group practice to get us ready for time. (We are just a few kills away)

What I'm curious about is points, I've heard you get 30per person on the raid so ~1000 points for one full raid? if thats the case You can afford to upgrade yourself 40hps every single Rugi raid, which imo is nice considering EVERYONE gets those points. Overall it helps the entire raid out a little as opposed to 1-4 people getting a big boost. I think its balanced its just "sneaky" balanced ;)

[Splaktar]

I think you get 30 points per raid, you don't get 1000. They are still tinkering with this on test, I heard it's currently 150 on test.

Well, we killed Quarm and are now working on seeing what LDoN has to offer. We're currently trying to get everyone 2 successes on each Camp so that we can raid.

Seems like there might be a lot more exp time in the comming months with everyone working on the expensive Time augments for a good while. We'll prolly retro flag a bit more, but then split time between LDoN and Elemental planes for off hours. Time when it's up during prime time, etc.

We'll have to see how it works out, so far though everyone's been mostly happy with LDoN.

[wandor]

For servers that have multiple elem and multiple time guilds (we have 2x Time, 6x elem) the LDoN raids are a blessing.

We have a rotation set up for Time right now and on nonTime days we have a hard time getting 50+ to log in. Well, we did before LDoN anyway. Now people are playing again. Just because raids are limited to 36 people doesn't mean you can't run multiple raids. If you can but together 2 teams of 24-30 together that are better balance, you can do that instead. Or you can run one of 36 and one at 18, or hell some people might want to just go rack up points in 1 group adventures.

Another thing to consider is the loot that is coming from the raid level content. Sure the base stats are similar to elem gear - but the LDoN items usually have 2-3 or more augment slots where as elem gear only has a single type 1 slot. In time, LDoN raid gear will be closer to Time tier 2-3+ items than they are to elem items.

[Mourningloree]

2 win / theme is a myth. Ran a deepest guk raid on Saturday had people with 1 win in Guk had people who had just activated LDON 5 minutes before, all were in the zone...

[Splaktar]

Strange.. we've tried to run raids about 3x now and we've yet to be able to get it to work. We figured it was because you needed to get some wins in the camp. Guess there's just some bugs ... no big surprise.

[Mourningloree]

If it helps here are the steps:

I was raidleader, I had 2 wins in deepest guk.

I invited 6 leaders who formed their groups I do not know if each leader did or did not have 2 wins.

The raid had 34 in it at the time that I right clicked on the raid recruiter.

Confirmed that normal was set and clicked accept.

Was told to go to the dead tree in Innothule went there all zoned in about same time, 34 in zone.

[Brodda Thep]

Newsflash kids, LDON raids are NOT gimp events you do in off hours.

We tried Ruj raids tonight on NORMAL (N O R M A L difficulty I tell you!) and got both our raids asses competely and utterly kicked.

We have cleared Time including Quarm.

Sony did a shitty ass job tuning these events. They used beta buffed characters with free time loot to the point where ENCHANTERS were hitting close to 10k fully buffed. Hello, get a fucking clue, k?

You cannot possibly expect the encounters to be tuned for live servers using testing raids like that. Plain and simple, the encounters are tuned horribly, and need to be looked at before any progress is made in a majority of them.

Some of them (like MM) are stupidly easy. I don't know where they get off on setting the conditions for how difficult or easy they will be.

Oh well, back to PoTime for 5 months of farming before we can progress in LODN raids.
These raids are fine. No you won't ever be doing two raids at once and win. But we finally have something challenging. I have done nearly every raid and I expect to beat every single one inside of a month. We did both those raids and almost won the rescue prisoner one and got surprised by the death count on the other one.

Also, normal/hard has nothing to do with difficulty. The number of people has nothing to do with difficulty. They are just the way they are.

The raids are Time level(ish) as far as difficulty, yet the gear you gain is.. well Elemental at best. Now thats most peoples arguement but Look at what just off the top of my head we as warrior can gain.
40hp anyslot augs 1150 Rugi points, fit on 5 armor types for a total of 200 extra HPs.
I don't think a time level raid has been completed yet. Mistmoore doesn't seem to have any that are time level difficulty and that is where the best loot so far has come from.

[FulorianC]

I believe mmcf was intended for VTish guilds, and mmcc for Elemental.. but I can't confirm it. Just stuff I remember from beta.