Thanks for the replies guys.
Hows the status on raiding guilds?
The raiding scene in EQ is honestly going down hill. There are maybe 15 (20 or so max?) raiding guilds in the game worth discussing. That isnt a lot.
http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/
39 guilds have beaten at least the first t4 raid, 18 have beaten the game. I really hope your definition of "guilds worth discussing" is a little more broad than a guild that's beaten the game.
Also, the raiding content itself is copy/paste bullshit from group instances. Or in some cases, just beefed up group instances. The devs have ran out of ideas regarding the raiding game and all originality is out the window these days.
Actually dev's have said it was the opposite. Raids were written first and then copied over to the group content because they wanted the casual player to have a chance to experience the full lore of the game, rather than only the top 5% seeing the full story first hand. Other expansions for example, unless you raided, and beat the expansion, you never got the full story of what was happening, or how it was concluded. How many guilds never actually beat Plane of Time until it was trivial a year later? What good is having a story line if you have to wait 2 expansions before you can experience it first hand? How pissed would you be if you went out and bought a copy of Baldur's gate, and the last level where the story was climaxing was too difficult and you had to buy the expansion that gave you new gear and an increased level cap before you could go back and beat the first part of the game. I'd be pretty pissed myself. Yea, I could go online and read all the dialogues and such on Allakhazam's website, but why did I bother buying the game in the first place? Why buy any games? Just go on GameFAQ.com and read the walkthroughs on there!
VoA is the worse raiding expansion in years with raids taking entirely too long (1-2 hours+) and meanwhile, other raids like Windsong, CoB and Sep5 being ridden with bugs that wont ever be fixed. VoA was a piss poor raiding expansion no matter which way you slice it and IMO its only going to get worse if VoA was any indication of how shit will be done in the future.
Think your numbers are a bit off there.
Argath - Honestly, it's been awhile, I don't remember how long it took.
Sarith - 30-45 minutes
Valley - 30-45 minutes
Beast's Domain - 45 minutes... including gathering and buffing time, 30 minutes max if it's your first raid of the night and you've already buffed in GGH
Resp. Temple - 45 minutes, max, should be closer to 30 (Not counting wipes)
Rubak - 30-45 minutes.
CoB - 45 minutes
Pillars - 45 minutes
Windsong - 30 minutes
Sep 1 - 20 minutes
Sep 2 - 20 minutes
Sep 3 - 20-30 minutes
Sep 4 - 20-30 minutes
Sep 5 - I'll give you an hour to 2 hours here
Lets compare to Anguish. Anguish clearings typically took a full night, and then OLMM was done on a second night. So you've got KtH, Jelvan, Ture, Hanvar, AMG on one night, then OLMM on day 2. 5 bosses one night, 1 boss day 2. My guild runs Sep 1-4 in a single night, then sep 5 on day 2, followed by some easy raid like BD. Sounds about the same to me.
While I haven't personally run Sep 5, the only time I actually got a bug up until that point was in CoB when the emotes failed to fire for a couple minutes. Yea, that was problematic, but our guild didn't have any issues dealing with it.
Ive never seen an expansion where raiders dread raiding as bad as VoA. Ive heard many stories where raiders dropped down to the group game and went casual due to the raids in VoA and how unpleasant they are. The devs made a lot of the raids in VoA like a guild would only do them once and never go back. It was like they didnt have the foresight to understand that guilds would be stuck farming a lot of these garbage raids for several+ months.
I saw worse reactions to GoD raids to be perfectly honest, Uqua anyone?
The biggest problem EQ has is the fact that most of the truly hardcore raiders have quit and moved on to other games, or onto real life. The end game hardcore guilds are taking casual players with casual mind-set people into their ranks, and these casuals are unwilling or are unable to play at the level consistent with past expansions. Personally, I've raided VoA since around April and have done every raid it has to offer, except Sep 5. I could count the number of emotes I've missed in that entire time on a single hand, both as a tank class and a caster class. I've played in a top 10 guild at the peak of EQ's life, I've gone to casual guilds because I didn't have the time to commit, and I'm in a top guild now. While I can't speak for other guilds personally, I notice way too many casuals and way too many missed emotes in easy raids like RT. 5 years ago, the top players wouldn't be missing emotes, at all. They might miss one emote, and after they get their res, they'll probably apologize in guild chat saying they missed the emote because their was a nuclear holocaust going on outside and they had to afk for a little bit to move their laptop into the bomb shelter.
Especially with Audio triggers, the events are not that freaking complicated. It tells you on the damned screen in bright ass letters to DO SOMETHING. I didn't even start using audio triggers until T4 raids! If people are unable to follow that they either need to 1) Fix their UI so they can see them easier, 2) get much better audio triggers, or 3) Pay attention!
Regardless of what you're saying about the raids, personally, I enjoy them quite a bit. The only raid I "dread" doing is Pillars.
