[calm]

Its not an idea its how it is.

[leyor]

Looking at the various servers and their progress, raiding guilds currently have quite a hard time in this game, the overall server progress is quite slow and on quite a few servers have actually regressed as raiding guilds has thrown in the towel and quit the game. Spending alot of time trying to find tactics to compensate for broken mobs, and a very poor itemization scheme might be the cause of some of it.

I currently see changes on the testlive server that forces people to bring people more in line with whats apparantly the intended vision on how to deal with various boss encounters. Like removing necro pets frenzy on bosses, bosses ignoring line of sight, only allowing people on the actual raid to loot items dropped off a boss etc.

While these may in some cases be sensible changes to avoid players exploiting or decreasing the difficulty rating on encounters below what the developers intended. It's my heartfelt plea that you adress the causes of these tactics being implemented in the first place first. Fixing the broken scripts that makes some bosses more difficult than intended, or reviewing the itemization system and raiding system that makes it so raiders have a very hard time gearing as it is.

We really need some positive changes before we get changes implemented that makes things even harder. You may disagree with my opinions, but the numbers speaks for themselves, raiding guilds are leaving Age of Conan faster than anyone can step up to replace them.

Realizing that there's a general apathy and raidguilds are having big problems keeping a consistent raidforces should figure into your considerations regarding changes to raid content. Continually making it harder for guilds to continue raiding is putting all raiding guilds into a bad loop, where they continously have to recruit new players, regear them, regearing taking longer. etc. We need more healthy raiding guilds on each server to provide the majority of people playing this game an incentitive to keep on playing past level 80.

Game mechanics changes:

Boss respawn times: Please increase respawn time on boss mobs, at the current progression rate, most raiding guilds only have a very limited bosses to kill pr. week.

Raid loot: With raids at a very limited size, class specific drops should be replaced with either archetype specific drops or tokens. Also disallowing people not present at the actual raid to loot will futher discourage people forced to sit out and decreasing the rate before a guild is capable of progressing. You shouldn't need 3 months of gearing up from T1 mobs, mindlessly farming them once a week before your capable of dealing with BRC bosses. Please consider this point.

Improved instancing system: Please improve the instances and who gets bound to it. Having to form a raid in a certain order, forcing people to zone in, in a specific order so everyone gets in the same instance is an unnescessary hassle.

Improved Raid GUI: Raidleading tools like afk checker, countdown clock etc. would also make raids more enjoyable.

Specific raid encounters:

Vistrix :
Vistrix have a hard time pathing in his lair, when pulled he'll stop up and suddenly flame if he can't get to the people who are currently on top of the hate list, and then reset. If the flaming is intended, please allow a longer grace period before he flames so people can actually pull him proper. Vistrix randomnly resets, even though the two people on top of his hatelist are within melee range. He also sometimes reset when he kills off one of the tanks.

Champion of the Honourguard :
Make him reset proper.

Kylikki and Yakmar :
No comments.

Tier 2:

Gargoyle Master:
Please let him drop gargoyle dust so people dont have to sit around for 10 min's after the raid is over, waiting for stun to wear off, maybe reduce the stun time with 5 mins.

Yarekma the Soul eater:
The fight is too long, especially considering the repop time. Please decrease his hp's somewhat to bring him more into line with the rest of the encounters in the instance. Also please decrease the respawn time of the mobs into the room, if we're unsuccessfull on the first tries, we sometimes have to sit around for 20+ mins waiting for the room to repop, so they don't pop during the actual fight.

We're having problems tanking him with two guardians both wearing full t1 and t2 raid gear (- 1-2 pieces). We move him from side to side. Have proper coordinated heals from all 3 healing classes on both tanks. The dot combined with the swing he takes still finishes off the secondary tank around the 4th dot.

One of the spheres that removes enrage, in his room is bugged.

[TwinBoss]

Yarekma the Soul eater:

One of the spheres(Globe) that removes enrage, in his room is bugged.
Exactly what happend to us last night.GM contacted-fixed.Started again bugged!

And yes i agree 100% with you Leyorcoe

[Paricher]

Totally agree with the posts above asking "why make it harder?". We have the same problems as everyone else seem to have...get enough people to the raids. And even if we get, there are almost always some new players that dont know the exact tactic and gear (etc) and therefor makes the raid alot harder to accomplish.

I can without shame say we have not gotten very far in our raiding (Downed only Kylikki and Yakhmar, wich means we cant even enter the t2 bosses). And this is really frustrating. Most annoying part is when we got Vistrix down to 15% without any deaths and then he resets...doh..we lost the spirit totally.

Raids is what most of the players wanna do to get better gear (better looking gear if nothing else :P )..why make the first raid encounters to hard for the mainstream players?..I dont get it.

This is just my oppinion

Tier 1 bosses should in my oppinion be atleast doable for all players, the hard part can come when they have the gear and the teamwork is better.

As for now I would never join a PUG tier 1 raid because its a 100% failure even if 20 people knows what they are doing, there are always someone that misses something and make the raid insta whipe. (cuz in this game, if 3 or more people die from a stupid 1-shotability = just reset the whole fight...where is the epic battle in that?)

[Hundu]

Without reading any posts here, I'll just throw in a couple of my ideas.

So t2 should be difficult to do without having t1 on you? Have you got an idea on how long it takes to equip people? You can do the t1 raid encounters in 2 evenings I think if all goes smoothly. So what are guilds who want to pve supposed to do so far? I guess one of the most important things is to equip your guardians, but with the randomness of drops some guilds can be really unlucky and not get any drops

The T2 raid content is more difficult as it is and I don't think there are so many people actually raiding it. Why, may I ask for the second time today, change something that's not broken?

I don't understand this, is FC just trying to ruin PvE totally?

[whip5phara]

Ahazu Zagam (poison wing2)

Further to my other posts above we now completed this boss

The encounter seems really fun , and everyone on the raid enjoyed the challenge..its a good difficulty level ..the only fix required now is to make it reset properly

it appears to espcially bug out if somone in raid crashes (on AoC a common occurance) ..then if you go to rez you also end up in a random place in khesh..dead and have to /camp out ..please fix this other than that Ahazu is a fun encounter...probably the most fun I have been to in AoC.

[calm]

Seruha is broke, or at least needs toning down slightly

[jediknight2k1]

Vistrix :
I think Vixstrix is one of the most encounters in AoC. Once the aggro is fixed it should be fine.

Champion of the Honourguard :
It's just your average zerg encounter really. Lacks any real scripting and tactics apart from "Stop DPS".

Kylikki :
Fun but the wolves which spawn need to add something more to the encounter. All they currently do is remove two from the boss as they kite around room. Add some type of script like attacking a random healer etc.

Yakmar:
A giant slug who pops more giant slugs. Ugliest boss I've seen .

Tier 2:

Gargoyle Master:
The 15 minute stun is just to long and ends up with people just sitting around while it wears off. Maybe make GM stun a bit a more but a lower timer, something like 30 seconds or so. As there is no real curing for healers then 15 mins is just to long imo.

Ahazu Zagam: Another really fun enounter. Just fixing the reset bug should be enough. Apart from I thinks it fine as is.

[Acidbaron]

Silirrion,

Cut the spawn times in Half, There are 3 tier one raids and 3 tier two raids.

It's much beter to give people something to do and be done with one character then to let people wait a week to participate, not to mention people will start to level up alts when done looking forward to raid again if the raids are fun and don't require endless grinds.

Also from my understanding guilds excist mainly out of 30 to 40 people that are active and level 80. This means not every person can raid per week as there are rotations to keep it fair for everyone.

Regarding the raid loot drops, a token system OR a system that makes use of the mob boss droppings that can be traded in for gear.
(Vistrix skull shard = heavy armor/full plate for sold classes) by doing so you make items more available and less things rot.

Let 4 items drop per kill one per archtype, as coming from AO it was easier there and more fun as there was less class specific drops, especially the last designs for quests and encounters made it that way.

One thing i want to point out is the items have to be obvious enough to know for what class it is by preferably adding a multiple class tag to it.

A too complicated system of what to do with what item would ruin it and make it too annoying after a kill and frustrating if a sold gets a mage item and vice versa.


These are my suggestions.

[Semela]

Today the whole instance at Vistrix was bugged.

1) mobs we killed the other day havent respawned ib one wing
2)Vistrix constantly was bugged to the point it was ridiculous: did often random fire breath ,suddenly freezed several times for like 15 sec then resetted
3) first tme i ran back through the halls i saw the mobs at one place 3 champions , turned around and told the group we need to clear the way, then turned to them and champions were gone. And next time they appeared again but this time killed me.
Total mess.