Upgrading the difficulty on the two raids.

[RandomKeypress]

I would also like to point out that mana pots are essentially free on Lammania - we don't have a pot-chugging total for those epic and elite completions, but from what little I've seen, but raids can be won just by protecting the healers and having the healers chug pots until everything is dead. That isn't a successful long-term strategy for live.

How would you change the raids so that they couldn't be beaten on the first day and yet still be beaten at all. The pre-raid stuff does not give next-tier gear and the raids don't require it. If you have a dedicated group of end-game players, they're going to beat the raid. You could throw in ultra-complex boss-battles with convoluted dealing strategies (EQ, WoW etc.), but that isn't DDO.

[lekkus]

We went in there as well with 5 but with a different setup then Revenants (gz). We failed the second time (first time we all crashed), and by then it was already done for the first time. Very nice raid tactics? I don't know, 5 archeons and wings for the win. 30 minutes after the raid was open on Lamannia it was beat. That sounds indeed a bit too easy. Make him at least resistant to light damage


The second raid.. hm no idea. We didn't come that far as a few had to log but I am looking forward to that. Sounds as great fun if I have to believe the threads

[Xyfiel]

If the raid is 7 manned within hours of coming out, that means in a few months it will be soloed or 2 manned. I thought all the epic geared best of the best wanted something challenging. I don't need to play the raid to see it won't be challenging to the top players soon.

"The raid is very difficult, but we beat it in an hour" isn't ironic to you? How long did it take for someone to solo Vod and Tod? Those are achievements, this is nothing but same old difficulty of other epic raids. The only reason it feels more difficult is because it is new and you have not learned how to best complete it. That will come with time, just like every other quest in DDO.

[jakeelala]

If the raid is 7 manned within hours of coming out, that means in a few months it will be soloed or 2 manned. I thought all the epic geared best of the best wanted something challenging. I don't need to play the raid to see it won't be challenging to the top players soon.

"The raid is very difficult, but we beat it in an hour" isn't ironic to you? How long did it take for someone to solo Vod and Tod? Those are achievements, this is nothing but same old difficulty of other epic raids. The only reason it feels more difficult is because it is new and you have not learned how to best complete it. That will come with time, just like every other quest in DDO.

just to reiterate again: pots are free on lama. this is not normal circumstances. Solo'd and short man raids are not the norm on live, even the easy ones. Only DQ is really an exception to that rule for people trying to get base items.

[Dark-Star]

Taking nothing away from the accomplishment, we did have the luxury of pots (as did everyone else that tried the raids today), and that will be a definite difference between Lamania and live.

We also had the advantage of having played together a lot lately, often in a speed run atmosphere where things are happening very very fast, so being able to coordinate teamwork under pressure was a huge key to victory.

I have no doubt other players will find early success as well, but there will be many others that struggle for a long time with the raids - at all difficulty settings. To increase difficulty without broader player feedback is a mistake in my opinion. Let these raids be run on live where there will be a reasonable resource constraint and I wouldn't be surpised if there is a movement to decrease difficulty.

Boss hit points are so inflated now that raids like ToD elite will see very few completions simply due to the strain it willl put on resources.

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

Any chance you can upgrade the difficulty for the two raids or at least one of the raids on epic. The raids appear far too easy. Resources are easy to come by in game so if I have to use some resources shrug. I would love a real challenge. I actually want to fail at attempts in completing a raid for the first time for a few weeks that would be awesome. The old abbot and Titan were both great - give us one of those raids. The game is much too easy on epic.

You shouldn't even be allowed to POST in the Lammania Discussion area, none the less head a thread recommending Turbine change the difficulty of a new raid.

Turbine is not going to craft a raid for you. If you think you "beat DDO", go play another game.

[Morosy]

Kudos to you for 7 manning an epic raid, with only 33 deaths.
But if you can 7 man a raid that should be balanced for 12 peops ( as lvl 25) - then its way too easy.
Here i thought epic raids should be for the best off the best & actually give them a challenge ... i guess i was wrong.

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=336475

Nah, 1 Revenants = 4 normal people, so it's pretty balanced

[Aaxeyu]

Very dissapointing to see them completed so quickly. Far too easy.

[Absolute-Omniscience]

Very dissapointing to see them completed so quickly. Far too easy.

This.

No matter how many pots you used, it's way too easy if it's completed within hours of release.

Either make it harder, or limit the use of SP potion. Preferably both.

[FengXian]

The funny thing is that if these guys' scream for upgrade will be seconded by the devs, they'll prolly start asking for nerf complaining it's too hard when it goes live

Revenants and such + infinite pots = it's ok to underman a new raid, and doesn't mean it's easy. Plus you can't really expect uber-over9k-hard content, even an epic raid has to be beatable by very good, well geared, still not necessarily uber players.

[insaneuou]

ALl you uberminded ppl asked for challenging raids, devs gave it- 2 raids. They might have been beaten on day1 but that are hard, fun and challenging. What do u expect ? raids which are so challenging, to crack them after six months?

[Epitome]

***SOME SMALL SPOILERS***

On live resource management at Elite/Epic difficulties (of which I didn't see very much of a difference) will be the biggest challenge. Having a full raid group may assist in this or detract depending on the HP, self sufficiency skills and most importantly twitch and positioning skills of the players themselves.

Master Artificer almost requires having a balanced raid group, else-wise be prepared to do major mnemonic keg stands while trying to stay alive. One of the bosses during a 2 boss fight is best handled with melee that doesn't rely too much on arcane/divine buffs for their DPS (or a piping hot ranged ranger). One of the bosses' rune arm charge hits that he spits out very very frequently is very brutal requiring targets to have ~650+ hp (lack of some gear on lama made this hard to achieve for some of us, at least my toons that completed it) but these shots can be dodged again putting tremendous focus on player skill. The environmental curve balls tossed at groups after the first few waves of mobs will be extremely challenging as well (although patterns exist that do not seem to randomize or change each new raid instance you do, yet the patterns are more difficult on higher difficulties).

Lord of Blades reminds me of some challenging 6 man group action of something like warhammer online's top end dungeons in that you can't sit and tank & spank mobs. The combination of the boss's abilities and DPS and some of this cronies floor aoe's (nasty dog grease/dmg puddle that without fom you don't want to step into on epic or you will fall over very quickly) requires the group stays very alert.

Some of us are pondering how to do this in a conservative manner regarding resource use when it goes live. Doing so will increase what I believe will be the new most challenging fights in the game.

Another challenge is doing these raids with this piping hot group UI. Always a joy to be the lone melee with their health bar cut off from the divines in the raid group. I will recommend that as a melee you do not rely too much on high end silver flame pots, in both encounters it will lead to a quick death.

[EatSmart]

Hitting for 600+ damage?

So - melee = Barb for good now I guess. Unless you take a ftr with like all 7 base feats as Toughness.

A Lord of Blades raid sounds like fun. More hp/power creep doesnt.

Last raid turned up the dial to over 500 hp or dont be a 'tank', now its going to be 700 hp? Somehow between level 20 last year and level 20 this year every melee is supposed to pick up 150 more hp out of the blue?

*SPOILER BELOW*






Its complicated by the lord of blades debuffing the target with a stacking debuff called touch of the mournlands that lowers the target's %HPs. Tanks where going from max hps 1k+ down to max hps <500 after stacking applications. We've not yet worked out if there's a counter to this beyond swapping tanks for a bit to let the debuff stack expire. (timer is 1:15-1:20 ish i think)

Holding off my own judgement on the challenge until we know more about the raid mechanics, but it seems pretty solid.

[maddmatt70]

Some of you guys have forgotten about this game's history. There was a whole group of people who enjoyed trying to beat the titan. They failed numerous times, but they really enjoyed getting together as a group and trying something out whether it worked or not was almost immaterial. The titan assumed an almost mythical stature. It is no coincidence that many of these people that tried to beat the titan no longer play DDO because DDO quite frankly has taken the easy road.

Some of these people will come back to check out these new raids and some of the newer people to DDO who would enjoy a challenge will also try the new raids. When groups beat the raids on the first day and starting farming them for gear these people will just think the game is the same old easy. Since Turbine is releasing two raids, this is a great opportunity to make one of the raids incredibly difficult and not just from a resource standpoint which is not really that difficult when all is said and done because I can alway buy and farm mana pots, but truely difficult.

[Lleren]

I think balancing a Raid for the "best of the best" of players would be a mistake. Those players can beat pretty much anything the devs put out, if its not broken in some way.

Also, I really don't want to start encouraging folks to put even more points into Con so they can survive these Raids. It is hard enough to get new player's characters over 400 hit points reliably. Raising the bar on hitpoints is getting silly.

Well at least we can TR now, if someones build gets treated like a red headed stepchild in these new Raids.

[Lifespawn]

Titan wasn't beat day 1 because when it was released you couldn't even get to the flagging quests.
The keys did not drop when it first came out and you could not pick the doors to progress.

Then when everyone did manage to get in the raid, the Titan itself had some major pathing issues.

Abbott was beat day one if I remember correctly by brute forcing it and was made unplayable by removing the ability to brute force it. It went through several iterations after that to make it playable.....

it was beaten after the brute force was taken away on sarlona before they made the easy changes where people run it all the time

i do hope the epic raid is some kind of challenge even tho it was beaten on lama it could have taken tons of store bought mana pots that wouldn't be realistic on live

[Deathdefy]

I honestly think they sound good; I would have been stunned had Revenants not beaten them on epic within the day they were released, short of very hard / bugged puzzles. Any dps / reasonably intuitive strategy requiring raid should have been beaten by them to be remotely accessible by the rest of the player base. For the record, the requirements to deal with the spoiler revealed earlier are what I hope is the first step in a great direction toward requiring fewer tank and spank moments in raids.

Revenants play their toons very well, are geared almost literally perfectly for their classes, and are a good in-game communicationy lot, and have a bunch of TRs on top of this.

Given they had a LOT of deaths, (and potentially drought-inducing mana pot ingestion?), the LoB raid at least sounds darn hard - shortmanned or not.

My money's on threads calling for nerfs in the future.

[FengXian]

Some of you guys have forgotten about this game's history. There was a whole group of people who enjoyed trying to beat the titan. They failed numerous times, but they really enjoyed getting together as a group and trying something out whether it worked or not was almost immaterial. The titan assumed an almost mythical stature. It is no coincidence that many of these people that tried to beat the titan no longer play DDO because DDO quite frankly has taken the easy road.

Some of these people will come back to check out these new raids and some of the newer people to DDO who would enjoy a challenge will also try the new raids. When groups beat the raids on the first day and starting farming them for gear these people will just think the game is the same old easy. Since Turbine is releasing two raids, this is a great opportunity to make one of the raids incredibly difficult and not just from a resource standpoint which is not really that difficult when all is said and done because I can alway buy and farm mana pots, but truely difficult.

I see your point, but as many already said you can't balance a raid just for the top players. Plus it looks like these raids do require some skill. I don't really think the devs have ignored the players' requests for a tougher and different from "tank'n'spank" challenge. But the good players WILL beat it, and this happening on day 1 means nearly nothing. How long do you think it can take to figure out a puzzle or a strategy to beat a boss? Creating something completely new, so new that the vets will have a hard time figuring it out, is kinda impossible without unbalancing the game/quest.
I do see the game evolving, chrono was already somehow more varied compared to previous stuff, and I think LoB and MA will likely be the next step. Not the last tho, evolution comes gradually

[Epitome]

This

i do hope the epic raid is some kind of challenge even tho it was beaten on lama it could have taken tons of store bought mana pots that wouldn't be realistic on live

Had to have my stomach pumped after the raid...waiting for turbine to release an ioun stone that has an IV drip bag of major mnemonics, but on live it would be a different story.

[azrael4h]

Some of you guys have forgotten about this game's history. There was a whole group of people who enjoyed trying to beat the titan. They failed numerous times, but they really enjoyed getting together as a group and trying something out whether it worked or not was almost immaterial. The titan assumed an almost mythical stature. It is no coincidence that many of these people that tried to beat the titan no longer play DDO because DDO quite frankly has taken the easy road.

So you mean that two years with no content in a game that was in an obvious death spiral had no effect on people leaving. Instead it was the devs not listening to exactly two people (you and shade) and building the entire game around the whims of those two people.

I'd mock you but the challenge is gone.

Oh, didn't notice this because I hit this thread first, but even Shade considered some aspects of the LoB raid difficult, and suggested toning them down. So you are so very alone.