Never played on P99, but I do occasionally lurk the forums as I find RnF very entertaining. I just wanted to address a few things that I've noticed over the years and hopefully get some introspection going in the twisted maze that is the hardcore raider of the Velious expansion in 2018.
I see the words competition and skill thrown out a lot around these forums, especially when it comes to from what I understand to be the two top raid guilds, Aftermath and Awakened. I am here to make the argument that neither guilds, or anyone who raids in EverQuest for that matter is particularly skilled at all.
However before I do that, I'd like to first touch on the "competition" of the raid scene here. My understanding is that the first person on the aggro list of a raid mob triggers a zonewide "FTE" message. Obviously none of the content on this server is instanced. That, combined with these FTE messages leads me to believe that the competition most of you guys are talking about is who can login to a parked character and claim a raid mob first. When I was a teenager I enjoyed cockblocking other guilds and feeling good about myself knowing that they would never be as "good" as I was. But then I realized, if each party doesn't have equal opportunity to engage in the content, is there
really any competition?
With that out of the way I'd like to get down to the meat of this argument and that would be the skill part. I think this really boils down to two things. How well you can play your character, and how well you can traverse each raid encounter and the specific mechanics of each boss. Playing your character in classic EQ basically boils down to pressing a couple buttons here and there. Do you press your backstab button as a rogue with such passion that it makes you better than someone else? Boss mechanics in EQ means running a ranger into a DT mob and having 10 or so clerics press one button every so often.
While all of you like to talk about how carebear WoW is, and I tend to agree that most things in the game are compared to classic EQ, the raiding scene in that game is definitely not. A fight like 100+ man AoW, vs a fight like Heroic 25m Lich King really outlines these differences. The Lich King, and pretty much any Mythic encounter of recent expansions, had/have multiple abilities that gave
one person the ability to wipe your raid instantly. I cant think of anything like that in EQ short of somebody training something into the raid. Now I know that the average RnF'er on this forums has the attention span of a goldfish so I'm going to ask a few questions directed towards the members of these two guilds specifically and anyone else who is in the cutting edge competitive hardcore super serious raid scene that is Velious in 2018.
- Do you, in good conscience, feel like you are skilled when you are killing ~20 year old raid mobs with an insane amount of players?
- Do you feel like there is real competition on P99?
- Given that WoW is generally considered easier than Classic EQ, do you think that AM/AW could compete in a raid scene that everybody has an equal shot, and statistics on individual performance can be looked up for literally anything?
It has taken me about 7 years to ask these hard hitting questions so I expect some Shakespeare quality answers. Looking forward to it.
