The One and Only larsusn wrote:
Fear is only a problem if people sit around waiting at the top of the hill at zone in if everyone runs West immediately on Zone-in, you almost never have over 5 or 6 mobs - or if you can take it run everyone to the NW corner of zone picking up about 15 adds and then safe for pulls without adds.
It wasn't about people standing around though. The problem was that the lag on zoning due to the size (it's an outdoor zone with a good view from where you port in) and unique models in the zone at the time (and the fact that it was pushing the display capabilities of many systems) meant that most people were "stuck" for a good 30-45 seconds after zoning in, simply unable to move. You'd see them standing there, they were attackable and they'd certainly agro stuff, but they were still at the loading screen.
This wasn't as much of a problem as time went on, so Fear got easier. People still wiped, but honestly while the break was always the most *exciting* thing, once it was over, it was a pretty boring and simple clear from there on.
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Sky just sucks because you can't get up there without a wizard to my knowledge.
If you can't get a wizard to port you to sky, you probably had no business going there back then. Today? Maybe. Back when those were the only planes? You were asking for disaster. How many guilds capable of raiding Sky back then didn't have a wizard?
Oh. Samira. Absolutely agree with you on PoH. My exact impression as well. Boring! We did the same thing the first half dozen times. Sit in that damn room for 3 hours while the pull team cleared the roamers and then statics on the first floor. Then run to Maestro's building and pull to the left room. Then pull maestro and hand if they were up. Then go upstairs and sit at that first corner while pull team pulled the second floor roamers and statics. Then move to that wall (no clue which side it's on), and pull the rest. Then move to whatever nameds were up and kill...
Yeah. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. Don't really miss the old plane at all.
Still not sure I agree on Sky though. It wasn't just about taking 24 or more people (we only did that a few times for example, and it truely was a nightmare!). Due to buggy pathing and corpses falling through islands, we *always* came up a few keys short. Especially on Az isle. You'd come in with 24, have no problems getting all the keys for them off the first island. Then you'd clear the Az's, the static Az, the boss Az, and come up 4 keys short. It was not uncommon for us to end up with only 18 or 20 keys from that island.
Spiroc could really really suck if you didn't know how to kill and in what order. Just fighting wrong could cause huge problems. And that's maybe one of the reasons I think Sky is so much worse. You could make simple mistakes that didn't just wipe you (or wipe you at all), but could ***** up your whole reason for being there. A great example is Spiroc island. If you came there to farm wingblades for example (obviously this is later for epics, but not that much later), you absolutely had to avoid killing the guardian. So you had to be *very* careful when clearing the trash spirocs, or you'd agro him, and your raid would be forced to camp to clear agro (and hope you could get your people back on without re-agroing him). Simply having your group a tiny bit too far to one side could make this really really hard.
Dunno. I voted based on the pure pain of the planes. Sure Fear breaks sucked when they went wrong, but there really wasn't anything intellectual about them. There was no real thinking involved. Simple rules and tactics would allow a successful fear break. Once in fear (and hate) there really wasn't any penalty to your hunting based on what you did. You could kill mobs in any order. You didn't have to worry about making sure to kill them in the right order, and at the right pace, and plan for X mob spawning at such and such time and if you did it wrong, the day and a half you'd spent on the raid would be for nothing. That was painful IMO.
Did you ever raid Sky before they added the ability to transfer group leadership? That one change made a world of difference in terms of planning the keying stuff. All it took for someone to be out of the raid permanently was for the wrong person to click to the next island prematurely. Adding people to a raid in progress was virtually impossible due to the inability to get them into a group. Wizards took a huge hit because they often had to eat deaths to be able to port people back up while leaving a corpse for rezzing them back to the correct island (couldn't just drop off because your keys would poof). The worse that happened in a fear raid was that you died, and had to clear tons of tough mobs to CR. There were some strategies in PoSky that you literally had to think 3 or 4 islands ahead of time and do the correct things in order to use them (like some of the old bind sight tricks to add people to a raid in progress).
Heh. Then part of my particular hatred for sky stems from the fact that I never lead a fear raid. But over time, just due to osmosis from doing so many sky raids, I ended up being one of the senior folks leading our sky raids. It was pure brain pain to manage. Again. I can't compare to leading a fear raid, but I personally think it was much more taxing. You either succeeded at the fear break or not. If you succeeded, the rest of the raid was cake. A Sky raid could easily go 2 or 3 days, and you had to constantly be thinking about exactly how to handle every single mob, it's drops, who should loot based on what groups people were in and who could be easily shuffled around for coffining, etc. And that was before having to consider what order to kill mobs in just in terms of clearing the island successfully. There's simply nothing nearly that complex about clearing hate or fear IMO.