Why push for elementals?Follow

The more I think about it, the more I think pushing for Elemental flagging alone for Vex level (and even lower) guilds is a mistake, and that it is a slow route to guild progression versus other options onhand.

Smith Rondo, the only raid level flag mob before Kod'Taz, is most definitely beatable by any guild that could kill, say, Terris Thule in ponb. I think any vex level guild could take him. Vxed, the second flag, isn't much more difficult than an LDoN hard, and with basically a 6 hour time limit, any level 65 group taking it slowly and conservatively can beat it. Tipt needs a solid construction, but honestly, as long as tanks use nohit disciplines (fortitude, weaponshield, nimble, etc) on the boss, gear really doesn't matter all that much on it. And that would flag a guild for Kod'Taz.

2 groups of vex level characters could easily farm that first Temple skulls event for Time phase 4-ish level drops. One group of vex characters could kill xp nameds all day for phase 1/2 level drops. And a very well constructed single group of vex characters can (and has) get through the 3 single group ikkinz raids, collecting a solid array of Time level drops, and more importantly, flagging the guild for Ikkinz raids.

Ikkinz raids were upgraded, but they are still not hard. I know a Vex level guild on another server, not flagged for elemental, that clears Righteousness, Glorification, and Transcendence. Those are all phase 5 to quarm level drops. I mean, the guild would still have weak slots after, but you'd still be getting 18 or so really high end items per sweep of them, supplemented by Summoner Ring, Yxtta nameds, xp nameds, and kod'taz pit/skull events. Then it's just Uqua and Antechamber, and while both are hard, there's an awful lot of cheesy workarounds possible in both to scrape by with minimal gear... which just leaves qvic, and that place reminds me of PoFire before the minis were buffed up.

Elementals and Time are good ways to gear up, but there is also intense competition for them, whereas for most servers there simply isn't for GoD. I think my server has the most Kod'Taz flagged guilds at 3, versus like 15 some elemental flagged guilds, and half the time mobs in Kod'Taz/Yxtta are just sitting up compared to elemental where everything is permadead.

The interesting part is Kod'Taz and Yxtta were designed for elemental, NOT Time guilds, so nearly all guilds currently in those 2 zones don't have a whole lot of motivation to farm the statics for drops that are beneath their level. Any elemental level guild that could make it there would probably be dominant, and from what I've seen, though difficult it is certainly viable.

My guild is currently getting into Vex Thal, which seems appropriate for us and a good deal since there are only 2 or 3 guilds there who are already deeper in. No competition with Elementals, and the loot, including from Ssra, is still very good. Maybe once we've been farming VT for some time we'll start elemental progression, once everyone there has moved on to GoD, OoW and beyond. I enjoy content as well, and it's nice to work somewhat older areas without a lot of uber pressure.

While you can take my post as just a map of the best way to advance/gear a guild, you don't have to, nor is it inconsistent with how you want to play the game.

First off, I don't skip content myself, nor was I advocating that (I said pushing for elementals -alone-, as in making it your only major raid target/goal). Saying to avoid linear progression from vex to the first few tiers of PoP to elemental to Time to GoD isn't the same thing as saying to skip content, because my feelings are you'd be best off working on GoD while in elementals. In fact, your whole point about not wanting to go back and experience elementals before it is trivialized by GoD gear strengthens the argument to work on GoD, because if you wait to get to Kod'Taz until after Time it will be trivialized when you do it, since it is tuned for sub-elemental and elemental characters, not Time level ones. Early GoD is doable by Vex characters, and made for elemental ones, and waiting to do it until after Time is stupid, since by then it is like going back and doing Vex for the first time with elemental characters.



See, that's the reason I posted. There's an enormous amount of content right now that no one is using because it is aimed at people much below the only people with access to it. The content isn't -bad-, just most guilds assume it's a logical progression and will be post-Time when it clearly isn't, so the guilds that would be challenged by it never do it until well after they'd gain anything from it. There's still a bleeding edge with plenty of bugs and **** poor tuning (qvic, Inkta'tu and the last couple raids to get access to them), but that really largely wasn't what I was talking about. My feeling is that early GoD will basically turn into the Vex-level LDoN raids. No one level appropriate will ever do it, because they hear horror stories about how hard the Time level raids are, and never try them until after they are in Time when they are tuned appropriately for basically level 60 characters.

Edited, Fri May 14 15:26:36 2004 by DruidOfEq

I thought it was a very interesting point. One of the things that killed SoC was people saying "there's nothing much more we can do with 3-group raids".

This appears to be suggesting that there might have been. Although I don't know if we qualified as "Vex-level". If it offers a way for smaller guilds to progress without hitting the almighty roadblock in PoP then it is definitely worth thinking about. Although too late for SoC by some months.

It would be nice to think that there were alternate paths rather than the kind of rigid linearity that seems to have grown up.