Did the Original Planes come out before Kunark or after?Follow

Im just trying to figure it out as i wasnt playing back in 99 2000. Would like to really know

Wasn't Mischief added during Velious as well?

Not that this is a suprise, but Gbaji is right

All three of those were before Velious, but not sure that they were before Kunark.

It was just after Kunark, I believe. Kunark was late 2000, Planes of Fear, Hate, and Sky were early 2001

Edited, Apr 5th 2008 12:04am by yenwangweh

Edited, Apr 5th 2008 12:07am by yenwangweh

OMG I GOT A PIECE OF INDICOLITE!!!!!


Seriously, though... Fear IS nasty. Scarelings were the worst, though... had a couple bug out and get into an endless loop where they would gate at around 10%, run all the way back, hit me once, instantly gate again, rinse and repeat.

And yes, I completely forgot Mischief... but that was also added during Velious.

I have never died as much as I did in Fear and Hate, and yet that is still some of the funniest( and terrifying ) raiding I ever did.

It was beyond intense. IMO, it was far more challenging then pretty much any raid content is today. Nowadays success at raiding is pretty much entirely about gear. You have sufficient gear and numbers, know the event/script, and don't do something monumentally stupid, you'll win. If you don't, you'll fail.

Back then, folks raided with gear that the average twink would pass on without a second thought today. Every single person had to know exactly what they were doing, or the raid failed. And failure often meant hours of recovery time. There was no cross zone corpse summoning back then. If you wanted your gear back, you absolutely had to get people in zone, physically retrieve your corpses, and rez them in zone and then get out of the zone. All without wiping again...

When I started raiding, I was wearing a mostly full set of Armor of Ro (paladin class armor). I was wielding a Blackened Iron ******* Sword, Polished Granite Tomahawk, Bullsmasher, and IIRC the shield you got as a drop from Crushbone (it had magic resist on it, which believe it or not mattered more then the extra AC).

For most boss mobs, resists mattered more then AC and HPs. I clearly remember raiding Naggy and Vox (and other planar bosses as well), and taking off my normal armor and replacing it with my resist kit, which consisted mostly of jewelry. So very little AC or HPs on anything, and almost entirely resists. This was necessary, or your whole raid just died from the AEs that all bosses had.


Gear really didn't start to ramp up until maybe PoPish timeframe (and even more after that). To give you an example, my wizard has (ok, had. I've leveled him a bit recently) more AC and HPs at level 52 then my paladin did when he first hit the same level. That's a *huge* amount of difference. And I considered him "well geared" when he was that level, since I'd been raiding planes since level 46. IIRC, I had almost a complete set of valorium armor (old tier planar), and tromped around Kunark with that stuff (and was quite successful wearing it back then!). IIRC, I basically wore that old planar armor all the way until I replaced it with Skyshrine quested stuff in Velious. So basically, I was hitting HoT as a paladin with fewer HPs and AC then an similarly leveled wizard would have today. In fact, I was tanking stuff there with that level of gear.

Believe it or not, support classes mattered a lot more back then. There's a reason why heal rotations were required. It's cause tanks simply couldn't survive more then a few seconds pretty much no matter what. And while you can argue that dps folks just waited until the call and then dpsed, their participation was far more important back then IMO. Up until SoL release, success against a raid target was basically a race against the clock. If your healers ran out of mana or screwed up their timing before the mob ran out of HPs, you lost. DPS was *huge* since it was the single biggest factor in terms of beating that clock.

With SoL the concept of sustained raid performance appeared. High end raids had more to do with how long they could sustain a combat level. Gear didn't change that much, but mob dps decreased while hps increased dramatically. Fights were *looooooong*, and you had to carefully manage them. Um... DPS was often still the make or break there as well.


It's hard to say which is better or worse. It was just "different". It was certainly a lot more scary to raid back then. You were really putting it on the line. The absolute worse that can happen in a raid today is you fail to defeat the mob and lose the loot, and perhaps take some deaths and get rezzed back in the guild lobby. Back then, it was not uncommon to eat non-rezzed deaths, often many of them, and it also entirely possible to simply lose your corpse entirely. No shadowrest back then. If you didn't recover your corpse in one week, it was gone!


That said, it was also incredibly fun. I still remember my first planar raid clearly. It was plane of fear and my hands were literally shaking after we did the initial break. No raid experience since has been that exciting...

Gbaji;
I so remember the resist "jewelry". I also agree that those raids were the scariest ( literally I was shaking at the key board ) then anything after. Part of that was that it was the first raids the game ever knew, and we had no idea what we were really getting into.
I'll bet for anyone the first raids that you did ( no matter the era) you probably felt fairly similar.

I raided back then as well. I remember them being pretty difficult. The Ring War event in GD comes to mind. I dont know if they were more difficult back then though. I will say they were different. The raids of today, have tools that werent available back then. Just the fact that not every cleric had their clicky rez was a huge difference. If you died on a raid, you were pretty much out of the raid till wipe or success. Today's raids, you can get rezzed, and be back in the fight in a relatively short time. Some raids were so difficult, that you actually had a second raid formed, just as support for the first. Anyway, I dont know which "era" was harder, but they both had/have their challenges.

I really liked the Raids in SoL, especially IV, and the Thought Horror Overfiend (if I remember his name right) in the Deep. In PoP, I really liked the raids. There was just something so satisfying in beating those with a well thought out strat, instead of trying to Zerg it. The GoD raids didnt really impress me, except I couldnt help but think of Benny Hill on the one when you have to run around willy nilly at certain points in the encounter. Anguish is very fun imo. Finally, DPoB, which is where my guild is now, is sorta fun, but very unforgiving of mistakes, although not as unforgiving as Vish in DoN is.

I don't think the overall difficulty of raids have changed much over time. Each expansion's end content raid was difficult for the period in which it was released. Except for the level mess up in GoD (raids tuned for level 70, but 65 was the cap), I don't think any expansion was that more difficult.

Now for the exception. Starting with Kunark, raids really didn't require a "break-in". For anyone that played back in 1999, nothing sends them to the therapist quicker than talking about a Fear or Hate break-in. Ever since Fear and Hate, the players had a relatively safe place to buff and prepare. Nothing like porting up to Hate only to die before you can completely zone over. In Fear a north wall or west wall break-in wasn't guaranteed. One random wandering mob could start a chain reaction of aggro that would wipe out the entire raid, and could lead to 7+ hours of corpse recovery. I was part of many recovery teams that helped out other guilds get their gear back.

Nope. That was the last expansion that we did any raiding at all before my old guild fell apart. I basically left the game right after DoD came out.


That's exactly the sort of scripted raid I'm talking about though. There's one way to beat it, and your basically hit over the head with it. Don't attack the spirits. Do attack the eggs. If you get cursed, run over to the whatzit's and say the magic phrase. Do that and as long as you can physically overcome the raid mob, you win. Don't do that, and you lose.

I'm not saying that this is "better" or "worse". But, as another poster said, it's "different". The challenge is following the script properly. Older raids didn't have scripts, so the actual fight was tougher. Subtle differences in positioning and pulling made or broke a raid. While individual contributions may not have had as "obvious" an effect as they do on a scripted raid, they all added up and often made the difference between success and failure. It was more "subtle" in that sometimes seemingly minor actions by the raid force as a whole made a huge difference. When the entire raid relies on managing damage sufficiently to defeat the mob before your MT dies, minor changes in dps and heal efficiency end out making or breaking the raid.

There was a greater focus on those things as a result. When I speak of "more skilled raid force", that's what I'm talking about. Anyone can learn to follow a script if they're given instructions. It takes experience and skill for every single member of your raid force to automatically and seamlessly adjust to slight position changes of the target in order to minimize damage taken while maximizing damage done.



That's a pretty big deal though, isn't it? Part of successful raiding was the skill of getting the raid force to the target, while managing trash along the way (and possibly during the event), and dealing with CRs if things went wrong. Heck. The entire difficulty of Sky raids back in the day was knowing how to get people from point to point successfully. There were a few "tricks" as well, but the environment itself was challenging...

There isnt anything as tough as a max level 50 fear break in modern EQ give the oldtimers the credit there do.

The original 3 planes were before kunark. EQ was released 16 march 1999. PoFear was released as a halloween event in October 1999 when a rift was opened into kithicor forest for the weekend. That is why there are undead in kith at nite now.

Yes, you can zone right over to Fear, but there is a good chance that you will immediately aggro something. With the spacing of the mobs in Fear, the instant you aggro'd one mob, it turned into a chain reaction that would get everything in the area. Most of the time, this isn't a huge issue if the person dies right there. Usually, someone didn't realize they had aggro and they ran to the raid force along with 50 mobs.

A "good break" the first group would go in. There are a couple FD classes, and a couple clerics. The FD classes went in and a couple trained mobs away, and one would FD near the raid spot. Hopefully, the clerics are able to make it to the raid spot and camp. Now, your main tank group would come in, if all went well, they would make it to the raid spot, and start trying to pull some mobs to free up some space. From here, other groups would zone over, if they had aggro, you would run away from the raid to die.