Allakhazam Poll: Trouble in the Original PlanesFollow

You could zone into the plane of Sky from inside Veeshan's Peak prior to the revamp. Going in this way also let you keep your buffs. I Havn't tried this since the revamp though so don't know if they changed it or not.

I have to go with PoS. The one raid I did there I was...want to say mid 50's, & one of 3 chanters. The mobs there just LOVED me for whatever reason. Id die get rezzed lot med die 5 seconds later lol...I prolly died like 30 times b4 I left...guild didnt blame me either. thats my worst eq experiance & the only thing I can say to that is...Thank GOD for clicky cleric epics =)

I dont understand the discounting of pof because it was easy with the correct tactics or whatever. "Back then" it was totally different. Pentium 300, hard zone to load. The first person in the zone wouldnt have the ability to create a massive train, theyd have died while loading

Another thing is, when the first raids went to fear there was no real known tactic. It involved a *lot* of trial and error. We went in, wiped, grabbed a bunch of crap gear and magician summoned stuff, ran back in and died some more. Then we ask another guild to help out and they wipe as well. Days later...a third guild wipes trying to help us as well. I didnt go because i was refarming my gear. It was only after the corpses in pof numbered in the hundreds that the GM decided to help us out.

Ive been to the new fear, ive seen all the old planes within the last few years, except for fear. There is nothing that can make me go back to that regardless of how trivial it has become. Ill take the old style PoS 36 hour long raid anyday over the initial pof break in attempts. I think the people who view fear as easy are the same ones who read strategies on websites of how to do it, and they were all level 60. If you wait a long enough time, every encounter becomes pretty trivial once the path is blazed for you. Perhaps 'old days' is too big of a lump of time, because after enough fear runs, it does become easier than pos I suppose. Its just those first ones that stick in your head so vividly.

Yeah. But you can say the same about almost any raid zone the first time people attempted it. While I wasn't personally at that level when Fear and Hate were introduced, I don't think it really took that long for the basic strategies to evolve. How long exactly does it take to realize that trying to fight at the portal doesn't work? Sure. The first week, lots of folks died... horribly. But the poll wasn't just asking about how bad a particular plane was before people figured out how to manage them. It was about which one caused the most trouble overall. Honestly, how many people were raiding in Fear the first week or so it came out? Compared to the total number that raided it "back in the day"? Tiny percentage.

For those of us who did regularly raid the planes for a couple years or so, both pre-kunark, and later for epics, and even later still for epics and for some gear drops even as late as Luclin, the overal difficulty of the break into fear just really wasn't that bad. Once you knew how to do it, it was really pretty simple. In fact, due perhaps to a totaly bizaare set of luck, I've actually *never* died on a fear break. Not once. Admittedly, I was just plain lucky, but it really wasn't that high a risk. My first fear raid, I was 47th level. We did a ridiculous "north wall" break (I *don't* recommend this!). Even then, it worked. Lots of people died. Ton's of people "stuck" at the portal. I was basically lucky. I was in like the 3rd or 4th group, and had a pretty decent system, so I didn't get lagged out too badly. I ran to the north wall and camped with out getting a scratch.

The closest I *ever* came to dying on a fear break was during a west wall break, when we really didn't have enough people on (but this was a bit later so we figured we should be able to handle it). We ended up getting into some trouble on the initial break (we were actually doing a nibble/port break tactic this time). When our nibble group got a bit of bad luck (mezzer got ported by an eyeball, and by the time the group realized it, their porter had died. Just plain bad luck), we went with a quick west wall and camp break. Didn't go quite as we planned it, but it *should* have worked. It was a set of bad luck that jinxed it (which could technically be blamed on me depending on how you look at it). We got to the wall no problem. The few of us "tanks" were fighting a handful of mobs and the cleric camped. No problem. We had a FD SK watching (he'd survived from the first break group). After the cleric camped, the rest of us kinda made attempts to see if we could survive if possible. I'd ended up with 2 or 3 mobs on me, so I ran them out in a line along the wall and rooted them each. Then ran back to the "camp" spot and camped. Just about 5 seconds before I camped, I saw one of my roots fail (so at least one mob was barrelling towards me, but didn't make it back to me before I camped out).

Would have worked just fine except that the cleric, instead of logging in an alt and waiting for the all clear sign, just waited a couple minutes and then logged right back in with the same character. She didn't realize that there might still be mobs running around near the camp. She ended up logging in right into the mob(s) that had tried to get to me when I was camping out. Oops. Shouldn't have happened, but it did. Even then, we really didn't have any problems. Just got me back on, once the all clear was given. I rezzed cleric, SK started dragging corpses and we had a strong enough core group within 15 minutes to clear the portal and roamers and bring the rest in safely (not that there was much more at this point, I think we only brought like 3 or 4 groups total that time).


Point being that it really wasn't that hard or dangerous. You could *easily* recover if you kept your head. Fear breaks were usually made worse by having large numbers of people who didn't know what they were doing. Maybe my experience with fear is a bit different then others. Aside from that first one, we always did it with just a small force of guildmembers (that first one was an "alliance" raid, and someone else was leading it). We always had more success with 20-30 people who knew what they were doing over 50-60 people who didn't (which was the typical approach to fear).


Dunno. I just always found that the fear break, while it did cause death and mayhem, just wasn't a "headache" like other planes provided. Pulling in Hate was *vastly* harder then pulling in fear for example. Assuming a double-FD pull team in both cases, you could easily ensure no overpulls in Fear (big outdoor zone with plenty of visibility). It was not uncommon for the pull team in Hate to simply be unaware that they had agro on them. Hate also had that wall agro thing...

And of them all I still maintain that the PoSky corpse/rez/key thing was just more "painful" to manage. Sure. It didn't get you all at once. It wasn't as dramatic as dying to a horde of mobs from all over the zone. It certainly wasn't as dramatic as chain DTing mobs from across the zone either. But it was generally unavoidable, and the amount of effort it required in order to do it right was alot. And if you didn't do it "right", your entire raid could easily be over.



I'll grant you that. I just had a completely different experience I guess. Again. I definately raided all of those planes well before level 60 (and before the level existed). What's even more interesting, is that while I had lots of experience raiding PoF and PoH before Kunark, the majority of my PoSky raids were *after* Kunark release. Certainly all of my PoSky experience where I was one of the people "leading" was well after Kunark release, so we had higher levels. That wasn't the problem. The plane was just so unforgiving if you made a mistake. So, I'm essentially comparing raiding Fear with all sub-50 characters to raiding PoSky with all 50+ characters, and I still think PoSky was worse...

although everyone keeps talking about fear break in which was to e not as bad as having to port the groups up to hate for the break in with the same kind of adds before the revamp. to me it was sky that was worse. one you needed wizs to port everyone up, then the whole key thing that used to be no rent thus leave or log and you had to start all over. the bs of the die summon rezz to get others to where raid was if they were not there from begining and the fact that it used to take 2 days to get to last island with a good raid. never mind the no talking in say etc etc

I definatly took the question as "back in the day".

Fear is easy now. Hell, you can take one group into fear easy today and mop up.

But 2 or 3 years ago, Fear was the penultimate raid to do. If ya screwed up the break-in, you could just plan the rest of the night as a CR operation, unless you had some high level freinds to come and break it for ya.

The longest FEAR raid I ever did was 13 hours, and still wasn't done, I went to bed. (ya, that means mobs started repopping).

The thing I hated about fear was that the break-in was to draining that by the time you cleared half the zone, about 6 or 7 hours had passed and everybody was getting tired, you almost had to start swapping people in and out of the raid just to get some relief from the mental fatigue that build up.


In any event, sony musta been paying attention to the fact that most players want a definate start and end to raids, usually in a 4 to 6 hour time span. Thats why so many of the raids since GoD came out are either on a time limit, or are designed to be won in within a reasonable time span.

Honestly. PoSky is a cakewalk today though. While I'll rant about how hard it was "back in the day", it's almost as different today as PoH is (but in a different way).

The raid and group tool improvements have removed 90% of what made PoSky difficult. It's now trivially easy to add new members to a raid (still have to do the death/corpse summon thing to get them to where you are though, but at least you don't have to do ridiculous gyrations to get them into a group in the first place. With the ability of a raidleader to shuffle group members around willy-nilly, it's even easier. Need a cleric, necro, wizard, and the "new guy" all in the same group? Just click a few buttons and it's done. That used to be impossible back then, and in a zone where you can't see the zone-in from where you are, can't get back there without dying and porting back in, people there can't get to you without keys (which they don't have if they're just joining the raid), and with no way to move people from one group to another without them all being within targetting range, this is a *huge* deal.

And now, the keys are no longer no-rent, and they no longer poof when you leave the zone. So you don't have to have your poor wizarrd die every time you need to pick someone up. Someone wants to join your raid in progress? Make wizard a group leader. Wizard drops off island. Ports to that person. Invites person to group. Port back. Raid leader shuffles a necro and a cleric into the group with the wizard and new guy. New guy attacks keymaster and dies. Wizard drops off islans *again*. Ports to where new guy is. Ports them both back to the plane. Necro summons corpse of new guy from isle one to wherever raid is. Cleric rezzes new guys corpse. Violla! New guy is with raid. Wizard just uses his keys and uses transporters to get back to raid (better make sure wizard gets all his keys).

Realize that process used to require that the wizard die as well as the new guy. Not fun if you're the wizard. There's a reason PoSky raids were *very* strict about folks getting there on time. If you missed the start time, you didn't get to go cause it was unfair to the other players who'd have to give up exp to get you with the rest of the raid.

Also. You get to keep your keys from one raid to the next now. Used to have to fight through the entire process every time. So if your guild was trying to get some bit from isle 6, 7, or 8, you had to spend ridiculous amounts of time getting new keys for everyone each time. Now, you can at least get your entire raid force to spiroc isle without having to fight a single thing if need be. Makes it a hell of a lot easier IMO.

heh fear can be broken with 1 good necro.

Fear was the part of my Enchanter Epic 1.0 that caused the most concern. I took a long break from Eq and a necro friend said lets go to Fear. He zones slow so I went in first, ran west with my train and died. He was in, feigned and the rest went beautifully simple. Several years before I had been on some fear raids that went reasonably well, my mob was just never up.

It was much nicer with one necro that knew what he was doing than 40+ people, 1-5 of which did not.