Akylios isn't easy

[Ladara]

The ultimate point is that MMO players are probably not the best demographic you want to be testing pyramid style progression on, where each level is tougher than the last. It has to be build more like a skyscraper.

You're as good a raider as you're going to get at the end of your HK tenure.

I will respectfully disagree. Going into new content can helps raiders adapt to paying attention to multiple things at the same time and reacting quickly to mechanics. A good new raid forces you to be aware of your surroundings while doing the best DPS/HPS you possibly can. Just not standing in purple isn't enough. (I move for Matron's ground AE, having dark passage on that fight is nice) When I first started playing Rift I was much less skilled than am I now at playing my class (first MMO as a healer) and managing mechanics. I got better. Raiding helped that. Not gear, experience helped that.

As far as raid difficulty topping off at HK level, I think a lot of people will be very disappointed if you're right.

[Sebb]

No, you've seen the quality of performance of your raid team increase from doing that particular thing several times. Put them into a new fight or pressure them into a challenge they can't get better at, and they'll derp like it's T1 raiding again. Take a vet like me, and there's nothing we haven't seen or done already. We don't have any green left for easy improvement like avoiding simple bombs.

Do I avoid matron's bombs? No. Can you claim you do? You can try.

You only learn to dodge floor AoE once. You don't learn to interrupt faster than beruhast, get out faster than heat funnel, stop dps faster than rune king, put out more DPS-for-gear than areandorn, and team coordinate better than akylios.

So for all of you hoping and wishing that ID mechanics make HK's look easy, I don't really think you have a good grasp of how MMOs really work. They can't rev up difficulty for 10 years. That's not how this is done lol...

You all aren't really thinking critically if you think every new tier of raiding is going to be harder than the last. not sustainable. HK's challenge level is just fine. You'll wipe plenty.

Do we have a Formal submission form for nominating top PF posts? If so i'd like to throw this one into the ring.

[PFalcon]

I will respectfully disagree. Going into new content can helps raiders adapt to paying attention to multiple things at the same time and reacting quickly to mechanics. A good new raid forces you to be aware of your surroundings while doing the best DPS/HPS you possibly can. Just not standing in purple isn't enough. (I move for Matron's ground AE, having dark passage on that fight is nice) When I first started playing Rift I was much less skilled than am I now at playing my class (first MMO as a healer) and managing mechanics. I got better. Raiding helped that. Not gear, experience helped that.

As far as raid difficulty topping off at HK level, I think a lot of people will be very disappointed if you're right.

You are trying to extrapolate two tiers of raiding forever, and it's simply shortsighted. Calculus II isn't harder than Calculus I. The scores aren't lower. The dropout rates aren't higher. It is merely the next step in progression.

This is how MMOs are built. You confuse the first two tiers of raiding in a MMO, of which the first tier is a learning tutorial built in the game, with how raiding always goes from tier to tier.

Games just aren't built that way. Endgame content doesn't get harder as MMOs age. I don't know where some of you all are getting your expectations here. It's never happened.

This is your first one, that's fine. Your growth spurt is over, man. You don't grow your whole life, and neither does MMO challenge.

[PFalcon]

Do we have a Formal submission form for nominating top PF posts? If so i'd like to throw this one into the ring.

It's not wrong. If you have a lot of raiding skill to improve on after you're finished with HK, you're probably being carried. I can't DPS any harder. I can't interrupt any faster. I can't get out of AoE sooner. I can't stop DPS faster. I can't jump and turn my face and take my weapons off and do any of the petty nonsense they design for players to do when the bosses don't just straight wreck a team..any better than it's being done.

And honestly, neither can you.
That's all there is. There is no more. The only thing making content harder will accomplish is to cut a bunch of players out who can't muster more performance than they gave in HK.

You feel free to tell Trion that HK was too easy for you. But if it wasn't, you're fine with ID being just as tough, standardized to gear.

[PFalcon]

Let x be challenge of the raid content, and tiers of raid content separated by arrows.

How Rift has gone:
x-->2x

How you all assume Rift is going to go:
x-->2x--->3x---->4x----->5x

How all MMOs really go:
x-->2x-->2x-->2x-->2x

Learn your limitations. If they make ID harder...are you really going to be the person that failing doesn't happen to? "It'll never happen to me" is a fallacy this population still believes in.

I can handle one more tier of harder-ness before I cap out. That's friggin it, and that's a challenge level that can't remotely support a MMO's bottom line.

Why do I tell you where I cap out? Because I know almost none of you are capable of it and I'm comfortable with my limitations. I don't want to see another weedout session here. It's not even fun to survive any more.

[Sebb]

It's not wrong. If you have a lot of raiding skill to improve on after you're finished with HK, you're probably being carried. I can't DPS any harder. I can't interrupt any faster. I can't get out of AoE sooner. I can't stop DPS faster. I can't jump and turn my face and take my weapons off and do any of the petty nonsense they design for players to do when the bosses don't just straight wreck a team..any better than it's being done.

And honestly, neither can you.
That's all there is. There is no more. The only thing making content harder will accomplish is to cut a bunch of players out who can't muster more performance than they gave in HK.

You feel free to tell Trion that HK was too easy for you. But if it wasn't, you're fine with ID being just as tough, standardized to gear.

Apparently you can avoid AOE faster if you still get hit by matrons bombs.

And yes, as someone that carried many a people through HK, I felt it was far easy.

[AWHavoc]

Akylios IS easy.

We pulled Akylios for the first time to learn him Saturday. (Spent a couple months reforming and adjusting raid schedules just doing 10/11 and not even attempting Akylios just because we didn't have the time)
We killed him Sunday.

The overall experience was boring and extremely disappointing, and wish we would have just gotten off our ***** and made pulls earlier :\

[PFalcon]

Apparently you can avoid AOE faster if you still get hit by matrons bombs.
And yes, as someone that carried many a people through HK, I felt it was far easy.

While babysitting an interrupt and aligning cleaves optimally? You can posture and claim you're pro all you want, but I'm not embarassed to say matron bombs hit me because unlike so many internet pros...I have nothing to hide about my performance capabilities.

Once again, you feel free to petition to Trion that HK was too easy. Don't be surprised if they don't listen.

[Chrissibow]

Sorry to burst your bubble. But it's insanely easy now. Rune King is the new hardest boss in HK!

Breaths are announced and you don't need to move from waves so what exactly is going to kill you?

Nothing can kill you unless people don't use their brain.

And seeing how almost all 10/11 guilds got to 11/11 same week tells us the same story

Seems waves knock you off the in P1

Seems Damage still kills you.

Seems if you can't do enough DPS that kills you.

Seems you can still lose to RNG it kills you.

Seems you aren't smart but your post to prove it.

Seems you still have to do the fight. If you mess up you wipe.

Only thing that made it easier that after 15 mins of jumping through hoops and you are tired of it you don't die from P4 waves causing the whole raid to wipe. The whole fight is 10 mins to long. Trion made it a touch easier. So what. Should have been nerfed long ago.

[Chrissibow]

Seriously, I can't think of any fight other than Silgen, unless you over-gear it, that is harder than it. Look at it from a pure skill level. People like to say that even if you react perfectly you still get hit by heat funnel. Those are lies made by people that have lower than average skills. I can think to last night, we did Silgen and we must have gotten 2-3 heat funnels in a row in melee because we had 2 warrior DPS. Heat Funnel is melee is a lot harder than Heat Funnel in ranged, first of all. And, yes, I've done the fights on both ranged and melee(warrior and healer). The easiest way we have found to have the priests be arranged in a predictable fashion(arch) is to tank him slightly outside of the tent where he stands, but the tank in its place with his back to the room. Tank eats the anchors and it eliminates a lot of disconnect for melee. This also gives melee a lot less room to run and less places to turn to if the funnel decides it has the AI of GLados and comes straight after you(you can not out run it without a shift or fleet of foot). Yet, all those times we got funnel in melee both me and the other warrior managed to get out of the funnel without taking a single tick of damage. It's possible, but it requires perfect execution from the player, not RNG. You just stop your rotation and strafe or whatever you do to move.


This, besides dodging waves while going in for a deadly mind decay or stacking for orb around a wave, or even going around a wave trying stay on top of your stingers(ranged perspective p3-4), are easily the hardest skill checks in the game and are more valuable than any other checks, in my opinion, because they either show you who the real bad*** raiders are or make otherwise new and seemingly average players into wanting to become truly epic. There were other reaction and skill checks like these in other fights, but none were as hard, or as tight, even in their prime(Grugonim reaction to emotes, interrupt on Beruhast, tight purge rotation on Sicaron, etc). And out of all of these skill/reaction checks one remains true to its original form(Silgen's). So, that leaves me one conclusion: Silgen is the hardest fight in the game. These skill checks, even after weeks of practice, can still cause many wipes if not executed with 100% perfection from all 10 members and 100% full focus. Other mechanics in other fights can be easily overcome while people are tired, drunk, not at 100% capacity.

Just my $0.02.

Twitch mechanics isn't still. It's do you have prefect internet connection? If not it will not matter about your skill. a 1/2 sec of lag is a wipe.

Twitch mechanics are there to make sure you wipe. It only takes 1 to wipe you. RNG mechanic are just as bad. They are there to wipe you. Fun? Not in the least.

Then you make the encounter dg on for 20 mins. This will always cause a twitch death. I've watched videos of world first kills where people die. Are they bad? No. They got twitched. Then take a normal raider and a twitch mechanic is death.

I causes guilds to break up.

Yes I'm all for Little Raider having his fun of wiping 500+ times on a Boss. Once the top guilds get a Boss it's time to turn the twitch mechanic down a touch.

I'm with Lore on Tankspot. If you can easily get to the last Boss in a Raid it shouldn't be a brickwall that you never kill. Akylios was a brickwall. If you can get to him you should in time kill him.

And no one was. So Trion took a bit of twitch out of it.

[Mayakov]

Akylios IS easy.

We pulled Akylios for the first time to learn him Saturday. (Spent a couple months reforming and adjusting raid schedules just doing 10/11 and not even attempting Akylios just because we didn't have the time)
We killed him Sunday.

The overall experience was boring and extremely disappointing, and wish we would have just gotten off our ***** and made pulls earlier :\

I giggled. HK in general is much easier compared to launch due to gear buffing and nerfing things left and right. We went in last night with 10 of our alts and the rest of them were pugs from faeblight. Faeblight is probably the most casual server in rift atm and it didn't take us more than 3 tries in 3 hours to get 5/11. Seriously, I can't wait to get to akylios and just trollolol through it and start getting lolrelics on my rogue.

[AWHavoc]

I giggled. HK in general is much easier compared to launch due to gear buffing and nerfing things left and right. We went in last night with 10 of our alts and the rest of them were pugs from faeblight. Faeblight is probably the most casual server in rift atm and it didn't take us more than 3 tries in 3 hours to get 5/11. Seriously, I can't wait to get to akylios and just trollolol through it and start getting lolrelics on my rogue.

Yup, I'm severely disappointed with how easy it is now, I'm hoping our core gets serious and attempts progression during early ID, because a fight without a challenge is just a waste of time not worth logging in for

[PFalcon]

Oh great we're putting cable connection stats in our sigs now. Awesome.

[mtbsean]

If you guys are so good and it's so easy now, do it with Blue or Green gear... Let the skill talk, not full relic gear.

[Inixia]

Silgen may be the hardest fight right now but that doesn't mean he isn't easy.

my vote goes to Grugonim in Faeblight lag. Dps is lower, people's movements are jumpy on the ground phase and sometimes don't match up to where they visually are, and even grugonim lags, on his corrosive bile occasionally he will wait a sec til after your raid moves after the channel to cast ; ;