Our friend Green Armadillo has asked us to mention Turbine’s most recent inspiration in promotions: that Dol Guldur is “the most challenging 12-person raid ever devised.” I might go on to add: EVAR!!! How challenging are your 12-person raids, Blizzard? I didn’t think so.
: Zubon
The graphic on that splash screen is pretty sweet, however. All the pictures of Nazgul-on-flying-beast are.
Depends on the definition of Challenging though. Syncaine will happily tell us wow/lotro raids are not challenging compared to Darkfall’s basic (and much more AI-driven) pve, but i think we can discount that, as darkfall is a somewhat unique snowflake.
Tobold posted a while ago that raid fights went into three variants (http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/09/raid-encounter-classification.html) – challenging the strongest, challenging the average, and challenging the weakest.
I’m going to assume, from secondhand views of LoTRO’s raids, that as with WoW, most raid encounters fall into the first two types – as type C forces you to bring only good players, lowering the number of people who see the content.
Secondly, complexity increases with player numbers, so a 12-man, while complex and challenging, will probably (on the forums at least) “not be as challenging as Helegrod was”. (did I spell that right?)
As we’ve seen here in 2009, letting as many players see the content as possible seems the order of the day.
I honestly don’t think any mainstream MMO can deploy a raid encounter, on only the first or second tier of gear in that addon, that they can claim is “the most challenging 2-group raid encounter ever!”
….as you can see, I have too much free time today. That splash screen is pretty sweet, although as a new zealander I’m somewhat biased when it comes to LoTR stuff.
Well, technically you could do a WoW 25-man raid with just 12 people, and that would be more challenging than Dol Guldur. ;)
Isn’t this from the same company that said Moria had 800,000 monsters or something.
And that over 4 million characters had experienced Middle-earth! ;-P
You know, I’ve never even noticed that phrase. I’ll look for it next time.
Technically, the most challenging raid of recent times was the cockblocked C’thun. There was also an EQ/EQ2 equivalent, but I just woke up and can’t remember the name really.
C’thun was not really a cockblock, just a gimmick fight. He was very doable at release, but most people only saw the Youtube video of the laser insta-killing people and assumed that really was the fight. He was tough, no doubt, but Twin Emps before him could be called tougher.
Nax40 wins for most challenging. It took the world’s top guilds MONTHS to beat the 4 horsemen encounter (which is funny because KT went down in less than a week after), and during those months they were not broken (unlike say, original Rag, who took so long because he was actually broken rather than ‘that tough’).
The 4H event, before it got nerfed and then removed (golfclap Blizz), not only required all 40 people to play at the very top of their game, but was also somewhat luck based (taunt resist at a bad time = wipe), and long enough to be somewhat of a mental grind as well. I remember the guilds back then who were working on the encounter all agreeing that it was, by far, the best designed raid boss they had ever experienced.
yaiks. Well it sounds like, since nobody has played ALL the MMO’s raids, even the biggest ones, (especially this new one that few players have seen) nobody is qualified to judge if it IS the toughest. Still it is a rather funny marketing statement.