Was something really cool in early everquest where it seemed like some of the raid bosses were impossible to kill. Often times actually being truly impossible to kill, but thats not what I would prefer MMO's did. Just sitting the ultimate bad guy of the expansion out there that takes 100% farm of all other content in the expansion, fully equipped raid group, that perfected a ffxiv type of level of strategy to beat. But not every single boss - just like.. one, maybe? per expansion. Too many people, including myself, just want to zone out and enjoy bullshitting with people in a video game to be try hard 100% of the time. Mythic raiding in WoW leads to burnout, so I can see why smaller audience games dont want to go down that road. (Nor should WoW at this point, either.)
I agree, and I miss that about early EQ expansions. They all had all had end zones or end bosses that were super-hard compared to the rest and took a while for someone to take down: Classic (Fear), Kunark (VP), Velious (North ToV/AoW), PoP (Time), GoD (Tunat), and OoW (Mata). In one case (Tunat) it wasn't taken down until the next expansion was out and everyone wa 5 levels higher. After that it seemed like bosses went down pretty soon after being unlocked, with keys being the only speed bump. Now it's basically an immediate thing.
Underfoot is great and a lot of elite players love it, but it drove off a good amount of casual guilds on live because every raid was super-hard (except Badgers of course). A lot of those fights weren't interesting either. So a guild could spend a month dying to that giant slug boss, or Fippy freaking Darkpaw. That definitely made people quit.
The Burning Lands might be my favorite late-game expansion, between the cool aesthetic (genies and Plane of Air/Fire) and the way it's structured. Most of the raids in the expansion are tough but fair, not that bad to take down, but require enough effort to be rewarding. Then you've got Mearatas at the end which is one super-tough fight, exponentially harder than everything leading up to it, and requires people to be on their A game and A equipment and so on. They successfully recaptured that vibe that old eras had where you had to really put in some work to clear the very last battle, and if you didn't want to put in that work, you had the whole rest of the expansion to mess around in.
I'd love to see a Burning Lands 2.0 type expansion with the same vibe/aesthetic/models that covers the opposing themes of Earth/Water with Loruella as the endzone. They set everything up for it in TBL and I'm surprised they didn't follow that up. Loruella being Mearatas on steroids (and held back from testing until, say, the last week) might recapture some of the old game's vibe. Surprised they didn't do this after the Luclin remakes, considering it's basically part 3 of a PoP remake (Broken Mirror, Burning Lands) and they could reuse a ton of assets.
