Yup. That's the one that gets the attention, but it's also one of his
tamer moments. It's also one of his
funnier moments, considering that yeah, while Seru Sanctum and Vex Thal were horrible time sink attunements, it turned out all those giant salty tears Kaplan spewed about Ssra were ultimately...pretty fuckin' hilarious and embarrassing (for him) in the long run. Here's that
entire post, because the Reddit thread missed the context that made this just, "chef's kiss":
The encounter wasn't bugged, LoS was doing it wrong the entire time and couldn't figure out the trick; you couldn't just faceroll Ssra while abusing the Cleric epic. There are eight adds that spawn; Ssra isn't targetable initially, and you have to kill two placeholder adds specifically to force-spawn the add that, when you kill it, makes Ssra targetable.
Then you kill Ssra, and you have to CC/offtank the rest of the adds until he's down; when Ssra's down, you kill the other adds, which in turn spawn mobs that drop the quest item you needed to get the Vex Thal key.
If you don't kill the adds in the right order...well that's where the zone-wide DT comes in. It's Ssra's hard enrage mechanic. Now, Ssra
does have a single-target DT, but it's survivable by a tank that has a good CH rotation...but it's a 95% de-aggro, so unless you have multiple tanks on Ssra and the DPS is
really throttling until the burn phase, Ssra's just going to go buck wild and start one-shotting PC's, healers first. The only reason you need characters out of aggro radius, is if you have clerics spamming their epic to res tanks instead of setting up a proper CH rotation.
So here we see Kaplan crying great big crocodile tears because his guild was, well...
stupid. And so was he for accidentally telling on himself, that his guild was simply trying to cheese the encounter. That post actually made Kaplan one of the biggest laughingstocks among SoE CM's and GM's for
months...because they knew where, why, and how LoS was pooching it, and admitting their shitter status in raw ignorance. The only other time I saw GM's take pure, unmitigated, public
glee in an EQ fracas to that extent, was
Fansy.
The Cleric epic is why LoS was infamous for griefing Ragefire, they were trying to keep clerics from any other guild from getting the Cleric epic and therefore challenging their "uber leetest of the uber leet" status. They were also notorious for killing bosses they already had on farm status, just to prevent other guilds from downing them and progressing (something Afrasiabi's guild, FoH, specialized in too).
Kaplan was
extra salty over it, because "lesser" guilds figured it out and were already clearing Vex Thal while
his guild was still trying to figure out how to kill Ssra. And, basically every other guild had LoS on information blackout, because they were sick of LoS's griefing bullshit to prevent their own progression.
I remember one time, our server GM and a handful of guides
almost got their ass setting up a sting operation to catch them glitching Manaburn, killing raid bosses to grief other guilds further back in progression. Some of them had multiple warnings, meaning catching them in the act would have been a bannable offense. Unfortunately, they got suspicious and backed off before we could start swinging the banhammer.
(Maybe later I'll talk about how Kaplan's and Afrasiabi's toxicity as EQ players negatively impacted vanilla WoW and TBC game design, to the detriment of anyone but hardcore raiders, while their former guildies, and associated guilds on other servers, got insider information about raids and encounters, and were even tapped for feedback during development.)
