f13.net

Figured I would bitch a bit.

A Calling in the forest - The Lieutenants are a bit too rare... I've spent  an hour going between camps clearing sentry's and patrolmen waiting for one to spawn....

Two hours.

Timberclaw Gnolls in Antonica

Jesus fuck that was an annoying one. Multiple nights (night only spawn), even with tracking it took waaaaaaay too long.

This is my #1 gripe about the game.  Oftentimes, you'll have a "kill x foes" quest and that many foes do not exist at a given time.  So you're basically forced to sit around and wait for it to respawn.

I mentioned that to Grimwell who in turn mentioned that to Gallente (EQ2 developer) and they said this is old quest design and unintentional and I should /bug it whenever I ran across it.  Happy day!

Then I found this was going on in Echoes of Faydwer as well.   :tantrum:

I suspect what's happening is that many areas are set up so that other types of foes take up the spawns of the foes you need.  So you're basically forced to kill those foes in order to free up the spawns.  Of course, if dozens of players have already been through, chances are there will be zero of those foes to be found there, and other than using an SOE-approved cheating method (http://maps.eq2interface.com/), you have absolutely no idea those foes were ever there.

Anything involving Nektulos Forest. What a godawful zone that is, but it could be so much better with a couple of minor changes (change griffon quest from a 'timed egg run' one to 'run to towers' and breadcrumb it so people run it first, make all of the sodding spiders non-aggro, better location descriptions).

Actually, that latter point could probably apply everywhere - stop giving me "Go kill mob X/collect item Y/find item Z" quests without even giving me the vaguest hint as to where X, Y or Z are. Similarly at the end of quests don't just say "Return to questgiver" - tell me where the bloody hell he is! I could have had that quest in my journal for days or even weeks, so I don't necessarily remember which particular stretch of dismal riverbank somewhere in Nek Forest he or she is camped out at - and I'm certainly not going to spend any serious length of time searching when I can just go to the EQ2 wiki or whatever.

Alot of these problems first developed in Nektulos after the initial revamp.  Spawn points were moved around / changed and I don't think all quests necessarily took that into account, making them harder then they used to be.  In the case of this one, the LTs can be found fairly regularly at the Gul'Thex Citadel (they can spawn at the ramp leading into it).  That woulld probably be a much faster way of getting one then clearing those spawns out in the woods over and over (EQ2 Maps are not always the best thing to use for tracking down spawn points, sometimes it pays to do some footwork / google)

I always felt that the Return of the Light HQ was a bit of a cockblock.  It's one of the first HQ's you can do but it's full of rare spawns and to finish it you need either a three group raid of mid-20's or a solid group of mid 30's.  Silly for a level 18ish newbie type quest.

Fortunately there is almost always someone camping the rare spawns or forming a raid for the last part so it's not impossible to finish.

The rares aren't actually rare any more for that quest (no more placeholders - they spawn every time) but I agree on the final part - the quest can be soloed with minimal difficulty by the mid-20s until the final stage, then it drops you into an instance full of social L25^^^ heroic mobs.  :ye_gods:

A smarter design, IMO, for the first heritage quest would have been tricky-but-doable solo, then have the next couple of heritage items needing a duo or trio & scaling up from there. Lead people into the concept, and so on.

It's been too long since i did these to remember, but I know that they have changed some of these mobs and areas from heroic to solo to heroic to solo a half dozen times. I think in some cases they've lost track of where it fits in to things.

Some quests are just frustratingly awful.  Antomica has a bunch of terrible quests.  I remember running about in the same area trying to get quests to update.  I remember doing the same trying to trigger the quest NPC to spawn so I could continue or complete.  Whenever possible, I abandon that sort of quest.  It's hard to do, though, if it's one of the special ones. 

Uggh...... running to the docks and the impressive train of owlbear thingies  it generated  :ye_gods:

Only problem I ever had was getting an exploration update for the falls in EL, it was very finicky about where you had to be.

LTs, as mentioned, spawn fairly regularly at the citadel.

I've always seen it as part of the core game design, something I kind of accept just by playing EQ2 over another game. A quirk, if you will. Same kinda thing happens with harvest nodes, someone will cherry pick out all the hard metal nodes and eventually you'll have a land full of bushes and fish (lot of people forget fish and glowies count as harvest nodes when clearcutting).

The EQ2 mantra is 'clearcut'. From loot tables to spawns, it's just how the system works.

I also think Nek is a great zone, spent a ton of time there with Vith.

Simond: if you kill off the spiders, eventually you'll have non-aggro spawn, since nektulos has an interesting trash mob table. I was harvesting like mad to push my crafters through that tier and I could get the entire area from N'Marr to the Spires to be non-aggro spawn by killing aggro mobs and leaving the non-aggro alone.

Expanding this to a general peeve thread.

Thanks for taking away my dark elf's racial hide, motherfuckers. Now I have to log out to go afk with my SK (since FD for casters is a nerfy version).

Yea I picked half-elf just for that reason. Nerfed me too. Bastages!

The devs giveth, the devs taketh away. Bummed I lost my racial hide, as mentioned.

Baffled as to why my dark elf now has a racial float, as does my erudite and I'm guessing all races. What's the point of safe fall now? Was there really that much bitching about the stupid fae races? I figured it was a nice balance to having your ingame persona be a little faerie.

Clear example of stupid design decisions that don't fit the lore that's been laid out by almost a decade of the franchise. Of course, you don't want to do the opposite and cling to the Vision to the exclusion of good gameplay, but this change totally baffles me.

But I do note my SK's feign death is finally useful with the same duration as brawler fd, finally. Now if we can only address the 5 minute reuse timer!

The Enchanted lands. Every quest had you killing the same bears, wasps, whatever near the dock but not in any parallel. Its like 5 different people designed quests there each with no input from the others and each decided those groups of bears and wasps would make good objectives.

Oh and Lavastorm, what a wreck. went there with a pug the weekend, never mind the fact that it took like 30 minutes to clear to the entrance of the place we wanted to go but during we lose people and having to replace them in imposable. So when we reach sol's eye zone in we are down to 4, one person falls in the lava and we are dies out of res range. so the 3 of us grab the teleporter and get replacements, re-clear and actually make it. inside wasn't to bad. Place it huge, made it to the 6th level and had a bad pull so we called it.

If you actually play at the level where you have to clear down to Naggy and the fights are not trivial that dungeon is a HUGE time sink.  I did it once with a group of low 50's.  It was an all day thing.

That whole zone needs to be revamped so people can get some use out of it.

My most recent annoying quest: Missing Girl

Get this level 65 quest from Terin(?) by the GFay spires. He is looking for his sister who went exploring in Felwithe (New Tunaria in EQ2, a 55-65 mostly heroic zone). Note: I did this with a 73 zerk so the parts of the zone needed were 99% grey.

1) Find her earring. This tiny ground spawn item is near the front of the zone but so small as to be impossible to find without a loc spoiler. Return to Terin, a 3-4 minute run on a +48% runspeed mount.

2) Find her <cannot remember>. Another tiny group spawn deeper into the zone. A bunch of fighting would be required if the mobs weren't grey. Return to Terin, now a 5 minute run.

3) Find her bracer. Deeper into the zone yet again, but at least you can see this one on the ground if you are looking. Return to Terin, now a 6-7 minute run.

4) Find her body. The corpse is on a rock in the middle of the lake. It helps that you can see the quest book icon from quite far away. Return to Terin, now a good 8 minute run although I burned an evac potion to save some time.

Reward: 9g.

I just wanted to clear this quest from my journal before it went grey but boy was it a waste of almost 30 minutes and I didn't have to fight at all.

Mask of the Deceiver HQ. Second and third Billy spawns are rare spawns, the PH is on a ten minute timer. Screwed me out of that HQ last night when I finished Hadden's HQ. Today I did one kill/respawn, found out it was a ten min timer and did the zone in/out trick to reset the spawn (last night I had already triggered the lockout).

Zone in, run to game room (luckily I'm 44 so it's all grey, what a nightmare if you had to fight it all). No Billy, run back out to entrance, zone out. Repeat. In my case, repeat 19 times. Without using the workaround that's 190 minutes + time to kill PHs (as it was it was still a half hour of dicking around not having fun). Just for the game room Billy. The third Billy is on the same kind of spawn setup. So repeat the whole process again.

And then repeat the whole process once again with the (slightly less) rare spawn of the Pig Lord. I got super lucky and had them all spawn the 19th time. Then my luck ran out and Everling whupped me, even though I pasted him hard last night. Grr. Stupid group content.

Nektropos is a cool zone though.

WOW Sky, I'm impressed. You min/maxed!

I did? How so?

I have tried that zone in / zone out thing for Billy and after half a dozen times I get fed up. 19 times is heroic.

Granted, I was medicated and ill :P  :uhrr:

The original post reminds me of some quest I used to do over and over in EQ1...the mob was supposed to spawn by the corner of a castle up on Luclin ...but the damn thing wouldnt spawn..and when it did, it spawned in the side of the wall where you had to stick your head through the corner of the wall to see it.  Uggh. Talk about annoying.

Any quest that I have to look up is annoying.  And 9 times out of 10, it's some bullshit that I was pychicly suppose to know to do.

I catassed yesterday with my now 76 monk.... Did...

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Metal (http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Metal) which is folowed by
http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/For_a_Few_Coins_More (http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/For_a_Few_Coins_More) which is followed by the waiting game...
http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/An_Ugly_Bounty (http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/An_Ugly_Bounty)
Waiting on those spawns was brutal.

Love the quest names, though.

Are you test or are those live now?

Live - I can't wait to see how the +75 damage changes my dps.

WTF? Are those new quests? I played last night and I didn't see any feathers at Dreg's Landing. My faction with TG is max.

edit: The Di'Zok language collection will be a pain.

She's up on a ridge closer to the skeletons really. Have to climb up top to Teren's then fall down to her.

Thanks. I managed to get all the scattered pages and get the Di'Zok language. Took me a little more than an hour. I will go find Anda next time I play.

I like the flavour texts in a couple of WoW quests:
:grin:

Found her and spent more than two hours working through the quest.

I'm amazed the difficultly I am having with the Bronze Shackle quest in Kunzar Swamp. I think I might stink.

Trial of Harclave.  :oh_i_see:

I know people who have lavished praise on it. It pwned my SK a couple times before I gave up (8 hr lockout ftl). Just got pwned with my wizard last night, but at least I took out the first named in the Arc portion (post-buff) thanks to being able to invis over to him. Was trying to clear the area around the second named because there were wanderers, got taken down hard by the first group in that area I tried. Thought I'd be ok if I kept away from the wanderers, but no deal.

I officially hate that quest and it basically cockblocks me from TS porting. No big deal on my SK who can hit TS/Nek from Neriak docks, but I'm real tired of humping over there from Qeynos with my wizard.

Most of the praise for this instance  was from folks who did it right after Splitpaw was released, since it was really good XP at the time.  However, I believe it was nerfed quite a bit to break that, so now it is kind of meh.  Still, it's worth doing once to get the teleport unlocked to Splitpaw but there is way to much other content to do now to waste much time in Splitpaw

It's really about going slow and making sure you only agro one group at a time.

I am aware of this and yet I still get my ass handed to me. It's the larger groups of +3 lvl ^^^ heroics that get me either way.

How did the arena battle go for you?

Harclaves has gone through a ton of changes since it was first released.

Back when Splitpaw first came out it was pretty much how I ground my Swash up to 50. The experience used to be awesome and the loot was the normal non-named chance for heroic loot. So you'd come out of there with tons of adepts and an occasional master. It was also pretty darn easy and my Swash could clear the entire zone in less than an hour. In the beginning dps classes had a definite advantage as the buff was the same for everybody.

Then they started making a bunch of changes to the zone, I don't remember what order these happened but here's a rough list:

 -- They changed the buff depending on what arch-type your class was. Healers got a bigger damage shield and DPS mod but less regen, Melee got more regen but a smaller dps mod. etc... Totally jacked up some classes and made it near impossible to complete.

 -- They nerfed the everloving shit out of the experience in the zone and made most of the exp come on the quest completion.

 -- They nerfed the loot drops into oblivion

 -- They added the lockout timer

Back when it was released pretty much everyone did nothing but Harclaves runs to level up. Anymore the zone is probably never used outside of picking up a few AA points by running it once.


A fun bit of trivia: When AA's were first added the first point for Conj & Nec was in a skill called "possess pet" which lets you control your pet for a brief time. If you possessed your pet then clicked the arc to get the buff your pet would actually be buffed instead of your char. This had a couple effects, first you now had an uber pet that could own 2-3 of those groups at once and second you didn't get hit by the experience debuff. That meant you could roll through the zone wasting heroics like they were green solo mobs and getting full exp. Good times...

Cakewalk. And I know how to take on Heroics, though groups in tight quarters can still give my wizard some problems. I've been pointedly practicing against heroic groups lately.

I don't really care about the 'nerfing' of Harclaves, what people were doing isn't my style of gameplay. I just want the goddamned TS teleport for my Qeynos-based wizard so I can skip the Antonica bird ride. Another reason Neriak is the best city (lag aside): dock porters to TS and Nek.

You can bell to TS for 60s from the Qeynos docks and skip the Antonica bird ride that way.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Still gotta endure the QH lagfest, but better than the bird, I guess.

QH lagfest is nowhere near what it used to be though...

True. Neriak at the end of a long playsession is an almost guaranteed CTD with the out of memory error. And slideshow lag otherwise, something seems unoptimized or something in there, which sucks because it's functionally the best city. Graphics lag, because it's not too bad when I crank things back to crap settings.

Random gripe: Why do wizards get the shaft with ports in EQ2? Seems every other zone has a druid ring and I have three stinkin ports (plus maybe that one in Kunark I don't have yet).

Whatthefuck? Played a wizard in EQ and he was the friggin' rambling man.

My guess is that travel is pretty damn easy regardless, so they kept the ports down. In EQ1, it was the only viable means so they spread out the ability more.

Except that druids can port all over the place. And SoW. Again. Wizards got a little shafted is all I'm sayin'. Easier travel or not, if droods got it, why not wizards, too?

EQ2 needs easier travel across the board.  First time it's an adventure.  100th time it's anti-fun.

/signed.  I'd support a few more "voyage by sea" places.

Why not everyone?  I mean what's the harm in giving all classes access to some type of port system.  Making it class specific seems archaic.

EQ2's travel was never really much of an issue that I saw once you had been somewhere once -- between bells, carpets, birds, horses, etc. It does require knowing your options though and Qeynos has a bit of an advantage. The only real blocks I can think of are the spires and the boat to Kunark, both of which are 5 minutes or so at most? (And getting lost in KOS, but that's my problem--the clouds definitely need a subways style route map). EQ2 has the lowest travel of any of the games I regularly play, whenever I play WOW or LOTRO I'm always shocked at the amount of time I spend travelling, either on glacial birds or long runs.

The why doesn't a wizard thing is the fundamental flaw in EQ2 more broadly translated to "why doesn't EQ2 have (EQ1feature)?"  Anyone thinking of doing a sequel game should take a good long look at that one because it really frustrates people. And there's enough people with enough features that didn't translate to make the answer "because it doesn't" unpalatable. I imagine we'll see people saying the same thing in Warcraft even though it's not a direct sequel.

Eh, Qeynos only has the advantage of a carpet in the harbor. 60s for a bell to TS or Nek when Neriak gets them free?

Qeynos - Antonica, Sinking Sands
Freeport - Commonlands
Neriak - TS/Nek
Kelethin - screwed?

And the TS/Nek gets you the Zek/EL/Feerrott/Everfrost etc. Sounds to me like the game needs a travel revamp that'd be pretty simple to do. Just add more destinations via context menu or something. Qeynos and Freeport at least need a carpet and TS/Nek access (without paying 60s). Neriak should add a carpet and Commonlands, though Commonlands also sucks in bird placement and dock distance from the city. Kelethin needs to be unscrewed, at least a carpet and bell to BB docks.

And something that occurred to me as I trudged for the zillionth time up the valley from the Antonican bird by TS to the TS zone door...what sadist designed that long valley?

Too bad Hartsman is gone, he might actually read this and get something done.

Qeynos also has the advantage of carpet to Sinking Sands, then carpet to Butcherblock.

Neriak/TD is even better in that regard. Carpet to SS, then Carpet to TD which has Griffon to BB. Easy access to all 3 areas.

Levelling 43-47 Sage in the time it takes for 40-41 Provisioner (banahr). Provisioner rocks but all the good recipes are at the end of the tier and it's grindy grindy. Not as bad as armor or weapons because it's way easier to get bushes than metal, but still...thank god for the ipod imo.

(Note: I rant because I mostly enjoy the game)

I have been crafting up a storm lately, and even though I generally like EQ2 crafting....it quickly becomes mind-numbing.  Add to that it is hard to get motivated with weaponsmithing (horrible choice I know)- nothing really sells that well and the t8 stuff is really ho-hum.  So I am exclusively doing writs.

As a 40+ provisioner you should be grinding rush orders. They are a bit tough before 40 but your buffs are good enough now where you should be able to bang them out with 2-3 minutes to spare. And it's nice to get that 7-8% exp bonus every 6 combines not to mention you're leveling your guild at the same time.


Edit to add: I have some sort of crafting disease. I now have 2 Alchemists (71,53), 2 provisioners (75, 38) 2 Sages (55, 51), 2 Jewelers (61, 30), 2 Woodworkers (68,32) and at least one of everything else in the 60's or 70's. Most of the time I just have a crafter up on the laptop while I'm studying or player poker on the other PC but there have actually been times where I've 2-boxed crafting... I have a problem...

My main is a 21 provisioner. If I want to grind writs, how many of each tier appropriate base ingredient do I need and how much fuel?

Shiz, you make it sound scientific. I get a bunch of stuff, once I have a stack I craft until I run out of rest xp bonus, then I get more stuff.

Delt, rush orders use up more stuff. I usually grind out basic meat steaks until mid-tier, then make stacks for my 2 adventuring characters for the rest of the tier, which uses up the rest of the bush components. Not optimal from an xp viewpoint, but it maximizes resources and products (after the mid-tier switch, want some wyrm steaks? :P). However, with the abundance of bushes to harvest everywhere, I'll give it a shot. T5 is definitely when writs become more worthwhile imo. I don't have my prov in BC because I didn't want to spam the guild with all my alts and he wasn't doing writs.

I have a 45 armor, 30 weapon, 50 wood, 20ish carp, 47 sage, 41 prov, 30ish alch, 40ish jew, 40ish tailor. I do crafting while doing critical listening on the ipod, examining guitar styles or memorizing songs I want to learn. Just found a cool tune by Son House, "American Defense" about WW2 I want to learn...

Woodworker rocks, but armorcrafting got a huge boost and lots of people are wearing mastercrafted these days.

In addition to having the same 60s to TS/Nek option as Qeynos, Freeport also has a carpet to SS. They really need to move the carpet in Darklight Woods into Neriak.

Sky,

If you're worried about resource usage just do the x0 writs until you hit x4 or x5. The recipes from those writs all use the 1 resource, 1 liquid/dough, and 1 fuel formula. Then once you reach x4 or x5 you'll have all of the discovery exp from the x1-x4 recipes to gain another level or two. After that you can pick whichever are the best x6 or x7 recipes to grind on that's best for your chars and use the least rare(ish) resources.

And in regards to the boost to Armor it's been like fucking Christmas for my tailor. Roots and pelts are usually under 10g each for pretty much every tier and for some reason no other tailors on my server have realized people really want the new mastercrafted armor so there's usually not much on the broker. I've been buying up all the >10g pelts and roots I can find and reselling armor from 50g - 1p for each piece and I can barely keep it in stock. I've probably already made 15-20p since the change without really trying.

If you have a 40ish tailor that means you can do tier 2, 3 and 4 Tranquil cloth armor. That shit sells like hotcakes.

I think I worked it out that with out ts vit, to go from 40 - 50 Jeweler I needed 1200 roots, 800 metals and 600 gems. + fuels that I just re-bought every time I ran out. As mentioned its better just to let your vit build and craft then.

Resource requirements are kind of weird. Up until T7 they keep increasing by about 1 or2 resources per combine each level. IE... A recipe in T3 that uses 2 roots will use 4 roots in T5 and up to 8-10 roots in T7.

That all changed in T8 and requirements went back down to about what they are for T4.

Some of the T7 recipes are just crazy. My tailor can burn through a stack of 200 roots in 15-20 combines. Some of the recipes take up to 12 roots plus a pelt or two.

I can't believe you guys are complaining about how much resource usage goes into high end crafting. I suppose you just want everything handed to you why dont u go play a single player oblivion!1!@e u ned 2 ERN ur stuf! otherwies it has noe meening!

Where green button lulz?

Crappy quest? The damn zookeeper quest in Ak'Anon. (Or should I call it, "Suck'Anon"?).

Mobs that never stop spawning and will attack you through the floor and through the ceiling. Lovely.

It's kinda funny, I snuck through Klakanon Monday night to do some quests. I went down for the zoo quest and decided I wouldn't be grabbing the knapsack part. Died once learning that, then died again getting the exploration experience (and quest update) for Retrofitting. It's ok, wizards die a lot, I'm used to it.

Also decided to cancel the Bulka Bloodhorn quest, don't think I'll be able to take out the few lvl 44 minos to clear enough room to do Bulka without a lot of hassle. Was going to pop Meldrath and the other two nameds in there for AA, but eh.

Headed over to Lesser Fay for most of last night, dingered 54. Going to have to do some sagery now that my vitality is back up. 50+ spells are $$$$ that I don't have.

QFT. That area's as bad as Drafling was back in the day (not that I think they fixed Drafling, just no one goes there anymore)

Apparently after the last patch, quest mobs aren't spawning properly. Lots of bitching on the boards, folks can't finish HQs or Epics. I was trying to get the Minion of Ro last night and the mobs were not in the library where they were supposed to be, wasted about an hour (my entire playtime) looking for one. Looks like it's crafting week, hope not everyone gets that idea and empties out the harvest nodes like the time rare harvest drop rate was tweaked.

Geldoned to add:
Woohoo! I get the memory CTD in Neriak almost every time, and occasionally in Pillar of Flame and a couple times in Kelethin if I'd been playing a long time (max graphics settings, which are fine everywhere else).

So much for crash fixes, getting a new lockup with a sound loop.

Staff of the Observer, I hold off until the King's cave is half grey at level 60, so I can pick through the mobs. Apparently he calls the whole zone in when he's low on health. So I patiently work through the bajillion kobolds in there, all clear except his room. Hour and a half. Go take a whiz and CTD while I'm out of the room. Log back in to Steamfont, instance reset.

Motherfucking. I want to invade it.