Bad quests/Annoying quests in EQ2

[Furiously]

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....

[Furiously]

Two hours.

[Horik]

Timberclaw Gnolls in Antonica

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

[geldonyetich2]

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.   

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, you have absolutely no idea those foes were ever there.

[Simond]

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.

[Chorulle]

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....

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)

[Murgos]

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.

[Simond]

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. 

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[Signe]

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. 

[Ixxit]

Anything involving Nektulos Forest. What a godawful zone that is

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

[Sky]

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.

[Sky]

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).

[Furiously]

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!

[Sky]

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!

[Kirth]

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.

[Murgos]

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.

[shiznitz]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Furiously]

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

[Sky]

I did? How so?

[shiznitz]

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.

[Sky]

Granted, I was medicated and ill :P 

[DarkSign]

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.

[tazelbain]

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.

[Furiously]

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

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Metal which is folowed by
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
Waiting on those spawns was brutal.

[Sky]

Love the quest names, though.

[tazelbain]

Are you test or are those live now?

[Furiously]

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

[shiznitz]

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.

[Furiously]

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

[shiznitz]

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.

[Simond]

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 like the flavour texts in a couple of WoW quests:

Find and slay Golem Lord Argelmach. Return his head to Lotwil. You will also need to collect 10 Intact Elemental Cores from the Ragereaver Golems and Warbringer Constructs protecting Argelmach. You know this because you are psychic.

[shiznitz]

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

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

[Furiously]

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