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a harbinger of Fear new?Follow

#1 Apr 08 2015 at 12:47 AM Rating: Excellent
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Was in Plane of Fear with my 85 Ranger. Just killed Terror and Fright and noticed a blue con npc named a harbinger of Fear (the F was capital on Fear). It spawned near the temple looked like a iksar skeliton but with updated graphics. When hailed he said something about the denizens of fear were killed but will return. Could not attack him.

Didn't see anything listed on the site about it.
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#2 Apr 08 2015 at 1:04 AM Rating: Excellent
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It's in March 25th update: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/game-update-notes-march-25-2015.218967/

In the Plane of Fear, a harbinger of Fear can help adventurers get their epic 1.0 pieces that would normally drop from Cazic-Thule or the golems. These pieces cannot be multi-quested or traded. In addition, a harbinger of Fear can advance the Whistling Fists quest in the same way as Cazic-Thule.
#3 Apr 08 2015 at 10:47 AM Rating: Good
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That is awesome. So far I am really liking Daybreak.
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#4 Apr 08 2015 at 2:55 PM Rating: Excellent
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wish they had this guy when i was doing my shaman epic last year.... Camped them golems for a long time Smiley: bah
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#5 Apr 08 2015 at 2:58 PM Rating: Excellent
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Definitely a good move by Daybreak. A better move would have been to flag characters so they can only loot tradeable high-end loot ONE TIME from old bosses. I'm sick of seeing how those original named toons are perma-camped by players who manage to kill them the moment they spawn.
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#6 Apr 08 2015 at 3:22 PM Rating: Good
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Sippin wrote:
Definitely a good move by Daybreak. A better move would have been to flag characters so they can only loot tradeable high-end loot ONE TIME from old bosses. I'm sick of seeing how those original named toons are perma-camped by players who manage to kill them the moment they spawn.



Determining intention (or deciding a new intention) from the devs would help determine how to adjust something. I'm thinking character flagging on named looting would be a fair bit of work to implement, and really upset some people. Maybe some other tweaks could move towards the same end...

-class specific epic loots that are no trade should not be on farmable mobs. So either remove the farm-tempting other loot from said mob, or make said mob spawnable with just the epic drop. Plane of Fear would lose a lot of farming* if the AoN wasn't "worth dropping in for" --so make it nodrop or move it to a new mob in a less disruptive spot for others. Note: chanter epic 1.0 drop in fear is on an otherwise useless mob, but gets wiped when farmers do there thing and the drop rots (chanter epic cannot be MQ).

-if epics are supposed to be hard... make all epic parts nodrop. This would make some epic 1.0 harder than originally intended though... so do they up the drop rate of said items. *and if epic drops weren't tradable then there is minimal market to sell them outside of Multi-questing.**

-Maybe they add a faction vendor that you have to do some quests for to get alternate access to some epic drops. This would be pretty easy to tier. (as in the tier 1 quest would match difficulty of a minor epic quest item and so on). This could actually build lore into the game... rogue's guilds for example make perfect sense as a place that just might have a rare item available to the right customer that does a favor.

-spawn timers set for Kunark population of this game... really should have been changed years ago. Consider last progression and how easy Lower Guk was.... 1 group was clearing camps that used to keep 5-6 full groups busy. Easiest solution is waaay faster respawn because mob behaviour/adds still were risky for the modern group there, but breaking the camps on the long timer removed the risk and the huge area could be easily held. When it is retuned right? When an average-gear full group on a progression server can only hold down 1 traditional camp before the respawns start popping. If Kunark dragons spawned every hour, but cast a 12 hour debuff on you that made you "dragon vulnerable aka autodeathtouch for being in proximity of a Kunark dragon" then one person couldn't own the spawn so easily... and it's not like killing the dragons would be easier.

**multiquesting.... dead "feature" as of Omens of War (iirc)... and for epic 1.0 it wasn't something every class could do. Look at the "abused" items from epics in respects to MQ and change the drop from the traditional mob to "uncrated epic drop#34". Then the class that is supposed to have that drop has to put it into their "epic rogue crate" (that only a rogue can get for this example) and click combine to get the proper version of the item for the quest. Note that this doesn't break any existing looted MQ able drops, just stops anyone from looting epic items for MQ from now on.

---just ideas by the way, not necessarily my platform of what I would want to do

#7 Apr 08 2015 at 3:43 PM Rating: Good
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I dunno, I think it's easily programmed to flag each toon so it can only loot certain high-end tradeable items once in their "lifetime." Sure, pharmers have alts to do the looting but eventually they'll run out of alts. The abuser will always find a way but a change like this would at least lessen the chance that pharmers would hog a spawn eternally. It's really a lousy thing and hurts the game. Some mobs can't even be SEEN anymore because they're killed so quick upon spawning. I was shocked one time last year just running thru Dreadlands to stumble on Gorenaire. I just admired her---and of course she attacked me because she has a big agro range and doesn't seem to care about level differences and I just left her to be, taking comfort in the fact that I allowed her a few minutes of virtual life before someone more malevolent than me stumbled across her.
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#8 Apr 08 2015 at 4:27 PM Rating: Good
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Dunno. I think if the item is tradeable, then it should be farmable. Fair or not, saying "you can sell this, or use it yourself, but only once" is kinda strange. It opens up the possibility of creating more problems than it solves IMO. And in most cases, the market tends to sort this out. The real problem is the no-trade items used for quests. And unfortunately, there are a host of different variations of that problem. Some are MQable, so they get farmed for that. Some are not, but are on mobs with other drops that are (or that are valuable for other reasons). Sometimes, it's as simple as the scenario mentioned above. There's a mob that no one other than the person at that stage of the quest needs, but it gets killed in a crowd of other mobs when farmers do a zone kill. Each of these scenarios requires a slightly different solution.

The last scenario is probably the easiest. Just make those mobs immune. So you do your turnin and it respawns into whatever mob you do need to kill for the drop (don't recall the chanter mob specifically, but I know that the broken golem for wiz epic could benefit from this simple change). In fact, you could argue that any mob that is used only for a turnin that spawns something you have to fight (or just gives you something for the next step) can and should be modified this way. Back when epics were first being designed, the game didn't have that feature, but after zillions of complaints of vendors and bankers (and quest mobs) being killed, they can flag mobs this way, and it's an easy fix. They've been hit or miss on doing it though.

MQ solution is also easy. Eliminate MQ. Yeah, it can cause some problems, but I don't think it's that much of a hardship to have mobs that take quest turnins require that the set they're looking for all be handed in by the same character. I suppose you could even require they all be handed in at the same time, with an incomplete set resulting in the extras being handed back (that might require some coding, but is probably the easiest solution). Lots of ways of doing this, but IMO, allowing MQ is what causes the farming, which often results in those quest mobs not being available for those trying to do the quest, which in turn creates the demand for the MQs.

The last part to deal with is mobs that drop multiple drops (or can even drop multiple epic drops). I suppose the easiest way to deal with that is to just massively increase the spawn rate (like a one hour respawn maybe). The MQ solution above prevents this from being a problem for the most part. There's still the issue of sellable items that drop off mobs that also drop epics, but how much demand is there really for old Kunark armor bits and spells? It just can't be that much of a deal, and flooding the market with them surely wont hurt the game at all (and will reduce resale value to the point where farming isn't worth it anymore).

I think there's a number of ways to tackle this. It's really just a matter of whether there's sufficient need to justify dev time to do it.

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 3:30pm by gbaji
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#9 Apr 09 2015 at 4:47 AM Rating: Good
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Won't quote (lots of text) but the posts after my last one got me thinking more:

-I think it is generally agreed that most of the farming issues revolve around 1.0 epic blocking (though there are other situations). There is no epic 1.0 on live servers with a mass of people trying to complete it at the same time (the anticipated bottleneck in era).

So what are the actual bottlenecks created by farming? As in what items/drops/mobs need one of the variety of fixes mentioned above?

-enchanter kill in Plane of Fear --nobody else needs this mob to my recall, so unkillable without a quest hail would work, as would spawnable.

-various openworld zone Kunark Dragons --multiple classes need them, way shorter respawn might help, spawnable versions with just the epic drop for the questing player would work.

-enchanter/rogue froglok kill in Lower Guk... just make him spawn way more often on the cycle (and maybe up respawn of whole zone). I sat 14 hours for that one once... was ridiculous. Tradable item that is rarely for sale.

What others bear mentioning?
#10 Apr 09 2015 at 1:59 PM Rating: Excellent
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snailish wrote:
-various openworld zone Kunark Dragons --multiple classes need them, way shorter respawn might help, spawnable versions with just the epic drop for the questing player would work.


Wasn't that the case for the dragon needed in the big ocean zone in Kunark (Timorous Deep?) for the Druid epic? I thought I remember (back in May of 2002!), spawning it so my guild could take it down for me.

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#11 Apr 09 2015 at 2:26 PM Rating: Good
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VS is an obvious one. As mentioned in an earlier thread, I started looking for him back in June (July?) last year. Finally saw him up for the first time like two weeks ago and got the drop (would have sucked if he didn't have it). That's nearly a year of playing 2-3 times a week, and checking the spawn every time I logged on, between dailies, and prior to logging off (when playing my wiz) before finding him up. Now that is ridiculous. I can't imagine how much more of a pain it would be for a class that needed something like that, but didn't have an ability like secondary recall to make it easier to get there quickly.
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#12 Apr 09 2015 at 2:29 PM Rating: Good
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tatankaseventh wrote:
snailish wrote:
-various openworld zone Kunark Dragons --multiple classes need them, way shorter respawn might help, spawnable versions with just the epic drop for the questing player would work.


Wasn't that the case for the dragon needed in the big ocean zone in Kunark (Timorous Deep?) for the Druid epic? I thought I remember (back in May of 2002!), spawning it so my guild could take it down for me.

Tat


I think that druids whined a lot more back in the day, so the Devs gave them spawanable versions of their epic mobs. Not sure of the details though, but it seems like they somehow made an argument that druids weren't wanted on raids, so they had a harder time getting their epic mobs unless the mob was specially spawned just for that (which really doesn't make much sense if you stop and think about it). Not sure though, so don't quote me.
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#13 Apr 16 2015 at 5:21 PM Rating: Excellent
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snailish wrote:
So what are the actual bottlenecks created by farming? As in what items/drops/mobs need one of the variety of fixes mentioned above?

-enchanter kill in Plane of Fear --nobody else needs this mob to my recall, so unkillable without a quest hail would work, as would spawnable.

-enchanter/rogue froglok kill in Lower Guk... just make him spawn way more often on the cycle (and maybe up respawn of whole zone). I sat 14 hours for that one once... was ridiculous. Tradable item that is rarely for sale.


<Edited quote for brevity according to the parts I am addressing> I am with snailish. As an enchanter I camped that lower guk froglok for HOURS when working on my epic. It took me over 20 hours stretched over two days. It was stupid how long it took that mob to spawn and of course no one had the item to sell me. I did however get lucky on the Plane of Fear mob, thank goodness! Logged in with a couple of friends and we slaughtered our way to the area the wraith spawns. It was before the days of the extended target window and we were blowing through the mobs like wildfire. My friends ran ahead while I stopped to loot and lo and behold, I was staring at my item in the loot box on my screen. We hadn't even noticed we had killed the mob. I almost jumped out of my chair to dance I was so excited because after my Lower Guk experience I was expecting the worst. I figured with how the golems and Cazic seem to be permacamped, the lockdown artists would just keep everything clear. But my being lucky does not change how hard that part is to get for others, so a change is needed in my opinion.
#14 Apr 17 2015 at 3:54 PM Rating: Good
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Yeah. Add another case then. Place all epic mobs on their own spawn cycle rather than as a random chance in place of a more common mob in a zone. The problem with the placeholder approach is that it requires that you continue to kill the placeholders until your rare spawn shows up. If they're on their own spawn cycle, then the mob will spawn and then stay up until someone who needs him comes along. Once killed, after X time, that same mob will spawn again and sit there waiting for the next person who needs it. That's a much much better way of dealing with this.

The placeholder approach made sense when these were zones that were commonly camped back in the day for loot and exp. So if you were looking for that mob, you'd go join groups camping where the mob spawned and eventually get your piece whilst earning normal loot and exp. Back then, these were arguably the easiest pieces to get because you could grab them in the course of normal adventuring. Today? Silly difficult to get. No one sits in Lower Guk doing exp grinds there for a month straight just because it's a good place to camp for exp and the loot is a bonus anymore.

Edited, Apr 17th 2015 2:55pm by gbaji
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#15 Apr 20 2015 at 5:22 PM Rating: Good
Sippin wrote:
Definitely a good move by Daybreak. A better move would have been to flag characters so they can only loot tradeable high-end loot ONE TIME from old bosses. I'm sick of seeing how those original named toons are perma-camped by players who manage to kill them the moment they spawn.


I firmly believe that this is the impact of Holly coming in and looking for some quick wins to make the player base happy. I expect we'll see more of this kind of thing over the next few months.
#16 Apr 20 2015 at 6:02 PM Rating: Excellent
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I think that druids whined a lot more back in the day, so the Devs gave them spawanable versions of their epic mobs. Not sure of the details though, but it seems like they somehow made an argument that druids weren't wanted on raids, so they had a harder time getting their epic mobs unless the mob was specially spawned just for that (which really doesn't make much sense if you stop and think about it). Not sure though, so don't quote me.


They whined and made a very valid argument. Back in Kunark days, the only raid as a druid I got asked to was Fear. I was always on the break Team. (no druid epic drop in fear either lol) We got VSR and Faydedar (Dragon in Timorous Deep) as spawned versions. But druids was a solo class, jack of most trades, expert at nothing.

I like the Harbinger of Fear idea, I was lucky and got my ball of everlasting golem mqed for free from a friend. Bought the Green dragon scale for 20k pp and got the red dragon scale from a Severilous. The Spiroc Wingblade was my big bottle neck. Never got that until HoT. Boxed a level 82 monk, 82 ranger and Shaman to get it. Now I have Wingblades on those toons and few others that I mq for free since I know how hard epic pieces are to get. I mqed the child's tear for my fellow shamans a few times as well for free. I announce if a mob is up in general, but somethimes mobs like Wraith of a Shissar are kos and get killed and there pieces rot since they can't be mqed. I'm surprised they didn't include that mob with the harbinger.

Right now I am trying to get Ireblind Imp for my berserker epic and the torn and frost book for my pally again (screwed up the turn in and the quest guy in Posky despawn =( )

If your on Tunare serve and in need of a wingblade check for one of my toons;
Gregoryxx, Nancyxx, Zolixaxx or Torarow
I will be happy to mq the wingblade or help with any epic fights.

#17 Apr 21 2015 at 9:12 AM Rating: Good
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Labradorian wrote:
If your on Tunare serve and in need of a wingblade check for one of my toons;
Gregoryxx, Nancyxx, Zolixaxx or Torarow
I will be happy to mq the wingblade or help with any epic fights.



Sent you a PM!
#18 Apr 22 2015 at 11:44 AM Rating: Excellent
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Tried this out just now. Earlier today, my Wizard turned in both Pally books to Rineval Talyas along with 1000pp and got the book of scale. Just now, on my Pally, I got both books from the respective Harbingers, tried the turn in and Rineval kept the 1000pp, returned the two harbinger acquired books and said "This is not enough. Leave my sight at once!" Borked maybe?

EDIT: Figured it out. The books you receive from the Harbinger mobs have a "Charge" on them. You have to right click on them like a clickie to convert them to the correct books to turn in. Wonder why the extra step, weird.....

Edited, Apr 22nd 2015 2:06pm by KC13
#19 Apr 22 2015 at 3:54 PM Rating: Decent
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Labradorian wrote:
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I think that druids whined a lot more back in the day, so the Devs gave them spawanable versions of their epic mobs. Not sure of the details though, but it seems like they somehow made an argument that druids weren't wanted on raids, so they had a harder time getting their epic mobs unless the mob was specially spawned just for that (which really doesn't make much sense if you stop and think about it). Not sure though, so don't quote me.


They whined and made a very valid argument. Back in Kunark days, the only raid as a druid I got asked to was Fear. I was always on the break Team. (no druid epic drop in fear either lol) We got VSR and Faydedar (Dragon in Timorous Deep) as spawned versions. But druids was a solo class, jack of most trades, expert at nothing.


Fair to say that druids were not super common on raids, but I'm not sure how much of that was because of usefulness to a raid, and how much was the mindset of the players. Druids were by far the easiest soloable class in the game and were very self sufficient, so people who chose to play druids tended to do so because that play style suited them, which meant that it was harder for them to get into guilds that raided often enough to complete things like epics. But there were a ton of guilds who raided (maybe not the top tier guys), and who would take whomever showed up, and where druids were perfectly welcome.

Why I said it didn't make much sense was that back then it still took a raid force to take down the spawned version of VS. If you were a druid in a guild that raided, you just had to show up for raids and you'd get your drop eventually, just like everyone else. If you weren't, you had to talk a group of strangers into joining you while you spawned a version of VS that only dropped what you wanted. Seems like if you're having a hard time getting people to let you join raids as a druid, you'd have an even harder time getting them to basically help you kill your epic mob just for you.

It made it easier for druids in guilds who already raided to get their drops, but didn't really help those who had no chance at all. But those in the latter group joined in the whining, thinking they'd get something (which they didn't, at least not until the spawned version became soloable), and those in the former were certainly not going to complain if they got something quick and easy.
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#20 Apr 22 2015 at 5:58 PM Rating: Excellent
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Just remember epic quests were SUPPOSED to require the assistance of a raid force at some point. None of them were expected to be solo-able or groupable in their entirety. The final fight with Faydedar for druids was a real PITA because not only did the druid need a raid force for it the raid force had to make probably the longest journey in the game (in terms of travel time) to get to the island where Faydedar spawned. But the whole idea was that a guild DID this for its members, in exchange for their loyalty and support for the guild. QUID PRO QUO!

When my guild was gathering on the island to do my epic 1.0 fight, ages ago, some non-guild 'tard, just for the heck of it, killed the dorf fisherman on the beach that you have to talk with to spawn Faydedar. We petitioned and a GM showed up pretty quickly. But he refused to respawn the dorf, and this particular NPC was on an 8-hour timer. Luckily for me my guild was willing to return the next day for the fight, which we won.
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#21 Apr 22 2015 at 6:55 PM Rating: Excellent
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Labradorian wrote:
I will be happy to mq the wingblade or help with any epic fights.


Thank you very much for the MQ on the Wingblade!!! One more Epic 1.0 put to bed! Also, Gratz to your Pally on her Epic!
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