Stonewood Bow Staff and Plane of War Progression

It's a permanent zone - it isn't going anywhere. The "problem" naturally fixes itself in 30-60 days. Want to be part of the top "elite" % that get deep into the zone early on? Get in PoE and farm your stuff. Otherwise just wait for a few weeks or a month and leave it alone. It isn't that difficult of a concept.

From the pathetic replies I've read it literally seems like people were hoping to zone into this place, run straight to the very end "boss" and solo him with a mage pet. Get over it!

For those that think that having a way to buy the parts for the bow is an option, since the bow has a tribute value of nearly 50k, the price of NPC acquired parts would probably exceed 100k, something like - Stonewood Compound Bow Kit, - buy it click it and you get the parts on your curser, with combines yet to be done. So you need to either be a master fletcher or know one. Another option might be to have an NPC item that when added to one of the other bows, Air, Water, Fire would turn them into the Stonewood version- likely 50k pp or so and no fail. I expect that while there is a rush on right now, that in a few weeks/months the demand for bows will decrease though asking prices will probably not decline to old tribute value prices. In any case it would take time to prepare either a bow kit or a transmute item, so we will have to live with things as they are now until May, consider 10 trees dropping one per day each, would mean 300 bows by the time we patch again (1% drop rate).

That only works if this progression is not needed for the raid.

Would be nice to find out if this is needed for the POWar raid.

I'm surprised this bottleneck wasn't mentioned to the devs when it was on test.

That would imply that they thought there was a problem with it on Test.

Hey, I just saw Stonewood Compound Bow in the Marketplace!

Oh wait, April Fool's day is over.

It might have been mentioned in feedback on test, but the issue on test wasn't as big as it ended up being on live for 2 reasons: the test server pop. is super small compared to most servers so very few were trying to make bows, and with /testcopy people just bought/made one on live before the demand went up and copied them over for themselves and their boxes/guildmates.

Got 5 staves in about 5 hours in Plane of Earth A. Kill the trees near the zone in. There are about 6-7 trees that spawn RIGHT towards the entrance.

Since I have all of my staves, allow me to reveal some tips:

Guado's Center For Kids who Can't Snipe Good, And Want to Learn How To Do Other Stuff Good Too:

1. 2-3 toons are required. SIT each toon on a spawn point
2. If you have a pet, turn greater hold off
3. F8 is your friend; find a place in your field of view that does not contain any other mobs... but also where you will be able to target the treants
4. Now, spam f8 and any AA or ability that is INSTANT CAST and HIGH damage (Pet classes: spam PET ATTACK too). You are trying to 1 shot or get the NPC below 50% so you get the kill credit.
5. Pay attention to roamers around you. They will be your cue for when your trees are spawning (by killing them)
6. Kill each tree as instantly as possible... that way: when 1 tree spawns every second for 10 seconds, it is easier to lock down your mobs.

The problem is People, not the quest or the mechanics. Completely reasonable people turn into raving lunatics when things like this appear in the game. I've already seen guildmates go at it because one guy is trying to take 6 camps of trees to himself and all of his scumbag boxes. The other guy is just trying to get 1 single item for his main character. Combine that with the other 20-30 people roaming the zone looking for a snipe with their own main + however boxes and yeah.

I expected nothing this morning.
Step One: Ignore the problem (where we are at now)
Step Two: Deny the problem (optional - coming soon)
Step Three: Admit a slight problem - maybe even correct it without breaking something else.
-R
PS: Current bazaar prices on Cazic are pushing 1mil for the silly bow.
SOE says: "Buy your KRONO today!!!"

Also: I really hope the developers realize what they did when we gave the sword from Earth A to Murdunk in Warrens...

We gave Murdunk a weapon from the future... who KNOWS what affect that will/already have?

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is that the rare piece off of ten trees that spawn every 15-20 minutes is tradeable. What this does is create a situation where players can essentially block other players with their progression. For all of the excitement and joy and love that Planes of Power gave us, I just do not recall "Ability to block/prevent others from enjoying content" as one of the top reasons players gave.

Theoretically several players can monopolize Plane of Earth for as long as they want, control the market price by charging (what many consider to be) outrageous amounts of plat/Kronos, and essentially control who gets to go past the wall. Obviously this is worst case scenario, but it could happen. And it is happening to an extent on all servers.

It is one thing to wait your turn to loot a PoEarth piece. Many can live with that. It is those players who could be in there for one, two, four, eight weeks controlling their server's progression. That is an issue.

What about PoJ trials for flagging the first few weeks/months? This kinda reminds me of that, actually.

It'll work itself out over time, but yeesh.

Like others have said, the biggest problems seem to be coming from greedy people. If people would get what they need for their toon and leave there wouldn't be near this problem. While I don't know if it is actually the case or not, I'd be willing to bet that there are farmers in there holding spawn points/ganking mobs solely for their own benefit. If it was current content mobs dropping this, it wouldn't be a problem, no 1 shot kills.

Yeah, this reminds me a lot of PoJ trials too. Or fighting over the ogres in Plane of Storms for the alternate Tactics flag, or server drama over guilds deliberately blowing the Coirnav spawn to prevent competitors from getting time flagged, or paying 100k for an ornate mold / 50k for a level 65 spell, and so on and so forth. There was at least one server (The Rathe?) where a coalition of guilds had what amounted to a flagging cartel, with a mutual agreement to not allow any guests on raids unless the guest was a coalition member. It really was a cutthroat time for the game.

PoP was a great expansion through rose-colored glasses or if you were on top of the heap.

To those that are saying people don't want to work for this, having people need to farm grey mobs on old content to gain access to new content is absurd. Compound that this access piece is tradable and now there is incentive for players to farm for profit. In the VT example with shards, would the situation be different if they were tradable?

While I enjoy a challenge, and a zone designed for raiders to group in is cool, all of us that have purchased the current expansion are still waiting for the other half. If this is a new design trend, visiting old zones for tradable access pieces in order to enjoy new content it's going down a path I am not excited about.

Fortunately I had a bow on a twink, so my post isn't a rant because I do not have one.

Ruven

Dont worry .... in a week or two the bows will be for sale in the marketplace ...

I was playing during PoP and can't recall a bottleneck in form of fighting for a gray con spawn with 100 other people. PoP access quests took time and effort, but not of this kind. This is a version of Luclin Ssra/VT keying timesinks: instead of camping 10 different key drops where you still had to fight and kill mobs, and if one camp was taken you could go camp another, you are now competing against the whole server at a single camp for mobs that take zero effort to kill. This is not 'very PoP era'. In fact, it's not at all PoP era.

this quest is nonsense. make it difficult because of the skill involved. dont make it a timesink of mindlessly sitting on a spawn point for a grey con mob that you can 1 shot every 17 mins in order to get a drop. I havent spent 8 years developing my toon to an endgame raiding character to spend hours a day doing this. It is absolutely ridiculous that this is where the game has gone. If i wanted something this stupid easy I would have started playing WOW long ago. I am so disappointed right now Its not even funny.

Bad that they cant even take 1 min to respond with a working as intended post.

perhaps the bottleneck was intentional to slow down the stream of traffic. I have no idea why this drop wouldnt drop from treants in grounds but if it did. wouldnt they need to nerf the tribute.