Stonewood Bow Staff and Plane of War Progression

I can't think of a single rare drop required for all of PoP progression...am I missing something there?

As far as the limited number of hails goes...originally there was no limit to the amount of times the planar projections could be hailed...they were up for 20 minutes then despawned, flagging however many people managed to get the hail off.

The problem? I know one day on Brell a guild killed Bohemouth to open up Plane of Tactics, moved the hail mob to the zone in, and was advertising to everyone to come in, hail the mob, and get the flag.

Shortly thereafter they put the limits in.

Only mob I can remember having limited flag numbers was the Carprin cycle at 36, half the 72 most would give you.

Seriously though...this isn't a raid based flagging, which is how 99% of pop flagging progression was achieved. The *only* exceptions I can remember, at least before they put in the alternate access quests, were Plane of Valor + Plane of Storms, locked behind justice trials, and at a later date, Bastion of Thunder, locked behind a quest full of common drops...granted this too was originally locked behind raid progression but was changed early on in the expansion.

So please...what flagging quests during PoP required farming a rare drop? Not saying that they should necessarily change the quest...but shouldn't there be at least one example of a rare drop needed for pop progression for them to claim they made a rare drop (from grey con mobs) as required being in the spirit of PoP progression?

I still stand by my statement...wanna keep it in the spirit of PoP quests? Make it a group task...which was pretty much the spirit of 99% of pop progression...

~MrGPAC

Plane of Torment Key to Saryn's Chamber
Plane of Storms Key to Bastion of Thunder
Bastion of Thunder Key to Agnarr.

The Odyllic Vial was a pain to get because of the Oil of a Frog. There is only one room in Plane of Water that has the frogs and you might clear it and not get a drop. And the zone, at least it felt to me, had a really long respawn time.

That doesn't really compare since you only needed one vial per guild, though.

Is there anyway to move it to a 95 zone or a 95 version of Plane of Earth? I don't remember there being mobs in the PoP era that you could fight with impunity, even so much as a pet soloing it for you while afk. I think if the content was a bit tougher (aka level 95ish mobs) then it would alleviate some of the player's concerns while keeping it in the PoP theme.

Players wouldn't be able to afk farm them as easily as they are now. Make the mobs require a group and even better. If we're going to make it like PoP, lets make it like PoP. There was nothing that cried solo in that expansion

Make it like PoP? So how much PoP progression involved rare drops from a population of ten gray mobs?

I don’t mind long, involved quests – DoN faction, OOW faction, cultural aug quests (though those aren’t as time consuming as this) – or hard quests (PoJ trials were pretty hard for non-raiders back in the day). I don’t mind if it takes 8-10 hours to get access to Fields of Strife. That would be PoP-like.

What I do mind is a quest were I have to wait in line to get a spot to kill a grey mob every 15 minutes for 8 hours on average to get one of the required parts. Or - since I am one of the vast majority of players in EQ that do recognize camps - steal the mob from someone else’s camp if I don’t want to wait in line. I don't remember anything in PoP requiring that.

Sure, people will farm items for tradeskills. However there aren’t really any relevant tradeskill drops where the mobs dropping such items are so limited and so weak as to make permacamping feasible. It’s not like deciding that 4k per Befouled Silk in bazaar is too high, were there are over a dozen camps I can go to and odds are darned good that at least one will be open.

To echo Tharrg’s whinging, this is like fear golems being permacamped – except instead of a handful of players being jacked with (I was trying to get my 1.0 when ghostkilling was all the rage, so I know that pain), here you have far more of the playerbase being jacked with.

- - - -

Was there competition for spawns in PoP for flagging? Sure. But the dynamics were entirely different. In PoP you might have half a dozen entities (guilds) racing for mobs at any given tier. While cutthroat at times, the number was small enough so that cooperation was possible – on Quellious once the initial rush was over, several guilds set up cross-flagging alliances, so that players could tag along on other guilds raids for flagging to get caught up (as well as target rotations).

Here you’ve got likely thousands of individual entities (toons) trying to get flagged. And the racing dynamic is completely different. In PoP, it was not simply finding a mob up, but if it was contested the guild being organized enough to assemble a raid force there fast enough to beat other guilds trying to do the same thing. While there was competition, it was also competition that required and rewarded teamwork. Not sitting waiting for a grey mob to spawn every 15 minutes and hope that someone doesn’t gank you when it pops.

I don’t mind a difficult, long- quest to get into Planes of Strife ,or the factioning I have to look forward to when I get there. But this codpiece-block of an access quest for this is one of the more disappointing items from the last few expansions.

COTF lacks content as it is, and now ‘content’ is hours and hours of killing one of ten grey-con mobs – or farming the plat to buy the drop? Please – if we are going to get a laborious quest for PoWar access, let’s make it a real quest. Even just having to kill a few hundred mobs in the (no exp) Zekarian area to prove oneself worthy would be preferable. At least there it is doing something - rather than looking at 45-50 hours of killing grey con mobs to flag a party of six.

People are still crying over this? Prices are already coming down nicely. Give it another week or so and it will be the price of getting someone to do the combines for you.

Just adding my 2cp to all the pages and pages of comments that are being ignored.

This is the dumbest mistake SOE could have made really, they celebrate 15 years of Everquest by making every noob designer mistake in the book. There are levels on levels of stupidity in this flagging requirement that simply leave me stunned, it's almost as if they were making their first MMO 15 years ago. Is it some kind of nostalgia? Remember when we had really dumb ideas?

Just get rid of this part, it's so screwed that it's not worth fixing, not worth increasing drop rates. Just ditch it and be done. PoEarth is a griefers playground now, couldn't be worse.

Those pulling abilities that don't work in PoWar? It seems they just moved them to the npcs.
Imagine my suprise yesterday when an SK ogre seemed to use hates attraction on me.

After getting over the initial disorientation it was a great laugh.

I know it's easy to pretend otherwise, but let's be realistic. They do this with all items every single expansion. When HoT opened up, people were permacamping Feerrott and HoT mobs for droppable tradeable gear to sell at the bazaar. They do it every expansion, every time. They farm gear to sell and block people who need the gear from actually camping it themselves for days, weeks, or sometimes months.

Now it is a bit less tedious than the current item, but lying about things isn't helping anyone.

Will the group mission, and raid, released in May 2014, require a character to be flagged?

IIRC, flags / keys will not be required to participate in the mission / raid

Currently the plan is to NOT have the Anniversary Mission and Raid gated behind anything in Plane of War.

The Plane of War Mission is currently planned to start in Plane of Tranquility with a special Anniversary NPC, Commander Gorok. This will allow level 65 and up players to access the NPC to start this mission and participate in their own piece of the Plane of War. This mission will scale with the level of players.

The Plane of War raid will start with a special Anniversary NPC, Jorgar the Pacifist. We're tuning this raid for level 100 raid geared players, and there are no current plans to require any keys or flagging to participate.

The Plane of War mission and raid are planned to go live on Wednesday, May 7, 2014. Like other EverQuest anniversary content, these will be available in game for a limited time. These will be available in game for approximately six weeks after they go live.

Currently?

I hope you can imagine what would happen if you were to suddenly change your mind about this and announce that everybody will need to be keyed to participate in the raid. #OccupyPlaneOfEarth

it wasn't the plan , until folks started buying tons of kronos to trade for a bow staff.

Sorry to correct you...but all of the drops for the BoT key in the plane of storms were extremely common. Only hard part were the mini raid named that people were one grouping even back then...and they had 100% drop rate of 3 items per kill. I got flagged for BoT the same day I got flagged for plane of storms and it was effortless easy and quick.

Same deal for both keys in BoT...further, you only needed 1 key to the towers per group as clicking took your whole group up...and only 1 key from the tower mobs per raid. And again...all those components were common... I got all of the components for this key quite incidentally while working on experience in the zone, as it was a great place for xp and glyphed rune words/ spectral parchments. Remind me how many alternate rewards I can get farming mobs 35 levels lower than me?

I'll give you plane of torment keys...mainly because I remember that being a real pain and not much else about it...mostly because I never actually completed the quest...you needed one per raid...

So again...where is the rare drop needed by everyone for access here? Then where is the one off grey con mobs that present no threat and no reward other than the key?

~MrGPAC

because they are using mobs from POP era.... if you were same level as you would have been when POP released the mobs would not be grey. This whole... you show me grey con mobs thing is getting old.

That's a good argument for it being in plane of earth.

My point isn't whether or not they should keep or not keep this as is...my point is it doesn't resemble PoP era quests, and to pretend that it does is a huge stretch.

Ultimately I think this was a genuinely good idea that kinda backfired a tad bit more than they had hoped... Personally I'm happy to do the camps...but not deal with the drama getting them...I've given up on EQ being a drama source a long time ago.

Ultimately all it really means is delayed satisfaction on getting to play in plane of war...which in the grand scheme of things isn't that big a deal...but it does kinda suck after all the hype.

~MrGPAC

just a heads up GMs are not getting involved with people KSing ninja looting ect on this problem.

and didnt a dev recently post that they could track people who were " farming " those rare drops in the instances a few weeks ago ? why can they not see and track the plat farmers who are doing the same thing in earth and causeing the XXXX blocking problem . ?

Problem is when this was first released there where tons of people in plane of earth trying to get a rare drop from a uncommon spawn to progress their quest to get further inside plane of war , i think theres like 8 tree spawns in plane of earth combined so there was fighting over the mobs and some people was sitting on tree spawns all day long not to get the bow staff to progress but to sell for extremly high prices , while it has certainly become less crowded ( or expensive ) now i still find this part a bad move from soe.
I hope you dont make the same mistake again in further content.

This is the singularly the most ridiculous thing sony has ever done!! Plat farmers, and raid guilds have all the spawn points permacamped on cazic-thule and bow staffs are selling for 450-500k plat. I get the idea of making this difficult but this is absolutely the wrong way to do it, unless this is a ploy to make more money selling krono so people can buy the overpriced bow. either way this is having a very negative impact on the game and the fairness of play. people want to get to this zone and are looking at months and months of waiting to either farm the plat to get the bow from bazaar or spending hours and hours waiting for a single spawn point to camp and then camping it till u pass out with a very small chance of getting a bow staff. I see people in chat getting mad and leaving the game how about fixing this.