Example: Excavating an answer. Over an hour to get to end in small group. Group wipe Seven enraged skele's linked. Cant split No chanters 'free'. I guess they know the fight. Many deaths Imbalanced risk and reward.
Hey, I always felt that the captain Russell HA's were unbalanced as far as risk and reward. Are you completing this for the cotf progression arc, or just for exp?
I'd love to see the monthly stats for Dead Hills instances. You have to think it'd look something like... Into the Hills: 264,000 . . . . . Excavating an Answer: 5
For this mission what exact step did you get? What classes did you have with you? 1) Destroy the supports holding up the excavation towers 0/12 (Dead Hills) If You Get This Step: Kill 12x "scaffolding support". They look like stone brick columns on the wooden scaffolding and should be fairly noticeable. Nothing adds to these, so you can just send in pet or cast from afar. ===================== 2) Dispose of any hostile guardians that get in your way 0/14 (Dead Hills) If You Get This Step: This is a kill update of mobs on the other side of the barrier your broke through. Note that the mobs involved with this step are red-cons, see invisibility, are immune to mez/stun, can have high damage spikes in their DPS, and have a lot of hitpoints compared to other mobs (estimated around 2 million hitpoints each). ===================== 3) Defend the Archaeologist as he inspects the remaining excavation sites 0/10 (Dead Hills) If You Get This Step: Archaeologist Don Laborm will move around to inspect different areas of the last scaffolding. As he does, undead mobs spawn in waves of two and attack him. He will move after being in a location for 1-2 minutes, so the spawns keep coming until you've killed 10.
They should do another round of reward rebalancing; increase the reward on the HAs that are failed, or take more than 3 hours the most often, and maybe, MAYBE, trim back the overplayed ones.
I agree they are all a PITA compared to the rest of DH HAs. Farming the Collection items and the hunter stuff was a major drag.
Ohh i have found that just to get to the point to spawn the named and shinnies at the best i could do was maybe 20-30min. It took dozens of runs to get fairly efficient at them. considering i can 100% finish Gribbles in <20min i think these take way to long. Damn near all other HAs take about 10-15min to get to spawn the named and shinies. even ToR and AH only take maybe 20-30 min I am fairly confident that Captain Russell HAs are still the most difficult HAs in the entire expansion. I think even the easier Clearing the Path HA is a PITA. It seems that all of them too have you killing so much unneeded trash as well.
Thanks for the assist and offers of advice. Pleased to say that in the end we were able to jump in with a 105 box group. He was awesome and chain mezzed the 7 mobs while we single burned them down and assisted with heals. It was nuts and took several attempts but we made it in the end and promptly went to bed at around 3am, ready to go to work at 6am. At least its done.
No, the Gribbles are way too lame. They need to be beefed up a bit, either their lookout times greatly increased or otherwise re-worked to make them harder. Else, people think they're "winning EQ" with their 10,000+ AAs but when they finally step out of that ridiculous comfort zone ... You get threads like this, as was so eloquently pointed out by Duhbeast I'm not speaking from some elitist high point or something either, I respect different play styles and abilities, and I'm always down for whatever ... it's these threads and the mindset that comes with it that I hate. Toughen up princesses and stop asking for content that the rest of the EQ playerbase enjoys, to be nerfed because you, personally, can't beat it and don't want to tough it out and get better or move on with some humility.
I actually think Gribbles is fairly close to the target they wanted. While we plow through these in like 10min i stil think the avg folk takes about 30m. I believe that was suppose to be the target with HAs. a couple of the Gribble missions could use another 10 or so mobs in the kill count to balance them out. Now Darkark. I like to think of my self as a sort of high-end player and find Captains HA a bit challenging; however, I cant stand doing them more than i need to when farming shinies. I would not do them to farm Marks or AA that is for sure. I doubt that many do Captains HAs. Really all you have to do is look at the shinies market to tell what HAs people do and dont do. Beings i have done every HA more than 50 times i think im confident that Captain HAs are the worst in many ways. With that said i probably hate Gribbles missions worse as i have done them enough times early on in CoTF. It wasnt until I started working on hunter title and farming valuable shinies that i forced my self to do other missions. Ohh and you can always tell a difference in developer style with the different themes lol. Did the same person make Gribbles as Captain?
I don't disagree with anything you said really, except that first part. While I obviously don't know the devs' minds, now or then, given the difficulty spectrum over the set of HAs I find it hard to believe they genuinely intended for them to all be equal. I think it's a given that Gribbles' HAs are lame as hell compared to the rest. In fact, it's just two really - the one where you have to "dig up the graves" and two skeletons pop? I'll even give that one a pass. As for the rest of your post, yes, I think Coopers' HAs are at the other end of the spectrum, but it's not really relevant to my main point The mindset of people whose whole game universe is a Gribble instance, or close to it, finally venture out of that comfort zone and come here and ask for nerfs to content is what irked me. It completely disregards the rest of the player base and any entertainment they might get from more challenging content. My other point was to try and get Gribble's changed up a bit, which I can probably flesh out a bit. I know that since they implemented the HA lockouts people now do 3 different Gribble HAs instead of 3 of the same Gribble HA. It actually got people to see just a little bit more of the game, and despite the howls of "Daybreak's telling me how to have fun!! I quit!! /wrist /wrist OMG /wrist!" from the peanut gallery, it: - allowed every other player that did want to see some more content a chance of a group in that other content, and - made some contribution to end the calls for nerfs to content because people can, now that they're used to it, handle just a little bit more in the game (for example: 2 skeletons popping on you instead of constant single pulls in that other Gribble). Admittedly, the difference made wasn't enough to give players a chance at a group anywhere, or end completely the calls for nerfs to content harder than a Gribble, but it's a good step in the right direction The Daily HA, same deal, but less so. Regardless, I think my motivation for asking for something to be changed up with respect to Gribble's is clear. But whatever, I'm not too worried about it.
I could be wrong but I do remember they were targeting somewhere between 30-60 minutes per mission (45 might have been their goal). If so, some are easier, some are harder but they're all mostly in line.
