Add Undead Dragongut Strings to non-UDB Trakanon Please...

Impossible? Did they buff Trak to the point that he is unkillable? I'm confused.

Can't tell if troll or serious, but I'll bite. No one kills Trak in open world anymore because his loot drops are subpar now with Velious out, and Velious has tons of instanced and open world raid content to keep guilds busy. Finishing the epic requires killing Trakanon, then waiting out the UDB pop, then bringing a group+ back to kill spawned Trakanon and hope no one else competes with you.

It's not technically impossible, but really unlikely.

Its now more difficult (more effort) than ever in the history of the game to complete the bard epic. Thanks to the increased spawn rate of trakanon and MoTM.

Congrats, Daybreak.

You need to either remove motm from open trakanon or make all versions of him drop the strings. I have not seen a single trakanon has died message since velious launch which is expected because his loot is awful now and no guild wants to take 20ish people to go down him at the small chance one of their bards will end up getting UDB.

I saw -A- Trak die yesterday, whether it was instance or not I can't confirm.

[Sat May 28 23:00:35 2016] <SYSTEMWIDE_MESSAGE>: Trakanon has been defeated by a group of hardy adventurers! Please join us in congratulating Melveny along with everyone else who participated in this achievement!

#Melvenythepeopleshero

The real MVP. Still it needs to be changed. There's probably more bards than ever who are stuck at this bottleneck now considering open trakanon is now almost constantly up. The bard epic is one of the best 1.0's out there and useful for a long time and it being so much harder to obtain now that velious is out due to this one single bottleneck is awful.

It seems like there should be some logical solution that doesn't involve praying somebody doesn't steamroll your spawned mob.

Regardless of when he was killed, he's back up this morning eating that tasty Undead Bard. So nice of Daybreak to have a trigger that requires a raid to kill, and then have the actual mob spawn 18 hours later so anyone can kill him.

Maybe its time to change the way UDB pop, make him pop when Trakanon dies.
Problem fixed.

Trak should drop the guts in an instance. UDB was added to help bards get through the trak bottleneck not make it worse.

I do think it is interesting to see how instances have effected the culture of EQ. You just don't have guilds raiding "One Expansion Back" the way you did on all the other servers. While there were a number of old school EQers who were confident there would still be guilds killing this content, because that is the way it has always been, this cultural change was pretty easy to predict. Devs should have anticipated this, rather than refusing to modify any epics because it would take too long.

I would like to point out that this particular complaint has nothing to do with instancing and everything to do with MoTM. In fact the bard epic is "One Expansion Back"; but because Trakanon requires way more people than he did back in the day it is difficult for bards to get people to kill him.

Any solution which would involve having to gather ONE raid force for this portion of the bard epic I would think is not unreasonable.

Having to gather a not-small raid force to kill the trigger mob, and then having to come BACK fourteen or so hours later with a similar raid force to secure the kill against other guilds that show up with raid forces is a little too much. Every UDB my guild has done has required probably 3x the force actually needed to kill the spawned Trakanon for this reason and it's really silly as all hell.

Make the UDB pop in instance, immediately upon Trak death, or at least give it a chance to do so. It would still require a much larger force of people than any other part of any other epic in the game, but at least it would be doable without massive toxicity between competing guilds.

Killing trak with MoTM is already much harder than the epic ever was before, and a solution that 100% of epicless bards should be happy with.

Glad I finished my boxed bard's epic in kunark

That plus the accelerated spawn timers. It has gone from just one more improvement they never got around to for the TLP's (instancing the few remaining epic bottlenecks), to a huge new hindrance they created with their "improvements".

At least take out the serverwide for trak so the guild that kills him has some kind of advantage at catching the UDB up.

Long outdated I'm sure but to me mage always seemed like a high one - simply because of the 30+ individual camps that you had to do to get those 30+ drops; add to that some of the drops are raid/large group only and the tediusness of all of that time you need to put in seems to push it into 'high' for me.

The original TLP implementation had UDB spawning in pickzones on Ragefire. The devs went out of their way to remove him from pickzones and make it that much harder despite letting other epic steps be trivialized by pickzones, such as VSR.

In Kunark I could understand both sides of the argument for making the UDB portion of the epic easier, but it was obvious with how instances changed progression drastically that a good case could be made for changing how it worked.

In Velious I can't see any reasonable argument at all for not having guts drop off real trak, and 100% of the time. Having udb spawn after trak dies is redundant and he already pops every day when trak is being killed. But when no one needs to kill trak (and due to the nature of the server, no one does, even the most casual guilds), it means no one gets guts. Or you kill it, get a server wide message and the guild that killed trak will likely not even get the udb due to the respawn time.

A lot of epics don't work as intended due to instanced content and faster progression, but this is the only one that actually gets significantly more difficult with velious specifically due to the nature of the server and respawn times. And udb was always intended to make the bard epic easier, not harder.

Either have guts drop 100% off trak or let udb spawn in instances. Guild can pop an instance and bard can poopsock (if you still want it to be annoyingly difficult).

At a minimum, kill the server wide message for trak dying so at least the guild that kills him has a chance. (And kill the server wides for everything out of current expansion for that matter....)

Sorry for the newb question - but as a new bard (level 59), how does UDB work? Does he just spawn every X hours?

I get the rest about it - if he spawns and Trak is up, Trak eats him, and that you cycle the lute body through him, kill him, then a spawned version of Trak pops up and you kill him to get your 100% guaranteed guts.

Just didn't know if UDB is on a static "respawns every X hours after being killed" or "spawns X hours after real Trak dies" or something like that.