I would really love to be able to buy the Fragment with Marks of Valor - one good reason to run the Heroic Adventures more often and spend time in current content instead of going back to VoA / RoF for leveling the tear.
The rock really is not that hard to level, despite the harrumphing. And it has already been made easier. The arena in Shard's Landing is an excellent place to evolve this, and always yields several fragments when camping/clearing the arena. I knocked out levels very quickly hitting the arena. The Alra tasks yield 3 and the missions are 20 minutes - and that was for one mage and his mercenary. Get some real players in there and it's faster, and everyone gets a frag, btw. Leveling the rock with currency from CoTF is a bad idea, and in no way fits with the lore and story, not to mention the historic precedent with other items. You can't get an epic 2.0 orb with CoTF currency. Or your MPG trial stats. Or... <insert nearly every other quest item/achievement in EQ other than casino items>. Heck, using that line of reasoning, you might as well make every item from a prior expansion still worth having on the vendors to be purchased with today's currency. How much should one pay to buy some of the quested items for the UF Coldain Shawl, having met the tradeskill level requirement? No. Bad idea. The final item has very nice stats. Extremely nice. And it is worth the time. Earn it.
Can this be made as aug type3 as reward of leveling it up to lvl 20? and replace the timer on task to 2 hrs instead of 6? I just cant hang lvled it up mass killing for 1 hrs for 3-4ish % at lvl 11 when all my toons are AA maxed and merc about to be it aswell... and i know its gonna get alot worse lol
This is only if you complete the optional parts, isn't it? Erm...none of these, that I can recall...have ever required anywhere near as much work overall as the tear does to max...and they sure as heck don't in today's game. Also...how would it not be earning it by having to do HAs for currency to get it. Not to mention, with the fact that time and the very fabric of reality is essentially coming undone in WK etc, how can it not be said to be unable to be tied into the lore. Not to mention, how do we know that some unknown alarans didn't visit the continents other than Alaris at some point. Or...for that matter, that some non-Alaran race that we don't know of (after all, we know almost nothing about the Xulous) somehow made it beyond the veil and brought back texts....or that dragons brought them back and they have since been scattered and they are just now being uncovered in Dead Hills, WK, etc because of all the turmoil, upheaval and in general destruction of the original habitat going on.
Maybe this used to be a good spot for getting fragment drops, but I've been grinding here for a couple hours per day for the past two weeks and have only seen one drop. It's getting ridiculous.
The Word of Melretia, The Word of Anriella, The Word of Fal`Kaa, The Word of Erion, and The Crisis of Faith. All have optional objectives that will reward you a fragment. The Word of ... optionals can be easy or downright impossible to do depending on your group makeup. Crisis of Faith is easy as long as you can fade. The mobs that chase you aren't social, and will continue to chase you even after you fade.
There is nothing on WK currency vendor that I need... baught some stuff for my mercs its about it... I worked my way to ally, hoping that DH elite vendor would have something new but apparently I need to be more accomplished. That would be great to add something comparable to the fragment... It could be anything else then a frag that increase items with evolution if that could fit better in the theme? How many times did we work on something never ending to get it to have it change to free after a expansion or 2, let say a few months for some? The stone still deserve some work, yes but it is a time sink right now
As someone who finished it before the change Trajet was quoting Dzarn on (without calling it a quote), I can say that regardless of the drop rate of the Fragments, it is significantly easier and less time consuming to level the Stone Tear than when I did it. The five tasks in Pillars, even with the Fragments dropping elsewhere, really are the best way to go about evolving it. Kill experience is too slow. Sure, it starts out fast, but it gets real slow after a few levels. Just two boxing those five Pillars tasks (though one of them I needed help on most of the time, due to the boss hitting for over 17k) generally took me 4 to 4.5 hours per set, kept all my various Pillars factions very high, and got me 5 Fragments per character. Killing for that length of time, even Headshotting, would not have resulted in anywhere near that level of Stone Tear growth, unless someone is willing to point out a camp where you can get ten Fragments in under 5 hours camping Alaran mobs. Word of Melretia - takes either a high DPS group, or someone who can pull an entire floor in Anriella's Pillar, hold them all in one spot, while they or someone else clicks the item that the quest giver gave everyone. That process generally had to be done twice (as a ranger, I pulled them all, used Weaponshield to protect myself, clicked with my bot, used Vinelash to hold them all together, Cover Tracks to drop my agro, cleric merc rezzed bot, when the Vinelash snare was about to fade, bot clicked again, and died again, but usually got all done, or all but one or two). Get any remaining kill or Convert updates done the slow way, go upstairs, get the kills done for the book, loot the book, and run it back, all within 30 minutes. Word of Anriella was REAL easy. Just do the task normally, but after you click the mana device and trigger the appearance of the boss, don't kill the boss until after it has AE FD'd everyone three times. Piece of cake. Word of Fal'Kaa - when you first enter Erion's Pillar, you are not KoS by the task (you are whatever your regular faction is). On the way up for the book, be sure to kill all See Invis mobs that either wander by the path you intend to take on the return trip, or are standing by it. There is only one exception, that pseudo-named as you are swimming up almost always spawns as see invis, you have to watch out for him. Make sure that anything that you kill respawns as a non-see-invis. On the floor where you get the book, unless it is a see invis, DO NOT KILL anything in the middle - and that includes the pseudo-named that wanders in and out. Just kill stuff from the outer ring until you get your book drop. That makes the return trip very easy, with only the one pseudo-named mob that you have to watch out for swimming slowly up that central swim tunnel. Avoid getting agro on the return trip, both in and out, to complete the optional step. Word of Erion - this task makes you KoS to everything in Fal'Kaa's Pillar, regardless of lightsource or normal faction level. That's ok - its just a kill task. Kill in, kill down, kill up, and kill the Fal'Kaa Shadowward at the top. He was a hard mob, but given today's gear, shouldn't be that hard anymore, only hit me for 17209. Crisis of Faith - either be able to blur mobs, or fade them off of you repeatedly. I was using the two ranger spells, Flusterbolt and Blusterbolt, to punt mobs away that I was not interested in killing. Hard part about this task was not the mobs, hard part was running around finding the trees. For the Resplendent Temple section, find a good pattern that you are comfortable with, in order to find the right trees. The random nature of the trees is why I would not recommend trying to do this task for more than two people at once. With invis, it is easy to avoid other mob agro in this zone, and to just run around touching trees until you get the right ones, and the last one triggers a mob you have to kill. Unfortunately, this is a solo task, so everyone has their own trees to find. The Windsong section is fewer trees, and if you are careful, you can check the map after each update to get a good idea as to what trees, or even the exact tree, you are supposed to run to. Mob agro is a problem in here though. After you get the kill in here, its back to Pillars, and you are just running through them, not doing much killing. After you get the last mob dead, you get an item to hand back in to the quest giver. Complete all of this within 72 minutes (one EQ day) for the Fragment. All in all, they were not all that difficult. If you cannot do one Pillar's task, then DO NOT DO THE OPPOSITE PILLAR'S TASK. Crisis of Faith, however, is mandatory for maintaining good faction levels in all the Pillars - and running around non-KoS (except for the Erion and Fal'Kaa tasks where the task makes you KoS) makes the whole process significantly easier.
Ive been doing those task but then need to wait 5 hrs to do them again... alarm clock is set and i am waking up in the middle of the night to do them again... If it could be set to 2 hrs leaving a hrs to get a snack and a cofee refill that would be ideal! or add more tasks with a fragment as reward!
Yup No one doubts that. Still, for all the simplicity of the mechanics of actually getting it, all that simplicity has a trade off of massive time sink. Probably one of the largest time sinks in the history of the game. It might be that for many in the current game, an item that is unobtainable just through the fact of not having the time to do it is an oddity or a throw back to when it took years literally to finish and only the hardest core of the hardcore would make a focused effort to work an item like this. I have heard of few people finishing this and fewer yet divulging how long it actually took them in terms of daily investment of time or how often they dedicated time per week for nothing but the pursuit of leveling this item. I think with most people, there isn't time enough free to work this, raid, or do missions in current content. I only work it because mobs that level this tear overlap with what I am already doing. You can't really blame people for wanting some overlap in current content. Granted, with no lvl cap increase, its not a bad thing to go back and do stuff in RoF, but many players have moved into CotF and unless you can molo or box, Alarans are a bit more out of reach now. T4 zones in RoF are almost ghost towns, but they have the highest conning alaran mobs.
Ive been doing SL killing DB and light blue by waves of 4/6 mobs constantly ... I pretty much clear half the underground city before they respawn that is tri-boxing with 3 wiz mercs but damn it is sooo boring... specially looking every now and then to see 1-2 pct added to it ;/ It is the only camp where u can perma feed your self with Alarans. They should have added those frags way before when I was in that content now i am kinda sick of seeign it lol
Ive actually thought about this recently. It would be cool if they put these Fragments on merchants for currency. A lot of us have useless currency backed up on our accounts that we'll never use. Perhaps put a merchant somewhere with these fragments on them and they'll take any type of currency for them sans plat etc.
Done with it! Aint as bad as it sounded at first but it is still a pain. 53 fragments from tasks and 84 from killing Allarans. My goal was to reach lvl 15 before clicking any of those fragment with 100 banked considering that its way easier to lvl it up before 15 then pass it. I was surprised by the drop rate sometime making me jump up and down or some others felt like jumping down a bridge. I lift my hat to all those that finished that Tear before it was tuned down Now i kinda feel naked with nothing in my ammo slot /rolleyes
Finished mine night before last as well. Getting to 15/20 and farming 100 tablets is the most efficient way to do it, imo. Regarding ammo slot, completely agree! Haven't decided what to put there yet, threw ghostrider up for now for the choice horse head icon! For other camp options, I found the upper floors of resplendent and the center camp in windsong decent for alt lessons/farmery, too. Resplendent has a lot of alarans.
The problem is the that a lot of them are light blue at 100. Really, the mobs should just give the same amount of exp regardless of con...or at least make the lb/green/blue give the same exp as even cons. Also, the exp should not be lessened if you are not soloing either, imo. -_- Honestly, though...aside from the above...if they just took out the redo timer on the word of tasks + crisis of faith, the tear wouldn't really need tweaking anymore, imo. Barring that, though...I stand by my suggestion to add them for currency on the WK merchant for ~1/3-1/2 the price of normal items!
Should add a fragment as a substitute to the 'To kill A thel Erth Ril' line of tasks. Either pick Alsa Thel droplets or a fragment as reward.
Actually, I really like this idea. Add it to both the 500 tears task rewards...as well as the task rewards that give the "Alsa Thel of Beasts", "Alsa Thel of Oratory", etc. This would be a sufficient way, imo, to help people get this done faster without opening it up to non-alaran mobs (though, maybe all mobs in VoA should improve the thing, regardless of them being alaran or not, heh). Could also make them drop from VoA/RoF mission chests and have a much higher chance of them dropping from RoF/VoA named alarans (and heck, just any named, tbh, heh) than any Alaran mob. That being said...having the exp not be lowered when more people join the group would likely improve the levelling rate of this thing by itself. Though...if all alarans simply gave the same exp as the 'red cons' listed in the exp values before, especially on top of the aforementioned non-lowering of exp with more in the group...then it wouldn't be nearly as bad to max it out, even without lowering the experience to max it out again. *shrugs*
why was the drop rate decreased after they were put in? Just because a small few completed it during the higher drop rate. doesn't mean that its dropping to much... do Devs forget how hardcore some players really are? If they really want a quest that takes 10000 played hours when not specifically working on it to achieve it. or 500-1000 hours when strictly working on it with a passion. The stats should be much better. Thats a lot of time invested. Chase items are good, ones that are out of reach of 99.9998% of characters but then dont have significant benefits are.... crap. So its pretty simple adjust the time or the stats, or both. This should be very black and white.
