Plane of War - Failure or diamond in the rough

I very rarely post criticism of SoE for content. Most of the time I can see how someone, somewhere is going to like and take advantage of whatever has been delivered. I have a very hard time seeing anything at all redeeming in PoW. Yes, there is the raid that will challenge the top 5% of guilds until the strat is made known then maybe the top 25% will attempt it, but from a group content perspective I believe it's a complete bust.

I spent a couple of weeks and probably 30 hours minimum to get ally in one of the castles. This was even after it was published that the named content was basically raid content and without multiple groups you could not hope to succeed. I have peeked in there a few times and the zone is basically deserted now. Everyone that I have talked to in game refuses to even consider going back there given the mechanics to get anything done.

So what should be done? Waste months of developer time, sweat and cost and let the zone sit there and rot? Or should SoE tune it to something a bit more realistic? Thoughts?

I realize I'm in the minority, but I love PoWar and go every chance a I get.

The only thing I might add would be a larger loot table, but the limited loot table suggests there will eventually be another similar zone which I would love even more.

Please remember that PoWar is just one zone. There are many more zones with easier content that yields more XP. You don't have to go there. It's easy to avoid. Please don't ask them to homogenize the game.

This place was a ghost town Monday night. Not a soul. And I only zoned in by mistake. I was headed to the mission outside and just clicked the stone.

People saying it's just one zone really need to look at what we have going in current content. How much offers relevant gear and rewards. There's not much really. CotF is paltry group wise. How many HA can one person do?

PoWar was asked for by, in my opinion, a very vocal, but, very small group of people. It's a failure. It should be opened up further. Removing many for the mechanics and allowing the content to be progressed without ideal groups. Cause frankly, it was a waste of someone's time to make this and have it sit empty so very soon after release.

I have not even zoned in to PoW, and will not until the handicaps they imposed on all classes is removed. To cripple classes just to make things harder is just stupid.
You might as well just strip all your gear off and go fight in the Tower of Lag to get the same challenge (at least you could potentially get some xp).

I see lots enjoying it but I agree some aspects could be toned down some. There is nothing wrong so to speak but it could use a few tweaks to open it up a bit more.

I think it needs to remain not solo or molo'able but they should allow for pet tanks in my opinion. Lots and lots of people or friends grouping together have chosen to use a mage or pet class as their tank. They have spent thousands of aa, farming and time into getting that pet class up to snuff. These people are not rerolling and gearing a tank for one zone and most stick to grouping with their friends and such exclusively so they avoid the zone entirely rather then picking up a random tank. Mobs should remain brutal but make dps checks or nasty spell effects make it so people can not molo them. Don't totally negate a playstyle thats been around for 15 years just because once you get a mage all setup aa, spell and focus wise that they only need to update a few things to be back on the ball verse a tank having 20 things to upgrade.

I have no problems with the time and effort required to move through the zone currently but they do need to look at the rewards. To me there needs to be a few bigger carrots for different classes. Not everyone is a tank or one archtype so the really good rewards need to reflect that. Their needs to be options like twincast clickies for casters, twinheal clickies for healers, dps - like a higher haste mod click - or endurance boost clicks for melee or stuff like that that works for differing archtypes. In my opinion the rewards just do not motivate the masses at the moment as a secondary tank aug really motivates 3 of 16 classes.

You could put a few exclusive chase items here that hold value for a couple years and allow pets to work but dps checks or mob range dps checks that prevent solo or moloing that would make the zone much more enticing to the masses and not just those who enjoy a challenge for the sake of a challenge.

PoWar was a great idea but it missed its target by 2-4 years. It's meant for the 'old school', 'hardcore' players, the ones who like challenge and are willing to invest some time to get a reward. The very same players who are being driven out of EQ for the last 1.5 years, told that they are no longer the focus of the development, fed with pushover content with zero challenge, and simply starved on new content. Now there is this great challenging zone, but a lot of its target audience is already gone. The new target audience for whom 'Call of the WoW' was created is not interested in a zone like PoWar. They cannot get any rewards there in 1 hour with a merc, therefore it's too hard and not worth their time. They want raid loot in Heroic Adventures, not this. PoWar would have been a massive hit during House of Thule. Now it's just out of place.

As someone who plays only pet classes(necro main with mage and bst alts) I see pow as having a big sign on the zi that states PET CLASSES NOT WELCOME. Sorry 2 of the things in PoW are just slap in the faces to pet classes and any zone that is going do that I not going go near. The only reason i have gotten form soe as to why they made it so names can't be pet tanked is "that is how we wanted to do it". As for what other players have stated that they did it to force people to group. Near is a reasonable reason to do this. And until I get a answer that makes sense and is reasonable I am not going back.(fat chance cause I can think of no reasonable reason as to do it) The only time I have zoned in was when it 1st came out and I went in to test it out to see if it was true. After that besides the anv quest have not going back in. So as far as I am concerned PoW was a flop and a failure.

And just so everyone know I don't want them to make it so easy I can go in and molo the names. I could care less if it takes 2 groups to kill a mob. But to make so a pet can't hold aggro is totally unreasonable.

I'm a big fan of both War and Rot. Some of the best game design in years, IMO.

First of all, a pet class shouldn't figure on just having an earring and the pet tank AAs and go pwn PoWar. Unless you have pretty much all your AAs, you really don't belong in PoWar.

The pet nerf is something the pet classes got, and it's shocking to them, but as far as I know every class has found things in PoWar that don't work as normal. They're still powerful without their pets, and I gladly invite them to join me in PoWar when I have a DPS slot.

If it's so easy to readjust zone difficulty, why not take some really old, vacant zones (LoY, GoD, etc.) and rebalance them for today's players rather than destroy the favorite zone of an admittedly small minority of players?

I love Plane of War for it's difficulty. Is it something I can steamroll? No .. But me and my friends can! The thrill of a Judicator pop.. So good ..

Are there disadvantages? Yes and there is supposed to be.
I love the zone

Plane of War is the best zone I have played in in a LONG time. The difficulty that every single mob possesses past the Gates of Strife that always makes me pay attention I really enjoy. The quests are either difficult, long, or both, and feel like an accomplishment when you complete them. The lore of the zone and how it fills in what was missing from Planes of Power was great, from a lore junkie, and I liked how it even used lore from expansions after Planes of Power - Tosk and the Korascian Warrens, mainly. The various named of the zone all have very unique mechanics for named these days and they're enjoyable to fight, although a few are very easy. The Grandmaster is, by far, the best group or two group encounter in the game. And to top it all off, his enrage timer is the most hilarious thing I've ever seen. He doesn't start hitting for 100k+. No, he has a much more clever way of removing you from his chessboard if you have stalemated the game.

You have to really put in work to progress there, and it is indeed a diamond in the rough. Getting flagged for the Antechamber of Drunder and being among the first to kill The Grandmaster was an accomplishment I'll always be proud of. I hope a zone like this is included in every expansion. I'm not asking for every zone to be like War, because it is certainly not everybody's cup of tea, and I understand that completely. But one zone like War for every expansion would be amazing.

They aren't going to rebalance any zones. They hardly had time to make ToR. Any seriously think we'll get revamped zones?

No. We're left with a zone that few people can use,that breeds player discontent and is being justified by a small minority that doesn't use the zone all that much themselves.
The intent may have been noble. But the implementation was lacking and as someone said earlier, years too late.

Seriously, on the couple toons I have on other servers, the best I can guess the use this zone sees as a rule is two groups from raid guilds at anyone time. And that's when it's not completely empty.

As the title asks, I call this a failure.

Looks like we are in for a long summer with nothing else to do, may as well leave it as it is, at least it will give some something to do.

Never said pet classes should be able to pwn PoWar. But there is zero reasons why a pet class should not be able to use his/her pet to tank the mob while the rest of the group(s) ripe the name apart. Merc tanks are crap. Only time I use one is if group with my wife cause she a zerker and we use a tank so she can get up close and do dps. But even then if we get a named it always ends up being my pet tanking cause the merc tank can almost never last the whole fight. If I have a real tank great but it nice to know if something goes wrong that my pet can be a back up tank if needed. Make the names hard as can be to that they can't be moloed I don't care bout that. It the fact that I can't use my pet as a back up tank or as main tank. Cause as it stands now in PoWar if you only have one tank and he/she leaves that is it you group is done unless you have a new tank to take the spot.

Group players still want a challenge. We just want to be able to use the PoW zone without an overwhelming challenge. Raid gear and RkIII spells make a big difference.

Don't blame the easy CotF HA missions on all group players. That was SOE trying to cater content to the heroic 85's and the Free to Play players. And lets face it raiders line up to grind through the easy HA missions just as much as group players do.

I get the feeling that people who dislike Plane of War actually really want to be in the zone doing stuff, but for whatever reason feel they can't. All trash in this zone is pet tankable, meaning the quests are pretty much doable using a pet tank. Group geared tanks can handle it, including the named, but you need a real healer. The named don't actually hit that hard, but you need a certain amount of DPS to kill them in time, which can be difficult for one group.

The only problems I see with this zone are bugs and lack of reward for certain classes. I consider the pet aggro vs named effect to be workable, but in some cases it seems broken.

With only the Field of Strife flag, you can get a 10% Dodge aug, CoP 4, caster dmg+mana proc, and a melee dmg aug upgrade. There are certainly enough people interested in these items to make a group and do them, but people are reluctant to do so, either because they're afraid of the zone or have forgotten how to work together.

A lot of the named and quests in this zone have really cool and interesting mechanics. I think it's worth the effort. Even if I couldn't use a single thing from this zone, I would be very happy to have seen it all.

Raiders saying the feel accomplished because they did stupid long faction grinding and had at their disposal very well geared players and an abundance of them to choose from are being short sighted, IMO. Because, there's just more and more of us leaving due being disenfranchised and leaving you with less people to recruit from and less people to show off this accomplishment to.

But in either case. Too few are able to experience this type of content. So it goes against what was said earlier that they are making EQ accessible by more people and then turn around and make War.

So. Not only are we being content starved what content we are getting , it not usable by 90% of the population? Not a roaring success in my eyes.

Honestly. You can't pet tank on 11 mobs in the entire zone, and the zone is much more than that. In those 11 cases, you can't box your group mage to kill it. You need a tank and a healer, and you can fill in the other classes with whatever you want. That isn't asking a lot. If you can't find a single tank to help you, that is a you problem, not a zone problem.

I like the zone. I just wish more people felt the way I did, because it is empty whenever I want to play there and trying to convince people to go is difficult.

People have kept saying they have trouble getting groups to do the content and keeping the groups when they do get them without it being some aggravating effort that most nights ends with disappointment.

Yet, you fault the players. That's not the players problem but the games developers ignoring our issues and making content for the small minority that is endorsing the zone in this thread.