I am just curious how long these are supposed to take to finish. I was just short of an hour and a half into Unveiling the Mystery. I had done "world's end" and "the pit" and I had just dropped down into "the aquaducts" and killed a couple mobs there. I ran out of time and had to quit. I'm a boxer and can put out pretty steady dps. I run a Mage (10500 aa), Chanter (8000aa), Wizard (7500aa), Ranger (4500aa) and then wizard merc (burn) and cleric merc. I am also 100% group geared in full T2 with a smattering of T3 starting to trickle in...EM 14 for mage. I was wondering what the average time is for people to complete this mission. It's pretty rare if I get more than an hour and a half to sit down and play at any given time. This is going to be hard for me to finish and not because of the difficulty, simply because of the time restraints I have to deal with. I used to be able to log on, find a camp for something I needed and kill stuff for an hour and a half or so and maybe get lucky on a named. Seems like with the half the loots distributed throughout really long missions that I might be having some problems gearing up. I have only done Breaking the Seal and a little over half of Unveiling the Mystery thus far and while I did think they were fun, I just am not going to have the time to farm these things like we are going to have to for upgrades (small though they may be, I still want them). I prefer the old way. Any thoughts?
Wished the augs dropped off a named, cause the missions suck to redo because of the timesink and are frustrating to box because of how awesome auto follow works. On the other hand you get to explore the entire zone without high mob density in the missions, both POS and Chelsith.
What you mean 'ran out of time'? The timer on it is 6 hr. Why did it take that long anyway? The first part is killing 4 mobs with different resists. The 'worlds end' is 21 trash mob. The 'pit' is 11 trash mobs. How come a group that includes 3 strong dps with lots of AA + a dps merc spent 1.5 hr killing 36 mobs?? I would guess the part about boxing is the key. Not to sound arrogant, but looks like it was not an efficient boxing. Try doing the same mission grouped with real people and see the difference.
Ran out of time meaning that my allotted Everquest time had expired. Really? Thank you Axxius for the first "suck less" type of comment from a raider. I've boxed my way into the best group gear available for the last 3 expansion (while wearing group gear). I'm pretty good at it. I did probably spend quite a bit of extra time on the portal guys. It was my first run and i actually was trying to balance them down before i decided to just burn them down and see what happens. You didn't answer my question though. I'm asking someone that has it down pretty good how long it takes to do this. Including the bonus mobs.
Very first run at this with a group of 5 PCs (one boxing) took ~2+ish hours. It was a very low DPS group though: Ench, Rng, War x2, Clr x2 and we had AFKs throughout. That said, after knowing the mission and with a balanced group, I don't see this taking more than a hour max, even boxing. Compared to other tiers, I'd say the chance of dying in these missions is extremely low, but the initial time investment to really "learn" the mission seems a little higher. Given you have a Mage on your box team (I do too), you can really speed things up with a selo horse and COTH, especially for the Chelsith mission.
Thank you Silv. I will see if I can get some time later in the week to try again. Ignoring the balance mechanic and just killing the portal guys will save me a ton of time I bet. 2 hours is still going to be at the limits of my play time but maybe I can hone it down some and be able to farm it in an hour and a half after a couple runs.
Geez, touchy people get offended at the mention that killing 36 mobs in 1.5 hr is too slow for a 4-dps group... And probably should mention that you've spent a lot of time learning the mission. If you don't know what to do, you can spend 3 hr and it won't mean anything. 6 hr is the only time limit associated with this mission, so when you say you've run out of time - hpw is everybody supposed to know what else you mean... Fine. I don't know about 'average' cause that depends on how many groups and what setups you want to average, but it takes 45 min to 3-box this mission with this group: Wiz (raid), Enc (group), Brd (group), tank (merc), 2x healer (merc), without doing any extra named, just the 48 mobs and the statue.
I know most people do but in the interest of not assuming... did you check out the writeup on EQResource? Personally, having the maps with markers lets me think out the most efficient way to run the mission. Also, if you're going for the Limestone Oddity, only the beach optional boss has it on the loot table so you can skip the other optional to cut your time down (unless of course you want another T3 item).
No group task should take longer than 30 minutes, period. The main reason that a lot of these group tasks take an ungodly amount of time is due to the fact that the devs are blurring the lines between raid and group content. That stuff needs to be kept separate.
Yes, I agree raids don't belong in the group game. Plus, it seem the Devs are trying make content that is anti-boxing. Here's what is happening, actually now and in the future, if this trend continues. Boxers will either stop playing when they can't accomplish what they are used to and because its why they started boxing in the first place, or, they will pare down the amount of accounts they carry. Why pay for subscriptions and expansions and have them be useless? While it is because they are trying stimulate grouping, it's just too late for this to have the desired effect. I would never go back to wanting to get things done and have to spend an hour or more to get it put together, get there and have the group fall apart. Never. A couple things fine. But if more than a couple or it's one of those things everyone dreads repeating, no way. If it continues, EQ would not be able to hold my interest.
Issue with many of these missions is they are weaker version of the raids. And the raids cannot be boxed very much, so obviously the same goes for the missions. I wish all these missions could all be like how HoT missions were. Fairly easy and not time consuming (almost all were less than 1 hour to do). Even fear itself was not as remotely as bad as many of these missions. I have not done a lot of these, but a bunch of them seem to the group version of the raid with 6 people. Not sure why they need to be this hard. Group missions should be done easily by an average group. Otherwise it becomes like how group stuff for discord or UF was not doable by anyone who can group so no one did it. Having exclusive augs and other gear just makes it worse becuase you have to do terrible missions over and over.
I was finally able to finish this mission....no limestone oddity Took my considerably longer than 1 and a half hours. If its possible to do this thing in 45 minutes as Axxius claims then I must be doing something really wrong.
Wiz , real cleric, SK, boxxed rogue, boxxed berserker, boxxed shaman. ( everyone over 5k AA, in Elegant [ Sarith raid] or RoF T2 gear) first run took about an hour and a half. second run took ~40 minute. the first 4 mob take almost as long as the last 36 trash mob . to the OP: either you spent alot of time Learning mechanics ( or went really slow on the first 4 to keep hem even) or you aren't getting the maximal amount of DPS you can from your boxes...
A beastlord friend, my wife's mage, my enchanter, tank merc, wiz merc, and healer merc, take about 90 minutes to run through this one with the two optional bosses. We'd probably shave 20 minutes skipping arena boss. I like this mission as it is. It's a good grind and easy to do 60 aa with double experience going. Add three loots and a mote and it's a productive 90 minutes spent. I much prefer this one to the first PoS mission (want two Quicksilver Globules and haven't seen any out of 45 loots so far). That one might be a bit quicker, but 90% of the mission is spent running around in that maze, where very little actual combat. I also enjoyed both of the second missions and wish they had more rewards for repeating them.
