My friend and I have been trying to clear out some old quests, and we cannot for the life of us find menacing droplets in Palace of Awakened to update this quest. They're supposedly on the 1st floor, and assuming they're in or around the fountain, but there's been no spawn for nearly an hour now of them. Is this a known issue/bug, or is there something we're missing?
nevermind, finally got the spawns, it appears they're on a 30 minute timer though and I suppose someone else wandering through killed them before we got there the first time. 30 minutes seems a bit much, maybe reducing to 10 would make more reasonable.
I was doing some quest in Silent City (contested) some day and I had to wait for a rare named to spawn for like 2 hours or so... welcome to the hardcore old school quests
If it were for a named mob, that makes total sense and I have no problem with that whatsoever....but we're talking about a simple quest update in the midpoint of a quest here.
Okay, so then I change my argument to the quest in the Qeynos Catacombs where you need 30-ish rat intestines and they only drop from like 1/7 rats forcing you to wait for respawns for 3-4 hours... Welcome to the hardcore old school quests
That's still an apples to oranges comparison though. The difference is, the droplets only spawn in one area of one floor of the entire zone and are a far, far more limited/finite number of mobs at that, spawning only once every 30 minutes. Conversely, there are bunches of rats spread around the underground of Qeynos. Or to bottom line it, the original scenario is inactive, the example you brought up is still active in terms of the player involvement. And actually, since you mentioned the random update mechanic, I'd go so far as to say that if they changed the spawn timer on the droplets to 5 minutes, but made it a random update like with the rat intestines & many other quest updates through the course of the game, I'd be completely fine with that solution too! Just because bad or illogical gameplay mechanics existed once upon a time doesn't mean they should be just shrugged off and accepted in a 'why bother' manner now. And just because for many veteran players a zone like this no longer matters to them doesn't mean there aren't many players who either either new or otherwise completionists who don't care either. I'm simply trying to offer constructive feedback on a better way to change things.
You have to realize that when this zone was current that these mobs use to be heroic and weren't gathered up all at once and one shotted with one click of a key stroke. So, a 30 min respawn timer wasn't all that unreasonable. Yah, now it is but I don't see how a zone from 6 expansions ago has any high priority seeing how the gear changes have pretty much screwed up every zone from past expansions.
Speaking of which, didn't the Qeynos Catacombs and Freeport Sewers use to be full heroic zones? I could have sworn there were no solo mobs there when I started playing EQ2... Or do I remember wrong?
Understood that things were different then, and I certainly wasn't suggesting this or these kind of issues should be at the top of the priority list either. But neither should they be ignored or forgotten either. If this were some more 100% grinder/endgame purist MMO, I probably wouldn't bother (mainly because I wouldn't be playing it most likely), but as the nature of EQ2 being a quest-centric game and many people being as much or in some cases even more into the lore and story behind the quests especially, it means more here than it would in other games to still keep things like this in mind. Maybe they'll go back and do more prior zone revamps down the line too. Here's hoping!
I'm not sure about 'no solo mobs' whatsoever, but I think you're right in that there were a bunch of heroics there, just as there were most places in the old days. Guessing they did that at the same time they took Antonica/CL down a couple notches.
I think the quests should stay the way they are. Biggest reason I like EQ2 is because of the hardcore style that exist in some quests and areas. Making the Shades of Drinal line soloable felt like a punch in the face. But anyway I do think they could up the rewards to be worth the time and trouble it takes to do those hardcore quests. Killing rats in the catacombs for 3-4 hours to get an item which is worse than what a named mob drops in the overland zone in a few seconds feels wrong. Old items have cooler names though, more lore bound and less auto generated. But they lack in power...
I don't think most would agree with you in terms of a 'fine as is' mindset. If we're talking about the mobs being more difficult, requiring more grouping/etc, I'm totally on board with that, or other solutions as I've said. I'm not wanting things to be easy, nor am I debating that point. The problem here or in other similar quests though isn't so much the difficulty or even the time investment, but rather the implementation/mechanics behind that time investment. Again, it boils down to an active vs passive/idle issue and keeping the player engaged (and right now I'm speaking in general/universal philosophy in terms of how you develop a game like this, not just in terms of how the game changes over time have affected this one outdated quest). You can do that through difficulty, through depth of the story being told, through a number of different ways certainly, and I enjoy seeing all of those, but what we're discussing here isn't an example of any of them. If devs created quests in any MMO like this purposely and consistently (and understanding in the case at hand, that's not the case but rather morphed that way over time & many changes), it would die a quick death, and rightfully so.
