Bastion of the Tranquil is a sadistic grind.

The second part of the Mage epic 2.0 quest takes literally one hour to do the entire thing. Interesting...

If you've done the AoM Questline yep. (The one that gave no real useful item for alts).

Total Pre-Reqs so far for Mage epic Quest 1 and 2 as I see it;

• City Timeline - 47 Quests in Qeynos.
• SF Timeline - 162 Quests.
• SF Faction - 30+ of the same repeatable (Of which they take 10+ mins unless you have a ton of Conjs).
• ToT Repeatables - 70+ of the same repeatable
• AoM Timeline - 83 Quests.
• GD/CS Othmir - 40 Quests.
• Shield of the Magi Quest.

Yeah, it's true there is a ton of pre-requisites for 'em. It was a breath of fresh air after the faction grind for me, at least.

Exactly! Players need new content to skip now and complain about having to do later...wait, that makes no sense.

The complaints are from players who want the game to meet their current needs. The Devs should be able to predict then they will stop playing an old character and be ready to code an entire new experience for the FOTM class players.

Sorry your expectations are so incredibly small, although with the last 2 xpacs I can't really blame you when the bar was set so very very low.

Most of us paid money expecting to play KA, not Sentinel's Fate and Destiny of Velious.

Couple things that stand out to me.


These epic weapons are supposedly, well, epic. So, its kind of in the vein of the EverQuest franchise to be a huge huge undertaking... maybe an 'epic' one even, for such a powerful weapon (that the devs said should be good for 2 years). That is huge. So I would expect the epic to be not only an "epic" quest, but a lot of work - INCLUDING "work" - yes "work" that's painful to get through. There's always a desire for more new content than we have but to make enough new content to take the entirety of an epic quest would be undoable even with their old crew imo. Also, EQ2 is basically the biggest MMO ever made, why not make use of all the existing content that TONS of players have never even seen?

To be fair, it is old content and for a lot of people its really tired stuff. I get that. Coming from a fresh toon I had to go back and do entire expansion sig lines just to talk to people along the epic quest (NOT including what is needed for the epic quest itself). But, I'm doing it anyway because I want the weapon..and well, I expect to have to work at it and maybe even do things I'm not "excited" about.


My one suggestion that might be a nice compromise is, for the devs to re-code how difficulty scales, so these quests feel challenging and engaging, and it doesn't feel like we're running through and entire zone, not even stopping to smell the flowers, and laying waste to hordes of mobs and the "end boss" of an entire questline with an accidental riposte or a mean look from Claz'aka. Right now, mobs scale to "level" but are several expansions "behind" in difficulty. The end boss in the city questline took one hit before it flopped to the ground in mercy. That isn't engaging, nor is it immersive.

Re-scale difficulty to follow itemization with each expansion and then people will be challenged and more likely enjoy, and stop to smell the flowers on this old content. Best of both worlds perhaps.

I agree. It's too much and makes you wonder why devs didn't make us start from the very first expansion and replay the whole game as some here still pointing that epic should be a hard work. Said with sarcasm of course. Wouldn't it be exciting? Honestly for me not really.

I am actually in awe that somebody already had Bastion of tranquility faction at 50k to discover the item we need to buy. I don't even see it on a merchant yet. It's really amazing. At least with Faye in Thalumbra you could guess that you need max faction when you see a new merchant that wasn't there before and who don't want to deal with you.

What bothers ME that I have to do the entire quest line in SF just to be able to start building the faction and it's more than 100 quests. Thus was my question why not to get us back to the very beginning of the game then? Oh well... off to factions grind.

Sig lines alone would have been fine. The faction grind is just a slap in the face.

I would have said "a pain in the rear" but that's just me *giggles maliciously as I step backwards into the shadows*

It's not a slap in the face, but they're definitely forcing their hand somewhere...


Edit: Dammit Meneltel, you beat me to it.

Learn to step backwards into the shadows faster, makes your rear a harder target to hit! *giggles from the shadows*

was a breath of 'holy god I have to do AoM again??? 4 times was enough. blahhhh' for me. Though I will take a questline over a faction grind any day if the time needed is similar. At least questlines feel like they add history and meaning to my character. Even if I have done them before multiple times. It's not a good idea to put them as required for this, but for me quests > faction.

Creating this quest on a game world where all quests have been completed and all factions maxed was a mistake. There should have been NEW npcs or NEW versions of old npcs put into the game in order for anyone who has done the CURRENT pre-reqs of KA to get the stuff and do the quests in a streamlined manner. Difficult to find? ok. Impossible to find because you may have not done the obscure steps (city timeline???? mage shield???) not ok.

They already have a time gate with ascension. I do not understand the need for any others. (not directed at you Liscia, just quoted you because i'm glad quest 2 was nice and simple for someone, though it was not at all for me.)

and the thing is...even if you went back and did every sig line from the beginning of the game, you might miss a quest or a billion. LIke for example a quest from a guy in a tree in a zone you may never need to visit.

And I agree fully in terms of 'who had 50k bastion faction?' It seemed like you didn't get much from doing it. For me, and MANY others, if a quest will not give results that boost my effectiveness, I'm not going to do it. Point is, even if that quest was current, I probably would not have touched it more than once to get the sig line done unless it had a best in slot item rewarded at the end. There are other more important things I can do with my time. At least the 2 factions in KA were easy to build because of key quests, which are very important currently, and the trade quests, which are ALSO very important currently even for adventure players. Why are players who want to make efficient, awesome characters being penalized/frustrated SO MUCH by these quests?

So they would take even longer?

No way. The best thing they could have done was make these quests streamlined with current content with perhaps a few steps sprinkled about the world in ways that did not require faction or old quests to see them. Then it would have been fun.

Yeah, I completely get what you mean. I happened to return to the game when they gave a free L.95 boost and I hadn't purchased ToT so I did the AoM questline.

I suppose I *did* grind for it, but it was at the intended level of progression I was at. I do agree the timegates and "artificial filler content" is cut and dry instead of genuinely interesting, exciting, or otherwise FUN.

I started during TSO and did many solo quests to catch up then continue progressing my toon as new expansions were released. In fact, I have done over 1600 solo quests even though I play this game mostly for grouping zones. When you are max level and AA and capable of running AS or heroic zones, there is little point in running solo quests beyond the signatures as they did nothing to advance your character. Many of the faction grinds are only pre-reqs for something else, therefore unless you need that faction, there is hardly a reason to grind simple repeatables over and over and over again (very bad game design to force this on players).

For Epic 2.0, as a mage there are 432 solo quests as part of the pre-req (thanks Feldon for listing it all). Of the 432, 100 quests are repeatables needed for faction. Even having done considerable amount of solo quests while leveling, my toon still requires most of the solo quests and all of the faction grind including the Bastion faction grind. Even if you chrono down your toon, you will still 1 shot a ton of mobs at once, it is still in zones you spent months exploring in previous expansions, pre-reqs still consist of a significant portion of repeatable faction quests (do even diehards enjoy running the same quest over and over again?), and these solo quests do nothing to advance your toon beyond serving as a time sink set of pre-reqs. And while you are investing your time doing this, you are not playing the current content with the majority of the player base. And storylines, that is laughable. I found nothing of interest in the disjointed storylines with these random pre-reqs. I've sucked up doing some bad pre-reqs before, but this is just too much.

I've already made the decision not to do the Epic 2.0 for many of the reasons listed in the countless threads, but more because it is just not a fun gaming experience. This also indicates a direction the game is heading that no longer interests me. I have a few months left in my sub, and unless I see some major changes, I am done!

I found the Freeport timeline very interesting. It answered a lot of questions and I would never have done it if not for the epic. Also, get off the forums Sacred! I'll smack you!

The city's questlines are not the worst ones. They are actually interesting. And I've done them on all my toons out of curiosity and fun way before they came in play as pre-req for epic 2. But faction grind is what kills me. If to get faction maxed meant to do just questlines it would be ******* awesome! I've already maxed my City paineel faction just doing sig line. But not anywhere close to Bastion. Repeatable quests just for faction sake puts me in a mood to not login at all. I am sure it's the same for some folks too.

I wish devs would put as pre-req sig lines instead of repeateble quests. As some agreed here it would be OK to revisit sig questlines. But repeatables are nuasating

Cant seem to edit, but what questions in particular? Why I can't kill the goddamn x4 in the middle of freeport.