Is there a Getting Started Guide for 'The Hole' ?

My wife and I primarely duo and we have worked through the overland quests and are now in our upper 80 ready for 'The Hole'. However we get there and dont really know what to do, it looks like we have bad faction with all the groups and have to kill them to get to the people to get the quests. Is this what we are suppose to do? Also it was my understanding that this was suppose to be duo-able for upper 80 toons that dont have raid gear is that true? We dont have raid gear, only T1 shard + Mastercrafted + legendary from the quests.
If there are any guides to The Hole could someone point me in the direction - I cant seem to find any.
Thanks
Denon

My experience:

Just doing the quests with the illusion is very slow way. What I do is just go on a killing spree on the rats without the illusion. My rat faction stays at -50k but the other 2 will rise. Once you are around -10k, they start offering other quests. You can unlock new quests at each 10k interval. This is a fast way to get the other 2 to +50k. After doing all the quests you can either go on a killing spree on the other 2 factions if you want fast rat faction. Or you can start grinding on the rat quests till you can unlock more.

I was going to do a writeup for The Hole but then they started fooling around with the quests and making it harder and harder to get updates and even get the quests in the first place. I ended up working on other things. Briefly, there are 3 wings of the Hole, and 3 factions in the Hole. Certain factions want you to kill certain enemies. Each wing has different enemies. Also, the 3 wings are roughly classed into easy, medium, and hard. The ramp to the right which leads you through the rats and to an area where you climb down into a kind of abandoned city is the easiest wing. Starting from the center of the Hole, if you go into the adjoining room which has guardians on either side of the door, and quest givers inside a circular room, and if you go down the stairs, you will end up in the medium difficulty area. And if you take the ramp to the left into a cave with swirling brown elementals leading to a series of waterfalls, that's the hardest difficulty area. I wouldn't worry too much about which faction you are building but instead which difficulty you want to try and which of the dozen quests to work on. Each wing of the Hole has certain types of mobs, and the 3 factions each offer you quests to kill some of those types of mobs. One aspect of the Hole is that for absolutely no reason, certain mobs which are non-agro will attack anyway. This includes rats in the cave and certain guardians. No explanation has been given for this behavior, and no matter how much faction you earn with them, they'll still try to gnaw your leg off. At level 88 with Tier 1 and legendary quest armor, you'll probably be able to slowly kill the easier mobs in the easiest part of the Hole. But since there are direct upgrades in the Hole from the vendors once you earn enough faction, hopefully you'll be able to upgrade as you go. Unfortunately, and completely unnecessarily, the quests in the Hole were changed so that each one can only be completed once per day. This is a huge roadblock to just playing the game and reduces the effectiveness of The Hole for its original purpose (allowing duoers and trios to do some relatively easy content until they can earn enough faction to upgrade their gear). Have you got your Fabled Epic weapon? Have you done the repeatable Elemental cleansing quests in Lavastorm to get enough blue gems to buy jewelry from the vendor there? There is some good jewelry to be had. P.S. I am not playing as much as I used to, so some of these facts may have changed.

Denon wrote:

You start with -50K faction with all of them. -40K is all you need to make them not attack you ... except for the seemingly random exceptions Feldon noted that will attack you even though they regard you as an Ally. (With friends like these....)
There are a lot of ways to go about it. It's less worthwhile than it used to be and it gives me the impression that it's broken as heck, but there are a dozen or so Marks to be gained here and named drops that may very well be upgrades for you and if not certainly make good transmuting fodder.
What I would do:
1. If you can duo your way to the quest areas in the Guardians and Defenders areas to pick up the quests, do so. (Have the illusion on if you're not already at -50K) If not, don't worry about it.
2. Head back to the rat area. Wipe them out ... all of them. There are two really good spots for earning faction. Maybe I'll add the waypoints later, but basically one is groups of 4 overjoyed corpse handers. Immediately after heading through the cave of naughty stabby-stabby refugees, climb down the wall and take an immediate right. There are cooks over there and what not ... many of these mobs don't have the faction tag, but they are needed for some of the quests. (e.g. famished watchmen) To the left of this kitchen area you will see groups of 4 corpse handlers that you can kill for faction.
The other spot is much deeper in. To get there I usually jump off the front area with feather-fall rather than climbing down. Jump so that you reach the pillar to the left, then jump again to land on the giant pillar/bridge. The path will turn left ... then you take a right thru a doorway ... then a left (away from the cannon) ... it curves right ... another doorway on your left ... then climb up the fallen pillar ... take a left at the crossroads ... you should see a big temple right in front of you ... on either side of the temple are masses of 6-rat groups. All the faction you can shake a stick at.
Kill whatever you want until you are better than -40,000 with the Guardians and Defenders. Now you can walk through those areas with impunity. Well, except for the seemingly broken mobs that attack you to show their affection, but they leash pretty easily if you just keep moving and ignore them.
3. Keep killing rats and/or doing quests for Guardians and Defenders. Eventually (around -10K?) they will offer you NEW quests - most of which are really easy and soloable with good faction standing - that unlike the repeatables will reward you with XP and Marks and even (/gasp) AA. Take a gander at the items for sale on the faction merchant ... see if it's worth worrying about getting to 40 or 50K for you or not.
4. Once you've done everything you want to do with those two factions ... worry about the rat faction if you want. Personally I only come in to solo the daily mark quest anymore. Remember if you do the daily mark quest and the target is a named in the Guardians/Defenders area to use the illusion when you're killing, then take it off to walk safely back.
EDIT: You'll want to pay close attention to the quests too. If your goal is faction, note that there's a rat quest that only gives +10 faction and no XP and is therefore not worth doing by anyone. Ever. But also pay attention when you turn quests in because seemingly randomly some give XP and some do not. As I recall the intent was that the ones you can do countless times would give faction and the ones you were limited to once per day on would give less faction but would give XP. In reality though, there's no rhyme or reason to it except that the quests that give Marks definitely give XP. Plan on doing it for the combat XP and/or faction rewards ... consider any XP/AA you get a bonus ... you won't be disappointed that way.

Thanks for the replies. This is the information I was looking for.

I wrote one in another thread when the expansion was fresh. About a week later they changed all the quests and invalidated what I wrote.
In fact, they nerfed the xp so bad, I would revise my guide to the hole too:
The quests xp rewards are so nerfed, don't ever go there again.
The End.

Anyone have a map for the hole I cant seem to find one lol

Atan@Unrest wrote:

Have to agree with you there. They put in this great zone which worked really well for duo/trio setups, but because of some other mistakes, highly motivated individuals were able to level to 90 in just a few hours:

• Allowing Refer-a-Friend to work from level 80-90.
• Having encounters that can be repeatedly respawned.

The dev team panicked and broke everything nice about The Hole and now it's a slow XP grind, with difficult to complete quests that you can only pick up once per day.
Hopefully some day the devs will realize that every expansion release has had some design flaw or exploit which has allowed people to reach level cap in a few hours. Punishing everyone else doesn't stop those individuals or even discourage them. In fact, it's encouraging them. Over and over, I have seen that players who take their time leveling get a bunch of intentional time-wasting thrown in their path, while players who rush to level get the smoothest progression path and the best rewards.
I'm getting tired of my time intentionally being wasted by the Kunark solo quest timelines, and then The Hole being turned into a slow XP grind. The next time the level cap goes up (if I'm still playing), I will dedicate the first 48 hours of the expansion to leveling and earning AA as fast as possible. I'm going to try to outrun the nerf bat.

So, the hole isn't a good place for a duo any longer? Two conjy level 90 so-so equiptment.

Azxira@Blackburrow wrote:

No, not for level 90s. It's good for solo/duo leveling up through combat XP. Period. That is the sole purpose left for the zone.
I suppose that's oversimplifying it. If you grind faction (no XP/AA rewards) enough you can obtain a series of 1-time quests from the factions. Each of those is worth AA and a MoM. Around 15 of them altogether - i.e. 5 or so for each faction.
So for a duo it's still good for:
*Faction Missions
*Daily MoM
*Legendary drops off named mobs for transmuting fodder
There MAY be gear that's an upgrade for you on the faction merchant if you have so-so gear. Worth checking out.

Duoing the Hole is sort of like duoing Karnor's Castle. You can do it to try to get to named mobs for the chest drops, but otherwise it's a painfully slow experience that provides little to no benefit. The same situation applies to the Hole. Some nameds you might be able to duo. Most nameds will likely be beyond your abilities to duo. So you'll run around once killing things for AA, then you'll leave.
The only people who like the Hole in its current state are the guilds who liked to gear farm for the Broker market. Those few Hole items which are valueable have had steadily increasing Broker prices as SOE has continued to make that zone worthless. So of course, these farming groups love it and are intentionally bleeding people since it's hard to get groups to go into there. But for the average person, the Hole stinks.

Kurgan@Everfrost wrote:

They should drastically increase the number of quests offered from each faction and increase the amount of marks and faction given from completing these quests lines. The repeatables should not offer marks unless its the once a day faction based repeatable (3x possible + 1 offered by the gruenach). There is nothing wrong with duoers recieving contralled amounts of marks of manaar to upgrade thier gear and the hoel should be the place they can do this.
There are aproximately 5 non repeatable quests from each faction in the hole. Imho there should be at least 15 from each faction with each nonrepeatable giving a mark of manaar.

*sighs* Any other suggestions for doing the duo tango?

On Test they put in two new quest lines in Stonebrunt Highlands. That should help a bit, but other than waiting for that the only real option is auto-mentor and do the new low level content. However, even running the basic Cloudmount questline grey supplied a nice amount of XP and AA from quest completion for several of my toons stuck at 86.

If you can manage a full grp that can slay a ton of mobs at once, hole is still a decent grind spot. The main problem with it is noone wants to go. Rok/tso quest grind and the eventually nerf of the hole really discouraged players from grping up for xp. I was really hoping the hole would turn into the next sos/poa for kos days but it failed.

iceriven2 wrote:

That's one problem I have with it, its another zone setup where the best rewards go towards mass AoE killing which I find fun in small doses but tedious in large doses. I was intrigued by the initial idea of a big wide zone where you could just wander and adventure but when I went it was generally ok but a little grindy (endless mob killing without any of the mobs actually feeling different, and that's from the perspective of someone in T2 void shard gear) and the much vaunted XP to be earned seemed to be missing (from what I read I got there way too late for the XP).
They could "fix" it to once again make it somewhere to gain lots of XP, but that still wouldn't fire me up for down there.
For starters its got plenty of mobs and yet they are predictable (making it feel like a game zone) and I can find them in any other zone like that, I'd rather the whole had been somewhere you could adventure in with wandering patrols, ambushes, creature camps in off shoot caverns etc to explore here and there. Something like that would interest me a lot more, you could form a group up to kill a certain mob you know normally spawns there, but you'd never know what you really might find. That design has worked great great for loot drops since EQ1, so why not open dungeon design?

My husband and I tried out The Hole and found it boring and nonproductive. It is all about killing random stuff, there isn't any real strategy or lore to it. It was also way to hard for our duo to make any significant progress. We both have T2/T3 or better gear and found it hard to progress very far into any of the areas without at least two more players. Yellow tripple ups that come in groups are just too much for our duo. (I am a Mystic and he is a Conjuror, our original toons we have played since launch) Perhaps a differrent duo would be able to work through this content, but not us.
I wish the folks who designed the old world sewer systems had been involved with designing The Hole. Those were good zones before they nerfed them by removing content and making it too easy to level out of them. No faction grinds there, just fun quests you could do in any order you liked.

Lateana@The Bazaar wrote:

I think if you threw a tank into the mix you would have a nice little Trio.

Kaita@Nagafen wrote:

Are you suggesting they procreate?
A duo is a duo. Adding other players is NOT our playstyle.
It's about time the developers of this game paid us a little attention and restricted content for us specifically and stopped nerfing classes in ways that severely hinder the casual small groups.

There really isn't much content in The Hole that's doable by a Duo unless you are exceptionally geared. For such a large zone, they really could have thrown a bone to duo/trio setups with average gear. Other than the vigilant sentinels in the antechamber, I am not really sure what duos can do. Even the first roekillik you encounter when climbing down the climbable wall in the "easiest" wing eat duos for lunch.