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

Discussion in 'Zones and Population' started by ARCHIVED-Denon, May 4, 2010.

  1. ARCHIVED-Alienor Guest

    Killing the rats as suggested above to get access to the easier quests should be doable by a duo. Of course it depends also on their level. I got about 8 ap from soloing the hole at 90 and I am not such a great player. Admitted, they could do more about such a large zone. Love it or leave it I guess *shrug*
  2. ARCHIVED-Obadiah Guest

    feldon30 wrote:
    If you are a tank and healer duo level mid-80s or higher they should give you no problems as long as you turn them to avoid the AoE autoattack some have. Those particular roekillik aren't the easiest though. What I was soloing (did this with more than one toon) starting in the mid-80s was the groups of 4 overjoyed corpse handlers off to the right from there. You can reach plenty different types of groups of mobs that are weaker than the ^^^ guards.
    At 90 a fighter-healer combo in very average garb is more than enough for everything save a few nameds.
    With the Conjuror/Mystic combo as long as you are specced such that your Fighter pet can retain hate you should be solid anywhere in the Roekillik area, although the Bane Warding nerf of ~80% won't help you any.
  3. ARCHIVED-Te'ana Guest

    We have gone back to the Hole since we hit 90 and it is still too hard. We both have our mythicals, lots of masters, and a smattering of good raid gear but still can't handle more than one tripple up rat and that one takes forever. We can get a bit bit farther into the central area and can branch out a bit, but not enough to complete more than one or two quests. We tried the third area and can clear a few critters from the cave entry area but those flying critters eat our lunch if we miss pulling any of the critters leading to the quest givers. About all we can do is kill tons of lowly rats back at the rat cave entrance and guards around the central aea.
    All of that was before the current Mystic nerfs. I guess we will just have to finish getting our AAs up some other way, although with only 220+ for each of us it will be a long road. We have already grouped with others and gotten most of the AAs possible from the new group zones that don't require top raiding gear, done the cloud mount series, turned in a ton of collections, leveled our crafting factions to the max, etc. There just isn't much else to do other than special events and the level 90 daily solo token quest. LOL I don't think my Mystic will be able to do that either now :(
    Saddly, I guess we will just have to level up that Inquisitor/Shadowkinght duo that I hear is best at duoing and to heck with the toons we have played since launch :(
  4. ARCHIVED-MrWolfie Guest

    Monk/Mystic, 86, mythicals, no masters, no raid gear, T2 and legendary/some mastercrafted. We owned everything in the rat area 2 days ago (pre-mystic nerfs). Killed loads of names, including three yellow ^^^ (some named rat on podium with bunch of followers, Caertax - ignored his adds entirely - and the summoned abomination thingy). We had no idea of the abilities and "tricks" any named in here might do, and we died once (to the first named with the knockback, until I pulled him where we couldn't be flung into the air).
    It may be considerably harder for us now that a decent portion of DPS has been lost with the nerf to BW (we don't have DBW) *and* her myth - but we can't be arsed to go back and check while there's Halas to explore...
    All-in-all, this area seemed ok.
    What they should have done is not have the epicx4 undead beastie (and have another heroic named instead or at least a really easy x2 - a raid mob in there is utterly pointless) and restricted the entire zone to groups of only three (maybe four at a push) or less. If you're going to tailor a zone for small groups make sure it's restricted to them and that all the content is relevant.
  5. ARCHIVED-feldon30 Guest

    Our duo group is 87 ranger and 87 illy with myth, very good TSO jewelry, and a combination of 5 pieces of WoE and 2 pieces of T4 gear.

    We get owned by the ^^^ roekillik. And I don't mean deep in the zone. I mean the first dude at the bottom of the climbable wall.

    These guys resist a lot of roots/snares, as you say they have a major frontal AoE.

    These mobs seem geared and tailored for full groups, but this is really leveling content, not 5-6 player group content that will be revisited. Look at Sanctum of Scaleborn. It's a great place to level, but for the loots, you do quests or instances. Even yellow, 2 people who are well-geared can do well in SoS. Not so much in the "easiest" wing of The Hole.

    Healer/Tank is the most popular duo setup, but other choices should be possible as well. Yes, I realize that means the easiest branch of The Hole will be trivialized for solo players in endgame SF gear. So what? This is no different from Karnor's Castle. They tried to make it hard and put control effects and it's still a plat farmer's paradise.
  6. ARCHIVED-Yimway Guest

    I think its tailored to a viable 3 man. Tank, healer, dps.
    However the xp gains of that 3 man is really, really bad.
    The only time I've seen the Hole worth running since the revamp is if you bring a full group capable of killing 10+ encounters / pull. Basically your TSO aoe grind group.
  7. ARCHIVED-MrWolfie Guest

    Atan@Unrest wrote:
    You realise that there are people who don't give a hoot about XP?
    I play this game for FUN. XP probably isn't even in the top three things I want out of the game. XP comes during the process of entertainment. If the XP were great, what makes for a fun environment would be spoiled by groups of powerlevellers rampaging all over the place. I'd go so far as to say that your full group would actually be a disruptive influence in a zone that wasn't designed for them (according to the devs) and that, therefore, is a design flaw on the dev's behalf.
    And, another dev failure is their complete inability to understand the small group mentality and the challenges that small groups face, especially those who roll with unusual class selections (like the conj/mystic poster above). My original duo was Necro/Warlock and they've been ineffectual (and I might say unwanted in full group situations too) since EoF. Quite frankly, developers here have completely misunderstood the risk vs. reward factor when it relates to small groups - everything we do is much, much harder the less players we have. In my opinion, the more players the easier it is, and that applies from solo content to raid content - the ONLY difficult thing about raiding is getting 24 people and keeping the majority of them focused.
    But small groups get no love from devs. The rewards are not truly equated with the risks we take, and the content is frequently engineered in such a way as to create artificial roadblocks (my Monk still hasn't gotten AA for Kierax as I always have to swap to my wizard). I can accept that the content isn't designed for only two people - but what little content there is, is so badly designed, so boring, and filled with fluff loot that's not even worth 'muting.
  8. ARCHIVED-Obadiah Guest

    Aemm@Splitpaw wrote:
    How is it badly designed? There's a nice layout that unlike SoS gives you freedom to find new ways of moving about, particularly in the Caertax section. There's a variety of named mobs, some of which are far from tank and spank for a small group. There's some story, although you have to stick around a bit too long for my taste to reach it. IMO all that's wrong with it is the removal of the aforementioned XP.
    If you don't care about XP, The Hole seems fine to me. It's perfectly balanced for a trio with a tank and healer, or a full group that's leveling up. There are a few things very deep in the zone that are manageable by a trio but could be difficult depending on gear. The rewards are a very small notch below the rewards you see dropping from the full heroic instances. I'm sure several of my toons are wearing something out of there either from drops or the faction merchants.
    As with any "small group" content, it can be soloed by the right classes or people with the right gear. It's the constant struggle when trying to create content for small groups. Of course, once you've "done it" you've done it. There's no reason to farm a named for a particular drop. There's no reason ever ever ever to go back apart from the occasional quest update and the daily mission, which takes about 5 minutes.
    I'm not saying it's perfect. But even with its flaws it is infinitely better than SoS or KC for small groups IMO; it's a step in the right direction at least.
  9. ARCHIVED-Denon Guest

    My wife and I have tried duo'ing the Hole a couple of times now with our Necro / Mystic combo. This has been a good duo combo for us in the past. We started to try the Hole at 87 and we are trying again now at 90. It is NOT that duo'able to us either ( like a number of other posts in the thread ) . We dont have that good of gear - just T1 shard + legandary + all skills A3 or Master ( No Mythical), basically we have the gear you would get by duo'ing. We have kids here in RL and constantly need to go AFK with very little notice, so grouping/raiding does not work well for us. Therefore we are limited to solo/small group content.
    My impression is the people that can duo the Hole have gear that are obtained through full groups/raids. So I guess in order to duo here you have to do other content that is 'not duo' - which doesnt that kinda defeat the purpose of adding content intended for small group / duo.
    We can not kill the first ^^^ rat you run into in the 'easy section' when you climb to the bottom of the pit. We fight and fight and fight him and even when it is going good, we eventually run out of power with him still around 20% health.
    If we sneak around him we can kill the ^^'s and the groups of ^'s around there - but that does not leave to much for us to do.
    I was really looking forward to this zone, but at its current state, I dont think it is playable by us. Also it appears it does not have much to offer to those who have gear better then we do. So to me it seems like all the effort that went into making The Hole is kind of a waist at this point.

    Denon
  10. ARCHIVED-Yimway Guest

    Aemm@Splitpaw wrote:
    Then this is certainly the zone for you.
    I however, am looking for a zone that we can get to cap playing cooperatively against mobs that don't fall down and die to a warm breeze.
    We were led to believe before xpac that the hole would be a place to do this in. It is still categorically slower than soloquesting.
  11. ARCHIVED-Kari Guest

    Even after the quest nerf, I thought the combat xp was quite good for leveling. Maybe because I play a defiler, but I found grouping in the Hole with steady pulling was a lot faster than solo questing.
    I agree the zone is not designed for duos that are geared from duoing. However if you are willing to compromise the play style a little and pick up a couple of other players it is a real nice zone. People in this thread are saying there are never any groups for the Hole but the times we wanted to go there we just advertised Hole group looking for more and got tons of responses. We don't go into the Hole much anymore but when we have gone for a quest update or to help a guildie with their myth conversion we always ended up with a full group. It was mostly people in their high 80s that were thrilled to be in there for xp, and we could pick up anyone that wanted to come without being picky about class makeup because the zone is very forgiving.
  12. ARCHIVED-MrWolfie Guest

    Kurgan@Everfrost wrote:
    *admittedly the main problem with the conj/mystic is that a conj tank pet is really no replacement for a real tank - and that's something which needs addressing for the class itself. But there are probably other issues, like control resistant mobs which need addressing to make it viable for unusual group set-ups.
    ** They began life as full group zones anyway - some would still consider them to be so even though SoS was recently re-jigged, but there still an overpowered (and nigh unavoidable) ^^^ wandering around every soloable room. KC was toned down, but who can do Xalgoz with a duo - there's three switches!! So I wouldn't say those zones are successes either.