Top 5 worst zones ever (come make your own list)

Why pointless? They're for quick little side adventures, and sometimes have nameds in them with nice loot besides.

Short, digestible side adventures are a great feature that adds a lot of charm to Norrath!

1. lavastorm
2. DFC
3. zek
4. nek
5. nek castle

Interesting choices in that much of the unhappiness is not with the zone design but with the lag/bugs.

Personally I loved Nek Castle, by far my favorite zone in either EQ1 or EQ2, it had fun little side quests that did not NEED to be done to make your way through the zone, a fun series of puzzles to get to the bottom and a sense of coherent design and theme. It was also pretty nice loot/experience for the levels we were there. I do agree that having to run through the sisters every time you go in is annoying though, and running through it last week I notice they have rewritten a lot of the text to make the puzzles really trivial.
DFC, on the other hand, is a nightmare. If you make a mistake along the way and miss a named its a serious annoyance to have to figure out who/what/where it is, and the rapid respawn grouped guards that keep appearing can make it impossible for anything short of a well run raid to complete.
To be honest my vote for least favorite zones would be the 5 or more that make up Freeport. By spreading out all the different races into seperate zones, each with its own mender, TS instances, bank, etc they have IMHO destroyed any sense of community. Each zone individually is nicely designed, I love the NPC emotes (especially if you play a ratonga, i love the rats following you about and the hissing cats ) but as a whole they do not create a sense of oneness but instead a feeling of seperateness that I feel is not a benefit to gameplay.

I don't know. Most of the zones mentioned happen to by my favorite I think if anything the bugs are whats hindering people from truely enjoying htese areas. Fg and Nek castle are still 2 of my most favorite zones.

Wow!! Interesting the DFC is listed on just about everyones list. Personally, never been there.. so I won't include it!
1) Nek Forrest - Personally, I don't care if it's bland looking. I like the beach area, but outside of that, I avoid this zone. When those stupid snakes 10+ levels below you aggro you 1/2 across the zone. Like someone else mentioned, no safe place to really fight without getting an add (stupid shrillers).
2) Fallen Gate - I liked this zone until they made just about every single mob Heroic ^^^. Not worth the risk.
3) Stormhold - Died too many times just because of mobs in the walls. Also, too many ^^^ mobs.
4) Antonica - The mountains make it so you have to go all the way East or West just to go North or South. Where as in Commonlands, you can go anywhere.
5) Zek - Do those Orcs ever stop chasing you?
One more I would like to mention - Thundering Steppes - I love this zone actually, but with almost all the Giants now being 25^^^, and the quests to get them are only 20?? Not worth the risk. Same with the quests for some of the skelly's. Quests are way lower than the mobs you need to kill.

I hate no zone to the extent at which I *hated* fallen gate.
Any of you evils know, if you played back around release, this freaking place was packed, everyone wanted in. We would have two freaking instances of Fallen Gate open, that's how many people were in there, all competing for the AQ mobs, or dying horible horrible deaths. If you were with anyone who didn't know how to play, you were going to die, every.single.mob was heroic.
Nek castle - hah gotta love when your healer gets mowed down by that trap mob and is dead at his feet. . . before you could revive in zone.
Nek Forest - Terrible zone design, getting from point a to point b entails much invisible wall dodging etc etc. i hate it.
Maj'Dul - Yeah, raid in there = mucho mucho lag.
Qeynos Harbor/East FP - laaaaaag, moreso in QH then EFP but sometimes EFP can get pretty bad. Oh and i just hate the way North freeport is plotted out ><.

Dont know whether you'd class 'interesting' as one room with zombies in it. Rumbler Caves is just a cave with rumblers in it. Hundreds of them, totally filling every space. The same mob over and over again.

Now if they chucked out the 900 rumblers and put a nice couple in plus a named encounter or something and tarted up the decoration a bit they might be interesting.

i must say that i rather enjoy both fallen gate AND Stormhold. and i've never come out of fallen gate alive. i love blackburrow just because.

I don't like Nektulos forest, but only when i'm trying to get somewhere else. when i'm there to kill stuff its great.
I don't particularly like the travelling times in Freeport. having to run from one end of a zone to the other and back again just to get to the chaps with the writs pee's me off.

Oakmyst Forest. not too fond of this one. why? because of that bloody named bear. also the hunter dudes, i've been stuck in a consta fight with them until the sun came up and they stopped spawning

Antonica. Kinda empty really...

Tradeskill instances. three words. whumph whumph wumph. the worst sound you can hear in game. period


i really like dungeon crawls, and no amount of gravity defying, ethereal mobs will make me think otherwise.

1) Qeynos Harbor: due to lag issues (loading so many textures causes the lag...you can tell by watching your harddrive light come on everytime the lag happens)

2) DFC: once again due to lag, but this time it's from so many mobs in the zone running around


I enjoy all the other zones in the game, and I think the designers did a wonderful job creating some of the most unique looking places I've ever seen in any game.

Some of my favorites are Antonica, The Living Tombs, The Silent City, and The Drafling Tower. Props to whoever made those.

Indeed, absolute most fun i've had in the 13 months this game has been out. I have still kept all my screens of that time. Some of my closest friends in game to this day were people I grouped with in FG. We felt so accomplished battling our way down to the final ring area. The deeper you got the fewer and fewer groups there were fighting by your side, until finally it was just us forging ahead into what seemed like an endless tunnel, each step more dangerous than the last. It felt particularly good getting down to the bottom of that. The only zones with that kind of feeling anymore are raid zones it seems. A Spirits of the Lost or something, but those don't have the same linear depth and you know most of the zones going in. Doesn't have that feeling of fighting your way to a dangerous new place.

1. DFC. If you have something to do in this zone, better do it fast, or your group will start going LD one by one.

2. Maj'dul. Lag is just so bad, and there must be a memory leak, because anytime I go to Maj'dul, my system gets progessively slower from that point.

3. Nek castle. I like the layout and the storyline here. I was excited about this zone, and took my guild group there with no prior infoz, just wanting to explore and learn it for ourselves. Too bad the zone is not designed for this, you can take a wrong turn or step, and get screwed and not be able to finish the zone. 18 hr lockout. Walkthrough time heh.

I am glad they changed it so you don't have to complete all the events to get to Everling anymore, tho.

4. Lavastorm. I like that the zone is difficult, and I like certain areas more than others, like Sol Ro Temple. But the zone is really too densley populated for your typical xp group to fight in. Most people run through this zone once for the terraporter, and might venture out into a couple other areas for some heritages, and that's about it. Maybe if there were some areas more designed around an xp group this zone would be more heavily utilized. I suppose now since no shards are dropped groups might be more likely to venture out into this zone.


I also used to have gripes with a few other zones (such as RE), but these zones have since been altered and improved.

We should also see a thread for the Top 5 Best Zones Ever sometime.

Worst Zones
1.) Deathfist Citadel - I love the idea of a raid on the Orc citadel... I love the series of kills you have to make to get to certain mobs... I love the abundance of named mobs, and the numerous triggered events... I absolutely hate the lag. It's not my computer, I have plenty of RAM and a decent vidcard. I don't actually lag out inside DFC, but once I leave, I have to completely close and restart EQ2. The combination of numerous mobs running around and dust in the air is just too much.
2.) Lavastorm - There's just not enough reason to go to this zone. The only thing you can do in LS is grind exp or run T5 writs. There aren't enough quests in the zone, and what quests you have just aren't worth it, except for the two HQs. Mob diversity here is wonderful, and the different zone areas are nice, though there is a bit too much emphasis on the "everything is KoS" strategy.
3.) Rivervale - The zone is simply too bland... It's like someone took the artists aside and said "Make everything except the water brown and green." The mob diversity is horrible... You've got the Nightblood/Lamia encounters, the good and evil Dryads, and the Fairy/Treant area. Aside from a few other uninspired mobs, that's all you really have to face. Once you get out of the opening area, EVERY single mob is KoS. Nobody hunts on the south side of RV, because the treants and fairies are all casters, packed tightly together, and too close to the wall. Running to kill Nightbloods is annoying, because you're aggroed by green mobs half the way there, even when you travel along the road.(Look, another rat aggroed on me, yay...)
4.) Stormhold - This is another zone that I love in theory, and hate in practice. The zone itself is well-laid-out, the mix of mobs is decent, the named/regular ratio is good... But the PATHING problems... UGH. Pull a mob, it's standing right in front of you beating the crap out of you, but you "Can't see target." Or, pull a mob, and instead of running straight for you across the completely open passageway, it decides to run through a side room, into the ceiling, around the back way, and then, when you've finally given up on it, it pops out of the floor and starts beating on you... while you "Can't see target." If the pathing and line-of-sight problems were fixed, I'd only have one other complaint about this zone... That being "If you're going to put player-spawned raid mobs in a zone, make them non-aggro." (Or at least lower their aggro radius to the point that you have a snowball's chance in heck of turning and going another way.) Case in point, the Chessboard raid blob will actually aggro someone who is fighting defiled squires in the passageways beyond the far end of his room... Not a fun thing, to suddenly be hit by a 1000-point nuke because someone "wondered what the lion's head thing did."
5.) Zek - "Look, a pathway through some brown grass!" "Look, another pathway through some brown grass." "Look, a pathway through some brown grass that has brown trees nearby!" "Hey, a pathway through some brown grass that goes between brown rocks!" (You know, rocks, grass, and dirt can come in more colors than brown...) I understand that Zek is supposed to be a desolate wasteland, over-lumbered by the evil Deathfist Orcs and their the lesser clans that serve them... But COME ON... Do these Orcs have some kind of sociopathic compulsion to paint everything they see with some shade of brown dye? I think I'd even appreciate some Orc grafitti, slogans painted on the cliffsides, "Keep Out" written on some of the remaining trees, etc. Just not more brown.

I have the opportunity to keep my graphics at high quality and I must say everything is beautiful in the game except the armor and robes.

Anyways.....DFC - this zone is the worst because of all the invisible mobs. I am never laggy in any zone except Zek and DFC.


Other than that I think every other zone is fun and visually interesting. The mobs I think are kind of boring since they are so repetative.

Basically every zone would be fantastic if the loot was improved and actually dropped from some mobs.

Icy Digs- A group of us went in for the first time of level 60 characters and we were all excited to find treasures in this zone. The access was reasonable so we all did it.

56 x2 epics, 52 x 2 epics named mobs everywhere and not one master. Being in this zone for a couple of hours to win some meat makes this zone not worth doing at all.

So basically - if loot dropped more often people would be happy with any zone.

I know I would frequent many other zones if loot dropped.

Icy Digs should be like poets where you know you are going to get a master chest.

Epic mobs should drop masters chests expecially in the instances with long lock out timers.

Poet's Palace is a Great zone but not for wizards - I have done that zone at least 20 times and I am burnt on it. Everyone that has been there with me has found a master, found fabled gear, and the only thing available to mages is that robe from the Keeper of Silence that has no resists on it but the other stats are nice but really not much else after you get that robe.

The ring events almost never drop any masters and when they do it is for mostly clerics, tanks, warrior class.

The fact that you have to wait for doors to randomly open and waste time is ridiculous.

Suggestion: review all the loot tables and make sure something good drops for each class so that everyone is happy and no one feels like they just wasted their time.

Cazzels Mesa: This one is perfect and actually fun and good drops.

Ancient Table - worthless and not even worth doing - same zone as Cazzels - the stupid spiders don't seem to drop anything and I have never seen the Ancient Cyclops. = This zone almost never visited.

Shimmering Citadel: ring event with treasure keeper- could be more fun if there where another named mob to kill before treasure keeper. The killing of multiple mobs over and over again gets very tideous.

So for casters: gloves drop off Cazzel's and ring I think - this zone is done everyday and every other class has won something except the casters.

Ancient Table - drops ring for casters - almost impossible to get. After 15 attempts I think it is safe to say forget this zone.

Treasure Keeper Ring Event in Shimmering Citadel = Tideous and another caster bracelet drops there.

Shimmering Citadel in general - named not dropping anything worth while. Also I think that the ring event that the Djinn keep spawning is broken because after they are all killed nothing happens and they just spawn endlessly.

Nek Castle Return = would be nice if all mobs dropped good loot and the lockets to be done once only that fiend at the bottom of the castle should drop master chests also. Maybe bring in some interesting looking mobs.

Spirits of The Lost = Great Zone.

Acts of War = I think this is bugged. The mobs do not reset after everyone has died and then they keep killing you over and over again and your guild does not have a chance to even recuperate at the zone in.

Sanctorium - LOVE IT

Vault of Dust - LOVE IT

SOL EYE - You guys should not let this zone go to waste. Maybe more mobs and maybe some Drakota epics along with Nagalik. - Great Zone and really one of the most amazing ones.

The Angler Epic in Cove of Decay = Love it- just needs to drop caster stuff more frequently.

Arch Lich - Great fun

MOTM- Great fun and should always drop a master chest just make it a huge loot table that way every single class has a chance to win something and include some t6 equipement on these mobs too or at.

The Courts of AlFaraz - so far a very fun zone and good drops for warrior and healers blah drops for mages it seems.

Silent City - Horrible drops and not worth going to.

Fallen Gate = can be very confusing but you just need a map- it is an ok zone

Nagafen's Lair - you should do a ring event there for groups of one and solo ring events- something where Nagafen is testing your character's ability and then you get an amazing reward.

The Court Instances - they are ok although the Ring of Fate Quest is ridiculously long. Nice drops for everyone it seems. Looks like an ugly mage vest drops there with flowing thought 3. I mean my god designers instead of copying an ugly vest as that robe why not use the barrister robe or beguiler robe template.

Maj'Dul - very laggy and at times confusing- other than that the city is actually very nice.

Zek - the zone is just ugly and unintesreting except for Tremblar.

Permafrost - one of my favorites- very nice and fun zone always.

Suggestion allow people to fly already and allow people to have flying mounts and allow arial combat with draokotas. That would be amazing.

Improve the loot tables and make it fair so that everyone has a good chance of getting something they can actually use. Once that is done you will notice how happy everyone wil be and love all the zones.

Please think about all the feedback from everyone here and on all the forums- and really hope that you can make the next expansions something amazing.


Final Note : Plain simple - if you are person that loves to do quests that is great. If you also like to adventure and kill tough mobs and many people ar like that, then after an amazing abttle you expect great rewards.

Thin about it - if an instance does not yield any rewards or seldom yields any rewards - is it worth doing - "NO".

I understand that it can not be expected that you will win a legendary or fabled piece or something on first try that your class can wear - and that makes perfect sense.

But 30 days of everyine in guild doing the same instances over and over again and nothing for casters? Now the only reason I do any of these instances is to accompany my guild mates but never because I anticipate winning anything of any use to me.

So when you start feeling like that, like going to Poet's or Cazzels or any of these places and to know that you will more than likely not get anything of use or worth using for your class can really unmotivate someone.

Then people start getting bored and it gets hard to find groups because why in the world would that person go to do an instance for a 20th time when they are not going to get anything.

Trust me it is more fun when you win rewards you can use versus rewards that you have to sell.

Many people will not sell the great stuff on a vendor- they usually give it to guild so the things people really want are never for sale.















Message Edited by Lady Uaelrea on 12-19-2005 09:15 AM

I am surpised at all of the people who hate FG, especially because it has heroic mobs in it. This is one of the most well designed dungeon crawls in this game, and the fact that it is low level is even better.
The difficulty is not off - it is excellent. I actually wish it was a little tougher with. I take all of my characters (10 now) through this zone from 17-25, sometimes up to 27 because it is just that good. A previous poster's early-release experiences of the dungeon are spot on. It takes a quality group with decent leadership and player skill to make their way to the bottom without incident.
Anyway, my worst:
1) North Freeport - really, Freeport in general, but the layout of NFP in particular is annoying. That there are two tiers that aren't connected except for on the north side makes this zone a huge waste of time. Add a set of stairs to the south side of the zone so I can travel from EFP to the guild houses without having my blood pressure raise.
2) Any place where mobs run into walls. Which is everywhere.
3) Qeynos Harbor - Lag, lag, lag. Did I mention lag?
4) Thundering Steppes - I just hate these huge zones with tiny little paths (riverbeds in this case) that you can travel in, thus making your travel time 5x what it should be. Extremely obnoxious.
5) Nektulos Forest - No one just comes here to hunt because it's a PITA.

Yes, one room with zombies in it is interesting. You're out doing other things, go in to slay a few zombies as a side goal of *something* (exploration, quest completion, extra exp in a private area, possibly some new treasure), and then zone back out to do the rest of the stuff. The point is that not EVERYONE is going to find the chest loot items that unlock these little areas, so it becomes a special experience, even if you don't get a Phat Sword of Uberness +8 out of it.

And when it comes to places like the Rumbler Caves, those instances DO spawn named encounters at the end, just not every time. If the nameds were always there, you'd wind up with lockout timers to keep the market from getting flooded. Instead, its a side adventure to get exp and possibly treasure, and if you REALLY want to repeat it over and over, you can.

Now for me, I would actually be ok with a lockout timer and a guaranteed boss. But still, in their current state, the little pocket zones aren't bad. They are OPTIONAL places to get exp. If you think they're so lame, you always have lots of big, non-instanced, overland zones and dungeons to pick from.

You know what would be great...if they scaled all of these zones- so people never run out of things or places to adventure.

That would be absolutely impossible in any zone intended for coexisting players. It would mean every zone would need to be instanced, and that sort of defeats the whole purpose of an MMO.

Nice analysis Einstein, catering to the alienware crowd does wonders for your player base, just look at everquest 2's. Form a group with 24 peeps, crank your graphics settings to max and see how nicely your homemade machine works.

You're an idiot,
Feel the love,

Sump

1- Soulsek Eye , cant even enter, my pc crash >.<
2 - Queynos harbor South and North Queynos, LAGGGGGGGGG! , why? bells and zone to DOF.
3 - Lavastorm : never stayed more than 1 hour , for raid or city task , never xp there , looks nice , but really bad implemented.
4- Blackburrow , annoying zone.
5-Nektulos Forest: The mini mountains everywhere, low hanging tree branches, low visibility, and lack of pull locations make this zone my all time number one "zone to be avoided as if your life depends upon it" zone. /agree now more playable with griffons
Message Edited by SkuaII on 12-20-2005 07:50 AM

1. DFC.
Great concept, poorly executed. With over 2 gig of RAM I don't suffer lag anywhere else anymore, not even in *gasp* Qeynos Harbour, but DFC still makes my hard drive sound like the hamsters have got out of control. The graphics bugs that randomly make all the walls/doors/corridors either disappear (so you can see through to Zek) or turn matte black are painful. Trying to do anything in this zone, especially with a raid of people that you don't want to keep waiting, is more hassle than it's worth and a serious menace to blood pressure. Hamsters don't like it either. Allegedly.

2. Lavastorm
Lovely looking place, but far too linear and lacking enough incentive to do anything there but grind writs or work your way up to the teleporter for the first time. The number of people usually to be found crammed into the relatively small T5 writ area is often aggravating, especially when you consider that most of the rest of the zone is so howlingly empty that a passing tumbleweed would count as front page news.

3. Stormhold
Actually I love this zone. I really do. If it weren't for the PATHING, I'd spend serious time in it with all my alts. Sadly, the good old 'cannot see target' strikes again. I've lost count of the times that I've yelled 'I CAN &*%# see the target' at my screen when trying to fight there. Add a character class with a pet (not a hamster, as they won't work underground without hazard pay apparently) and the fun just keeps on spiralling: it's just a shame that the direction it spirals in is down.

4. The Feerrott.
Botters. Botters. Botters. Farmers. Farmers. Botters. More botters. Probably even some hamster botters in there somewhere, since every other form of botlife known to man has gone there, set up camp, grown, proliferated and given birth to entire legions of the consonantly name-challenged bot-dead. If I'm ever feeling lonely, I and my hamster can sit comfortably on the shore listening to the hum of the insects and the pathetic far off wail (repeated every 2 minutes or maybe even less if we're really lucky) of the farmer-spammers. From time to time I flirt with the concept of /ignoring them, but sadly they appear to have handed on their legacy to others before the half hour is out. Does anyone really go to the Feerrott except to run JBoots, bot, farm or pass through on the way to Cazic-Thule? It doesn't seem like it.

5.
North Qeynos.
It isn't that this place is offensive, far from it. It just strikes me every time I run through how artlessly the buildings have been randomly dumped at intervals in a bland green lawn. If space is at a premium in the city (which the Graystone Yard ghetto, among other places, would seem to suggest) then the waste of land in North Qeynos is an extravagance sufficient to incite the populace to riot in front of Antonia's well-polished but permanently locked castle door. It's the same in the Elddar Grove really. There's...just...really nothing of substance or character to the place. If it were a food, it would be tofu. If it were a wine, the French would disown it.