Feldon A syndrome that I think many people who write about MMOs experience is that find ourselves actually PLAYING the game less and less. I’m certainly guilty of this myself. We get interested in a game, start writing about it based on our experience, and next thing you know we aren’t catching groups or raids anymore. So with Velious I made a commitment to get back in the game.
So one of my first experiences has been getting into Public Quests, which spawned the article yesterday. The concept certainly makes for an interesting type of content, one that was popular in Warhammer and is a huge draw for the new Rift. So far, I have heard feedback from quite a few players who have checked out Public Quests and have gotten mixed results.
It was very cool to see groups and raids forming for the Public Quests. Because of the cooperative (rather than contested) nature of these live events, anyone who is present in the fight area will get credit if they participate. But that doesn’t mean players won’t group up or form raids just for the cooperation possible, not to mention buffs, debuffs, and coordination. It’s unlikely that the full difficulty x4 raid version of Public Quests will be downed by 24 people standing around un-grouped.
A Matter of Difficulty
It is very easy in a Public Quest to “fail” which is to say not kill the initial mobs fast enough, or in the case of the Ring War, not be able to find the mobs (recruits) because they didn’t spawn. Once this happens, we have found that the Public Quests rapidly scale down in difficulty to the Solo setting. Remember there are 5 levels of difficulty from solo, to small group, to full group, to x2 raid, to x4 raid. It’s quite frustrating to show up with a full raid of 24 plus some other scattered individuals for what should be an epic experience, only to end up with a Solo encounter.
How do you tell that a Public Quest is downscaling in difficulty? The easiest way to tell is to look at your Quest Journal and watch for messages. If you see “so-and-so has Completed their Battle” and then in the Quest Journal, you see the quest steps change to “ignore Recruits”, “ignore Veterans”, etc. then you know the quest has scaled down dramatically in difficulty.
The problems we have been experiencing have been reported to Windslasher, who created and designed EQ2’s implementation of these events. In the grand scheme of things, the quests seem to run rather well. There just seems to be some tweaking required such as making sure the first waves of mobs are easy-to-find, always spawn, and maybe taking another look at how the encounter starts out at maximum and scales down. It would probably be a bit smoother if the encounter started at easy and ramped up based on how the players present in the event respond to the event.
Is The Reward Worth It?
So we reported yesterday that none of the armor we’ve seen so far from Public Quests has Yellow adornment slots. Turns out the loot we’ve seen linked so far is from difficulty 2. We have not seen any of the difficulty 3 (group), difficulty 4 (x2 raid), or difficulty 5 (x4 raid) gear. This equipment DOES have adornment slots and is worth doing.
I don’t understand why the difficulty doesn’t auto scale-up or down, regarding the number of players in the ring.
I found the quest being really slow, waiting for the timer to end until the lower difficulty mob spawn if we fail a stage.
not sure if I’m clear 🙂
Problem I’m seeing is that since you get loot Just for being in the area, people are going AFk for the whole thing and coming back at their leisure. I saw one guy today be afk in the ring war pq for hours. He’d loot when its over then go back to his afk spot. Since its timed its easy enough to sit there And farm the items and coin. Because you can set your clock to it. As I’m writing this that guys still there afk farming the pq.
Sadest part about public quest is not that they are bugged, or decrease in difficulties without much reason.
It’s getting an exquisit chest, done everything right and end with a craps reawrd for almost everyone with not even a single item, and the lucky people get the solo reward (no yellow slot)… from exquisit ! (happened 2 times)
While the Ornate version i saw each time they gived strong nice item (with yellow slots)
I mean [Reverberating Cache] for more than 75% of the raid when more than 30 people do the public quest (with no fail event), and the reward is an exquisit chest is … so wrong.
And as tank i dont feel the reward worth it, massive lost of crit chance AND multi attack.
Bonus set item 3 and 5 piece +100 main stats and sta look great
while the bonus 7 piece : + 3 potancy and crit bonus look very very small.
a +30 crit chance and 30 multi attack would have been more attractive.
(again me sorry i will not do it again lol)
Stop to say Warhammer or rift are owner of original public quest…
EQ1 was full of public event ;)… look at the death of the sleeper… something like 200 player killing a mob, that was not a public event ? =)
Why god EQ2 server cant handle more than 50 player in one zone ? i feel see 10 great divide also ruin the fun of public quest. People doing the ring event are always in other one.
Lathain: Thats not because the rewards for PQ’s are pathetic its how they are balancing fighter dps this expansion, if you had noticed your gear has substantially more critical mitigation then any other gear, time to learn to take hits and not deal them again.
It’s confusing for them to call it an Exquisite Chest, because of what people expect. They should have had “Legendary” chest and “Tremendous Chest” and “Exquisite Chest” be for the level 3, 4, and 5 difficulty quests.
You can get an Exquisite Chest on the Solo content. Very confusing.
@Lathain Warhammer could lay claim to being the owner of the public quest, but technically Rift launched with them after EQ2, let along WAR where it launched 3 years or so afterwards…
I was surprised actually to see them called public quests since WAR did put some sort of copyright out on them or indicated it whenever they mentioned them. I’m assuming that it wasn’t anything enforceable or a backroom deal was made, guessing the former.
So far I’ve only done a few early morning ones, one of them we got swamped on, I think its appraisal of how good the players are for ramping up and down the difficulty is a bit crude (I’m sure it just counts heads), where it could do with giving some sort of stat score.
My 85 Guardian was at the battleground gathering the relics for the daily as the Ring War started, and I was curious enough to do it. I was the only person there, so I kited one of the mobs (not the strong suit of a guardian, admittedly). I died twice, but since the coldain were beating on him he didn’t deaggro and reset total hit points. While on my third round of kiting a 90 swashbuckler and fury arrived; the fury healed me, and the swashbuckler got the kill credit. By then most of the fights had ‘finished’ and the quest had scaled down, but the named trio spawned and we took that down, and completed the event at level 2. I was happy enough with that — it was a wash on experience for me, as the exp for completing the event was equal to my death debt, but I got a couple of shinies and some AA, and the fun of trying. I do think it would be a lot of fun with more people — but in truth I’m not sure I’d find it so entertaining to have been there if a full raid force was also there. I think finding that happy medium may be problematic.
@ Lathain:
Death of the Sleeper was not a PQ. It was a massive raid for the hell of it. When the sleeper finally went down, there was no loot table, because I don’t think the mod’s expected the Sleeper to ever really get killed.
The raiders had to /petition rewards.
Having run both of them about 15 times now, I can report that it’s much more fun with a large group. Residing on Antonia Bayle, we have a pretty large and co-operative community already, who communicate well via the public channels (Level_1-9 and Level_80-89). This has made organizing raids for these extremely easy, and quite common. I’ve probably participated in 15+ of these now, either Ring War or Storm Gorge, where we’ve had 2-3 x4 raid groups formed.
I’ve probably had a 60-70% armor drop rate. A couple of the pieces I’ve grabbed -do- have yellow adornment slots. I think the better armor I’ve received has been from Storm Gorge, but I assume this is due to the fact that the Ring War recruits appear to be bugged in the tougher modes.
The exquisite chests I’ve received from Storm Gorge appear to contain the yellow adorn items, but the exquisite chests from Ring War haven’t up to this point.
I am curious (as are many others) whether or not your personal loot is based on participation (DPS, heals, taunts, overall parse, whatever), or just truly random.
For those that haven’t given it a shot, I highly recommend it. I also suggest reaching out to those in your guild or on your server. Even in in-zone /ooc or /shout may work to gather folks. Just keep in mind it can take a while to get everyone in the same place, so we’ve started forming 15-20 minutes before the scheduled start time. (Especially important when you have 5-10 different Great Divide instances, people in-combat so CoV doesn’t work, etc.)
Oh, and you may want to adjust your performance settings a bit. Storm Gorge especially gets quite nasty with 2-3 x4 raid groups fighting 4 names and 8 death squad mobs. =)
I have, to the best of my ability and recollection, added the Public Quest descriptions to eq2.wikia.com, if you want a quick overview of what to expect. Mind you, my experience has mostly been in the x4 raid versions, and usually participating, so I don’t have as much detail in there as I’d like. Please feel free to contribute. =)
Shouldn’t they create an “auto-join group” button at the top of the screen, Ã la Rift, just to make it easier for people to get grouped and raid to get organised?
I think so.
Anyway, I’ve player PQ several times, and in French, the translation of the quest objectives is strange. we were more than 12 people participating, but we only got an heroic final mob. No X2. And it’s weird having to wait the end of the timer when mobs have all been killed. This is not dynamic enough and should be rething. Storm Gorge event is more dynamic than Ring War though.
Hope they’ll keep on doing PQ because this king of content is fun, but they should really review the mecanism, and also the loot rules, because I saw some one who came at the end of the event and get a legendary armor loot, and I was there from the begining, actively particpating and did not get any armor piece. Not fair, though I understand that there’s part of a random 🙂
Are the quest steps saying you, in english, to “avoid the Heroic Kromtir” ? What do they mean by this?
Have participated in both the Ring War and Storm Gorge events, and according to guild notes we have been awarded the loot, but alas nothing in our bags.
Not sure if this is a bug still waiting for reply from soe
When doing Ring Wars this morning, we did a duo on it my guildy was awarded an Exquisite Chest, myself a treasure.
We did find them confusing to begin with especially Ring Wars finding the correct mobs but apart from the above, think they are a fun addition.
Biggest issue i have seen is when i am soloing the PQ with 4-5 people watching me. It knows there is quite a few of us in the area so it spams me with more mobs then i can handle. Should be a quest giver or something, so it can tell how many people want to participate.
Enofu : “time to learn to take hits and not deal them again.”
you have done mistake, i say “tank” and you have immediatly think i was dps …
No i m guardian full def spé (i can solo kill most of name in the hole with only 3-5k dps…). I can tank epic in the ring war public quest pretty well even without heal. But even with 155 crit mitigation full def and a lot of immuned to damage several mob can kill me like i was a naked caster sleeping.
(but yes with 155 i feel better, this happen lot less than when i was at 100… but still)
This public quest was already happening outside of thurgadin in everquest.
The whole zone was despawned and only mob from event was up. So when i see normal mobs in the public quest area i feel that so strong.
It’s the war ! and there is couple of rime that are at 50 feet of us talking like it’s was a day like all other… No mob should be up in the area while event are up.
Always someone to pull them and ruine faction of other.
Lot’s of bug (everyone know that lol)
SG the only one almost working is still strongly bugged.
– dwarf missing, they come when they want (if they come)… something the difficulty dont decrease and rape people if like 13 player are here they enconter like 50 heroic double up, who clear and wash the zone and camp us… since no dwarf to kill, have to wait. Can be single pulled to finish the step (and it’s fun to success) but clearly it’s bugged.
– dwarf leader fighting alone against couple of rime under the world. (very frustating to see dificulty decrease when a full raid search the dwarf, we know where he was but was not able to see target)
– count of first wave skip (20 to 30)
– Reward missing : Where is the T2-3 (yellow slot) forearm ? (i only saw the T1 one)
I can understand for chest and shoulder but forearm !
– Target closer monster keep targeting dwarf
– Rez stick on dwarf sometime dont work
– wrong timer, most of time difficulty decrease based on some hidded timer. (kill quick second wave)
– no epic version in SG atm (only heroic mobs)
…
. Really nice feathure, but way too many problem with this, i hope they ll get fixed befor people move on something else.
And dont be affraid of raiding guild, this reward are not interesting for them. So it will always possible to solo or group this.
But more people are on it, more it’s fun 😉 (when it dont lag…)
ring war, i was stunned to see an Exquisit chest with a Master in it drop from a recruit, mob from special event should not drop anything.
Specialy since the enconter is own by the player who give the first hit, so this player will get a master in front of people without letting them a luck to get it, pretty unfair. I was enough lucky that player was me, but i feel bad for other who saw that.
Ring war mob shouldn’t not drop anything as body or chest, the final reward is enough good (perhaps lack of random/choice).
Maximum Raid Size is 24. You can have more than that in a Public Quest. It sucks that people stand around and watch you die. I would try to encourage people to group.
I think the Master chest was just a fluke of killing a solo mob, not a part of the Public Quest.
\aITEM 298737145 -91568943:[Rune: Fervor I]\/a
\aITEM -483954680 -104757:[Exquisite Humming Cache]\/a
\aITEM -85858257 593104329:[a Dominant Weapon]\/a
reward from the patched public quest in ring war. Epicx4 version, drop from “a treasure hoard”
\aITEM 715425326 772610165:[Humming Cache]\/a
\aITEM 699057924 2022089263:[Shiny Money Pouch]\/a (more than 1 plat)
HOOOOO !!!!
\aITEM -213728336 -486697868:[a Dominant Chest Piece]\/a