Feldon Public Quests have been keeping Windslasher rather busy and he had posted some detailed answers about just how Public Quests difficulty are set. The Ring War seems fairly straightforward, but the Storm Gorge PQ (which will possibly see some changes in the next few days) has sufficient complexity to worth a more in-depth analysis.
From Windslasher on the EQ2 Forums:
Loot is not totally and completely random. It is only partially random. I posted a complete breakdown of the baseline loot at this link:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=30&topic_id=495127#5512456
Whether you get a humming, pulsating etc. cache is not random, but whether you get exquisite is. In addition, the fabled items have a fixed rare drop rate, but only for players who qualify to get a humming cache.
Also, you are not guaranteed a humming cache simply by virtue of clicking on the huge level-5 chest. If you were not present and contributing to the event at every stage, then you will get one of the lesser caches.
and:
To get Goredeth Maulhammer to spawn every time:
1) Show up with at least 19 players total.
2) Defeat the first wave (30 storm troopers) in less than 5 minutes from when they start coming.
3) Defeat the second wave (20/20/20 cavalry) in less than 6 minutes from when they start coming.
4) Never let the Siege Marshal die under any circumstance.
And that’s it. No, these times are not exact. You might have a little bit more wiggle room depending on other factors, but I won’t spill all the beans. Just know that if you can pull it off as described, it will always work.
Note: For step (3) there used to be a bug that would make the boss spawn more easily if you let the siege marshal die & downgraded difficulty to 12/12/12 cavalry. That was fixed. If you try that now, you’re guaranteed to not spawn the boss. So if you hear people shouting to try it, you should shout them down.
and about Ring War:
Ring War is actually not determined by time. The victory condition to spawn Narandi the Enraged is: Don’t let any of the named dwarves die in the first wave.
Now, in order to save them all you do need to bring a full raid of people, but that’s because the more powerful kromrif will spawn as ‘actors’ (i.e. they won’t be attackable by players, for safety purposes) if there aren’t enough players to reasonably engage them.
How many people are actually seeing and getting to fight Storm Gorge at x4 raid difficulty? Turns out not too many with all the lag:
My logs show that the epic version has gone down several times on [certain] servers, but not in the last few days. That’s interesting (in a bad way) and the first culprit I would blame is the server lag.
Anyway, I’m continuing to fix Storm Gorge in an effort to combat lag, and the next round of changes should get hotfixed out pretty soon. In addition to invisible optimizations, I’m removing AE Autoattack from all the base creatures and taking away the pet summons from the mounted cavalry.
I hope this will make a difference, and I’m going to keep at it until the problem is solved.
and just a helpful hint from Flint about Storm Gorge:
You don’t have to kill the adds. Once you kill each main mob, the adds despawn — killing the wolfs, rhinos, and snow tornadoes is a waste of time.
“You don’t have to kill the adds. Once you kill each main mob, the adds despawn — killing the wolfs, rhinos, and snow tornadoes is a waste of time.”
It’s frustrating how many people don’t get this. More often then not the encounter will be down to just having to kill like 8 more stormbringers and I’ll see tanks and DPS targeting everything but. I always try to make it a point to aggro the stormbringers and guide them into the AE cluster at least.
+1 I think the main reason is that many people esp tanks dont realise the dismounted rhinos and wolves taunt them off their target and/or people are not targetting through the siege master who mainly only targets mobs that the quest still requires. Yes he get taunted off too but he soon regains the appropriate target.
@Windslasher, Thank you for optimizing this encounters. They are very fun to do minus the lag factor. Looking forward to your future tweaks.
As a tank I am target locked to such adds, so if people do not have a main assist then burning such adds down is often the best option (otherwise people run the risk of pulling aggro).
Dont kill the add… they keep locking target people on them was pretty hard to totaly ignore them.
i dont understand why there is a timer in the timer, we have like 20 min for clean the weave, why put this timer in the timer ? that dont make sense. Specialy since he is hidded, Why use 2 different timer for same wave ? After the 6min it’s auto fail, so it’s wast of time.
I think SG is bugged. Raid was on last 4x boss and stopped DPS when he grew large but he healed himself to 100 percent anyway. I finall left the Raid after 45 min of trying. FRUSTRATING.
Something needs to be done in regards to how these things are designed. You have a system where if you aren’t in GD or GD2 you likely will have like 5 people present, if you do get into one of those two and happen to not be in a group if you crash or lock up you get zoned into a different instance and can’t get back.
I have lost two diffrent rewards completely due to this. Storm gorge EQ2 locks and gets closed by windows and then I come back to GD4 and can’t get back. I went from being on Goredeth to getting nothing at all. Except for the damage to my equipment due to 4 deaths because of his aoe’s and no healer.