Feldon 
EQ2 has a history of challenging contested heroic zones, and Contested High Keep is no exception. My guild has had some success there and we intend to go back for more. There are some choke points where things are tougher than they should be.
First up, certain mobs are immune to specific damage types, requiring the player to equip an item that transforms their damage to spells or melee as appropriate. However these items do not work for Rangers which first and foremost use ranged weapons, so a special arrow type ought to be made available that converts its damage to spell damage. According to Kander, a such arrows are incoming:
We’re looking at fixing the issue so we can make these arrows again.
Players have been reporting that a particular cluster of enemies in High Keep Contested tend to get pulled through walls, resulting in a quick and surprising death for unlucky groups. Also, damaging the chunks of rock which fall off the named Tunnelgorger’s barely make a dent, resulting in a painfully long battle with this encounter. According to Chrol, we can expect the following fixes soon:
Coming soon!…
- Several undead orcs and dark elves have chosen to haunt other areas outside the hallways leading to Captain Boshinko.
- The chunks of rock that fall off the Tunnelgorger now decrement his stoneskin twice as much as they did previously.
Some really powerful items drop from HKC so it’s worth a visit for well-geared groups.
My guilds only complaint at the moment with this zone is the “jail” key. We have one group just about to finish the Bloody Shank HQ And have yet to have the key drop for us. We have been in there long enough to get 1000 heartstones from all the kill quests in there. Not sure if this is a lot or not but I’d think the key would have dropped at least once for us. We had a guildmate who was luckily in zone when mother group was in there. He parked a toon and we have relied on a janky system of CoV and Conjy calls to get in and out of there.
I believe you need to kill the “An Undead Warden” in order to get the key. He can be located on any floor of the dungeon. If you don’t want to bother getting a key, just stand at the door, summon your merc, and tinker call to it.
Unfortunately, if you’re doing the HQ quest, you WILL have to GO BACK in to the jail, and at that point of HQ quest completion, your key will have disappeared. So just keep a lookout for the undead warden again or hey… the other suggestions work.
And be careful if you have the key. You only can use it once, so don’t close the jail door !!! 😉
Camp a toon inside the jail cell have one in there for last month and saves a lot of headaches…just saying.
As for the chunks of rocks off Tunnelgorger being a pain to damage enough to reduce his DR….I still laugh that they have not addressed this issue since when the zone first came out I advised pretty directly to a number of devs including Chrol that that issue needed to be addressed and was advised that they were not really going to adjust the issue with the chunks in the foreseeable future.
I’ve been in two different groups (one guild and one non-guild) that have killed Tunnelgorger. Since they fixed the Tunnelgorger fight a while back, what is the point of fixing the falling rocks when the fight is simple….