Hateful Gamers

The problem:There is a quest called “The Kragbak Strongox“, 3 of the 4 monsters needed for it is stupid rare.

http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/The_Kragbak_Strongbox

Alright.  So you get this quest from a Kragbak Gnoll item drop in Kaladim (Kaladim is another one of those pesky shared group dungeons, where other groups can run around and steal your mobs/bosses).   Any of the damn gnolls can drop it.  It’s called A Kragbak Ringlet;  it’s a piece of the gnoll’s chest that you find on top a cliff in the same dungeon.  After searching the chest you find that you need 4 more ringlets from rather rare Kragbaks.

One of the ringlets is held by a rare “champion” Kragbak from the arena ring event.  I guess I should explain ring events really quick, so you can realize how utterly gay this is.

A ring event is something, where you kill the first wave, and a second wave appears, etc.  After all the waves, the ring event is out of commission for a specific period of time before it “Respawns“.   The reason it’s gay, is, it’s in a public dungeon.  If another group beats you to it, congrats! You gotta wait until it respawns for you to get a go at it.  Especially when you need some type of rare spawn from these ring events for a quest..guess what, that’s exactly our problem! 

For the arena:

• First wave is a wave of generic spectators.
• Second, you fight a wave of generic mobs fighting in the arena.
• Third wave is one of three arena champions.
• Fourth wave is some stupid gnome that shouldn’t even be a wave, and got lost on his way to gnome academy or something.

The problem here is we need a specific arena champion during the third wave named “The Claw”.  There is some rumors that killing the spectators in a different order will spawn a different champion.  I don’t buy it.  See, the problem with EQ2 is, not many people bother playing it, so there is a real lack of information out there.  From what I’ve seen it’s just random which champion you get.  There appears to be a goblin, a bugbear and a kragbak champion.  You need the Kragbak (The Claw!) one.  We were rather lucky, in my group, and got it on our second try. (First try was the bugbear).

Here’s the kicker though…  These Kaladim ring events despawn for 2 hours after completion, so people don’t farm them.  Since this is a shared dungeon, someone else might have already done it.  Based on a long night of 5ish hours playing, you’re only going to get one or two shots at this part of the quest, assuming another group doesn’t beat you to it, and only a 33% each time to get the right Champion.

This isn’t difficult, this didn’t make the quest hard.  See, EQ2 has this shitty idea, instead of making complicated or difficult or memorable fights, that just make specific monsters retardedly rare, and consider that fun for the players. The challenge is getting it to respawn and seeing if the dice roll you up the right monster.  It’s called “Place holders” or PHs, and whoever came up with the idea, congrats!  Whoever continues to roll the idea out after WoW showed us it was a shitty idea, and instances are far far better, where the mobs you need for quests are always up, you can go to hell.

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Two of the other mobs you need are a part of another ring event, the Kragbak “Cliff” ring event in the same dungeon. In this one, you clear multiple cliffs of Kragbaks.  Again, this is another 2 hour respawn marathon, and one of the bosses is really rare. One spawns on the first wave, the other spawns on the third and final wave.  On EQ’s offical forums we hear these quotes:

Drazala writes: The channel lord is part of the cliff ring event and is an uncommon spawn. When he is up, he spawns up on the top cliff by the chest.

Rakk writes :The channel lord is part of the cliff event, he spawns up on one of the cliffs (where the chest is). I saw the Reverend about 3 or 4 times before I saw the channel lord - his name is not capitalised cos he is not a named and is either called ‘a kragbak channel lord’ or just ‘a channel lord’ - I really cant remember. I think I musta done the cliff event about 10-15 times before I got the channel lord. Note I’m guessing at how often I did it, I did it for a few days, and it was boring so it all kinda blurred into one hideously long ring event for me

Alright Raak.  I’ve cleared the cliffs 3 to 4 times now…trying everyday when I get home.  By your numbers, if I decided to sit there and get it at each respawn, I’d be spending 20-30 hours, to get some rare spawn monster for a quest. 

Solution:Look, SoE.  I get it, you have some narcissistic love for creating quests that are puzzling, unitutive, and generally face-slapping for players.  You enjoy quests that aren’t accessible, and make people want to cry in frustration.  You enjoy the satisfaction you get when you see a quest in a quest log for months.  I wouldn’t put it past you all to have a stat tracker, to track how long quests are in quest logs so you can throw a goddamn party for whoever created the longest quest to complete on average that quarter.  Well, instead of throwing that goddamn party, maybe you should use that tracker, and see which quests never get completed because of some asinine rare spawning monster, and up the spawn count, so people can actually do the quest.  Stop making quests difficult by making PH/rare mobs a part of it.  That is not a difficult encounter.  Learn to make an MMO right, goddamn. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under EQ2, MMOs.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.