This might be temporary but a lot of the new areas are not frequented very much by farmers. Take the swamp of screams, its scary as hell there. Now and then you kill or rout a mob that will bring dozens of friends. Unless you react fast, say bye bye to your party. Take the forest with the undead. If there is one terrain designed to have AF going haywire that is it. And there are more of those areas/mobs in Rune and Goddard.
I see these areas as efforts from NCSoft to make life harder for those we all hate. I for one hope they will succeed in their efforts and implement more of these farmer unfriendly areas.
yeah, swamp of screams is brutal. Because of the number of reinforcements they bring back with them, it's really tough for a party of the size the mobs are designed for in there.
Wall of Argos is a great place, but yeah.. they need to do some sweeps through there with the ban hammer.
Otherwise, hell's yeah the new areas are great. I'm really enjoying them.
Forge of the gods and the multiplying exploding mobs is nasty for ANYONE much less farmers. Swamp of screams is freaky scary too, darned frenzied stakatos.
Wall of Argos is _packed_ with farmers. The canyons work as "rooms" and makes it easy for them to keep on going 24/7. There's what, 8 groups running in there as we speak, on Teon. Getting A-weapon recipes as spoils and drops. A-weapon parts as drops and so on...
But none in the forge of gods and the other places I mentioned. Wall of Argos is old style terrain/dungeon and easy to farm in. The other sites require more challenge to play in. No way that you can do those with multiboxing. Now if every area was designed that way.......
Actually Woodsman, swamp of screams isn't just bad for farmers, it's bad for everyone, which is why it's bad for farmers, who are a part of everyone. Actually I would go so far as to say this area is much worse for players than it would ever be for bots, because for a human player to die, they've just lost 4 hours or so of their own time, but a bot who dies doesn't really lose anything at all, since earning exp is not its intended function, earning adena and materials is.
Considering the recent aoe changes as well, this area becomes even less player friendly, as sleep cloud will longer be a cushion through which a party can use to keep itself alive when the mob brings back more than 20 friends, eliminating any possibility for a group to feasibly hunt there no matter how large. You might say just bring multiple aoe sleepers, however this really is no guarantee of survival. The reasoning is the sleeping cloud of each mage independently selects 20 mobs to target, so it is quite possible that any particular mob will be targeted by the sleeping cloud of every caster while another mob will be targeted by the sleeping cloud of no caster.
The only way to feasibly hunt in such an area is with many many groups, which really is no different from hunting in an area that is bot infested, as in either case, there simply won't be enough mobs to go around. Though in the former case, the end result of such a state is the intended result of the poorly designed area whereas in the latter case it is the unintended result of making an area so good that everyone wants to farm in it (i.e. an area that is bot infested).
Thus NC actually made a bad decision when they chose to create an area which made life harder for everyone, as opposed to using that time to create an area which would make life better for everyone instead. With more good areas to go, the number of bots in each area would actually have been diluted a they would have spread out to take advantage of each good area, resulting both in every area being less bot infested, and in more good hunting grounds for every player to choose from.
We should all move away from the mentality of being willing to amputate our foot to get rid of an itch in the toe.
We should all move away from the mentality of being willing to amputate our foot to get rid of an itch in the toe.
Very well said. While I hope the new areas were designed for other reasons than bots, otherwise it failed horribly. Face it anything that a player can do a bot can do it usually 3 times better and more efficiently. So designing an area for players that bots cannot utilize is unreasonable.
Went to swamp of screams and 3 shotted everything. So much for even trying to bring reinforcements. The great part is when they start to run you don't take damage as a mage. Tis free xp :)