Good Morning Friends. Please join me in mourning the loss of the Tier 5 Workshop in my new adopted hometown of Brightwood. There is a project currently on the town board to complete this, but right now the progress is moving slowly. Ultimately the problem with not having my Tier 5 Workshop anymore, is that I can’t craft any of the Orichalcum and Ironwood items that I had been making to gain skill increases. Yes in another post I proved out that the most efficient use of resources was just to grind level 1 items over and over. However I am on a weird mission and as a result I don’t mind using a lot of Ironwood and Orichalcum in the process.
Essentially three things are happening, firstly I am farming the needed extremely rare drop resources needed to craft a set of Voidbent armor. Secondly I am using all of this Ironwood as a way of leveling my lumber skills which will allow me to refine Ebony wood from said rare resources. Lastly I am trying to craft a perfect set of Orichalcum tools. What I consider to be “perfect” is a very specific combination of traits namely Azoth Extraction, Luck boost, and Yield boost. I have crafted a number of slightly imperfect tools but to date the only thing I have that is in its ideal state is my Mining Pickaxe.
I have been to Myrkgard a number of times but I had never really been to Myrkgard. What I mean by that is I have participated in a number of Zerg runs that fly through the place consuming all of the resources and then move on to the next target. You don’t need much skill or finesse to do that and as a result I have never really learned how to function within the constrains of the zone. Last night around 9 pm I got an invite from a friend of mine to go do the Priest Farm in Myrkgard, and as a result I learned the route that players follow in order to make this farm work. Having experienced this… it feels exactly like farming content in Everquest did.
Now I have made that comparison before and have gotten some extremely funny looks, but what I am talking about are the dungeons that we used to farm repeatably for loot. For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, a big dungeon like Sebilis or Guk would be carved up by players into several camps, generally revolving around a boss or multiple bosses that spawned in the same area. Essentially you would “break” the zone, meaning you killed everything down to the boss you were going to farm. Then you would repeated kill spawns in a specific order in order to make combat the most repeatable and sustainable process.
Priest camp works exactly like this. You are rotating between two spots and catching the spawn of a specific type of mob that is known to drop good loot, and keeping this pattern going as long as you can. Once you have finished one spawn, you loot and use some creative terrain traversal to safely move to the next spawn without having to kill anything in the process. Essentially you are avoiding killing things that would be significantly more precarious and through use of terrain resetting aggro and the encounters if need be when a train comes through. This is sustainable with a five player group, but it seems that inevitably there will be other players with the same idea either as solos or other groups.
Based on my brief experience last night, this means that you more or less need to keep your head on a swivel and adjust to the encounter as the conditions with other players change. One of the “Priest” spawns is down this long bridge filled with other more tricky encounters, and the process is to run down to a monument at the end of the bridge… hop up on it… and then go prone to reset aggro. However if a group of players comes in staggered they easily can bring with them a half dozen enemies that will add to your group doing the fight. So you have to make a call if you are going to just burn and then move on, or if it is enough to require you to reset the encounter completely to keep from dying.
I had a freaking blast and cannot wait to go back. In order news… the march of yellow continues with Planet X knocking green out of Cutlass Keys. I think what we are experiencing more than anything right now is war fatigue. It seems universally the loss of players in the game is making it extremely hard to get fifty people to sign up to fight in a war. Yellow has had this resurgence brought on by the defection of Apex and Planet X and as a result there is a buzz surrounding those battles. Both Green and Purple had had to take part in multiple wars in each week, not to mention at least one invasion… and this fatigue is taking its toll. Even I find myself less excited about signing up for invasions when in reality I have only fought in a eight or so.
Essentially I am curious to see what server mergers are going to look like, because we are in significantly better shape than the majority of servers… and that isn’t exactly great shape. They are deploying a PTR realm today, and with it the Void Gauntlet. I have a feeling that this new weapon is going to bring a resurgence of players as well as the end of the Lost Ark testing phase. I will be curious to see what the coming weeks bring us.
I feel your pain with the T5 workshops. My server (EU Kantia) has had a substantial population reduction over the last two weeks, from around 800 average to around 300 average – so all invasions are losses, and few territories have the resources to rebuild what they lost before the next invasion arrives.
Even leaving aside the lack of ppl to run dungeons (especially low levels ones, and the much-cursed Well Guardian), and the lack of ppl to run Outpost Rush, and the lack of ppl to do Elite Chest runs outside of peak time, servers need to be merged fast to prevent entire server populations being locked out of highest tier crafting.
I haven’t been a fan of discrete servers for a long time (5 years of BDO showed the benefit of being able to swap servers whenever you wanted, for me) but given how much of New World relies on large groups of players to make their content happen, I am honestly bemused that New World launched as it did with a server model out of the early 2000’s…
I did a whole post a few weeks back about how New World is basically EverQuest. I haven’t played an mmorpg that feels as similar to EQ circa 1999-2001 since Vanguard. In fact, it feels like a cross between EQ and Vanguard, which is hardly a stretch since Vanguard was basically EQ with better graphics and now New World is both of them with better graphics still.