Making The Vah a little more accessible

Obscenitor said:
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Bango I think this is the first value-written response I've received. I didn't know Eisley = Marza, in which case I think his reply was a very poor representation on how a staff should respond to a thread.

That aside, I'd agree the Vah is an aside quest which isn't necessary. I still think, at the minimum, Summoner needs to be changed.
 
null1fy said:
Bango I think this is the first value-written response I've received. I didn't know Eisley = Marza, in which case I think his reply was a very poor representation on how a staff should respond to a thread.
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Eisley isn't Marza, if he was I am sure I would know about it! Eisley is a Dev-Trainee(?) though so I mean yeah he is staff but at this point he is probably speaking more as a player, who knows.

null1fy said:
That aside, I'd agree the Vah is an aside quest which isn't necessary. I still think, at the minimum, Summoner needs to be changed.
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If you consider the gap between Cmal 3.2 and 4.1 though, it spans over several tiers.. so in the situation of a guild or group of friends that are progressing through 6 man content.. they would have quite a bit of time to kill Summoner and get their key before they are ready for 4.1. However, having said that.. I still think adding a *'d version of Summoner that only dropped the key (similar to Ganzese and the Emberflow key) would be a solid idea.
 
I kind of doubt any of these would be killed at all without the vah. I just finished mine recently and basically whole zones for weeks were up except the quest boss. Some of these issues also wouldn't be fixed by removing the vah.
- Parcelain is a multi-quest choke point that would still be perpetually down if you removed the vah.
- I think the only players who kill earth terror are people on the vah, and he is up for days and one of the easiest to find kills in the line.
- Would guilds do anything in earth beyond croc and sister for relics if it wasnt for the vah?
- Shade was the only mob down is SoD during my three week search for him. And while his loot is solid for the tier, its filler and the real deal is off DoTo who appears up 24/7/365.
DoTo literally has some items that are amazing still for me and he is always up.

Also, many of those nameds have 7 and not 5 day timers, like shade for example.
 
Eisley is a Dev-Trainee (hence, no forum blue name) and a player who has completed [The Vah], and he is well aware of its ramifications. That makes his opinion on the matter worth at least a little consideration and not worthy of immediate dismissal.

You should already know better than to make a post saying that you only care about staff response.

Now, here's a resposne from someone on staff that isn't a trainee (me, and I'm not a Dev, so you probably aren't going to listen to me anyway).

The Standard of the Vah Shir is not some "you must have this" item even at the top end of current content(**). It is helpful, yes, just as are tomes and focus effects and charms, but it's simply not the broken must-have it used to be.

If you want to argue that you hate the quest existing, then that's fine. Feel free to join me in that, and you can start by finding my first Vah-hate post from August 2008. I dislike the quest, but the quest and its final rewards are not the detriments they used to be.



(**)Okay... maybe Vylast`Zara, the False Savior... but we don't know if he's even intended to be killable at Tier 13ish. He might be a mob that's supposed to be Odeum or Regrat difficulty and beyond reach of FWF currently barring some RNG blessing and "throw everything ever imaginable" situation on the level of the first ever Essence of the Mother kill.
 
Not to derail this thread, and I admittedly don't know a whole lot about Vah since I will never do it, but I think a much bigger problem is the Plane of Knowledge quests like relic hunters and dungeon delvers. These cause basically the same problems that the Vah do, but are more often done. The problem, IMO, is that a lot of these quests are intended for characters who are well beyond the necessary level to kill the mobs their items were put on. Lore-wise I don't know what a good solution is, but I would like to say that it is a practice that probably should not happen again.
 
Tarutao said:
Eisley is a Dev-Trainee (hence, no forum blue name) and a player who has completed [The Vah], and he is well aware of its ramifications. That makes his opinion on the matter worth at least a little consideration and not worthy of immediate dismissal.

You should already know better than to make a post saying that you only care about staff response.
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Yeah, and I would have respected it had he not come in here and posted complete dribble until about 3 posts later where he at least put some content into his posting. Don't scold me I did no worse than him.


Tarutao said:
Now, here's a resposne from someone on staff that isn't a trainee (me, and I'm not a Dev, so you probably aren't going to listen to me anyway).
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I don't get your negative attitude towards me, Tao. I've given you a lot of respect throughout our conversations and listened attentively.

Tarutao said:
The Standard of the Vah Shir is not some "you must have this" item even at the top end of current content(**). It is helpful, yes, just as are tomes and focus effects and charms, but it's simply not the broken must-have it used to be.
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You're right, I don't believe that the quest is one which you're entitled to. However, I don't think that leaving the quest the way it is alleviates the problem that the quest is causing unhealthy competition, specifically, within cmal with summoner or parcelan. I've heard some truly scummy and admittedly true stories about people capitalizing on parcelan spawn timers.

Tarutao said:
If you want to argue that you hate the quest existing, then that's fine. Feel free to join me in that, and you can start by finding my first Vah-hate post from August 2008. I dislike the quest, but the quest and its final rewards are not the detriments they used to be.
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I can't claim to know how the quest and its ramifications unfolded when it was released. I can only best think the quest was created initially when competition over it was not unhealthy. But what is clear is that now severe bottlenecks exist (parcelan for example). How can there even be competition when basically one person can capitalize on the rest of the community by controlling a quintessential step in the quest?

I don't know if you dislike the quest because of the difficulty or because of how it has influenced the community but in either situation, aren't compelled to see it improve such that it had a lesser negative impact on the game?
 
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As one of the people that has completed this quest, The Vah is really just fine as it is now in terms of difficulty and time investment. Any of the more casual players can easily complete the hidden presences and get several really good clicky items in addition to the Vah tmap reward which is hard to replace for anybody until ~t8, despite being fairly easy to complete. Those who can and are willing to invest the time into collecting all the banners can raid Shar Vahl for some cool loots in addition to an amazing clicky.

The idea of * versions of mobs has been discussed before on these very forums and Thinkmeats himself, the guy that made the quest, shot them down for the same reason that you don't like them not existing; they're meant to be bottlenecks. I can only assume the reasons the Mielech the Reanimated has a * version is due to 2 factors, he's a cash mob which 65 groups keep down and because his step is still near the beginning of the quest before you have access to all of the side quests.

The fact of the matter here is that this quest is NOT required for progression in any way. The final reward is a really nice clicky, yes, but I've never said to myself "well damn, if I didn't have the Vah back there I couldn't beat this monster". It became like this for a little while when Marza had to balance content around people having 2 minute god mode, but now that the duration is only 30 seconds, it's not as easy as it once was to abuse.

Basically, this quest was meant to be long, time consuming, and difficult. If you don't want to put in the time that it takes to track raid mobs and assassination mobs, collect rare items, and get all of your banners, then don't do the quest.
 
Well that sounds pretty conclusive, Torleran. I had never known that * versions of mobs had been discussed before, especially with Thinkmeats.

I don't know if I agree with the decision but I still plan on doing the quest all the same.
 
I agree that Vah Assassinations is really annoying but I don't think it's unhealthful. So you race for a 3 day spawn big deal? When this came out, some people were trying to sell assassination access to mobs like the Eternal One for 10k can you imagine?

You only need to find these mobs up once just keep at it.

I guess my point is that elaborate chests are far worse.
 
It sounds like OP is suggesting that single players keep these mobs down indefinitely. This probably has happened at some point in time, but in general the only thing that makes them hard to kill is that lots of people want to kill them.

When I did the quest, nobody gave me timers. I just put a tracker in the zone, and whenever I would play I would 2 box the tracker and do my thing on my main, checking track every few min. It really didn't take me long to find all of them, and anyone with access to a trackbot can do this and eventually get the kills.
 
ED maps are a real problem with price inflation and the way the drop rate can be for the quest item but aside from that I haven't had a problem doing the quest up to the point I'm at right now on two characters. The biggest problem for me with the long spawn raid mobs isn't finding them up but finding enough people who will go kill monster.
 
Just throwin it out there, I've done alot of ED maps, Out of these ED maps 9 out of 10 of them ware dropped ones from raid zones mainly prison(Have got a shit load of them in OP), And out of all the prison maps i swear on my grave the chance for the ED Vah sword is substantially higher on these, When fearless buckled under, i had about 7 or 8 OP/IP ed maps in my bank, and me jraul and mgkida decided to get a pug together and bust um out, i would say 6 or more of them dropped the sword. Just wanted to throw that out there that it might be worth ganking the first few pulls using the OP gate clickie to get your ED map vah sword.
 
I think you just had really good luck on those maps. We killed 6 nodrop ED maps from raid zones the other day and got 0 vah swords.
 
Silosobi said:
It sounds like OP is suggesting that single players keep these mobs down indefinitely. This probably has happened at some point in time, but in general the only thing that makes them hard to kill is that lots of people want to kill them.

When I did the quest, nobody gave me timers. I just put a tracker in the zone, and whenever I would play I would 2 box the tracker and do my thing on my main, checking track every few min. It really didn't take me long to find all of them, and anyone with access to a trackbot can do this and eventually get the kills.
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Im not against the quest the way t is. but i'd liket o points out "It sounds like OP is suggesting that single players keep these mobs down indefinitely" can and does happen. i know Melwin is probably the biggest of this. and i found parcelain up one day prolly 6 months ago. and i went in and tried to box it for lol'z... well i managed to do it and it wasnt hard. i've never done it since.... hell i havent even seen it up not once since then. but i mean what you said solo DOES happen.
 
I've known people to kill them for cash, but they aren't ultra diligent about it and they aren't trying to be malicious. Just box a tracker and you WILL eventually find the mobs you need. This is part of what makes the quest hard, and without it the reward wouldn't be as justified.
 
I've randomly found melwin up while running to EF to track, before I had info for a bot in there. Did him for myself w/ the help of Kjiel who was alrdy in the zone. 2nd time we did him for Ruthe. I don't know how long he was up for but...just saiyajin
 
I have great sympathy for anybody doing the Vah who has a life.

Basically be patient and keep tracking; it took me several months to do the 4 assassinations and the salves. If you track PoE every day and the assassination mobs then you eventuallly get lucky.

Your main problem will be having the crew on tap to kill Sister, Croc and River Keeper when you do find them up but it's just a matter of sheer bloody minded perseverance.

I'm sure Eisley and Draeos would agree that if I can get it done then pretty well evrybody on the server can get it done with the possible exception of Bridger.
 
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