Plane of Earth

volvov2

volvov2

Dalayan Adventurer
This relatively new zone is filled with awesome encounters (some of which I havent seen personally) but suffers from a huge drawback, pathing mobs. the raids I have done there, were all attempts to prove the zone wasn't a huge time sink for average loot, which was mostly proved wrong. Only one mob is actually a quick clear (the croc), the rest all seem to be 3-4 hours of clearing for one mob. And one of the more compelling reasons to not do PoE is that raid encounters can path through other raid encounters. Karnaf (the rhino) has been seen wandering near The River Keeper and Sister Sonderlia.

We attempted to kill Veteran Klindra, after clearing 2 hours of trash, we managed to engage, only to find a damn shimmering phantasm wisp thing wanderings into camp as we were killing him. It seems that no matter how much trash we clear, its never entirely clear to the mob we were trying. The River Keeper is an extremely hard encounter, and from what I've seen, so-so loot drops from him, most of his loot is comparable to other encounters that require less work and less quality of a raid force, Sister Sonderlia drops nice loot and is not nearly as big of a hassle.

I know the zone is extremely large and there has to be trash to make it seem not empty, but clearing to most of the boss's minus the croc is long, I don't even want to know how long it will take to clear to the Prime Sentinal tree, not to mention I've seen mobs path through the tree itself, so you couldn't even just move and clear and move and clear, you have to clear a ton of trash to make sure something doesnt wander through as you are killing the trash in the tree, not to mention the boss itself. Karnaf is another prime example, he would take probably 4-5 hours of chain pulling to clear an area big enough to keep the trash from messing the raid up.

We have tried several times to give it a chance and every time it just ends in extreme boredom for the time to clear to any given mob except the croc (just because of how he is set up), and the loot does not make me go WOW on any level.

What I can recommend: A serious look at decreasing the roamers across the board would be a good start. I'm a pretty good judge of time vs risk vs reward and 2 of those items are seriously skewed for this zone.

Thanks for reading the words.
 
Is there not a transportation system that allows you to move around the zone? Or is the concentration of trash even after doing that still too high?
 
The transportation system of mites doesnt seem to do much, using the first one teleports you across the zone to where there is anywhere from 1 to 5 wanderers right where you get dropped off if you time it wrong, not to mention you are still on the west side of the river (very important), and the 2nd mite location takes you across the river into more mobs as well.

I've raided every zone in the game at least twice (including all the new ones) and this is the only one that punishes you for trying to take shortcuts (mobs will wander to you at the worst time) and punishes you for trying to be thorough (3 hours to clear to one mob).
 
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volvov2 said:
The transportation system of mites doesnt seem to do much, using the first one teleports you across the zone to where there is anywhere from 1 to 5 wanderers right where you get dropped off if you time it wrong, not to mention you are still on the west side of the river (very important), and the 2nd mite location takes you across the river into more mobs as well.

I've raided every zone in the game at least twice (including all the new ones) and this is the only one that punishes you for trying to take shortcuts (mobs will wander to you at the worst time) and punishes you for trying to be thorough (3 hours to clear to one mob).
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I'm not trying to disagree with you - we only ever went to PoE a couple times right after it came out and I noticed some of the same issues. Some named Unicorn wandered into us (think it was only a mini boss type of thing) while we were clearing trash. To be honest, it brought back memories of Plane of Fear where EVERYTHING wandered and it wasn't uncommon to get mobbed by 15 mobs.

Maybe shortening some of the pathes of the wanderers so it is more readily clear which mobs you need to take out for any given named, and also to lessen the number of mobs that wander a given area?
 
I really have no problems at all at how much the first three/four named get cleared. When there were a few guilds in that tier it was just about right.

As for the rest I think it will just be another PoWater situation where once a guild with a certain skillset goes there and realizes you can bypass as much trash as you can handle it will be well used. There are also other rewards after the first three named that players have not seen yet that will make the extra time more worthwhile.

On the whole I really am not too worried about it. The zones difficulty lays in a much different area than any other planar zone in the game and because of it not all guilds at its tier are able to perform to the same degree. The most successful ones are the ones with a good pull team of keeping mobs away from the main bee line and pulling the mobs through.
 
oh - a quick aside


if SUBWAY is not feasible in its current incarnation I would be more than happy to fix it up. But the first station has to be on the same side of the river. Its the only linear part of the zone.
 
volvov2 said:
The River Keeper is an extremely hard encounter, and from what I've seen, so-so loot drops from him, most of his loot is comparable to other encounters that require less work and less quality of a raid force,
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River keeper is prob the easiest mob there just a long fight. Think ur strat needs work.
You can kill the first 4 named there without pulling more then 2-4 trash. Think your puller needs work.
 
1) Assuming that the 'skill-set' at least tangentially involves marathon pulls 3 or 4 miles through sow+-speed wandering trash (in order to "avoid as much as you can handle") that still does not address the several fights wherein the named is rooted or unpullable (Veteran runs 3 times faster than a bard can) throughout. These fights require an unavoidable sludge-clearing festival complete with wipe after wipe from missing that 1 mob from all the way across the zone that just now decides to path through the engage area even though you haven't seen a mob anywhere near you for several minutes. This isn't fun or challenging, it's just rude.

2) Of the few encounters we have run, two benefit disproportionately from raid-stacking. This isn't unique or anything, but I don't think 'fill the raid with rangers and rogues' is a sign of a well-tuned encounter. The Adulterant fight in Entropy is a little like this, too, but Entropy is a whole other thread. (Also I like the Adulterant fight.)

3) I can't imagine what sort of parallels you are drawing between Water and Earth. Water requires no advanced skill set beyond 'deal with crappy line of sight' and is a fun and well-designed zone. Is the 'certain skill-set' in Water also about avoiding trash? Because even with all the trash clearing, you can finish the zone before you'd have reached the 2nd or 3rd named in Earth.

4) For guilds with limited raiding time, avoiding Earth is a very easy decision. For guilds with ample raiding time, it's still probably best spent in Valor, Fire, Sepulcher, CoD, Prison, or anywhere else. I admit I don't know what the advanced rewards in Earth are, but since they are items, they will benefit only a couple people and if your goal is progression, that's a bad use of time. If your goal is to slow down, smell the roses, and try something new.... well Earth is a bitter experience.

5) Perhaps take a page out of the rust encounter trash and when you clear enough designated trash around a raid mob, the other trash depops or stops moving or something that would allow you to not have to clear every mob within a mile radius.
 
Sadly, I'll agree with Volkov.

- The amount of trash to clear to get to even the first batch of encounters (River Keeper, Aiwen; and I didn't see a kind of subway around) is just ridiculous because you have to clear a huge area around each mob.
- Encounters where some classes have to sit and watch the other play is just... Not interesting, for anyone. I like when encounters make it harder for some classes (spell reflect, or whirlwind comes to my mind) etc. But excluding four classes out of fourteen makes you think the devs put a cheap trick to make it harder. It doesn't promote "well balanced" raids, and is totally unfun.

We avoid plane of earth, because our time is much better spent elsewhere, where we don't spend more than half of our 4hrs of set raid time clearing trash.

EDIT: although we were very excited when Plane of Earth first came out. Plane of Growth or Plane of Fear feeling is all cool, but don't forget a 18 men raid of the right tier of gear can only kill so many of that trash per hour, as opposed to the 30-50 people we were bringing there back in the days on Live. It fast turned into a boredom and frustration feeling.
 
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Like I said I really am not worried about the trash. I can move SUBWAY to be a bit more convenient but until I see other guilds besides the ones who are happy with it using pull teams, training mobs out of the way, root pulling, mez pulling, rushing into corners and all the other goodies that the zone was designed for I am not about to change the trash situation.

This is the only zone that puts a guild into a situation where they are able to utilize any pulling strategy they wish without any worries and I would rather just wait until a new guild has the chops for it rather than changing it to meet the status quo.

The first three named are killed enough for me to be happy. The rest of the zone might be better off once I get time to play with SUBWAY.
 
Well the last time I was there I think we killed like 3 trash total to pull 2 or 3 named. It really does boil down to a good pulling team instead of trying to do the time consuming clearing. So it's not really all the bad if you go right for the named instead of all those adds.
 
subway

the subway is a cool idea and would prob be used alot more if you didnt get jumped by 5-6 random roamers when u port over. idk if roamers path thru the treehouse or not cause we've never bothered to go thru the subway because mobs are waiting there for u =\
 
Waldoff said:
Like I said I really am not worried about the trash. I can move SUBWAY to be a bit more convenient but until I see other guilds besides the ones who are happy with it using pull teams, training mobs out of the way, root pulling, mez pulling, rushing into corners and all the other goodies that the zone was designed for I am not about to change the trash situation.

This is the only zone that puts a guild into a situation where they are able to utilize any pulling strategy they wish without any worries and I would rather just wait until a new guild has the chops for it rather than changing it to meet the status quo.

The first three named are killed enough for me to be happy. The rest of the zone might be better off once I get time to play with SUBWAY.
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So this zone goes against everything I've ever been taught and told not to do on SoD, gathering a bunch of mobs up and training them away and allowing another monk/sk to pull the named?

Okaaay.
 
I read the same thing...

Seriously?

I can see where maaaaybe that would make sense.. roaming mobs in an open zone arent meant to be linear so its not skipping to bypass, or something.. but yeah.. I agree thats a little confusing if thats the intended method of progressing through PoE
 
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The zone is not a linear stretch of mobs. You can pretty much do anything you want to pull besides training away the static mobs- which happen to be around every boss besides one (sides the croc) and fall under the obvious guard mob clause. Of course if you can pull the mobs with the boss legitimately (IE feign pull all of them and tag the boss out) that is more than fine.

Ideally Plane of Earth should be a third pulling, a third maneuvering your raid well and a third being able to kill the bosses.
 
Oh well, that explains a lot.

We did a pub recently and while able to easily kill the trash, it just seemed like the trash was never ending. Someone suggested the whole monk pull all, fd, another monk tag named thing but I was all, "No, I am not getting banned today."

thx for clarification because that zone seemed 10x more retarded then it actually is.
 
In a big zone like this you really can not add the amount of trash that would be realistic with "pull everything in the way before pulling the named" unless you literally made them sit statically in a circle around the named.

Too little and at some point the wanderers will align right and you can just pull the named after a bit of a wait. Either that or you have to make their wandering area so small that it looks like they are patrolling the same 30-40 feet.
 
When I did PoE it didn't take nearly as long as has been quoted. Chain pulling and multi-pulling will speed this up considerably. Veteran klindra was dead within two hours of our first visit on a pickup raid. This was back when I was about 5k hp.
 
Pulling past wanderers is not content skipping, content skipping is only when you abuse game mechanics to avoid mobs that are clearly set up to be in the way to your target.
 
Which, as i thought harder about it, was more or less what i came up with.. but yeah, since that doesn't really exist anywhere else in SoD, i can see where it is confusing, and outside what is normally done.
 
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