PoFear feedback

Cambrai

Dalayan Adventurer
Prestige has been raiding PoFear every Tuesday for the the last couple months with on tier toons. We started new and now most of the raid is around 200-400 aa's. I figured I'd give some feedback from our experience there. We have killed Rab, the pirate ship, Tenebris and Seinar & Ranies so far. Got Arbiter of Etrezium to spawn last night but no real experience with him yet.

Love the named mobs so far. They progressed very naturally from Rat to Pirate ship to dragon. Meaning it took use a week or two to figure out the rat. Then once we killed the mob and got the strat down, it would take another couple weeks of xping and work to get the next named down. It progressed right in sync with how we were developing as a guild. Fun mechanics on the named that weren't so difficult to overwhelm new raiders ether. A+ on the named we have done so far. Trash up to the eyeball named have been a good challenge but doable with smart pulling and mezing.

A few comments on what I thought could be improved.

Relics - only seen 1 relic drop off a named here in 3 months or so. Same or higher tier than other planes that higher drop rate. I know it's a 12 man zone vs a 18 man zone but giving new raiders more a chance to get relics for the time they spend here would be a nice bone to throw.

Sands of Time - everything up to them feels on tier, these feel like a 2-3 tier jump. I'm not sure if it is a pathing quirk or the way it was intended but having 3-4 of these all stacked on each other is just a raid wipe from our experience. 1 is a hard trash mob. 2 is a good challenge and could end in some deaths. 3-4 is just hope and pray we can kill one before we all die. It's very hard to tell how many you have until you pull since they are all on top of each other so cycle target makes it look like you targeting the same one. The MR is very high so even the chanter has a hard time locking down 1. We have also noticed that after a wipe, if one is growing when we all die it keeps on growing until it is like 100' tall. Then it one shots the tank before it shrinks down. There are ways to deal with that but I don't think that was intended. In short, these feel much more difficult than the rest of the zone and could either be 1) spread out a bit so not all stacked together or 2) tone them done a bit so if they are meant to be stacked they are not an instant wipe.

But overall, it's a great zone and thanks for putting it in! Perfect for our up and coming raiders. I wouldn't object to more 12 man content of any tier considering the size of guilds and server population now. I know we get a lot of use when on my main DK characters in Abyss and Bloodstorm.
 
As a member of the Prestige raids I will add my 2 cents:

First, I pretty much entirely agree with what Cambrai has said. Pofear has been one of my favorite SoD zones I have spent significant time in so far. The encounters are a ton of fun and the drops are cool and exciting, which is why we keep coming back every week.

The boss difficulty progression has been pretty much perfect - we started out with the Rat being a very difficult fight and the next bosses have been in line with increasing difficulty as our team leveled/geared up more. That is, until we get to the Sands. There is a huge jump in difficulty here. The way they have been spawning/pathing seems like it could be unintentional as they are all so stacked on top of each other it is impossible to tell if there is 1 mob or 4. On top of this, as Camb mentioned they have MR high enough that our enchanter cannot lock down >1 per fight (and not even always the 1). Admittedly, we have not consistently had a splitter in the raid but I seem to remember our monk getting pretty much insta-killed trying to pull them when we tried in one of our first trips into the zone - they were so difficult for us at that point we actually thought the intent of the sands was to just kill people who weren't paying any attention and were in their path and not part of the actual mobs to kill lol. Now that we are higher-tiered they seem too difficult, but not impossible so I think they may only need a bit of a tweak as opposed to a huge change.

As far as relics go, I agree the drop rate should be increased. It is really a pretty high difficulty zone compared to many relic dropping zones for such a poor drop rate - I think 1 relic in ~20-25 or so boss kills for us. My understanding is the intention of the requiem zones was to get newer players into the higher tiers more easily. With the current relic drop rate as it is, it is not feasible to get all relics for even a single character in a raid gearing up from hate/fear without farming the zones far after the entire raid has all the gear. From what I remember (it has been a long time though so I could absolutely be wrong) once you get to tier 7 or so relics are pretty rare to non-existent so taking this path would also require significant farming of lower tiers.

Something that I would like to see added to the zone is a quest or two in the same vein as hate - get a flag for killing each of the bosses, grab a couple items from the trash mobs, a scavenger hunt thing to explore some under-traveled parts of the zone, etc. Maybe this could be used to increase the availability of relics from the zone without the need to buff the pure relic drop rate?

I would also like to echo the desire for more 12 man content. I think it allows for enough people to open up some encounter mechanics when compared to 6 man and is also more friendly to a smaller server population. I think one of the bigger advantages that will come to players from additional 12 man content is having more raid content that doesn't need as many people boxing - I know that I am boxing at virtually all of the 18 man raids, but I am more often able to run 1 char in 12 mans which makes for a huge difference in playing experience and, for me, varied play is important to keeping the game interesting.

Thank you to the devs, really great work with PoFear and I look forward to what the remainder of the zone has in store - we definitely intend to finish all the bosses!
 
Please note on the Sands, the enchanter was using relic mez, then tash, then remez, and sometimes before I could get it tashed, the mez was already broken. So yes, relic mez *will* mez them, but sometimes it's for a whopping 30 seconds. If not tashed, then mem blur won't land, and dead chanter. So you can see the issue with the high MR.

Completely agree this should be a viable zone for relics. If it's going to be a progression zone like the lower planes, it should drop relics like the planes. As is, we do the other planes one night a week, and ED maps have honestly been our best source for relics.
 
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