End Game Options

Travo02

Dalayan Beginner
I joined up with SoD about 6 months ago now. I quickly fell in love with the game and having no prior experience with Everquest, had a mountain of stuff to learn. I was fortunate to meet a great community, join a fantastic guild, and start the various 'grinds' for the Main Quest, Vah, etc. All in all, I'm having a wonderful time.

I must admit though, in the last few weeks, my desire to continue to play on my own has dwindled. Despite getting some great gear rather quickly through the generosity of my guild, I can't DO much anymore because of mechanics currently in place - mainly mob summon.

When I joined, I didn't know anything about anything, but what I did know from other games was I didn't enjoy tanking much, and I don't like the stress of healing. So I rolled a ranger and a wizard, and had a fantastic time, and found they meshed well together. Now that I'm 65 with about 175 AA's, I find I can't do a lot of the more important faction grinds, or quest progressions, or just exp grinding in general, because the vast majority of mobs worth killing for xp or otherwise all have the same core ability of summon. I understand for other classes it may not be an issue, but for quite a few, mine in particular, summon negates the core of what I do. I can't tank as a ranger or wiz, I can't root/snare kite, I can't do much of anything. I've even tried taking the majority of the defensive AA's first on my ranger to give myself a bit more survival, nothing helps.

Now I know I probably could have picked two better classes to duo with, but I didn't know at the time and as I said already, I don't enjoy some of the other aspects of it. I'm trying very hard to catch up to my guild mates to make myself a useful part of their team in a community that isn't too large to begin with. I still feel like dead weight, and unless I can find some charitable souls to group with on off times, there's no method for me to do so.

I'm not asking for summon to be removed entirely, far from it. Major quest mobs, named, high tier dungeons, go for it. Garbage trash mobs throughout Ikisith though? Faction grind mobs like no name giants/dragons? ANYTHING worth killing at 65 that gives xp to make it worth your time? I think that's hindering younger players like myself that want to get into this game, but can't. Just my 2c and rant!
 
Decent feedback really, and personally speaking I, too, dislike the summon mechanic. It was a weird thing offered up by the original game that's a bodge for silly design. We've brought up the point internally, not sure there will be any changes, but it at least provoked discussion at this point.
 
Regarding anything worth killing at 65 that gives xp: I think the east wastes orc fort has mobs that don't summon.

I would like it if more mobs didn't summon. I think kiting being more viable would add something to do for those times when you want to play, but you don't have time to commit to a group.
 
a lot of the flowers in overgrowth don't summon. cractees and crocs in remenants don't summon either
 
a lot of the flowers in overgrowth don't summon. cractees and crocs in remenants don't summon either

Most of the non-undead, non-forestlight stuff in rems doesn't. Half the roaming trash in DL and PL doesn't either. Those are my mindless antisocial go tos with my wiz.
 
It's very disheartening when you play a character for 65 levels then the game changes and you can't do your classes tricks anymore. I 100% agree that too many mobs summon, as well as immune to runspeed, immune to root, immune to fear, or immune to CC.

I appreciate that some classes shine in some areas. a high tier tank+healbox will be the vastly superior way to farm, or do most quests. It shouldn't be basically impossible to kill yard trash/quest mobs/easy-cash-farm mobs with your kiting/cc/rootrot classes. It is pretty awful to have a major aspect of your classes play-style cut out from under you after playing it as long as OP has.

No need to change raid zones/encounters, checkpoint mobs, and most names at all. I promise if you made zero non-raidzone yard trash summon, immune to runspeed change, fear, or root....it would still be substantially faster (and safer) to still get a tank + healbox and DS+aoe everything to death than to kite it.

(and to add in, I took a few years off of SoD before coming back and one of the major factors was that i couldn't progress any more outside of raid. everyone's advice was "log in with this ringer tank i have info for bro" and it didn't feel like i was playing the game anymore with the character i made. that seems like where OP may be headed :( )
 
Last edited:
Well, I kinda see a couple of problems here.

While I agree that the summoning issue is pretty widespread and aggressive it is manageable. There are a lot of areas for 65 xp that don't have summoning mobs but a fair amount of that is in the old world. Animals on non-KoS side of remnants don't summon but undead and plants do. Most critters/animals in DL don't summon but undead, bipeds and spiderkin do. I don't think the leeches or bugs in Murk summon. EW orcs, any non-named not a dragon mob in DN also good choices.

On that point I think the speed at which somethings summon is tuned a bit high and the threat of the monster could remain intact but allow for some more freedom to solo if how often they summoned was lowered or a diminishing return put on a player who is consistently being summoned.

The other problem I see is a matter of perspective. You have been playing for 6 months and have <200 AAs. Getting into a guild group where you are murdering 20k xp mobs by the handful skews your perspective on how xp goes for your power level. Also, if you are being expected to "catch up" to people with years of experience and playtime and have a Vah back within 6 months of playing you are probably in a bad guild. Vah isn't a worthwhile investment for your time or realistically completable without aggressive outside help nor is the Vah at any point meant to be completed without help. I have been playing for 6 years and only 3 months ago did I decide that the Vah was a worthwhile use of my playtime. While I am sure it is entirely possible to join this game and in 9 months be tomed, supremed, and t12 with a Vah that isn't the point of the game. If you want to be competitive with top 20 players 3 months after you join you want World of Warcraft, this is a game of inches.
 
Snare kite , fear kite , root rot , charm solo off the top of my head come to mind and eqlive deemed those to be a very legit way to kill most trash mobs on the non high end scale of the game.

At this point in the SOD servers existance and the state of the current playerbase (mostly guilded in tier 10+ guilds) it would be imho a wise step to strive to bring this to shards on a bigger scale. Ae's are already limited on target amounts and probably should remain so but there are ton of mobs that should not be summoning, immune to run speed changes, root , etc. Perhaps we should not be looking at the mobs that do not do these mechanics but more at the ones that do that should not.

Any fixes would have to probably be done on a per mob basis over an extended period of time unless a dev up like an anti- summon , run speed change , root immune spell or AA or a area of the zone where these mechanics are disabled when a mob is pulled to it. So maybe we should provide the staff with some input on mobs that should not be doing anti-kite , fear , root rot , etc mechanics.

These kind of players are good for SoD the same way a tank/healer combo is as it allows the community more options lfg wise to join a kite group or some dude you come across in a zone killing stuff with this style of gameplay and asking "Hey can I join you ? I cant find tank/healer group".

This is one of the best threads I have read in awile and hopefully it garners the attention it deserves by the staff to discuss and/or act on it.
 
Last edited:
I would like to start out by saying the mobs that pertain to faction grinding be looked at first in particular Stormhammer/Dragonscale alliance mobs, undead gruplok in murk, leeches in murk, kaesora library side maybe, trash mobs that impede getting a certain deity aug, silvercrown, blackscale alliance and CoI quest drops.
 
Most of the non-undead, non-forestlight stuff in rems doesn't. Half the roaming trash in DL and PL doesn't either. Those are my mindless antisocial go tos with my wiz.
That's true, but if you want to get the spell that ports you to anywhere in Ikisith, you need to go through tons of mobs that do summon, and we can all agree those are lengthy quests even for characters with tomes, let alone anyone without them.
 
These kind of players are good for SoD the same way a tank/healer combo is as it allows the community more options lfg wise to join a kite group or some dude you come across in a zone killing stuff with this style of gameplay and asking "Hey can I join you ? I cant find tank/healer group".

Kind of late to the post on this one but i read over this thread and it reminded me of something that happened recently. I was killing quest mobs, which summon, and a friend wanted to join. the thing is, my strat for killing them was send pet, feign (let it get agro) stand, dot it a few times, and if it gets back to summoning me, feign again. So my friend could come. but would have to be prepared to die if they get on top of the hate list and can't get off. OR we would have had them only help after a time. OR we would have heavy downtime between fights patching them up. the classic go-to, snaring the monster wouldn't work (summon, maybe plus runspeed change immune). Even if we were able to get around this issue (mob didn't summon at all, tight control of agro), it would have still been substantially slower than farming them on an equally tiered healer/tank combo.

I'm not really sure why have everything summon/mechanic-immune is the order of the day.
 
I would like to take a moment to say that as a tank box I really dislike how common summon mobs are. I know you can learn which ones do summon but a new player exploring has a good chance of dying when hitting a random mob because it will just constantly summon them. There must be heaps of essential content that just isn't doable unless you're a tank because of summoning. That would be infuriating.

I just remembered a time when I was running through a zone on my enchanter.....a mob started summoning me so I couldn't run, it was anchored so I couldn't move it, and it was immune to mez. All I could do was stand there waiting to die. This is a mob I could probably kill on my paladin by turning on attack and going afk.

edit-------------

I would just like to mention something. I find it likely if you had more xp and such you could probably do most of the stuff despite the summons(minus stuff meant for groups and such). You wouldn't be a ranger anymore which sucks but 175AAs doing vah is way under xped IMO.
 
Last edited:
Read this thread a while ago when it was made but I forget if it was mentioned. Might it help to put the mob summoning on a cool down so they aren't doing it as often? Even tanks that want to reposition have a hard time if they are wanting to get to a certain spot because the mob just yanks you back as soon as you think about moving. It would also be more helpful to the squishies that are running for dear life.
 
As a player who mained a ranger and ground out a ton of AA/tomes and the supreme charm of valor I can say there is a lot of places to grind exp/money that outside of a good group (good players and all T10+) that are worth more than most T9 and below full groups.
 
I must admit though, in the last few weeks, my desire to continue to play on my own has dwindled. Despite getting some great gear rather quickly through the generosity of my guild, I can't DO much anymore because of mechanics currently in place - mainly mob summon.

I agree. Someone make me a list with Zone/Mob name of mobs that summon and probably shouldn't and I'll look into it. I think dungeons are less likely to be removed, but any outdoor zone especially trash is fair game.
 
I'll try to mark the specific goblins but the yiv goblins in the camp near the beehive summon, at least the cleric ones do.

Also while on Forest the bees for trapping have a really bad habit of getting stuck in the ground during their pathing which means I had to find a good spot to nuke them out to capture them when they poked enough out.
 
I agree. Someone make me a list with Zone/Mob name of mobs that summon and probably shouldn't and I'll look into it. I think dungeons are less likely to be removed, but any outdoor zone especially trash is fair game.
Haven't been there in a long time but as far as outdoor summoning monsters, pretty sure FoB and ToE have a fair amount or at least some of FoB, don't know if baldakans in PL summon but that is an outdoor zone. Pretty sure undead city in remn summons.

Can't really think of any non-ikisith outdoor lvl 65ish zones.
 
Murk

A murkling watcher
A murk guardian
An executed gruplok
A murdered gruplok
A fungus brute

oddly these all can be snared but summon.


Prophets Landing


nothing relevant seems to summon other than baldakans


(I will test a few more zones as I got time starting with the ones relevant to questing etc first.)
 
Back
Top Bottom