The Spirit Realm

Damn, there's a lot of interesting stuff on Test. Check out thread for example.

That looks fantastic.

On a side note, I now know never to go to the Sony Test forums again. The prevailing opinion of anybody NOT playing on Test Server seems to be that we're a bunch of do-nothing losers personally responsible for every bug that goes live.

Whooo, I love reading posts from a bunch of people with bitterness/entitlement issues! (not)

But yes, looking forward to trying out these faction quests...

Competition for the mobs/quest items may be a problem at first.

Competition for mobs and items at first? Yup, but that will taper off within a few weeks. I would expect that at peak play hours it will be packed for the first few months maybe. But the way it sounds is that you do X mission and it takes 30mins and you cannot redo it for another 18 hours (a day basically). So once you're done, you move on to do something else and if there are alot of people, you can group up and it should take less than 30mins. So people get in and get out rather quickly and make way for other people.

Unless I'm totally misjudging server population and desire to do these at the same time, it should shake itself out to being very managable within in a month or two. I'm personally going to avoid it like the plague till then. I hate huge crowds of people if its not just one giant raid group.

As far as the gear goes, I'm freaking estatic. If any of you old people are still out there and remember me, I LOVED LDON and DON stuff. I even wrote a detailed guide for creator missions cause I did them so freaking often. The only thing that could have been improved (I thought) was to make missions soloable so I didnt have to spend an hour getting a group together (i settled for 2boxing). Now it sounds like they have made my dream come true. A way to get really good gear via soloing in a task based system that doesnt require you to get lucky to get a drop (always a pet-peave of mine, camp something for 100 hours and never see the drop you want, then a guildie says its rotted like 9 times )

Anyway, looking forward to what people on test have to say about it. The major improvement that I believe could be made is to have an instance created for you or your group to do the tasks in. I dont know if SoE could handle having a million instances open though. Just an idea to avoid competition.

I think you're right on the 18 hour lock helping keep things from getting too hectic.

Unfortunately, it sounds like there aren't going to be any visible slot items on this guy, so it won't be very LDON-ish. I'd gotten similarly excited until I read that. Don't get me wrong, I think this is still a great idea, but most armor slots are still going to need some other catch-up method.

Currently the tasks gives like 20-30 Faycitum ( the currency for that ) for 1 quest and most of the items range from 900 to 1200 for the armor and like 1400 to 2200 for the waepons.Its directly the tier 2 items from sof mobs.

A nice part about it is the pet focus earing with the demi plane pet focus that comes from the top floor of beza ( higher then the document npc i beleive) at like 1 k .Even if its at 20 faycitum at a time it sure beats trying to get up top of beza with a low end group.Hell it will even be soloable over a few weeks/months but hey its a alternative.

Faction wise its just a bonus and not what you should hope to mainly use for because at 2 hits per 18 hours im not sure you will have finish 1 faction by nov.And all delivery quests are on same timers and all combat quests are on same timer.

Another new currency? Really? Ugh.

Well, we got 20 currency for the non-faction task, but 3 for the faction combat/noncombat tasks. Just tried one of each, but it was pretty fun. Made me dang glad to have Selo's around.

Very nice way to speed up factioning. The gear will probably not mean anything for top-tier raiders, but if nothing else, it's a way to pick up a focus you're otherwise missing, without having to get lucky.

What I'd REALLY like to see is a wider array of focii. I haven't had a poison focus in a loooong time, carrying around a defiant bracer now, just to have something. It would be truly wonderful to see this here, since there's a friggin corruption focus.

So if I'm reading the original post & I remember the reward amounts correctly (big assumptions there) max currency you could get per 18 hours looks like 83?
2 x non-faction tasks = 60
7 x combat tasks = 21
1 x non-combat faction tasks = 3

That's definitely a piece of gear every 10 or 12 days that you do every task available, though that may be a stretch. I'm definitely not on a schedule to play 4+ hours every day. Still better odds than I'm used to seeing, and virtually no risk on all but a few of the combat tasks, depending on who you are.

Veril - thanks for the good suggestion, but definitely can't buy one on Test. I'd probably need to hunt down a more easily-attainable focus item. Maybe I'm doing something drastically wrong, but I can't reliably solo nameds in DSH, so I haven't tried HoS or the others mentioned as dropping the bracer. (it could be something as simple as a low shielding %, I'm not sure why I get destroyed so quickly on things that I probably should be soloing easily)

Unfortunately my regular play group is pretty much worse-geared and AA'd than the shaman, so we have a lot of catch-up to do before I can camp that caliber of upgrades.

This sounds to me like a way for casual players to obtain our 80 disciplines/Tomes before the next expansion! Hooray!

Thanks, Veril - that's just the kind of stuff I need to hear. Things have changed a lot since I was at the top of the game, and my habits are kind of dated. I do have a tendency to have autoattack on (the crit panther procs are appealing), but I'll cut that out and see if I don't live a little longer. I don't tend to let the pack dogs take hits, because I'm afraid of losing one, but it sounds like I'm not giving them enough credit.

The pack ARE going to die, but they are there to buy you some time to apply your dot's, and let your precast HoT heal you back up for a tick or two. Generally they let you get 1-2 spells off, if one of them enrages then you get another 1-2 spells off.

I am really psyched about this possibility. My shaman will greatly benefit if I am able to do some duo tasks, or even solo tasks that allow for gear to be gotten. I know that most of this gear is able to be purchased in the bazaar, but my biggest issue is the pure cost of the pieces.

I do have a couple of questions/suggestions...

For the Faction...is this a new line of faction, or do the tasks help you out with the other factions out there. (I am so dreading working all of the various factions)

Also...is a level of faction required to purchase the stuff.

For the Currency... is it tradeable, or if not...are the pieces obtained still tradeable. I am assuming that the armor is the Alloy-linked stuff, and since that stuff is currently tradeable it would be great for the new stuff to be as well. Might help some with the mudflation in the bazaar.

The other thing that I am hoping is that maybe the other pieces needed to level the armor will be available via this vendor method. Perhaps not the same level as a Crystallos focused armor, but perhaps there could be something similar. Would be nice to be able to power the armor up through the cores, and then eventually get an armor that has that special slot for the additional chest augment.

For those that do alot of soloing or duoing in the game, having a vendor option is wonderful. I know for me this would actually bring me more into the game, since I am more or less burned out from the raiding game.

And I am also really looking forward to seeing more than just armor and weapons. Non-visible slots, augments, and all the other stuff out there would be awesome... (get rid of some of the DoN augs that I have)

Can you tell I am excited.....

Currency is definitely not tradeable as of now - but hey, it's Test.

Also, I misremembered above. It was 53 faycitum for doing one each of the 3 types (so 30, 20, and 3 faycitum per task), so you could end up with a lot more per day (if you're crazy) than I'd thought. Who knows how it'll get adjusted by the time it goes live.

No, you don't need to do any factioning to buy the items, just save up the currency. The faction in question IS for the various SoF factions (Camp Valor, Ladies of Light, etc.). HE is not on any of these factions, but can raise any of them through the tasks.

That's only if the currency is tradeable. I'm hoping that will not be the case. Having these in place will be a nice way to update my current hodge podge of armor that scales pretty much from PoP onward. Also looking forward to the pet focus earing for my mage since there really isn't an easy item to obtain for 70+ pets aside from raid mobs.

ah - made an assumption based on all other currency having been tradeable in the past. my bad.

After I posted, I read the stuff a little bit closer that has been posted and I have to ask...

Is the Alloy-Link armor available this way, or is it just the stuff that has been posted for the non-visible slots? If it isn't then I will be a bit dissapointed, but there are still good upgrades on the list.

I am also thinking that if those items are still attunable, you may still have the issue of people selling the rewards to make plat and such. Which may or may not help the economy of the server depending on the supply. I personally want the rewards to be tradeable, because even if the currency is not tradeable, I could run the missions on one toon or both toons together and then kind of share the wealth since only my shammy really needs the new stuff.

Its sounding more and more like just the non visable slots and weapons. That disappoints me too a little, but its Test, so we'll see how things shake out. Also, neither the currency nor items *should* be tradable, but its SOE so who knows?

I wonder how they are approaching the fact that most of the equipment listed above is not no drop. x.x

Anyway, this isn't intended to be some sort of "look at me, I can skip teir 2 SoF" handout. Let's try to keep the complaining about the lack of visible armor to a minimum. x.x