What's your favorite NS4 areas?

[Daral0085]

Are they harder then the high end giants?

Fear aura is dangerous, and the troll map is usually very packed so you have to make the save a bunch of times. Other than that I'd say no. In terms of melee capability, blooddrinkers are definitely the toughest mob because they crit really hard and have strong AB. The biggest weakness of blooddrinkers is their spellcasting TBH, because they have what seems like 0 concentration and spend about 3-4 rounds casting. That is a very long time for them to be doing nothing. Troll shamans never seemed to be too bad IMO (they will summon undead, fire a few spells but nothing nasty), but the fear aura can really destroy a group at low levels.

[Rufio]

The reason I always skipped trolls before was because they take a really long time to kill for their CR. It was just more efficient to skip them.

[DeputyDog]

But the cr has been upped... alot..
I can see the fear aura being a problem.. Call it your first wakeup call to get that will save up. It only gets worse later..

Hmm Blood drinkers need less spells you say? we'll see. I think it gives players a slight breather:)

[DeputyDog]

Hmm Old Wyrm Road, Bottemless pit, Lizardman and Yuanti.
Any of that get used anymore? Could up the difficulty on those some....
Ideas?

[Elagneros]

Amazons should be a better place to cycle to during the day or night based on your class, but there is just too many Amazons. An adventuring party can too easily get overwhelmed and killed. The walk back is too long to come back and try again.

Long walk? You guys are NC! You can just bind in at the southern Outpost. That's all of two freakin' zones to get back. Hell, I can bind in the Black Hills and get back fast with an RK toon and that only adds on 2 or 3 more screens.

Actually, you can bind at an ally point now right? If so, your buddies in TC can bind at all your bases all over the place up there, and AO players (all two of them ) can bind in Black Hills too. Longest walk is SL/MA, and that's from Avendell.

I haven't used the Lizardmen/Yuan-ti recently at all because I'm in RK now, and they're all blue. IIRC, they were good the way they were, but I haven't actually fought them in years. The Wyrm Road bandits could use some toughening, there's two different ones, CR 4 and CR 6. Getting to the east end of the Wyrm Road either means going through Old Town North, where the undead are as tough or a bit tougher, or the Black Marsh with various animal types that are CR 6-8. Or you could take the long way from the west end and fight through the yuan-tis and lizardmen which IIRC were higher CR.

The west end of the Wyrm Road is pretty pointless. Just a bunch of big cats and some wyrmlings. That really should have better mobs with the Mezzos over in Ash mountains now, and the yuan-ti and lizardmen in the Bottomless Pit, east Wyrm Road and Lost Canyon.

[Daral0085]

It only gets worse later..

In my experience (and of course YMMV), PC will saves scale up faster than NPC DCs. Generally speaking, what I've seen is that DCs are really high early on because characters have almost no will/fort/reflex modifiers at all. I mean realistically, at level 4 (or whatever) you will have at most about 5-6 will/fort due to class levels and maybe 3-4 fort/will due to stats. That means even a very tough build will have like 10 fort/will. An average build will be maybe around 6-8, where you have a few cross-class levels and maybe you aren't con/wis based. Then you compare to poison/fear/disease/whatever DCs that usually start at 14, and you're talking about a 50ish percent chance of getting stuck with some sucky debuff. As characters scale up, their saves go up almost linearly with character levels so by 40 you have about 40 on all saves, but negative effects usually cap at about 24 for on-hit effects and maybe 35-40 for NPC special abilities. So by end-game, you have roughly a 0% chance of failing saving throws against the vast majority of NPCs. The only exceptions are some bosses that have higher DC effects like Sioxanala implosion.

TL;DR: In my experience, it get's a lot easier later.

Hmm Old Wyrm Road, Bottemless pit, Lizardman and Yuanti.
Any of that get used anymore? Could up the difficulty on those some....
Ideas?

I think upping the difficulty is actually a pretty good idea. If there aren't any lowbies going there for levels, it might be worthwhile to make it another 10-20 CR range, or maybe even higher like 25-32 so it's a skara/IoD alternative, though that might not work if lots of lowbies wander through there and get ambushed by high CR mobs. A CR ramp-up like what you see in zons might be best in that case.

[DeputyDog]

Yea it wouldnt be a 20+/. more like 10-15
Dont like epic areas being easily acessible and that is on a road that may see some newbie traffic.

Maybe up the dragons to a little bigger as well.

[Alkapwn]

bottomless pit/old wyrm/marshes have little to no reason to travel there. Possibly add some more uber bosses with better gear. Anywhere there are low level caster mobs most leveling pc's will avoid like the plague if the rewards (xp,gear,fun) aren't justified.

Possibly make them more on the lines of Gnolls , Mezzoliths, would draw more players to those areas. A nudge above ogres and a nudge below mezzo's. Maybe some named 13-16 gear or a 20lvl boss drop for the more adventurous soloist. There's alot of property around Bottomless-Wyrm-Marshes that for the most part never see any levelers.

[Rufio]

bottomless pit/old wyrm/marshes have little to no reason to travel there. Possibly add some more uber bosses with better gear. Anywhere there are low level caster mobs most leveling pc's will avoid like the plague if the rewards (xp,gear,fun) aren't justified.

Possibly make them more on the lines of Gnolls , Mezzoliths, would draw more players to those areas. A nudge above ogres and a nudge below mezzo's. Maybe some named 13-16 gear or a 20lvl boss drop for the more adventurous soloist. There's alot of property around Bottomless-Wyrm-Marshes that for the most part never see any levelers.

Yeah, that whole area could be made a high level area, it isn't an area that is used for traveling or leveling at the moment. I go sometimes to get a dragon scale, and that is it. Hell, as a newbie I only went to that area because I saw it on the map and it was like the last place in all of ns4 I hadn't explored. It is kind of a hard place to end up on accident because there isn't much reason to head in that direction at the moment.

[DeputyDog]

Had a thought about Lizardmen and Yuanti. Should these be hostile to AO/RK or just leave em alone?
They are part of the whole wyrm road/bottomless pitt area Im looking at. I know Yuanti drop a scythe that used to be good.

or

Leave those alone and just mess with the dragons and wyrm road bandits..

[Elagneros]

There are two bosses in the Marsh and Road.

Lizardmen and yuan-ti are supposed to be part of AO right? From the wiki:

A loosely-bound faction consisting of Dragonkin, Yuan-Ti, and other Lizardfolk. While their hatred of non-serpentine creatures is without bounds, they are more than happy to recruit slaves and followers from the planar rifts, with promises of great power and wealth. One of the more fractured factions, the Ancient Ones have locations spread throught the realm, but are somehow able to coordinate attacks with remarkable efficiency and skill.

So the Wyrm Road, Bottomless Pit, and Lost Canyon are supposed to be part of their territory. Few people play AO anyway so that matters little.

Yuan-ti have a selection of level 5 & 9 gear.

Anyway, I'd say just pump up the bandits a bit more and add a more varied mix of dragons to the road. There's not many places to fight dragons in NS4, so some variety would be nice. And if you're going to play with the dragons, you could take into account some of the creature scaling that 1.69 introduced. Have mini dragons instead of the wyrmlings for the juveniles and some other scaling for the different age groups.

[Ajantis.]

Amazons should be a better place to cycle to during the day or night based on your class, but there is just too many Amazons. An adventuring party can too easily get overwhelmed and killed. The walk back is too long to come back and try again.

Long walk? You guys are NC! You can just bind in at the southern Outpost. That's all of two freakin' zones to get back. Hell, I can bind in the Black Hills and get back fast with an RK toon and that only adds on 2 or 3 more screens.

Not that it matters, but I really wasn't speaking as someone from NC, but rather someone from another faction. I've leveled to 16+ without leaving the faction several times. However, if the plan is to spread out the adventuring parties away from giant mountain, I'm just expressing the thoughts for why players have not wanted to go to Duskhaven before. I look forward to checking out the changes. Thanks

[DeputyDog]

added a few more rooms to each duskhaven map and spread the harder vamp spawns some for now.
Thinned the lower amazon spawn a little.

Is there a reason for people to hit lizardmen and yuanti right now? It used to be a place for LA to go but none of the other factions are close and if they get there they are usually past lvl 9 or doing somewhere else.
Im fine with keeping it part of AO, but maybe they all need a bump.

[Amoenotep]

its close enough to SL/RK for use....but players are lazy

[Eldaquen]

I have gone to Yuan-ti when there are pker's on giant mountain. Or when I need a change of pace from orges and giants.