What's your PITA zone?Follow

Plane of Sky


/thread

One thing I love about Crescent Reach is the ability to get your free 50 tradeskill points... And not having to run to Abysmal Sea to do it. Gods, that place is awful.

As a cleric, I really hated moloing Blackfeather Roost . Kills just took sooooooo friggin' long.

I don't have the knowledge of the geography that most of you probably do, since this is my first outing and have only been at it maybe a couple of months; I sailed through the Abysmal Sea and may have stopped somewhere real briefly for a quest item but didn't spend much time there. Just made the Plane of Sky last night and left almost immediately (no gate or levitate? scary stuff right there) and it terrified me to no end leaping off the side to get back down to the ground. One of those instances I just had to cross my fingers and hope the info was right, and that I was understanding it correctly.

For me the biggest pain has probably been Guk because of all the ladders and narrow walkways I kept falling from (or, in the case of the ladder just standing there like a buffoon climbing an invisible rope and getting nowhere). Burning Woods comes in second not so much because of the zone itself, but just getting there. I spent a lot of time in Burning Woods and I'd leave and have to go all the way through the Dreadlands lengthwise to get back. It was a hell of a run, and I kept thinking, the Wizards Guild needs to get on their game and put a telporter out here.

But the biggest pain for me in the whole game? Easy. Ascent stairs to library in PoK. Roughest maze to smoothly navigate in the game so far.

Edited, Jul 28th 2013 3:13pm by broonsbane

Falls on his own sword...........

I dislike the current Bazaar too. It's needlessly time-consuming to run to a player-vendor. I guess the purpose of that is to get you to spend RL cash on Expedient Delivery Vouchers, which I admit I do use but only when I'm not IN the Bazaar.

Old-timers like me remember the previous Bazaars. My favorite was the wide-open one with vendors lined up like horse stalls. LOL. You never had "mysterious forces" preventing you from finding a seller in that Bazaar. Of course, I'm not sure there was a FIND function back then for vendors, altho I can't remember anymore. As a druid I always had TRACK!

Edited, Jul 29th 2013 7:12am by Sippin

Dungeons are almost invariably frustrating but I leave them off my PITA list because that's their nature. Dungeons are supposed to be challenging to navigate. I mention Kedge Keep as a PITA because it being underwater makes it a three-dimensional dungeon nightmare.

Not all dungeons are bad, though. Stillmoon Temple and Ashengate are both easily navigable "dungeons." It's probably being underground and with very tight winding tunnels that make a dungeon "bad."

Zone design is definitely an art form. I'm always amazed at the variety of a small dungeon like Crushbone, which is one of the smallest zones in the game but it's laid out in such a way that it seems to be a lot bigger than it is. Compare Crushbone, as zone design, with the neighboring Greater Faydark zone, which has seemingly an endless supply of "useless" space. Of course, outdoor zones are generally supposed to seem to be "wide, open (and mostly useless) spaces."

Hmmm... TT never bothered me much at all, even with the thick fog. I think mainly because you could follow walls and landmarks to get to the places in the zone you needed to go. Once you'd made the run to OS a couple times, it didn't matter what the rest of the zone looked like. It was "Follow left wall from EJ till you hit the aqueduct. Follow aqueduct into zone until you get to ruins. Follow ruins keeping them to your left to first corner. Follow around to the left until you see the fallen over pillar. Hang a left, past one building, then around and down the ramp till you get to the clicky". Didn't need to see very far to do that and it was pretty much completely safe every time (heh. pretty much).

There wasn't much reason to *be* in TT except to get the key bits for OS, and then to travel through it to OS. I personally kinda liked the spooky look and feel of TT and EJ though (another zone that you mostly traveled through, although I think EJ had a dragon in it IIRC). CoM rocked as well. As said above, they had this ancient world kind of feel to them that was really well pulled off.

If we're talking about dungeons though (and turning the topic around), I think my favorite one was Kaesora. I really liked the layout, and that it was one way in, one way out. I also particularly liked the "tower" sections, and how you were underground, and following a tunnel that spun around the circular rooms that were lined up above and below one another. Dunno. I just liked the layout. It actually encouraged you to dungeon crawl through it rather than just sit in one area. Hah. Thinking of that, the same can be said for Veksar. Loved that zone too!


It's hard to judge "worst" layouts when it comes to dungeons (or maybe "most pita") because you almost have to divide things into "pre-maps" and "post-maps". So a lot of the old world dungeons were *really* hard to navigate and forced you to learn them (cause no maps back then). What I do find interesting is that once they put in the in-game map feature, the dungeon layouts got simpler, not harder. I suspect because since everyone had a map, there wasn't much reason to make them complex anymore. But the old world stuff like Befallen, Runnyeye and Blackburrow? Holy hell! But you really gained a sense of accomplishment once you did learn the layouts of those zones. I suppose that's something that's been lost a bit.

My first 4 expansion PITA's(from back when it was current)

Vanilla - West Karana: This zone was just huge

Kunark - Takanon's Teeth: Not sure why but I dreaded running to Seblis because of this zone

Velious - Skyshrine: Want to check your Yelinak faction? Enjoy your 30 minute run through this place while avoiding ******** up your maze run and falling into pit traps.

Luclin - Mons Letalis: Before in game maps, finding the tunnel to the Grey was a nightmare sometimes.

I spent so much time in Runnyeye farming Blackened alloy and the few named drops that I SHOULD have known it. But I knew the top floor and the bottom floor (which became the Pickclaw level) but that middle area with the crystals coming out of the walls and stuff? Each time I wound up there, I'd pause and scratch my head and just start wandering until it looked familiar again. I think part of it was a lack of real camps in that area so it was always "pass through" real estate I never sunk my teeth into.

Siren's Grotto was a zone where 99% of the time you were just trying to get from zone line to zone line and perhaps shepherd the uninitiated through without killing them. The rest of that place... forget about it.

Does ANYONE like Siren's Grotto? I have to admit I was always grateful that I could succor across this zone and get the heck across it as fast as possible. Not only the layout is bad but those see-inv and enchanter mobs, with their charm and debuff spells made the zone completely worthless for XPing.

I don't really have a zone that annoys me, but my least favorite one would be Kedge Keep, mostly because of all the terrifying corpse runs I had back in the day, but aside from that, I think it's the scariest zone ever made! An underwater city full of tight maze-like corridors. Every time I went there I just felt uneasy, fearing for my life every time I turned around and saw a giant shark right in my face. Then as I went deeper I discovered one of the most dangerous things in the game, npc's with the ability to charm!

I still get scared whenever I go there, even with a character that can wipe the whole zone.

Flashbacks of the crazy tentacle monsters in EC.... before defiant gear that was some scary stuff.