Questing

Seeing as I skipped a few months, and am generally lazy about questing anyway, I decided to take a big part of the day to knock out a few that I needed to do. The first was the Evo Tree quest, which also drops the Woodbin for the master crystal, Seeking the Elements, which has a shot at dropping the Ingot Keys for the master crystal, and the two Grim quests. I actually started the Evo Tree quest a few days ago but only got around to finishing it today.


Evo Tree Quest

This one is somewhat tedious. It isn't bad exactly, but it employs a few things which I consider artificial difficulty mechanics and it also uses creatures that are basically reskins of other old creatures. At one point I even tamed two of the quest creatures because the non-tameable flag wasn't set. The corpses also betray what creature they really are in some cases.

The first leg of the quest is a simple matter of going to Wind Park and chopping trees until you get bark. It didn't take long, but that may have been due to lucky spawn mostly leaving me alone (or that I have a nice Cu).

The second leg takes you to the swamps near Trinsic where Ancient Dragons roam. There, you have to kill Ancient Trees for an annoyingly uncommon quest drop. As you might have picked up from the name and my previous comment, Ancient Trees are basically Ancient Dragons, complete with the same sounds and fire breath. They're not the easiest thing to kill and could possibly one-hit a low HP character, but this is further compounded by the fact that the spawner is completely stupid and spawns Ancient Trees in a cluster at a time. I'll be honest, I resorted to mirrors here; I can solo the stupid things, but it's far quicker to just throw obscenely overpowered throwaway summons around.

The third leg takes you to a dungeon type spot in Elysium with twelve different hallways. One lich (or "lich") will spawn at a time, in a random hallway. Some of these are actually liches, Lich Lords, or Ancient Liches, but a few are modeled after dragons, rats, or dire wolves. The dragons are even vulnerable to Dragon Slayer instead of undead. This is where I tamed quest creatures, a dragon and a wolf; don't get any ideas about doing the same. I reported it to a GM and the tame flags were set correctly (or so I'm told, I didn't test it again). This part is far easier than the Tree section, but it shares the annoying uncommon drop rate for the quest item.

Finally, after returning to the quest start you'll be kicked to the virtue shrine NW of Tram Trinsic, where the boss creature will spawn. She deals pretty solid damage and loves to drop Flamestrikes. At 241hp, she could probably drop me in four of them. Her physical wasn't bad either. I stuck with the Undead slayer while fighting with her, mostly because I was too busy to think of switching, but her corpse said Succubus, so next time I'll try Demon on her. She dropped the Woobin for me, which is what I really wanted. She also can drop the Evo Tree seed, but I'm far less concerned about that.

Seeking the Elements

This one starts in Tram T2A, the desert near Paupa. It's a pretty easy quest; the spawn is pretty quick, all vulnerable to Dragon slayer aside from the boss, and the quest drop rate is higher than the Evo Tree quest. You're basically running around the desert killing various custom ore elemental Dragons. They have a chance to spawn Terragon, but even without that the tend to be able to one-hit my pets. My Evo Hound rolled up twice, in one shot, and my Cu once. A Terragon Electrum got me thanks to teleport, but even as Terragon the dragons don't spawn with more than 2K HP so they aren't hard to kill.

The Plat dragon acts as the final boss and will drop your ultimate reward; Ingot keys and mounted dragon heads for each element are the only possible rewards I'm aware of. I lucked into my keys and probably won't repeat this one unless I hear about another reward. Be aware, the Plat dragon at the end is obscene; some of its skills were in the multiple hundreds and it's base damage was something like 91-110.


Grim's Keeper

This one was tedious. You have to collect 1000 undead vials, which drop on the creatures that spawn in Grim's Dungeon (the Elysium version of Dungeon Doom), as well as four custom drops from unique creatures. The uniques are generally very easy, though the Fleshless Dragon is easily the most lethal. It managed to kill me twice, though I only count one of them because for the other the guard bug hit my Cu at the same time and there isn't much to do about a 190 damage fire breath hitting with a betraying pet that hits like a truck.

This part of the quest is very managable, so don't get the wrong idea. Other than the dragon, everything is weak to Undead slayer and generally dies in a Flamestrike or two. The hardest part, if that word even really applies, is collecting the 1000 vials; it takes a while, so you may want to break it up into a few trips if it gets too boring. Your reward is Grim's Curse, which acts as the key to crossing the river to the gauntlet.


Summoning Grim's Pet

This part was much easier for me, but I could see a lot of people having trouble with the drop rates. It's very similar to the Doom Gauntlet, but instead of just facing one creature in each section you have a constant spawn with a named creature that drops an idol you'll need for your quest collector. Once you're in the room, you can't move on until you collect the idol.

The first room took a few kills before I got the idol, the next three were immediate, and the last took longer than any other, maybe five or skills named kills. The creatures in the rooms were the same; minotaurs, a named minotaur, golems (renamed, of course), and exodus robots. Nothing seemed any more amped up than usual, so it was really just a matter of making your kills and getting your drop. I let my Cu most of the work since it could one-hit most of them. The named minotaur took a bit more work, but nothing too threatening.

The Mechataur is the end of your quest. It's capable of dropping the Elysium gear and the Mercenary Wolfbane, all of which are worthwhile rewards. Be warned, there is no promise of a drop from making your kill and there's a week wait between quest repeats.

Mechataur can spawn minotaurs and golems, has a counter to ranged attacks, and has an area of effect type attack that deals decent damage. He can kill you with it if you're not careful. I let my Cu and my Merc handle him while I healed and trashed the spawn to keep from getting overwhlemed; even with five and six of those creatures out there were no deaths and I was able to roll out my damage spells often enough to keep things under control. The golems are complete trash and nearly drop in one energy bolt, but the minotaurs are a good bit more durable. It wasn't a long fight for me, felt shorter than dealing with Slasher of the Veils even. Sadly, I didn't get any artifacts or interesting items.


Conclusion

Of all the quests, the Grim line is easily the best of the bunch. The other quests are interesting but have a bit more tedium to them and not enough polish. It still disappoints me to kill a creature and see its corpse name betray what it really is, and missing the taming flags in the Evo Tree quest definitely adds a feeling that things were just thrown together. At this point, I feel like certain things in quest making should be fundamental; at the very least, certain things in creature building should be fundamental, but still we see lazy re-skins and Trees that make dragon sounds. Grim's quest is actually *older* than both of the others, yet it managed to get things right in that regard.

The other issue with the Evo Tree quest in particular was the drop rate; the whole reason I broke that quest into multiple days was because of the Ancient Trees. You only need to collect 10~ of the quest drop from them, but it took hours of hunting and killing to pull them all together. I consider this an artificial difficulty trick because it only serves to lengthen the time you spend on the quest without really making things any harder; if you can kill one tree (or three, with the way they spawn), then you can kill a hundred of them; the fact that you *have* to kill a hundred of them to complete that part of the quest doesn't make it any more difficult, it just makes it time consuming.

I also don't like the way some things just feel like they were crafted with making things challenging for the Mirror Image crowd to the point that it actually rules out other play styles; these quests are all impossible for a bard, the Ancient Tree leg of the Evo Tree quest or the ore Dragons quest is probably not possible for a true (non-evo using) Tamer, and all of them are extremely difficult for a Mage type without extensive use of throwaway summons. In the case of Fiana or Mechataur this is expected since they're boss creatures, but the Ancient Trees, for example, are nearly as hard as any of the bosses and you have to take out ten of them at the very least. The ore dragons could one-hit me if I wasn't careful or got teleported on top of. These are the sort of things that tell me what sort of play styles are expected on PF, and it's a little disheartening.

At least I can say that there was no insta-kill HP Fire breath this time.