Quest : Water Under the Bridge

[Electrohydra]

AKA That underwater algae cleaning quest that spawns in the Water Gardens

I was talking with another player about this quest and realized that in all the times either of us have done this quest, we've never actually beaten it without any casualties. The quest is weird and requires players to have specific skills and pay attention to things they aren't used to. Which is very cool, I love the quest in theory for that, but because it's an underwater quest (and gives relatively little rewards) it's not run very often, so people don't really know the tricks it pulls and it ends up killing less experienced players (or more experienced players who where counting on those less experienced players to have their back). I was under the impression that this wasn't supposed to be an incredibly difficult quest, more of an average quest for mid-level players like the other quests that spawn in the same place. The rewards also tend to be pretty lackluster since a lot of them are in loot piles that have very high DCs to find anything (25+).

To make this quest a little more attractive and less of a newbie trap, I would suggest doing one or more of the following :
-Remove Hold Monster from the boss's spellbook. This is by far the most frequent cause of PC deaths I've seen. Because you are underwater and in an entangle spam, failing the save on this is almost always lethal as your allies have a very hard time reaching you.
-Lower the DC on the various search piles. Rewarding people with Search is nice, but it would be nicer if people with low/moderate search still had a chance to find something.
-Increase the xp a little bit. I know the other quests in that "spot" have low XP as well, but 47xp at level 8 feels too little for a quest that's still very dangerous even to level 8 PCs.

[Egon the Monkey]

Yeah. I have enjoyed this quest, but that's because I have Sneak Attack, Light Armour and really good reflex.  One thing I like is how it is an utter playground for Rogues to rampage about in, as they have precisely the skill combination you want to mess the mobs up and loot the place. And that's rare.

Dispel/Hold Monster is brutal as it can strip your PfX/Clarity and lasts long enough it can drown you. And it's impossible for most casters to buff you up short-term for the boss fight because of underwater spellfail.  If the boss had 2 dispels instead, it would be still mean (because dispel is a massive dick move underwater) but not have spells so vicious that people metagame them.

I also agree on the search piles. Would it be possible to rebalance them so that most of them have low DC, but there are some with high DC/high reward?