This is a really difficult quest. I'm not sure if it just scales ridiculously poorly with party size or what, but the spawns and what they do makes for an incredibly difficult ordeal. My own run into it resulted in two deaths, and a fairly subpar reward for the SERIOUS expenditure involved in supply as well. We no where near broke even, and though the completion EXP reward is quite nice I imagine for higher level PCs, it still seems rather poorly balanced.
I cannot go into detail without it being spoiler territory. But it chewed through nearly all of my healing devices, three insulation pots, and even then I still died. Really genuinely unpleasant.
If this is the quest I think you mean, this quest has always had SERIOUS balance issues with big groups. Never do this quest with more than 3 people or you will regret it.
This quest also used to have a quest giver that granted large sums of gold, and a social skill check for additional good treasure. It has neither of these things, and while a relic from the past, the past this quest comes from was the "potion bloat" era.
I did it with four and it made me release a blood curdling scream at 2:30AM.
I did this quest with eight, with levels ranging from 5 to 9. We rocked it hard. Our only casualty was a mage with the extremely poor sense to attempt to use invisibility against eyeless slime monsters... and thus bled out twice in a row while we could do nothing to help him.
Of course, I should stress that we had such an exquisite suite of buffs that even our wizards in the back row had 20+ AC.
Our successful composition: Wizard, sorcerer, cleric, cleric, bard, fighter, fighter... fighter that can disable traps? Having a heavy lean toward magic made the quest dramatically easier, as did a carefully chosen number of summoned monsters that served to counter some of the most dangerous parts of the quest.
Even without powerful magic, I'm certain that particular feat builds or just a particular potion could tackle the quest quite effectively. I've faced off against the quest on several characters of different resources and roles. It's not impossible in the least.
Why is quest details or mechanical composition to do it discussed here? I am sure folks know better than spoil things or discuss mechanical details. Feedback to tell us to look at it, rewards or so is welcome, but not OOC guides to what to do in each quest.
I am not against removing forum priviliges. Please keep that in mind.
Quote from: Stranger;412514I did this quest with eight, with levels ranging from [COLOR="Red"]5[/COLOR] to 9. We rocked it hard. Our only casualty was a mage with the extremely poor sense to attempt to use invisibility against eyeless slime monsters... and thus bled out twice in a row while we could do nothing to help him.
Of course, I should stress that we had such an exquisite suite of buffs that even our wizards in the back row had 20+ AC.
Not true I was lvl 3 and survived there :)
It would serve well for there to be a suggestion sub-forum for making spoilerish suggestions. Maybe when forums are changed this will be more viable?
Quote from: Knight Of Pentacles;412526It would serve well for there to be a suggestion sub-forum for making spoilerish suggestions. Maybe when forums are changed this will be more viable?
This forum works fine, people on EFU seem to have this strange bent toward trying to tackle suggestions regarding quest difficulty by bragging about how easy it was for their optimal quest group compared to the issues say, a low magic group (with only one spellcaster) would have.
I wasn't really looking to discuss how to tackle the quest most efficiently, but more give my feedback on it's difficulty:reward ratio to the DM team. It's insanely difficult for what we got especially considering what we spent.
It feels like it was tuned for (what I assume and have been told) EFU:M was like, with more potions and rarer potions (like protection from
[COLOR="Red"][REDACTED][/COLOR] potions) being more common.
(On a side note: I only know them to come from one place reliably now, and that is on a low chance on a low level quest.)
Certain creatures having DR and others having stealth, tremor sense, poison and a penchant toward trying to assassinate the backline, and all of this happening within shooting galleries filled with on hit
[COLOR="Red"][REDACTED][/COLOR] makes it a rather frightful ordeal.
You almost have to have one of those potions or abuse AI or both to survive.
That's fine though. I don't mind a quest being extremely difficult. The EXP reward is fine, but the material rewards are less so.
I understand due to it's current design it'd be difficult to add the NPC back for the gold reward/potential for sweet treasure/et cetera, but perhaps this could be remedied by a gold treasure placeable within the quest itself? Or that old loot added to the table of the Ancient Chests?
Just some food for thought.
Also, I would by no means classify this as a 'Medium' difficulty quest as the description does. That was incredibly misleading and definitely colored my expectations of what was to come.
Back in the day this quest was usually only done if people had certain items made for its theme. There are things which drop inside of the quest, however, which a creative spellcaster can use to make it a much easier ordeal :) It has always been a very hard quest in the past, but back then there were certain items available from other sources to make it manageable, like ooze hunter spears, and as mentioned there was a more substantial reward.
It is nice to see an old quest brought back though! It probably could do with being scaled for the current lower magic environment of efu:r however.
I've done this quest several times with several characters, and while I see the potential for it to be a brutal supply drain if you just try to slog through it, if you've got a rogue (is that too much of a spoiler?) and you take your time and do it really patiently it's really not that bad at all. It's really similar in a lot of ways to the kobolds version of the mines quest, and a very similar difficulty as well in my opinion. (medium-hard I'd call it)
I do agree the material rewards are pretty sub-par, and last night when I finished it out I was given enough gold to give everyone in my party a 4 gp bonus for some reason, but as noted, the xp isn't bad. Considering that it doesn't show up very often, I must say I don't think it needs a major rebalancing.
Maybe giving 50-100 gp/PC at the end would be fair, but there's still going to be some people, and especially some classes, that hate it.
Quote from: Reylathi;412568if you've got a rogue (is that too much of a spoiler?) and you take your time and do it really patiently it's really not that bad at all.
Everything is literally SA immune and some of the NPCs have DR + SA immunity. How the hell are Rogues in any way good in this QA?
Uhm. I don't think I can say without spoilering...? I don't want to lose my forum privileges.
I've done the quest with low magic too, I need to emphasize. I only mentioned a group with a bloated abundance of spells because it was with they that I'd done it the day of this thread. With a level 3 among us, and a level 6 wizard, our team was definitely not optimized.
There are tactics for all compositions that can tackle the quest. I agree that it should be raised to Hard, as it's definitely more challenging than Smudgescale Kobolds, but it's certainly doable and only as taxing as one's approach.
I will take a look at tweaking this for EFU:R at some point. The mechanics were unchanged from EFU:M/A.
I tweaked the quest, but it will still be challenging.