Novia overland/overworld encounters - where are they?

I ran quite a distance through Novia both last night and this morning and found zero overland/overworld encounters. What happened to them? I didn't see any changes to them in the patch notes or any other recent threads about them.

Yes, I'm one of the odd players who actually likes them.

 

rejoice!!!!

in seriousness though the skele I always used to pass seems more absent - im not complaining cos they used to drive me up the wall because I couldnt run past some .. however there do seem to be less - maybe they quietly toned it down or tied it to astrology or something

 

I didn't have any problem getting caught be a skeleton and then a troll last night.

 

I'm not rejoicing. I find them pretty easy to get around if I don't want to be sucked into one (although I think they still need to fix the bug where your spawn protection doesn't seem to work if you load near a mob). Maybe it's just bad luck on my part. I use the encounters for lots of resources, especially since I don't want to play the quests until the game is actually released, and most of the zones are maddening. At least overland encounters are reliable, even if boring. I think a nice compromise would be to make the aggro radius of the overland enemies smaller so you can more easily slip by them, but I still want them in the game in full force. Stealth should also work better for avoiding them than it does now.

 

if you're in multi and there's a lot of other players on the map, they may have triggered them all

 

They're all still there from what I can tell.

 

What do you like about them?

 

Guaranteed resources, knowing what map I'd get based on the mob/location and being able to choose that, and getting a stag plains encounter is pure gold. Literally. I like that once I kill the entire mob, I can just gather resources and not worry about further distraction; few things are worse in this game to me than trying to gather stuff and being almost done only to be attacked at the last second and cancel what you're doing, then having to go kill the attacker, then trying to get back to what you were trying to do in the first place (repeatedly).

 

I agree with you that the overland encounters are nice for gathering resources. In one skeleton encounter I ended up with 30 nightshade and 23 root and 13 gold ore, 8 Cotten and 8 logs. It took me less then 5 mins to kill the mobs.

As for your frustration with gathering in scenes. I usually have what I call a honey hole in a scene usually around a landmark in the scene. I basically running the same path over and over in the small area of a scene and I am able to farm lots of mats. Also I always try to leave something behind on the mobs corpse so it takes them longer to respawn.

 

I like the gold ore and loot from the chest, getting a repair kit or recall scroll is pretty good.