The Mobs should match the Tier

He is still in there, the same approach as before (ie hidden walls) but they just redesigned the rest of the place around him. He's still red, too. lol

 

he better con red, given it is an lvl 60ish group thing (or more, did it first time with 80 so no idea) at level 1 he pasted me though.

 

They're worse than a waste of time right now.

A T2 road encounter has T2 resources, T2 treasure that a high level character doesn't want but the same encounter uses a group of T5 Lichs to make the T2 player who wants the resources avoid the whole scene.

T5-10 Monsters in a T2 zone is lose-lose.

 

He's still quite red at level 113.

 

Yeah. I mean, if I get pulled into a road encounter, even with T5 mobs I'm probably better off skipping it and continuing on to my final destination.
If a low lvl gets pulled in, then they may just get killed. Either way its lose/lose.
Road encounters don't need more monsters imo, they need to be a) meaningful or b)skippable.
Something along the road has caught my attention ...I have no intention of investigating ...move along.

I think its cool that there's new roving encounters for quests/emotes ....nice use of the mechanic, but I've done all of those, and there's no further need for me to enter these scenes, ever.
If they had something unique that you could only get in them, that was worth getting....or even if you had a chance to spawn like a huge cottonfield or forest full of choppable trees or something, then it would at least be worth it.
In the current state, even in the off-road encounters the harvest xp is inferior to just...going wherever you were going.

Seriously though. Road counter: Cotton field. Guarded by giant beetles, here for revenge...

 

In my opnion there does not need to be special things in it, only an mechanic that adjusts the encounter to the players level.
And maybe some serious tweaking to keep loading times down, the most time i spend with encounters is the loading screen in and out.
If there was serious wood to chop or so yeah.. maybe, but fighting respawning liches to cut trees..naaaaah that is kinda silly given liches cost me more money than they carry .

 

One thing I liked about the newbie zone east commanlands in EQ was the wandering Giants. Having to watch out for and avoid higher level mobs in a zone added some excitement to to adventuring. The tier should indicate lowest possible level. But there should be higher level surprises.

 

You wouldn't have liked them so much if three of them spawned on top of you for clearing the area. These giants are mostly in their own section of the zone not spawning on top of you blocking you from harvesting mandrake roots

 

An giant is hard to overlook though (and the giant in question was outrunable with bard/SoW, it was not like it one hittet you).
Extra high level mobs should be someway obvious, not found out by ending as suddnely ghost

 

I've noticed that the load times for the roadside encounters is a lot shorter now, so there's that too.

 

That is my point exactly. Not only is that a bad mechanic and experience overall, but a new player to that is going to throw up their hands.
Adding high to extremely high level mobs to lower scenes doesn't make sense.
When you go into a scene, regardless of level, but especially for the lower ones, the mobs should be slightly higher and slightly lower than that tier. Put one or two at the next tier isn't terrible, but this gang mentality doesn't make for an enjoyable experience.

 

liches in Tier3?Rly?srz?

 

I don't like that they keep making the game harder and harder for solo players: I use to be able to defeat the Siege Engineers/guards in sieges solo in a reasonable time and sometimes just one group of them to complete the Arcane Catalysts Quest, and solo the Encounters even tier 5 reasonably well, and now both are a hassle due to me needing 18 Arcane Catalysts for the Siege Engineers Quest and the Siege Engineers being changed to ranged mobs, which means now I have to always defeat all Siege Engineers to get any reward beyond their individual XP/loot, and I now have to fight waves of harder and harder mobs in the new Encounters to fully complete them. Yeah. I know I don't have to complete the Siege Engineers Quests/Encounters completely, or I should just group with other players, but I should have the option to do them reasonably well as a high end player solo and not be forced to team up with other players to complete them. Same with the Hidden Vale/Cabalists and Fire/Phoenix Quests which isn't fair for players like me who play solo 95% of the time. Why am I being forced to group with other players to complete encounters/quests when I'm supposed to be able to play SotA Solo Online?

 

I agree with you completely. There is a definite push to make scenes too hard for the solo player.
I'm not opposed to groups at all, but my time isn't reliable enough to commit to such things.
I don't want other people waiting on me, or vice versa. And just as bad, to get together, start, and time run out for the evening.
It feels like a lot of these punishing changes revolve around the economy.

I do recall seeing that. And it makes sense and doesn't seem too bad as written.
But in reality, it's simply not a fun experience. It goes from Tier 3 to 6 in the blink of eye. It's not Tier 2 with a couple Tier 3. Or Tier 3 with one or two Tier 4 with the chance of an escape. It's a mob that swarms instantly.
The risk FAR outweighs any reward you get from scenes like this. And in the end, as many have stated, scenes are being avoided. If people are avoiding the scene, it's time for a rethink.

 

It's a T6 scene with T2 loot/resources that T6 ready players will avoid anyway.

 

One of the reasons I startet in Sota was for the ability to play meaningfull solo too.

I am all for group content <If it is about new zones>

Forced to group is bad, it was one of the shortcomings of EverQuest, because the time it took to find a group (even with tools for it avaiable) was often so long for actual playing little time was left, more than 50% was spend waiting.

We just need the possibility to solo, in an meaning full way.

Then, few players in Sota like to communicate with others, so meh to forced grouping, it never really works out.

 

As someone who's running around on a way-lowbie character right now, the road encounters seem pretty well-tuned for solo newbie play this week. I was able to kill all of the mobs that were yellow to me in tier 3+ zones, with a combination of careful pulling and running to a safe distance when I got too many of them on me. I wasn't able to kill the powerful mobs, which were red to me, so I wasn't able to do things like pick flowers in the ring of columns in the skeleton encounters. But I did feel challenged without feeling like I couldn't get anything out of the encounter.

I can't speak to what other areas are like for newbies, or for what the road encounters are like for higher-level characters; so far I've mostly been focusing on doing quests. (Just got to Harvest, and went there right after finishing up most things in Resolute.)

 

I think Chet may have had good luck with some less-difficult encounters. Some of the encounters definitely seem to have aggressive high-level mobs (yellow to me at Adv. level 68) that spawn immediately (or early) and move all over the scene. I'm thinking specifically of wolves in bandit encounters. I think the (light red to me) liches are pretty easy to aggro, too.

I really like the idea of more variation in the encounters, and I love the idea that they can be tier 3+ for some solo-level and some party-level content. But if the encounters hit too soon with 3+ party level content, they're not 3+, they're tier 5.

I thought the way the Corpion desert encounters have worked since long before R54 worked great: soloable tier 2 content until you clear the zone, but after you clear the zone then the scary guys show up. Perfect! Completely soloable throughout the map, then a terrifying new challenge. However, I was deeply disappointed when I finally killed the Darkstarr Corpion for the first time, and he dropped nothing more interesting than one of the lowbie corpions would have dropped, and nothing interesting happened. I had been so hoping for something cool: a nice drop, or, even better, the opening of a secret burrow with a chest or . . . I dunno, something cool!

I like the new direction with variation and interesting new challenges, but also completely agree that some encounters might be genuinely too hard for lowbies, and I agree that the rewards are not adequate to the new challenge level.

 

Specially with the encounters now.. Travelling should be challenging in lower levels (because it is the scary wild) and then become easy at higher levels (reward for grinding endless hours the very boring rise)

Ok we can walk around the encounters from lvl 1 or just walk out again but...

For me the issue is loadscreens, I know there is no way to do away with them so the whole road encounter thing is kinda an loose/loose thing.

Putting in triple tier 3 or 4 in an tier 2 encounter though is kinda over doing it with quick waves (and wolves who are even with snare dammed fast, no speedlimits for them it seems!)