EZ Server

Two Minis Reopened!

The Catacombs of Dranik and the Bloodmoon Temple are both open for business again. It should be mentioned that they have changed the way they function to better accommodate EZ's playstyle (and to because I'm tired of them being exploited).

Firstly, they are no longer daily. That means one can spam run them over and over.
Secondly, the drop rate has been normalized to that of the matching tier(s). There are some areas that the minis are an improvement, some areas where it's on par. I'll leave that to you ladies/gents/trolls to figure out.
Finally, the berry reward amount has been SLIGHTLY reduced (Dranik from 10 to 8, Bloodmoon from 5 to 4) and the reward costs have gone up ~15%. Given that berries are no longer locked to daily (....for those not abusing the system), this was a logical step.

As an odd "bonus", this technically makes ANOTHER place one could farm up charms. A higher level could hammer though fairly quickly, which MAY be more beneficial than other zones.


-Hate

awesomesauce!

looking forward to testing this out

Cool, thanks HB.

The message when you accept Dranik says you get 7 berries. When you finish Dranik it says you receive 8 berries but you only get 7!

Just fixed. Good with reboot. :-)


-Hate

ran the bloodmoon 10 times last night and got Zero essence..


RnG?



love the new change

ran the other one once and got 1 Dmajor

As an odd "bonus", this technically makes ANOTHER place one could farm up charms. A higher level could hammer though fairly quickly, which MAY be more beneficial than other zones.


-Hate
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Not to mention an alternate for farming sls since they are on the vendor as well :)

I donated my entire Saturday to this...

I farmed  over 300 berries in one shot....

I dont recommend that...its tons of work.

So that being said I was rewarded with 50k AA, 6 Jewlery Candlelight , 10 LP essence and about 10+mil in plat

not bad for a days work I guess...

Now I am um...fairly...above normal I guess in rolfstomp gear... So for most people this will take MUCH longer.

It feels like a combo of TOFS and TOV... not bad really...grindy....but not bad....


Essence drop rate is sad

Its super good AA for sure.

I'm glad to see someone found out Jeweler Candlelights drop like crazy in there. Hopefully they'll get their slot 24/25s back (if they havent by now).

It's a great way to farm SLS while also gaining cash and AA. The biggest gripe the masses have with SLS is they were always a total waste of time and no gains beyond the SLSs.

Sad to hear the drop rates for essences are meh, but to be honest that would be some serious mudflation. Could lead to a chicken/egg situation where the stumbling block now for hoh tokens with less botters out there (since gminor and majors are going to need to be mostly farmed manually outside of minis) will basically devolve into the dminor situation, which are basically only farmed on dbl loot events. Admit it, any time you've ever seen anyone /auc ing for  t1 crystal stacks you've laughed that they havent made the obvious connection that the botters for that are long gone and no living human who's ever logged into EZ server has ever farmed t1 crystals.. to sell.. for plat. ever.

Regardless, good to see berries quicker to obtain with dediction now.

Side note: Does this spell the final end to the Abyss mini? I would imagine so, sadly, unless there was a way to force the same 5 bosses every day. Like on the server side 'today our bosses are Glassilisk, Moe, The Hammer, Life, and Decay". For the entire server. Would be a way to hard-code against mini-abuse for flagging purposes, and give the poor bastards needing abyss essences a zone to flail away wildly in..

And still make it worth doing for people who need t5 flags. Just  a thought.

I always loved the t5 mini because it was so darn quick and compact.. a mini that takes 10 min to clear feels like a 'daily' more than the slogfest and zonefest of dranik. :)

I've been having problems getting into a successful expedition for berry farming, just tossing this out here to see if anyone else is having issues..? It's doing all sorts of crazy stuff..

Attempts 1-3 (On my Laptop)

Stonehive - Sent me to Bloodmoon
Stonehive - Just gated out and talked to the miner again, sent me to Bloodmoon.
Stonehive - Deleted quest from quest window, started fresh, sent me to Bloodmoon.

Attempts 4-8 (On my Desktop)

Stonehive - Went through All of the Dialog, Sent me to the Vampire Area of Stonehive saying "You have already been assigned this task" then underneath it after it ported me it said "It doesn't appear you have an active expedition"
Nexus - Sent me to Dranik this time, but it was an empty zone and I couldn't get to second zone.
Nexus - Same deal as first time in nexus.
Nexus - Deleted quest from quest window, sent me to empty Dranik again.
Stonehive (With Nexus expedition timer going still) - Sent me to Vampire area again saying "You have already been assigned this task" then underneath it after it ported me it said "It doesn't appear you have an active expedition".

I have a Fraps video of me doing it, but it's like 9gb for some reason and Youtube told me it'll take over 300 hours to upload..lol?

Being the resident post production guy, I'll shed some light on this part.

Fraps records in uncompressed avi usually. Typically 5 minutes of video is 4GB. YouTube isn't a huge fan of uncompressed video, but other times it takes much much longer to upload and process if its in an unsupported format. When you try to upload, check to see if your video type matches the acceptable formats listed. I Render in wma files because YouTube seems to love it. It will process quickly and I typically see little loss of resolution in the playback window.

My double loot video was only 10 seconds long and sized for 1080p, but because I used a specific MP4 codec it took 6 hours to process and is pixelated to shit.  Comparatively, my Getting Started video is over 10 minutes long and it only took 30 minutes to upload/process and is at its full 720p format.

If you have any free software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, you can rerender your video in a supported file type and you'll have it on YouTube within an hour.

Oh, I know Noot. We've talked in game a bit about it, haha.

I used to make guild videos and stuff, I just haven't gotten around to digging out my pinnacle studio on this PC yet. I just rebuilt it a weekish ago. I was just stating that the video itself was too large to upload in it's current state. :)

I appreciate the input though, truly.

I'm going to try it again, since it rebooted, maybe it sorted itself out. o.O


/edit: Still having the same issue. However, Stonehive ported me to Dranik this time, not just to the vampires like before....still an empty/dead zone though.

Been experiencing the same issues for the last weekish, but I hadn't tried for nearly a year before trying recently.

I'll dig in to it shortly. Catching up on a lot of backlog. :-)


-Hate

Did some unintended testing with Kobra and found it has something to do with a box in the raid not turning in the t4 mini quest properly. In his case it was normally his mage. It even stopped us from entering a newly created frozenshadow, instead porting us back to dranik. If you're having this problem check your boxes for a toon that still needs to turn in the quest and/or #e leave, it seems to resolve the problem.

That wouldn't cure my issue, I have one character logged on and one character requesting the Dranik daily...if I request from the Stonehive miner I get sent to the vampires in the basement and if I request from the Nexus miner I get sent into an empty instance of Dranik. In either case #e leave does absolutely no good since any #e commands including #e destroy return a response of You are not currently in an expedition.

I was doing that too Dimur, and it started working for me after I threw all my toons in the group....I had this happen to me tonight when my group desynced in stonehive and I thought it was bugged until I zoned to nexus and saw that I was groupless. but yeah, I can't explain what Leis said previously, it just kind of happened routinely to my mage as she bites the bullet on occasion and dies before a named dies.

However, I think you're supposed to be going in them with a group, but I'm unsure as that'd kind of defeat the purpose if someone was to try to play EZ without boxes and/or play with friends. I dunno if others were able to do this solo before with one character or not though as I just recently started doing expeditions/minis.

Unless something has changed since last year, doing the dailies never required a group...any toon geared well enough could run through them solo.  The responses you guys are giving are good, because they offer up information I wouldn't be able to since I'm trying to solo the daily, so please don't mistake my responses as dismissive.  I'm just trying to emphasize for my particular playstyle, things are broken and I haven't been able to find a work around.

Taking Kobra and Leis suggestion into account, I loaded another toon and grouped my pair before requesting the daily. Both toons got the expedition and zoned into a spawned out Dranik, so I guess that's a workaround for now.  Before when daily was limited to once per day per toon, it made sense to run them solo and maximize the amount of times you could do it but now without a lockout, it's not that big a deal to load another toon just to be able to request.  I am curious though why it doesn't work solo anymore, is there something in the scaling code that bugs out if there's only one toon requesting; ie it'd be hard to average out the levels of a target group with a single variable.