Stronius
Member
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IMO the problem with Nulgath Farming in it's current state, for things like VHL at least, is the dull, utter repetitiveness of it all. This is due primarily to price inflation, but most top-tier Nulgath items require a rediculous amount of reagents, of which there are only one or two effective ways to farm for. To give an example, here is a rundown of how I farm for a single Roentgenium of Nulgath. First I grind out my CVKS for a few hours, to just gather up on the various reagents, hopefully picking up some Gems and a Uni 13 or two. Then I go to boxes and kill hundreds of sneevils for half an hour, turn in the SoN quest 20 times, then repeat this process four more times. Then comes the emblems, a grind for an hour or two, depending on RNG, in shadowblast. Makais die in droves in /Nulgath or tercess, as I need approx. 170 essences in total, 120 for the 20 Gems and 50 for the VHL quest itself, which takes another few hours, again depending on RNG and respawn speed. Then I sit in Evilwarnul for a while, gathering up Favors and approvals from the undead armies, picking up some diamonds along the way to restock my inventory. Finally, I have to grind gemstone drops from various bosses for Tendurr the Assistant, a quest that can take over 20 minutes depending on drop rates, and repeat this ten times. Once I gather up all of the other various items from the Black Knight and the dwakels, I collect my one Roentgenium, leaving myself another 1/15th of the way done with VHL (minus the void crystals, of course). Now, just one or two Roentgeniums isn't bad, but 15 of them is beyond tedious. The ridiculous amounts of tainted gems, gems and essences required, none of which have a bulk or efficient way to farm, is what makes the VHL grind, among other Nulgath items, dull. For me, AFDL was much easier than this, if only because the quests for it made the grind more spread out, more varied. At least when you had to collect the Malignant Essences, the quest sent you to a different map, for a different item, every 10 or 20 minutes, and with a little RNG the quests didn't take very long, either. You can farm for just an hour or two a day and get another piece of the AFDL set every week. The VHL challenge quest, on the other hand, reminds me more of the final AFDL quest for the armor itself, requiring hundreds and hundreds of reagents. Yes, VHL has avoided frustration by taking most of the RNG out of the questline, but this has effectively increased the farm time, and exponentially multiplied the repetitiveness, by needing untold thousands of simple reagents instead of that one, hard-to-get drop. This method of end-game farming is more fair and balanced, since two people doing the same quests can get the same items in more or less the same amount of time, but there's no fun in it, not like in, say, Gen. 1, when everyone would fight Groglurk, Kitsune, Vath and Escherion together, celebrating with our fellow farmers when one of us got a diamond or a cool Unidentified drop.
< Message edited by Stronius -- 1/10/2018 12:39:02 >
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Clever, witty, and slightly Daemonic. http://www.aq.com/aw-character.asp?id=Stronius
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