Hollowshade War (or, farming shadowscream ain't so bad)

[splunge]

The only time Test Server players are on a NDA is when we are testing new expansions (LoY for exampe). We couldnt talk about all the new tradeskill stuff here until it was released.

The Hollowshade war getting FIXED is not an expansion.

Over the last week or 2 they have been doing EXTENSIVE testing of the hollowshade war.

Quoting a dev GM in chat waiting for a patch: The Hollowshade War is 'working perfectly'.

/cheer

[Aanna]

Splunge, did you know you're my favorite person?

-Three cheers for the messenger-

[Sofrea]

prince

Just got done trying to reset war, since there wer no owlbears up. Was told to let grimmlings take over wolf camp (since they had the other two) and kill the boss that would spawn in the vah shir outpost.

Well did this and one named spawned near the river.. killed it and then moved on to the outpost. Been tracking the whole zone for an hour now and nothing. how long it take him to spawn or do i have to petition?

[Aanna]

In my experience that's petition time... though I really wouldn't count on the petition being answered.

More likely you're now stuck with neither owlbears nor wolves

I'd try petitioning, but not set my hopes on it. Expect to see the owlbears again after the next patch.

[Emelyn]

Gah, I have to say I am frustrated beyond words here. Our server has been lacking owlbears since the last patch. There are tons of smiths up to their eyeballs in wolf substances, and swirling shadows, but no owlbears.

I myself am nearing the end of smithing. I have manipulated the war successfully more times than I can count. I have learned a great deal in that time, and I have come to learn that lots of what has been posted here on these boards is competely and totally in error, and some of it potentially causes the bugs that break the scripts.

Yesterday I was working from home, so I decided to start out the day with a petition to get the zone repopped. In the past this has not worked, but I figured what the heck, explain that its been messed up for so long, and 2 patches have been cancelled.

6 hours later, to my ultimate surprise, they repopped the zone. This was a GM I was not familiar with who contacted me btw, not our usual senior guide who doesn't know anything about the war (there's 3 races that fight eachother???).

Yay! I rushed over there. I told my guild I would not be raiding with them. And I proceeded to manipulate the war. For the first few attacks, things were going well, but I hadn't yet gotten the desired owlbears take south island. This is familiar to me, who attacks who is totally random (I've proved it to myself long ago), you just have to hope for the right one, and be patient. Then people started to notice that the mobs were up in zone, and all of a sudden we had lots of people. To my horror, everybody has an entirely different concept of what has to happen, what works, what doesn't work, what is bugged and what is not bugged, and a whole lot of folks started doing a whole lot of things that in my opinion bugged the scripts again. Gah!

In the end, we once again have no owlbears, and I'm ready to strangle a few folks. In fact, I'm somewhat suspicious that one person didn't purposely cause problems in order to postpone more high level smiths skillling up.

Can't wait for them to actually fix it.

But you know, one thing I have never understood. Why should the owlbears/wolves only have that particular drop when they are in the south island camp. Why don't they always drop the items regardless of what camp they are in. To me this would be a far easier fix.

[solithan]

broken

In my experience it gets broken because people fight over what mob they want in control, so everyone just starts killing everything and much like children fighting over a toy it gets broken.

But yes I might believe that there are people out there that might break it to slow future smiths down, not that SS is fast by any means.

[EchtelionFV]

But you know, one thing I have never understood. Why should the owlbears/wolves only have that particular drop when they are in the south island camp. Why don't they always drop the items regardless of what camp they are in. To me this would be a far easier fix.

Well, that's what makes smithing so 'fun', lol.

Go for the owlbears in Paludal. Yes, only a dozen substances/hour, but you can read a book, watch tv or answer your email while you do it. 8)

[Quinner Sparrowhawk]

What would be the minimum level for a shaman to manipulate the war?

[Reflan]

Handor, it ain't so bad if you can AOE I guess. With my 61 shaman and 60 monk, I killed about as fast as I could get aggro practically; shaman pet was easily able to kill the wolves fast, and of course monk could plow through them. Shaman, like your wizzie, mostly looted. Every so often he reapplied haste and SOW.

Still, I spent more than twice the time you did to get more like 120 shrieking substances than the over 150 you got in half the time. It would have been hard for a melee-based player to move too much faster than my combo did, I think, without abandoning corpses without looting them or something.

You seem to be saying that outside of the four or five hours spent on wolves, you got the rest in just a couple more hours. I can keep the island where the shadows spawn in Twilight clear pretty easily, but then there's a long wait for more. I got under 30 shadows in an hour because I had to wait for repops. AOE doesn't make much of a difference when even people without it can keep the island just as clear.

For your 75 combines, adding in the 4 or 5 hours spent on wolves plus the time needed for shadows would seem to bring you to your total time spent without even figuring in any time for wailing substances.

There must be something I overlooked when considering your time.

[Aleena]

AOE doesn't make much of a difference when even people without it can keep the island just as clear. <<

Acutally it really does. Its amazing the amount of time you lose melee'ing over AE'ing. I have a 60+ druid/monk combo i clear the islands with and i gave up on melee. Chasing down runners and running to your next target really eats the time. Killing 40+ a pop with 1 blast really increases your drop ratio.

Aleena

[Sethlic]

AOE make a big difference. With a druid and cleric as AOE I can pull all of the three islands in two pulls. Killing them myslef I can only keep one maybe one and a half islands cleared at a time.

[Reflan]

Yes, I agree with that part; but when I said AOE doesn't seem to make a difference, I was referring specifically to hunting shadows in Twilight Sea, where there's only one island I clear, and then I have to wait 10 minutes or so for respawns. Sorry if I didn't make that more clear. In Hollowshade AOE must be a huge advantage. Those mobsng tons of things onto the shaman and then letting the pet kill them one by one while I manipulate the monk and loot with the shaman, but these guys repop so fast that not clearing the third island has got to be a huge loss in terms of kills per hour.

I still don't see how the original poster could get swirling shadows any faster than I can, though, unless I misunderstood something about his original post.

[Handor]

Shadows

I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't clear -- I was referring mainly to the Hollowshade War; we were in Hollowshade for two hours and got enough of both the wolves and owls in that time for 75 attempts...

Twilight Isle is streaky -- we round up the whole isle than AOE to death and loot... sometimes we get close to two stacks, sometimes don't even get a stack. /shrug

Since that first night we stopped trying to 'farm' Twilight since they take so long to repop; we do a lot of raids in Ssra so just clear the island on the way through.

[Reflan]

Considering you need two swirling shadows for each combine, I can see shadowscream literally taking months of constant camping. I spent all weekend -- and I mean ALL of it -- to get 206 shrieking substances. And that's lightning speed compared to swirling shadows, which I'll need twice as much of. :P I'm starting to think shadowscream may be virtually completely insane unless you can AOE.

The only thing slowing me down is looting really; I could hardly kill any faster as a melee-oriented fighter(my monk plus my shaman and pet).

This is looking even harder than I thought it would. Not just hard, but like...nuts.