AOC - Does anyone do pre-80 dungeons now?

[Qhue]

I noticed last night that everything seems to have devolved to either AoE farming of mobs for experience or solo-instance daily villas. Simply put no one I know is doing the pre-80 dungeons or epic areas and I seem to be in the minority in even doing the few quests that exist for the upper level zones. (Actually there are quite a few quests, but doing all them all gets you maybe 2-3 levels out of the 10 level range they are for)

This wasnt always the case though. I do recall joining groups for epic mobs in Connal's and I did do Sanctum of the Burning Souls twice when I was level appropriate and it was really quite fun. Also did one of the daily scaling 40-80 dungeons at like level 55 and that was fun as well... but the dungeoneering has been very sparse.

Did everyone have such a horrible experience with Sewer Main that it turned them off going to dungeons at all? Is the loot bad? Is the experience bad? Everyone I know keeps saying "level up so we can do Atzels!" but there is a ton of additional content out there that seems to be completely untouched. I tried to suggest that we go to the epic part of thunder river and I nearly got my head bitten off and told to just go AoE farm in kheshetta.

Granted there was a silly problem with people grey-farming the epic dungeons but instead of making people want to do the dungeons at level appropriate times they seem to have just made people reject dungeons entirely.

[Dashal]

I did Sanctum at level 41. I was probably on the upper end of the level range. We ran it twice, I got a lot of nice blues. I always see people lfg for Sanctum though, seems like a lot of people run that one at least. No idea what dungeon I should be running next though. Only reason I knew Sanctum was the constant LFM requests in OOC.

[Pyros]

Main System/Sewers is the big lvl 50-60 dungeon, you see advertisement while in noble district, but not while in field of the dead. There's an instance in fotd(50) too, but less people seem to run it. After that pretty much no one seems to run instances until lvl 75 in keshatta, mostly because the next dungeon is in thunder river but it's 70, at which point no one is actually leveling there anyway.

[Leviathan]

I've been part of Sanctum, Main System and Thunder River instance runs, although I wish I had skipped the TR prison bullshit. That's it. I wanted to do the instance in Atzel's (Halls of Eternal Frost?) but never found a tank and a healer at the same time. Go figure. Just hit 76 on my HoX.

[Fury]

I hope they aren't being skipped. I did Sanctum 3 times and had a good time doing it. I just hit 52 and am looking forward to going into Sewers and Cistern. I popped in there yesterday just to look around and saw a full group of mid 50's chopping through stuff. So I don't think the dungeons are being skipped, although it does seem the the "general" level of people is either around 60 now, or much lower around 30's. It seems a lot of people hit 50's and rolled alts, which is a whole different issue.

[spronk]

sanctum is ridiculously easy so you see a lot of people still do it at least once. The problem is since there is no LFG channel and the "tool" (its not really a lfg tool) doesn't tell you shit about what someone is looking for, you basically rely on region chat to form groups.

Tombs is ridiculously hard for people who are still in FOTD, its basically a 52-58 dungeon but FOTD is a 41-47 zone. The trash respawns extremely fast. Its also bugged atm that there is no rez point in it, so if you wipe have fun running all the way back.

Zone travel is also a big problem, you can wait literally 15 minutes for someone to travel from just the next zone. Forget waiting for someone from far away, it can take 30-40 minutes for them to come over and that is just completely retarded. Its nice how funcom has a "summon player to instance" menu option for the group leader, but there is no way to make it work.

The fastest path is just to group grind or solo grind/quest, running stuff like cisterns/etc is a huuuuge waste of time since you'll end up PVPing a lot, fighting others for bosses, waiting 30+ minutes for boss respawns, or ending up with your group scattered and unable to find each other. Plus the loot is mediocore, you'll get similar greens a few levels later and really stats don't mean too much, especially since they change very little level tier to level tier.

[Onte]

Our guild groups do dungeons quite often. We seem to have something going in a dungeon at least twice during the week. Cleared Tortelbach's(sp?) Friday night and had a blast. We're doing Cistern/Main System this week. Outdoors or Villas might be faster / better loot but the crawls are still fun.

[Digo]

1. Travel sucks in this game. No taxis, incomprehensible level design. That alone kills grouping.

2. Dungeons are boring, at least, everything I played up to Sanctum (40). I could be wrong and they could get better at higher levels, so someone feel free to correct me. They look kind of cool, but they're boring dungeon crawls with no real pacing or theme to speak of. Everything is a simple tank and spank. WoW has set a very high bar with their dungeons. AoC dungeons are extremely bland by comparison.

3. Loot is a crap shoot. You might get a really, really nice blue, or you could get a blue that's worse than your green item you got 20 levels ago.

[Elsebet]

We did a lot of dungeons in guild groups but I agree everyone now just wants to sit at the Deathmaster's camp for hours, which is great xp but horribly boring. We did Onyx Chambers the other day but it somewhat suffers from the same issues as Cistern/System and hardly any of the bosses drop loot. The guild area dungeons (swamp, oasis, ravine) suffer from the "quest cooldown" bug and issue that if people turned in all the quests already they can no longer zone in. Halls of Frost is nice but has hardly any mobs in it, so very little xp just loot. It really feels like there is a severe disadvantage built in to doing any single team dungeons right now compared to Aztel's/Keshetta grinding.

Raid trash mobs give about 4k per kill at 74 app'd to 79. Slow, but at least you get some xp and possible purple loot.

[Chaid]

My first time to 80 I did every dungeon. Once you've seen the sights once, no point in doing it again. The only pre-80 gear that means anything is the +2% XP ring (until level 40) from the collector's set. The gear at 80 isn't much to talk about either.

I made the mistake of doing Pyramid/Treasury of the Ancients on my second character, taking the patch notes as truth. Silly me, they're still broken, just broken differently. I'd also like to throttle the designer of the Pyramid of the Ancients for the mediocre crappy dungeon design.

Scorpion Caves are worth doing exactly once for casters, to get the Phantom Ward quest shield.

Caravan Raider's Hideout isn't populated (mostly). Need 3-4 runs to complete the quests in there, which arent really worth doing.

Onyx Chambers has potential, but too many bosses didn't drop loot, some quests weren't working (Heker-Tep) and respawn rate was crazy fast (~2 minutes).

Atzel's Fortress is ass. It's a Zul'Gurub design, but some of Atzel's council are harder than him (Tainmic I'm looking at you).

I haven't done Vistrix, but Kylikki's Crypt is nothing worth talking about. I had more fun during open Naggy raids in EQ with a bunch of strangers.

Black Whatever isn't accessible yet, since Vistrix isn't dropping a tooth to complete the access quest unless you social engineer a GM.

[Ailu]

Main system was much harder to do then any dungeons I've played in a long time. Tons of mobs with lots of patrols on a fast respawn. Doing it in a PUG is barely doable at the appropriate level in my experience. There is always someone who manages to aggro ten extra mobs and then you're back to the start. It was very fun with friends though. Other then doing it for the fun and quests, exp and loot wise it's definitely not worth it which is why not many are bothering with many of the instances at 80- I reckon.

[Dyscord]

The moment I started doing mainsystem/cistern is the moment i started playing WoW again.

Fuck.
Non-Instanced.
Dungeons.

[Kobalt]

Originally Posted by Dyscord

The moment I started doing mainsystem/cistern is the moment i started playing WoW again.

Fuck.
Non-Instanced.
Dungeons.

The main problem is the loot is so good that high lvls fight with lower lvls over bosses. Competing with other players around my lvl range is np to me, but when some asshole lvl 80 leapfrogs your group and kills the boss you need every time I just give up. Maybe at 80 I will complete the tons of quests there.

I never thought I would say this but, this game needs TLC in the worst way. I loved non instanced dungeons in EQ2 but this shit is retarded. Or better yet, make non instanced dungeons like battlegrounds in wow with different brackets. Let the 80s fight amongst themselves while the people in 50s have a separate set of instances.

[Tolanin]

unless they changed them again since the last change to make those bosses harder for high lvls those boss cant be soloed.. after that change me and my hox friend duod it and still barely won some of the boss fights.. i cant imagine anyone being able to solo it unless they are glitching out the boss... I enjoyed main system personally.

the problem in this game was that a grey didnt hit a higher lvl for anything so a solo high lvl could clear an entire instance, for the most part now thats been changed, only other change they need to make is dungeon mobs should attack you regardless of their level.

[Kobalt]

Ive seen multiple 80s solo bosses in there, know some were rangers not sure about others.