It’s a chicken or egg situation, it became a zerg because its the only viable option for casuals to increase their GS.
It’s also way overtuned to do them with the recomended amount. For real, try doing mal,myrk, imperial with 10 people.
And ffs, god forbid people having stupid fun to gain something.
The recommended for Myrk is 5 people. The devs couldn’t even do it and brought ten. It took hours. If you were to run all the zones it would be close to ten hours. Thats more than a full time job.
Anyone who thinks that is healthy for a games longevity is elitist trash. They have no life and want to be miles ahead of other people in the digital medium. Its sad really.
Everyone should be able to get maximum items regardless of time they have available. If elitists want something gated solely for them they can have exclusives titles or something. But not allowing the casual playerbase even footing will lead to them leaving, cash shop sales dwindling, and eventual game shutdown.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, anyone who wants that can be the king of the cinder.
Exactly this. Running the chest areas as a group vs a zerg is painful. Mobs are a chore to kill - worse if any caster mob which still are obscenely more hp spongey than other mobs. Many of the named type guys are epically long to kill. To make it worse, all these fights are unrewarding because they drop bugger all 99.9% of the time so they are literally all time wasters. I mean the elite chests tend to be guarded by massively overly hp’d non-boss mobs so you don’t even get a chance at Gypsum.
So of course people zerg it as there is zero reason to do it otherwise.
My company tries to do those areas with 10…it’s not hard, at all. it’s also more lucrative since you actually get drops from the creatures themselves, which is why we make some effort to do it without others. But it’s unavoidable a lot of the time (i.e. tonight we went out for some world PvP in Shattered Mountain and by the end we had 30+ of our faction left at the entrance to Myrk after the other faction gave up so we…just zerged it)
Initial report I got was mutated expedition orbs are 10k faction tokens and 1k coin from faction vendor. Is that a PTR only thing?
And no, my current 600gs isn’t crap, I can upgrade it to 625, so my having some excellent 600gs pieces already means I can hit the ground running on this update. If they were going to make everything 625 and have it come from drops, all current 600gs items would effectively be deleted from the game, which would be a horrible design decision.
Most games that raise gear score every so often are trash. The games are setup so that you can log on once or twice a week, knock out your raids, and log off. Once you get your new set you stop playing for a month or two until next raid set comes. How would there ever be world PvP and wars if this game copied that progression system?
doubt
Bro, the devs did Myrk with many people in barely 500gs, it’s not nearly as hard as some people make it out to be.
They failed, spectacularly.
But, hey upload a 10 player Myrk run for me, I’ll be in awe.
The game does indeed turning more and more from adventure to chore. Dailies or weeklies are bad idea in all and every game.
Your first mistake is saying that it’s punishment.Stop using that word when it comes to video games.
There are ways to get the best stuff, either you pursue those avenues, or you don’t. The CHOICE is up to you.
We didn’t specifically go after exactly 10 here, but think it was 9 company members and one random running Myrk here: [Twitch]
If I remember the night correctly, the streamer was our only healer and is a main VG/IG, just wanted to get hit life staff to 20 for versatility. So…not our most serious effort.
Myrk is easily doable with 5. We do it daily. Even 3 manned Mines.
Hell I can solo kill anything in Mines except the big bosses.
Absolutely agree with the topic starter! Every activity in the game SHOULD give an expertise bump up to 625!
“we don’t want umbral yet, this implementation is ass”
AGS: 
Legit impressed.
Cool vid, I stand corrected, I think you skipped 2 bosses no?
No idea. Every time I go to an elite run the group seems to go a different path. To add on, I’m running with a company from another server entirely, so they do things even more different from what I’ve done. But if you backtrack we had been running things for a while (mangled > caminus > mines > Myrk) and actually I think this was Jan 1st at like 12:10am so it’s pretty absurd we were even doing all that at that time, lol.
If I had to guess, most groups don’t make sure to bring a dedicated tank, which makes the sword guys so much easier to deal with.
Too early for 625, 100%.
I may agree with this. As I go fairly hard (though I lack a major company backing me) on this game/crafting and I only truly have a couple really nice 600gs pieces. Issue is you have to find some way to appease the true no lifers/power gamers, and big servers with companies making 2mil/week have got a lot of resources to blow to get their people 600’s. Though this becomes another issue because that means the power gap will widen and make it harder to take the town from them without some solid changes to PvP balance to shake things up. So we’ll see.
I normally do not really post on forums, but I wanted to chime in and say I fully agree with the OP.
This GS increase is much too soon. I’ll be fair here and admit that I exclusively engage in PvP content, and that I would be overjoyed if I never had to update my gear ever again. I play because I find the game fairly fun (and see a lot of potential in it) and because I like to improve as a player – learn more, get better.
I doubt this new change will drive me away from the game entirely, but my will to log in has taken a fair hit just knowing that I will be forced to do content I have absolutely no interest in. I do not want AGS to force PvE players to PvP in order to get the best gear, just as I do not want them ram PvE content down the throats of PvP players.