Useless zones....Follow

GOrge is RUNNYEYE OMFG all of you are weird. lol j/k

But it is Runnyeye.. get it right it's bothering me!

There's Beholder's Maze, also known as the Gorge of King Xorbb, which people were talking about, and Runnyeye Citadel.

One of my least favorite zones is the Burning Woods, simply because the branches on the trees reach all the way to the ground, making it impossible to see where you're going when you're not on the path.

I remember getting nuked by the bandits on the EK ramp fairly regularly. I usually managed to kill them (I think they were in their low to mid teens) and hoping to someday get some phatty bandit loot. They usually dropped about 2 silver.

Edited, Thu Aug 5 21:01:24 2004 by Yanari

/agree. Especially the murals and watchtowers on the ramp. Wish they would do more with the lore of the game, once you learn about it it is pretty interesting.

You are right, it is all in the eye of the beholder. I am one of the (apparent) few who enjoy leveling up my toons in the Karanas. They have good xp for the levels they are designed for with some fun mobs like the Evil Eyes in EK. Decent loot especially if you tradeskill or sell the silks/pelts in the bazaar. Hell, all my toons make their first 10kpp by the time they are level 15 getting XP and farming in the Karanas. And the best thing of all they are thankfully devoid of the idjits who populate PC and High Pass Keep. Not too many mobs aggro so CR's are not too bad and you can bind at the Gypsy camp in NK if you are a melee class.

Seeing as this thread is about "useless" zones I will have to concur with the folks who say that Emerald Jungle and Burning Woods are horrible zones. Not worth the trouble for the XP/loot they give. Eastern Wastes farming Ulthorks for their tusks is better XP/loot in the low-mid 30's, so is Crystal Caverns. In the low-mid 50's Natimbi is a fantastic spot for XP/loot.

Most of the PoP zones are horrible, too. When my alts get to the age where they would be in places like PoJ/PoI they won't be going there. They will be going to places like Dulak, Natimbi, Qinimi, Nadox, Seb, OOT, Nurga, Droga, Chardok. Don't care about the ZEM for PoP zones. My main has done PoP progression all the way to PofTime. My alts will give that a skip and go right into GoD progression.

The one zone I absolutely can not stand is Kedge Keep. It just isn't worth going there except for epic mobs. And even then I have to fight off the urge to just say no.

I consider most of Iceclad Ocean to be useless. It's not such an issue now that the boats no longer work but there is nothing but water and sky between the little island and the icebergs. The Icebreaker was quite a cool looking boat though.

Um, if you are gonna flame, know what you are talking about....why don;t you take a look under the Antonica zone list andd find gorge of king...then read about it while you remove your foot from your mouth. :-P

I still find it nice and I've had to run it innumerable times. I definitely would not be of the "if I can't get exp from it it's useless" camp. The game needs scenery and separation as well as hunting areas.

It is the epitome of today's channel-hopping micro attention-span generation to "get bored" because there is nothing to kill for 5 minutes.
And yet what do they do with their EQ? Play it in what is for me the most boring possible way camping static spawns and watching an exp counter inch along.

The other point is how would you handle mob level to make these things "interesting". West Karana is pretty full of things to kill for up to around 15. It is boring for us above that because it is just an open expanse with no danger. I can remember retrieving a friends corpse from the bandits at that dip in the road at about level 6. That was pretty interesting.

If you populated every part of every zone with mobs that would "interest" a 65 you would make the game unplayable for lower levels.

I've no problem with zone scenery for the sake of scenery. Hell, I'll even admit that the ruins in Emerald Jungle look kind of cool except that I can see the same ruins in Trak's Teeth, Warsliks, Lake of Ill Omen.. well, basicly on most of Kunark. Emerald Jungle does have the big staircase though, given the rest of the zone, that's like taking a vacation to Podunk, Kansas to see the world's largest fiberglass chicken

W. Karana does have the advantage over EJ of at least having some unique loot (well, kind of since Oowomp in OT has the same loot table as the high shaman guy in WK) and a couple rare spawns, though they're insanely rare and most people will never see them -- Timbur the Tiny, anyone? A zone definitely doesn't have to be a hunting ground for 65s to be interesting, it just needs to have a "catch" to set it apart from the other zones and not have a major downside that makes any hunting there more trouble than its worth (i.e. Kithicor Woods).

Temple of Sol Ro?

The ramp is, however, just one part of the Eastern Karana zone. The rest of the zone offers some decent hunting as long as you're content to kill gorge hounds and dawnbane serpents and watch people fight over the spiders. You've also got the Mucktail gnoll clan to play with. It's not an exciting zone, but certainly not as bad as some others.

Edited, Sun Aug 8 03:26:15 2004 by Jophiel

i can almost swear i was attacked by a griffon on that ramp almost a year ago.

I hate just about any zone that has been revamped. :)

[quote=Cobra101]
The place you can make the accusation of bad design is where they have redesigned a zone and broken it. Grimling Forest is one example where several quests are now either broken or severely bugged.

I totally agree. I remember about 10 lvls back looking up the war quests here and being all psyched up to head up there with a warrior partner and get him an awesome breastplate (forget which one now), and started one of the wars and it never ended. We thought we were doing the quest wrong but turns out it hadn't worked right for months. Very frustrating.

-Celyenya
55 mage
Rodcet Nife

Just a quick note about Iceclad Ocean being included as a useless zone. It is the absolutely best place for quadding wolves for mid-level Druids. No competition from anyone and a constant supply of "blue" wolves.

Also , the Karana's are a great place to level up as a solo'er and as someone said , they did give a sense of the enormous world of EQ when we first started years ago. I remember making the trip from Freeport to Queynos with no SOW and thinking what an incredibly large world that Norrath was.

I think Neriak and Nektulos are the worst designed zones along with Dagnor's Cauldron .

Bappont on Tribunal

I agree that the usefulness of a zone is in the eye of the beholder as well. As stated earlier, some of the zones really do exist just to provide a sense that one is traveling a distance in order to get somewhere. That may seem silly today with the PoK books, but back then, you *really* felt it if you had to run from FP to Qeynos. Antonica really was split in two halves, and there was quite a run between them.

I'd also like to comment about PC being too cramped for a zone with a high ZEM and full of people. Um. If it was spread out, you'd have... the Karanas! Think about it...

They'd also have to remove the ZEM because the zone wouldn't justify it. The reason it has a high ZEM is because it's cramped and difficult to travel around in, and has a small number of camps with a large number of mobs in them. If you have a spread out zone where you can run around easily, and pick off single mobs, then you don't get a ZEM. That's just kinda the way it works...

PoSky is a quest/raid zone. Trust me. If you don't have access to a wizard to get you there, or the money to pay one to port you up, you really wont do more then stand around on an island looking around for about 1 minute, and then spending 20 minutes figuring out how to get out of the zone. Also, given the keying restrictions in that zone, it's a good thing that random people can't just waltz in and kill mobs on the first island whenever they want.


Kerra isle is useless today because there's no real reason to go there anymore. But back in the day, when the Paw of Oppola was the best offhand item for wis casters in the game, that place was a major destination. It was the final destination for a pretty major quest, and tons of druids, shamans, and clerics spent a lot of time hunting there.


I think in a lot of cases, it's not that the zones were designed poorly, but that the game has changed along the way making their purpose less important. The karanas (and the various ocean zones) served to give one a sense of the size of the game world. Today, that purpose is destroyed with the PoK books, so they are just zones that are too big to make effective hunting zones. EJ is kinda the same. While it's got a major mob in it (Sev), it mainly served as a way to generate distance between FoB and places like CoM and TT/OS. Back in the day, travel time was a major issue, and places that were farther away from civilization generally were more worthwhile to hunt in (making the trip worthwhile). That's not really the same today though.


Other zones just became pointless due to mudflation. Who's going to hunt in zones where the best loot in the zone can be purchased for 100ish plat in the bazaar? While I tend to think the bazaar has been good for the game in general, it certainly has polarized the game. People tend to hunt for exp and *cash* today (usually by farming for stuff others will buy). It's just quicker to farm swirling shadows, or silks, or what have you and sell that for cash to buy what you want, then actually spending the time hunting for the items yourself. Hunting is done for exp, farming for cash, and no one really hunts for items they can use themselves.


And that's a major change from how the game used to be. I remember hunting in Unrest to get bronze armor back in the day. I remember hunting in CT to get bits for various class armors for people (and some drops for myself). I remember hunting in OS and KC for class gear. Even as late as Velious, I remember bringing characters to the Rygorr fort for gear, and CC for some neato stuff, and heading into Velks for stuff that dropped there as well.


No one really does that anymore. It's just faster to hunt for stuff to sell to others, and buy stuff that you need. That, more then anything else IMO has made many zones "useless".

That ramp used to be the favourite place to set up camp and pull the Cyclops to. Many a level 10 met his/her demise at the hands of a loose Clops back in those days.

West Karana was once as busy as PC, there were lists of people waiting for bandit camps, fights and slanging matches over "Bandit Farm" and a constant pile of corpses at the QH zone from being ganked by the Werewolf.

Actually WK has several great low level camps spots, the three Bandit Camps as mentioned, there are two towers with guards that you can pull lions and spiders to, the Ghoul camp, Scarecrows, Ogres and Cyclops. There are Corrupt Guards, Hill Giants and the loverly Oobnadiddywadiddy if you fell brave enough. Not to mention the highly selubrious Morin's Shortsword quest that all Rangers used to feel that just had to do.