Thank You Tiraslee and Silius for the Griffon Quest

Zinn · 03/23/2008 18:56:59

Despite all of GU4’s flaws one very good thing came out of it. The Griffon quest. IMO it is the best single group quest I have seen in any MMO. We as players have been clamoring for challenging content and the Griffon quest offers many challenging encounters that will push players and groups to their limits. Chath IMO is the best designed 6 man group encounter. It is less about DPS and gear and more about executing a well thought out strategy.

Tiraslee designed the content for the Griffon quest and he did a fantastic job. His imagination, game knowledge and desire to challenge player thinking and skill really can be seen throughout this quest line. Yes he have may gone overboard ( i.e the wackiness of Griffin Cocobo damage and the plain silliness of the Shadow fight) in designing some of the encounters but its by far the best most challenging single group content in the game and IMO its all doable by a very skilled heroic geared group. The only mob that I see that may not be doable by a pick up group is Strife McCloud.

The one complaint about the quest I see the most is that it encounters often require a perfect group. I do not see what can be done about this. If a non-perfect group could do it then stacking each encounter with a perfect group would make each encounter to easy. All classes will work in any encounter (although you have to rotate in some classes and killt he mob a few more times to get all through) in the quest. What is nice is each encounter with the exception of Naranda (which IMO is much to luck based) is about planning and strategy. Winning these fights is truly a guild accomplishment and goes beyond the 6 man group. A good guild will be there buffing your group, providing people to switch in and out of the fights as needed, rezzing, providing runes and cheering everyone on.

Many people have been asking for scripted challenging encounters. Now we have it. These encounters are all mini 6 man raids and need to be approached tactically as if they are raid mobs. The mobs even the trash mobs often have raid abilities.

I never dreamed the griffon quest could be this good. Grats to Tiraslee for all is hard work on the quest. I have not had this much fun in a MMO for a long time. Anyone who kills Harakan, Naranda, Chath, Shadow or Strife deserves praise. Grats to all on your kills and grats to those that finish the quest. You truly earned your reward. Grats again to all and thank you for the fun Tiraslee. SMILEY<img mce_tsrc=

**Tiraslee** · 03/23/2008 17:39:40

Thanks for the kind words, Zinn. SMILEY<img src=

" /> While I would love to take all the credit for it, I shouldn't. Silius was the one who actually wrote up the entire thing, him and another dev implemented the majority of it. Without going into too much detail, I came through afterwards and did some polish along with the NPC abilities on the group boss fights. The design of the whole thing was all Silius and he did a great job on it.

**rikoorakoo**

Oh my god. I am going to forbid talk of the griffon anymore.

That is, until I can get one! *jealous face*

When I rent one, I tell myself that maybe, perhaps...just MAYBE the rented mount will not want to leave and will be mine forever.

Beau

PS: If you want, Devs, you can give me one. I wont mind.

**Staulinmas**

Hey, you can't come in here a brag without PHOTOS!

Post some Screenies!

Zinn

Tiraslee wrote:

Thanks for the kind words, Zinn. " /> While I would love to take all the credit for it, I shouldn't. Silius was the one who actually wrote up the entire thing, him and another dev implemented the majority of it. Without going into too much detail, I came through afterwards and did some polish along with the NPC abilities on the group boss fights. The design of the whole thing was all Silius and he did a great job on it.

A lot of the encounters looked like your handiwork especially Cath and the evil abilities that were put on Strife and Shadow. Regardless of who did what, fantastic work and my apologies for excluding Silius. Great job by both of you. SMILEY

**Khabarakh**

Well said Zinn, and grats you & Trinity on Seradon's first griffons SMILEY

Awesome work, and awesome work by the devs in implementation of the quest, thank you so much.

Probably the only thing I disagree with in your post is that I really don't think Naranda is luck based, she is easy once you get into the swing of it SMILEY

**Twoofus**

The perfect group only works if you allow people to pick the class they want to play for that quest. Just how EQ did it in the end for certain missions. This was great fun.

In mostly all other situations, it just creates ill feelings.
Which is why the majority of the people postponed or abandoned the quest totally.

It might be the best quest ever.
But if only a tiny minority can do it, it's a huge amount of wasted resource.

Zinn · 03/24/2008 12:29:53

Twoofus wrote:

The perfect group only works if you allow people to pick the class they want to play for that quest. Just how EQ did it in the end for certain missions. This was great fun.

In mostly all other situations, it just creates ill feelings.
Which is why the majority of the people postponed or abandoned the quest totally.

It might be the best quest ever.
But if only a tiny minority can do it, it's a huge amount of wasted resource.

I would respectfully disagree. I have not seen an encounter that would leave out any single class. But rather encounters where you will need to stack the encounter with certain archetypes or classes. That does not mean classes are left out. Rather it means guilds will have to kill each named a number of times to get everyone through. I agree that can be problematic but I am not sure there is a good alternative here. Making encounters doable by any group make up would make them far to easy for those that take the time to coordinate an optimal class mix. This quest is truly a guild quest not a a group quest. It takes an entire guild to work everyone through. Although there are only 5-7 total hard mobs to kill it is not an easy quest and it would be hard to just do it overnight. It takes some planning, thought and cooperation. That IMO is a good thing and what separates this quest from normal quests.

Khab thanks for the kind words. SMILEY<img mce_tsrc=

I agree and disagree with you about Naranda. Yes I agree she is not a hard mob to kill but I think there is a large random luck factor to her. Sometimes we can kill her in 2-3 minutes then the next attempt we can take 20-30 minutes to kill her. Which brings me to problem #2 in the quest and that is Old Targ. I like the mobs in Old Targ and I like the spawning method. But I feel Old Targ's spawning method does not play well for multiple groups. We have been doing Old Targ the last few days trying to get the rest of our guild through and done with OT. With only a couple of guilds in the zone it becomes a mess. You have guilds out there killing mobs to spawn the nameds, guilds who just camp (and do not kill to create spawns) where the nameds spawn and guilds sending tells to each other claiming they spawned the name and should get to kill it. The problem is no one can say for sure who spawned the name and no other nameds can be spawned in the zone until the spawned named depops or is killed. It's just going to get uglier and uglier as more guilds show up in Old Targ. A fix here such as locking the spawn to the group that summoned it and allowing more than one spawn of a named at a time would help a lot.

Regardless I really love the Griffon quest. It offers a challenge and sense of accomplishment that cannot be found in the rest of the game. Fantastic job by Tiraslee and Silius. SMILEY<img mce_tsrc=

vespers

I think the spawning of the Knights is set up nicely. It's purely a RNG event where as you can kill 500 mobs and still have not a single Knight spawn or you can get back to back Knights spawning. If you are needing a specific Named mob to kill then you need to find that mobs spawn point and camp that spot until that particular Knight spawns. All of these mobs are contested mobs. People keep saying that the quest is perfect in that it is long and difficult, as it should be, for a flying mount. Locking the Knight encounters to a specific group then you would also have to lock the Mnalus Prince/Queen/King event next. Groups who just sit at a Knight's spawn area to snag every single Knight that spawns there without doing any mob clearing will find themselves harrassed by other groups.

Romans

....also thank you for your great efforts to improve the pvp aspect of Vanguard. Your timely replies and well defined road map are much appreciated.

**Malosar**

vespers wrote:

I think the spawning of the Knights is set up nicely. It's purely a RNG event where as you can kill 500 mobs and still have not a single Knight spawn or you can get back to back Knights spawning. If you are needing a specific Named mob to kill then you need to find that mobs spawn point and camp that spot until that particular Knight spawns. All of these mobs are contested mobs. People keep saying that the quest is perfect in that it is long and difficult, as it should be, for a flying mount. Locking the Knight encounters to a specific group then you would also have to lock the Mnalus Prince/Queen/King event next. Groups who just sit at a Knight's spawn area to snag every single Knight that spawns there without doing any mob clearing will find themselves harrassed by other groups.

The kind of guilds that will let others do the work for them and snag their spawns are also the kind of guilds whom wouldn't care at all if they're being harassed. On a PvP server there is an answer to this problem, they can be killed by other players. On all the other servers there is no answer to this problem. Training them to get them killed is against the rules so all you would do is get yourself banned whilst they laugh and go back to killing other guilds hard-earned spawns.

**Gortekk**

hey let's see some screens! ;]

**Khabarakh**

Zinn wrote:

Khab thanks for the kind words. I agree and disagree with you about Naranda. Yes I agree she is not a hard mob to kill but I think there is a large random luck factor to her. Sometimes we can kill her in 2-3 minutes then the next attempt we can take 20-30 minutes to kill her.

Ahh, now that is a different story SMILEY

Yes, the fight duration can depend on luck (or, more specifically imo, getting unlucky). That said, I would prefer that if there must be some luck factor, that it is like Naranda in that it simply draws the fight out longer, rather than say, having to pray the mob doesnt get "lucky" and 1shot your tank, thus wiping. Just imo anyway SMILEY

Just need Akande now to finish OT, really keen to see the rest of the counters!

**goldbeard**

Just wondering Silius,

Has the griffin quest been tested on groups with non raid gear?

Can a group of people with "normal" gear complete all the griffin quests?

- Goldbeard

Rakislash

goldbeard wrote:

Just wondering Silius,
Has the griffin quest been tested on groups with non raid gear?
Can a group of people with "normal" gear complete all the griffin quests?
- Goldbeard

I played a big part in testing this content on test server and I believe that you are going to have a very tough time completing this quest with normal non-raid gear. Like it was said earlier, you need the help of your entire guild even if the boss fights are 6 people at a time. You need to be buffed and very well geared, with thought out plans to complete this quest in its entirety.

I'm not saying it can't be done with you and 5 of your friends. It will just be a lot harder.