Swamp of No Hope, very non classic

[Jimjam]

Pathing in Swamp of No Hope is absolutely crazy.

I've seen greater scalebones, and even Bloodgorge patrolling up the path to cabilis in the level 1 region of SONH.

This is something that never happened, and never was commented on (as it surely would be a notable event) during the classic era.

edit: Add Soblohg and a bloodvein mosquito to the list of high level NPCs that are pathing into the level 1 area (2000,3000) but shouldn't.

edit edit: a froglok gaz knight is also pathing in to this area.

edit edit edit: scourgewing mosquitos also straying into the area.

edit edit edit edit: iksar pariah too

edit edit edit edit edit: iksar manslayer just appeared from apparently nowhere in the newbie field then pathed off. Maybe it spawned there? Should just be low level stuff!


There are also waaay less level 1-3ish mobs in this area than what I recall.

[Jimjam]

To get us started on evidence, eqatlas (https://eqatlas.ca/swampofnohope.html), last updated in 2002 has this to say:

dangerous anywhere outside of the safer area near Cabilis,

I suggest this 'safer area near Cabilis' refers to the open expanse full of level 1-3ish mobs, and should not have level 30 named frogloks, manslayers, pariahs, etc pathing through.

[Dolalin]

It's been on my to do list to jump on Live and see how Swamp is there, and if it's unrevamped, to follow the roamers around and map them out.

Hell of a job though.

[Jimjam]

It's been on my to do list to jump on Live and see how Swamp is there, and if it's unrevamped, to follow the roamers around and map them out.

Hell of a job though.
I think the biggest problem is a couple of misplaced pathing nodes in the wrong place.

There are other problems (a froglok escort and Froglok Escort too rare) but the high level KoS stuff walking practically in to town (many times within 30 minutes as evidenced by my first post) needs most urgent attention.

[Sunderfury]

I meant to test some stuff in this zone a while ago. It seems a lot of creatures should be "Scowling" but not attack, and perhaps skellies having low agro radius. Dug up some stuff below

Is any of this implemented on P99? Haven't leveled there in forever.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4527
Nov 18 2000
I am a gnomish enchanter with a taste for hunting in enemy territory... heck, in warsliks or the swamp evil types can hunt for me for 4 hours and not find me. Thats beside the point, though... what I am getting at is that all the (outdoor at least) zones in kunark have an odd mix of cons... very little out there ISN'T scowling ready to attack, and yet very little is aggro... lets take swamp of no hope for example... skellies, frogs, and bandits are KOS... plants, lampreys, nibblers, mosquitoes... (even cockatrices in their respective zones) all scowls, but none ever bother me... i've seen the same in every single outdoor zone in kunark.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4074
(out of era, noting that it was later changed to be an 'aggro' zone)
Aug 29 2002
Just a warning for everyone.
Things must have changed with a new patch... creatures that say KOS are actually KOS. In the past I would Med and watch a KOS critter walk right over me... no more... now the plants and the vine will actually attack without provocation.

Just a little warning to all those who like this quiet zone.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=74#Comments
NOTE: Someone seems to have added some notes on some mob spawn points for Berserker / Impaler cycle, not sure if they've dug into spawn points/pathing.
Set up camp just west of those ruins. There is a nice wide open flat spot there so you can see things coming that might agro. Start pulling from the ruins. The skellies in there have a VERY low agro radius. I have pulled one from the back by mistake and it climbed over all the other skellies to get to me. None of the other skellies agro'ed. I was amazed!

If you run out of skeletons, just take your pick of the non-agro MOBs who are crawling all over the place.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zones.html?zstrat=74&p=2#comments
Aug 10 2001
yeah, I hunt there a lot. If your're smart you can group with another and take these things down at a low lvl (I hunt there as a lvl 9 SK, with a lvl 12 Nec, and sometimes a lvl 10 monk) It's nice xp, especially if you pull a skellie from the house across, or a froggie that walks by) The wandering monsters DON'T KoS. Watch out for the nibblers and their ilk, if you don't have magic, or a magic weapon, don't bother, they can't be hit by norm weapons. I must admit, I don't know why no one hunts here...

Out of era, but suggests froggies and skellies will fight each other, which may keep some wandering KoS mob population down
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4567
Jun 03 2004
In swamp of no hope, I found one at 830, -2880.

He'll either spawn next to another froglok and wont move or he'll spawn next to a lesser scalebone skelly and they will fight each other. The skelly will win, so if you go to the loc and see just the skelly, kill him off and wait.

However, there are complaints about the newbie yard, so high level roamers there may be classic (but perhaps not as much):
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4052
un 29 2001
I ran into one of these guys in the newbie zone in SoNH. They hit for about 22dmg and they can stun you. I wouldn't try taking them if they are yellow to you.
Sep 23 2001
One took out my 7 monk near the newbie area. Do they spawn there or are they pulled there?

However no complaints here from a newbie:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4050
Aug 16 2000
I had just started out a newbie monk in Cablils, and he'd gotten up to level 4 and managed a full suit of patched. I did a little exploring beyond the newbie area, and before I knew it I was surrounded by red con aggros. I tried to be careful, I really did - this guy snuck up on me. He hit for around 38 I think. I didn't go back for my corpse, btw. This wasn't too far from what I think was the Froglok city. Once I saw the city, I figured the place was crawling with mid to hi level froggies (alot of them hide underwater). That was confirmed rather quickly. :(

Lots of mentions here of noobs being in the noob yard searching for items but no complaints of high level aggro:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4022

[Jimjam]

On the subject of Froglok Escort and a foglok escort,


2 different Froglok Escorts? (https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=4228#m97771571611931)
Quote
Reply
#Dec 25 2000 at 3:42 AMRating: Default
Anonymous
Anonymous
So far, I've seen two different escorts: a "Froglok Escort" and "a froglok escort". I did notice some behavior differences between the two.

The non-capitalized ones tend to wander about just like the rest of the frogloks in the area, and I've seen them in several different places near the East Cabilis entrance: near the trail area on the left side (if you're standing away from the EC zone entrances, facing towards the 2 buildings), and on the island across from the newbie area.

The Froglok Escort tends to just stand around, specifically in that left-side-path area (I left him alone and just watched him), and the time that he actually moved, he went up the hill, turned and continued moving, parallelling the zone wall (going past the brigand camp), and turned again into the center of the swamp, into what appeared like the Froglok village area. I backed off at that point (being level 10 at the time).

They both drop the same items (the Froglok Escort Fife, and Bixie Berry Pie), but I have a feeling that the capitalized-named one has some other purpose, beyond the obvious one. I tried to hail him (successful sneak), and he ignored me.

This data is corroborated by the kill locations shown in magelo for each iteration of the mob, which show the lower level a froglok escort (https://eq.magelo.com/npc/416378) being in the lower level areas each side of Cabilis and the Froglok Escort (https://eq.magelo.com/npc/386780) occuring on the slightly higher level area to the east of Cabilis where the skippers, fishers and escapees are most common (also note, even the froglok escort doesn't occur into the plain that should be populated almost exclusively by low level mozzies, leeches, decayed skeletons and tads so even higher level mobs shouldn't be here either).

Looking at magelo, both escorts should be far more common than they are on p1999, perhaps a 5% spawn chance of Escorts and 10% for escorts.

[Jibartik]

Whole zone needs an entire remake from the ground up, quests, items etc.

That frog town could have been the next kelethin and a hub! but no, its an empty zone of mosquitos and random frogs.

Sad.

[Ennewi]

Whole zone needs an entire remake from the ground up, quests, items etc.

That frog town could have been the next kelethin and a hub! but no, its an empty zone of mosquitos and random frogs.

Sad.

SoNH even has a tunnel. GFay and EC all-in-one.

[Jibartik]

SoNH even has a tunnel. GFay and EC all-in-one.

p99 needs a custom froglok & class as playable race.

A witchdoctor!

(the froglok on live is not even from the game of everquest as far as im concerned, its like taking a random character from spyro and including him in this game as some sort of ready player one, wreck it ralph crossover, I spit in its general direction)

[Dolalin]

Okay so SoNH in the newbie area on Live (I'm playing on Agnarr) seems pretty classic. I doubt it has changed much. The zone has not been revamped to my knowledge, at least it's not mentioned in the zone section on Allakhazam.

On P99 there is a parade of high level mobs up the road into the newbie zone. This does not exist on Live. It is a relatively safe newbie area.

Newbie area from the ruins down the road South to the water is populated by:


a mosquito (lvl 1) (I count 7 of these)
a swamp leech (lvl 1) (I count 5 of these)
a froglok tad (lvl 1-2) (I count 2 of these)
a decaying skeleton (lvl 1) (I count 1 of these)
a giant swamp leech (lvl 2) (I count 2 of these)


Newbie area to the water on the North/East side is populated by:


a mosquito (lvl 1) (I count 2 of these)
a large mosquito (lvl 4) (I count 1 of these)
a swamp leech (lvl 1) (I count 1 of these)
a giant swamp leech (lvl 2) (I count 7 of these, two fairly deep in the water)
a froglok skipper (lvl 3-4) (I count 5 of these, both on land and in the water a bit)
a decaying skeleton (lvl 1) (I count 1 of these)


There is a roaming level 4 'a giant swamp leech' that seems to be getting SoWed by something and is occasionally roaming in to 1976, 2747 (within the newbie yard), before heading back out into the water. It mostly stays in the water around the newbie area though. This is a candidate roamer to map out.

Overall it looks like the South area is the lower level newbie area, and the North/East is the harder newbie area.

[Gustoo]

Thanks for doing the research Dolalin this is valuable and the community appreciates it a lot, even if they don't know it. Serious props for caring. Thanks for making norrath a better place.

[Gustoo]

Whole zone needs an entire remake from the ground up, quests, items etc.

That frog town could have been the next kelethin and a hub! but no, its an empty zone of mosquitos and random frogs.

Sad.

So much potential in EQ thats what makes it fun. Its funny to remember that all the quests we take for granted in the wiki were almost secrets in the actual game, you really had to figure out WTF was going on by trial and error. Epic quests were epic, not trivial.

[Jimjam]

Mystic Dovan is not casting his heal spell on you when you hand in skeleton heads.

He is also not doing is rotating spawn with the Captain (both are up at a time)

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=684

[Jimjam]

He is also not doing is rotating spawn with the Captain (both are up at a time)

Ignore this part, they are switching just poor time keeping on my part!

[Jimjam]

I tainted my computer by downloading live.

The current state of the live newbie field looks much more like my memory of classic than what we have on p1999. Swarms of mozzies and leeches!

https://i.imgur.com/hI1AIqy.jpg


Here we have a track list filtered by distance containing mobs close to the newbie field. You can reference the position of the merchants on the list to get an idea of how densely populated the area is!

https://i.imgur.com/tAsLy5i.jpg

Note, I killed the escort (sounds terrible outside of an eq context) before the track screen shot was taken. The Escort was stuck very close to the east of Cabilis.

The Escort had an interesting assist mechanic; Uulump was repeatedly aggroing me from all the way across the zone while the escort attacked me (evidenced by the hate window), but would immediately leash/mem blur, assumably due to distance. Not sure if classic.

[Dolalin]

Okay so Magelo seems to have pretty much everything needed except for some roamer paths. I will collect these manually as pertains to the newb area.

The newbie parts of SoNH are very neatly delineated by the map for 'a mosquito'.

Here's the unedited map and then here are the boundaries I observed in terms of where mobs are spread out according to level.

There are two orange boxes in the south. The outer box represents the furthest extent of roaming of this level range of mobs, and the inner orange box represents where they are most densely clustered and are usually found (on the land, basically).

The red newbie area has one dangerous roamer: a_marsh_leech, level 8. But that's it.

The yellow newbie area doesn't have any dangerous roamers.

The orange area to the east has a few dangerous roamers around level 15-16, they come up from the middle of the zone: I saw a_morass_leech, froglok_tuk_warrior, an_insatiable_gnawer, and froglok_tuk_shaman roaming up here. Maybe a gaz knight too. I only ever see 1-2 of them in the whole area at a time, so it's dangerous but not crazily so.

The orange areas to the south have no dangerous roamers that I could see.

[Dolalin]

Attached is a .csv zone dump for mob numbers.

Red newbie area has about 16 mobs up total.

Yellow area has 18 mobs.

Eastern orange area has 16 mobs up.

Southern orange areas have 27 mobs up.

[Gustoo]

This is like a How-To on correctly petitioning for zone changes. Users like Dolalin is why this project has been so successful.

[Dolalin]

I had a further look at the magelos for the dangerous roamers in the eastern orange newb area, and it looks like this is just where their grids are drawn. They happen to overlap that eastern bit, but not the southern bit. So that makes perfect sense.

[Jibartik]

could someone explain to me how those maps work? Are those confirmed spawns or something? They offered me exactly 0% help during my classic mob safari.

[Dolalin]

The marsh_leech that roams into the low-level red newbie area also looks like it's just there because of random roaming within its grids, which just happen to be drawn over the red newbie field.

So this is all very straightforward I'd say.

[Dolalin]

I took the CSV I posted earlier and imported it into Excel, it is now filterable and sortable with x/y/z locs and all that good stuff. It can be used to get mob count and expected # of mobs per grid area.

[Dolalin]

could someone explain to me how those maps work? Are those confirmed spawns or something? They offered me exactly 0% help during my classic mob safari.

I think they're based on showeq style grabbing of mob locs as people went through zones over time. So every point is a point where someone saw the mob up, and its x/y loc at that time.

Repeat a few hundred times and you get very nice looking pathing grids. But if you only have one or two records you'll just see a few dots.