Rona: Pharlans

[cathedralmaster]

I've done the run three times now, twice with my shifter, once with my AA.

In my experience, as far as shifting goes, it's not a very friendly run. Though it is true that only the high priest is immune to manticore spikes which makes the possible damage fantastic, the problem is staying standing in order to do the spiking. When you have a druid and a bard or a cleric with UEF, it's no real trouble till the last map. However, Rano is not at all a caster friendly run and there are precious few druids to begin with, with the end result being that even now I can see I'm going to be usually deprived of one. That leaves you with a level 9 barkskin, which means your AC is probably going to be pitiful (I'm a double demigod with an asmo cloak so it's a bit better), and with no wizard to wall, the pharlans will just rip you to pieces.

What's more, even when you do have the buffs, one of the first moves of the pharlan casters is to mord, and since your a shifter, you have no defense against it. No buffs and you might as well just kill yourself. Not even staying in the back works because things so often backspawn which means the only way I can see getting through it unmorded is to memorize the placement of every single spawn. The only brightside is most of the pharlans seem to perfer leaving my shifter alone.

For AAs, I'm still in the air as far an opinion goes since I haven't tried it with divine voice arrows yet.

[sabregirl]

I've done the run now three times with three different characters: smiting blackguard, druid and rogue. And it seems more that there's a huge disconnect in the difficulty level depending on class. If you were a mid to high level dex rogue or assassin, I think the run would be relatively easy for you - well at least the early parts because the abs are such that generally you won't take many hits, negating almost all of what's REALLY nasty about the area. But if you're a STR tank with say mordable crit immunity, you're essentially fodder for very large sections of the run and once down it's very hard to get right again. The druid actually had not as bad of a time partly due to shunt and the ability to sanc and/or heal the party and oneself.

My rogue, equipped with only very basic UR gear by contrast, nearly slept through the run aside from the occasional spellcaster or flat-footing-while-rezing fiasco.

Overall, the difficulty skew of the area sort of makes it rather challenging to have a remotely balanced party which makes the area very exploration/xp un-friendly in general, much like hells runs, as it is hard to assemble the perfect composition of players to make the run go really smoothly.

-S

edit-
about view issues, there were a few spots that were somewhat overly thick but most places I could get a clear view pretty easily by playing with the camera angle using middle mouse and rotating. Good enough for a "virtual forest fix"

-S

[FunkySwerve]

Yeah...I see that Acaos asked for input. He mean bug reports. We aren't really interested in anything else until a few weeks have passed. Reason being, the input before then will for the most part be predictable and useless. Like all runs, it has a learning curve. Feel free to post your thoughts a little later on, when you are higher up on the curve. For now though, gonna lock the thread.
Funky