Ok, all my collection adventures until last night I usually finish with a good half an hour left, but last night, stuff just wasn't dropping in Miragul's! We finished but only with a couple minutes to spare. Not that we dwaddled or anything, we had a very brisk tempo.

It's just the RNG. Have bad luck on your drops and you're SOL! I think I'll avoid them in the future.

It does have a great deal to do with the RNG. First collection we failed by 1. The mob we were currently killing fell as the gong went off and it had the last item. There was a huge number of mobs without the item needed just prior.

Same result several times after. As a result, we rarely willingly choose a collection event.

Most of my fails are collections. I like the assassinate or kill X number of mobs ones. But they have all been fun so far.

I think the selection of mission types is far too small. You get four - exterminate, collect, rescue and assassinate. Despite the fact that they have minor differences like the number you need to kill/collect or the location of the mob you need to rescue/slay they are basically the same. I'd love to see these vary more besides just the four catagories.

For instance, instead of all collect adventures requiring killing random mobs, some could require specific mobs to be killed. Like, "We need rocks from the golems in Takish`Hiz to test the magic the geomancers are using to keep them alive." These would only drop off the golems and nothing else. Another variation could be an adventure that requires getting the item from specific named mobs. This could be a mix between assassinate and collect. For instance, "The ghost of various elves wander the hall of Takish`Hiz. We would like to know what keeps them from passing on to the afterlife. Please find them and bring us back something so we can do some tests."

Assassinate and rescue missions could use some spicing up as well. The mobs you have to assassinate should be more difficult than the rest of the mobs in the dungeons. The named mobs could have guards that are all linked so you have to grab several mobs at once. Or the mob could call for help and anything you left up in a certain radius will come to help.

It's sort of the same thing for the rescue missions. You'd think the minions of these dungeons would use more protection to keep their prisoners, but the mobs that guard the ones you save are no more difficult than the rest of the dungeon. I did a Takish`Hiz adventure where there were a whole two mobs guarding the named. I'd also like to see an adventure where you have to save more than one mob (but you wouldn't have to run them back to the zone).

Exterminate adventures are by far the easiest. I wouldn't mind seeing ones where you have to kill a specific type of mob. Or perhaps a fun variation would be something like, "We are having trouble breaking through the defenses of the orcs. We would like you to go slay as many things in Rujarkian as you possibly can. Return in 90mins with your report and we will reward you for your work." Then you have 90mins to kill whatever you can in the zone. The more you kill, the more adventure points you get at the end. If you clear the zone, you get a bonus.

Four themes is far too few for the 48 zones in my opinion especially when some adventures are significantly easier than others. You can do the slay ones and kill the 50ish mobs and then go to a collect adventure and have to kill more than twice that to win. It seems a little out of whack.

I think the kill X amount of mob adventures are the debil! My only attempt at one of those has been my only failure. Congrats for lousy chain aggro and retarded mob placement SoE! All the other ones have been fun and successful though.

Hopefully future expansions will, well, expand on this. Now that the systems are in place for instanced content, it should be relatively easy to add more interesting adventures...

What kind of luck are people having with the rescue missions?

Kill X number of mobs is by far the easiest adventure there is. You must have been unlucky or had horrid dps.

Time is of the essence.

Collection, Kill X number of mobs, Assassinate are pretty much equal in amount of time it takes to complete. Kill X number of mobs being the quickest.

The rescue ones on the ones that bug me. Having to deal with EQ pathing on a timer can be quite annoying.

So far I find kill x number of mobs easiest, followed by assasinate missions. Typically my groups complete these two types of missions in around 45 minutes or so.

Note that assasinate missions are easy because we have maps and my tracking abilities to confirm the location of our target. The one time my group failed an assasinate mission is because we didn't have a map and because zone layout caused tracking to be useless. The tracked target was always behind us but available branches turned everywhere but in that direction and we ran out of time trying to figure out which way to go.

My first assassinate one we followed the noise clues, but they were worthless because of the way the dungeon was configured. So now, they just send me ahead to scout and confirm the location of the target.

I haven't used any maps for any of them. I like the andventure crawn around and find your target. However I'm getting to the point where I've learned the maps by memory anyway. There really isn't much variation and most are fairly linear.

I've been doing mostly hards with some normals tossed in once in a while. Average time is about 40 min. Starting from when we accept the adventure to completion and starting the next adventure.

I pretty much hate the collections ones. They take too much time. I love the kill X number of mobs. Those are a blast. Rescue can either suck or be fast/fun. Depending on the dungeon.

Some people are way off the mark here. The "random factor" is what makes an adventure likely to fail or not fail. That means that the difficulty and predictability basically falls out like this:

Easiest (predictable) to hardest (random):

1. Kill X mobs (no random factor at all, just pull and kill)

2. Collection (random factor but spread out over large number of mobs which mitigates it a lot; basically a kill X mobs mission with a random element tossed on)

3. Kill Boss Mob (2 roughly parallel paths on map and you pick the wrong one = you lose; tracking and scouting only helps to mitigate this)

4. Rescue Mission (see #3 plus add runback time which is usually slightly longer than time to kill a boss mob)

All slaughter adventures (kill X mobs) which I did were successful.

Did most of assasination. Lost once because we didn't have a map, and ranger follow track which led us to the wrong place, + puller missed a door which we should have gone in so we ended up having to kill 3 extra mobs. Timer ended when we were killing the named. Note that we win in assasination even if there was no cleric. (to be honest, 1 actually died while fighting named but we still killed named within the time alloted)

Collection came in 3rd place. Drops are so random, that sometimes, it might be considered a rare drop in other zones.

Never did rescue. Heard it was really baaaad.

Two of my fails were on collection missions, one on a rescue and one when we had to leave early for a raid.

So far i have done two collection (failed 1 cuz of crap group), two assasinations (won both) and on my lvl 24 wizard i did a lil lowbie group in MM rescue mission which we won with insane ease. The two collection ones sucked because neither had a named and they just werent fun.

The assasination missions were awesome both including alot of hijinks, 2-3 named in each, and of course some deaths to spice it up! (healing aggro's a b****) Getting 2 or 3 named on a dungeon and having 2 or 3 items to roll on, even if its just as sellables is really nice.

The rescue mission was a strait forward killing through with no named as well. It was simply going through half the level (maybe 2/3) to get some loser dwarf and hail him to follow me back to ent. Neither the ranger nor the druid saw any named on track so we didnt bother to explore. In all i found it lacking.

Havent been able to try slaughter yet unfortunately but it seems like it may be the best for simply getting points.

Best to worst --

Kill X -- very easy, on normal a guild group takes about 20 minutes to finish this

Assassinate -- ditto, pretty much

Rescue -- same as assasinate except for running back to zone in can be a pain, I haven't had any pathing problems

Collection -- Screw these will never do another one. Dependency on the RNG sucks, and we can do 2-3 adventures instead of one collection. No thanks. Possible trigger somewhere around 23-25 for rarity -- collect 20s that I've done have been harder and taken longer than collect 26s.

Hard vs. normal is not pointed correctly either, but I hear the hard values are raised on test. It's almost embarassing to be plowing through normals where the goal is to have 4+ mobs in camp at all times, but hey, if you want points fast...