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I had a little free time and I was thinking about the clusterfuck that was the POTA revamp. I remember a few months after it opened, some of the top guilds were already in there, already getting their T3 gear, and already fighting the chickens. Yes. The chickens. Specifically Ataraxis and Zaseh. If you had the displeasure of fighting them, you probably just had the same bodily shudder that I did when I remembered those fights.

When I was new to POTA, sometimes the top guilds would be in there fighting. And at that time you couldn't really do much other than wait for them to finish, because the lag was so bad, and it got ten times worse when someone was fighting the chickens. I do recall that several times those fights took 2-3hrs. And often times they failed.

Wow, were the chickens really that hard? No. lol. no they weren't. The fight was extremely STUPID. It was literally the worst fight in the game, and the devs should be ashamed of that epic bullshit that was the chicken fight.

For those of you that spared yourself of this torture, let me lay out the mechanics of this fight. If you recall the horror of this fight, skip down to my proposed changes.

#1.You had to clear out all the fairies and other mobs in the area. Because they would aggro you, and they were pretty damn powerful. Some of the fairies could oneshot you if you turned your back to them. So it was important to get rid of them. Others could heal the chicken, and lol, healing the chicken is about the worst thing that could happen to it.
#2. Then you had to lure the chicken over to one of the walls, the area between the god alcoves. Why? Well if you don't kill the stupid thing within 45 minutes, the fairies will respawn, and you'll have to clear them all over again.
#3. Now you get to the tank and spank part. You had to watch what buff the Chicken had, because certain ones would mean instant wipe (To this day raiders are scared of the spellrip icon).
#4. How much tank and spank? Well, good ol' chickens have runes that absorb damage. And you have to do a ton of damage. This is why the fight would take hours. Because you were literally pestering the chickens to death. It's like if 12 mosquitos were trying to kill you. You were literally not moving it's health meter AT ALL.
#5. Once you got rid of the runes and you think you can finally do decent damage... NOPE! The chicken spawns mobs that could very easily end you. While your raid deals with those spawns, The tank and healers have to take the chicken to the center of the area, with that big black rift looking thing. You have to click it, and IF YOU COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS THAT IT ACTUALLY WORKS, it will remove about half of the chicken's health. MANY MANY TIMES this would not work. So that's right, you didn't get to do damage to the chickens at all. The stupid rift thing in the middle was the only thing that could damage it. So regardless of it worked or not:
#6. You have to repeat the above (Except possibly the clearing of fairies.). But yes, you drag it to the corner and wittle away at it.

MOST guilds cheated the fuck out of this fight, because it was so bullshit. Even the noblest of guilds that refused to do any kind of exploits in game were exploiting this. Suffice to say the exploits we used: Psis can charm fairies and have them attack the gods. The gods would easily kill them (Unlike the raid force) and you could clear much much faster. A Necro or any FD/escape class with a pet (Charmed or not) could then attack the chickens at a certain point. Doing this would artificially start up the rune counter. So that would drastically reduce the time. A 2-3 hr fight would now only take 30 minutes. In addition, we would position the chickens so that their spawns would end up in the wall. And lastly, we would always have two psioncists in the raid to mezz and hold spawned mobs that would be able to one-shot the raid to oblivion. Sometimes we'd do it so we wouldn't have to kill anything.

So suffice to say the only real strat that came from this fight were ingenious players that exploited so they wouldn't have to waste time.

-------------------------MY PROPOSED CHANGES-------------------------

The Chickens were actually the VG version of Harpies, which were really anthropomorphic vultures. We called them Chickens because, why not? They were also the guardians of the section of POTA they ran through: Zaseh protected the Order gods, and Ataraxis protected the Chaos Gods.

My thought is that a raid should be able to challenge the authority of the chickens. This way the fairies don't social aggro with the chickens, and you don't have to clear them (You still have to be careful not to AOE).

The chicken should have a rotating, random buff of one of the gods. (There's six on each side). When a certain buff comes up on the chicken, the chicken will run towards that god's chamber. Now each god should have it's own special gimick. It could be related to the trials, or it could be a brand new thing. We can figure out what later.

My thought is that the raid must follow, and they should do as much damage as possible to weaken the chicken before it can get to the god alcove. Another option is that when the god buff comes up, some in game object spawns at the specific god's alcove. And a small group of characters need to take out that object before the Chicken can get to it. IF they fail to stop the chicken or click the object, then the chicken will have some god-related effect. So coordination is *key*, which makes it fun and interesting.

It would be really cool if, for example Zaseh runs to Vol Anari, and everyone has to get out of line of sight, or the chicken will spellrip everyone in the raid, and/or produce a damaging effect. If Zaseh ran to Vol Tuniel, she might summon a band of rangers and druids to wreck your shit.

I'm mostly writing this up so I don't forget it later, and if we have the chance to retool raid mobs, then I think the chickens definitely need it. I would also like to see their loot table reduced drastically. It should also be at least an 18 man raid.

Ugh. Yeah I hated the chicken fight, and I never played a psi for it. Can only imagine the annoyance of re-mezzing the same mobs for a long time.

Jakkal's proposal sounds interesting, having an actual strat to it, though could also be quite complicated to make. Would also be a pain for people that are KoS to that side with fairy/golem aggro.

At the very least, it definitely needs to be changed. Removing the runes and reducing the number of mobs that spawn would help a lot. Then there'd be no need to use the rift or whittle down the chicken for hours/exploiting runes.

The chicken fight was required for a few reasons. One was a quest for the head of the chicken on the opposite side from the one you aligned with. Also, they had some good gear drops, but some were ridiculously rare. Others were so common that they rotted often even though it was a good piece.

I had some other proposals for POTA that should probably go into this post as well, such as:

#1. Get rid of the KOS. That made it frustrating, not difficult. Especially when you needed guildies to help with trials (Which was a necessity). Maybe they can be KOS to the gods, the god's guardians, and the chicken. But not every mob on that side.
#2. I feel like the gear from POTA should be changed to the equivalent to live's APW gear. And APW gear should get the stats of POTA T3. (I know this is not as simple as it sounds).
#3. Get rid of the kill 100. GET RID OF THE KILL 100. FOR FUCKS SAKE GET RID OF IT.
#4. Patient Assassin should have a loot table. Maybe some of the chicken's crap loot can go on it.

Get rid of the grind in general. POTA was a grindfest from hell.

I actually did not mind the Chicken Fights. Prior to unleashed I was in there with other guilds and we were killing them different ways. Whatever the name of the invuln buff was would drop after like 10 minutes or so and then you had something like 30 minutes with no runes and no invulns to kill it straight up. If you were well geared you could get him down in like an 60-75 minutes.

That way sucked, but so did the way Jakkal described. Sometimes it took nearly just as long just to coordinate all the fairy killings/positioning/what-have-you and then kill it as it did to wait for the invuln to drop. It felt like waiting in a parking lot for one of the spots up front to open up, instead of parking in the back and walking. Sure it took less time to "kill it," but not always less time overall.

Anyways, I'm kind of on the fence about the PotA revamp. I can't really decide if I'd like a complete overhaul or just to tweak some minor things (sliver drops, God Warriors, epic quest)

[quote="Apaelias"]Blah blah blah[/quote]

I DON'T WANNA WAIT!*

*To everyone else, this is an Unleashed in-joke.

The only thing that impressed me about it was--when our main tank bit the dust quickly, due to the healing debuff, I picked it up and tanked it successfully even though I wasn't "supposed to be able to", because it couldn't recast the debuff--and then it tossed me the Gravedigger (kind of a silly thing, but a serious upgrade).

Having said that...watching its damage resist tick along, and most of the other points mentioned, well, it wasn't too interesting of a fight. Some of the raid mobs had pretty neat stuff they did, while others were time consuming, hokey, or uninspired. I remember routinely beating at least four trials by some kind of exploit, and that bit about having summoned adds pop into a wall, was a standard. I would tend to agree with toning down PotA somewhat, changing a few things, and trying to get it as non-exploitable as possible. Some of the trials were fairly cool, and Hoarn is a total gear check for a tank, those kinds of things should stay in place. Given the game's history, PotA really sent a message that "we won't be adding any more content, so this is it". But now you have the ability to bring to life additional content that was never used.

As this ties in with our...derailment of the Call of the Warehouse question (I added what I think is a reasonable complement to the proposed progression changes), one big factor in PotA that's unlike almost anything else in game is the simple fact of the sealed doors. I cannot even attempt to help anyone on the next tier, without going through a phenomenal process. Whether I have an overgeared tank or a scrub healer makes no difference. While this model is pretty reasonable for the associated lore, it's always a bottleneck to the playability. If I feel like kissing the floor in Vi'rak, I can do that any time--but even the Chicken fight requires a fair slice of progression to even attempt it. Heg's lair is about the only thing that is equally sealed (door is up = no pass; log out - back to Raea). One Xennumet key works for the whole group, and only one person needs to trigger fungus face for anyone to get an APW key.

I did have one experience on the chickens that I really enjoyed, probably the only time of the hundreds of times we killed them that I enjoyed it. I was on my cleric, and both of our tanks died. I managed to grab, hold, and tank with my cleric until the tanks could be rezzed and rebuffed. That was a lot of fun.

Playing a tank or a main tank healer on that fight was more fun and challenging, but if you play a nonpsi DPS class, it was boring as fuck. You just hit your 1 macro over and over, then you switch targets sometimes and hit your 1 macro on that thing, then switch back to the chicken and hit your 1 macro on that.

To give an idea of how silly this fight really is - Oncalupe and I could duo it with a group's worth of boxed characters. We used to frequently challenge ourselves to see what we could duo with our alt army and amazingly, we could do the chickens. Kay would play the main tank, I'd play the main healer and the two psi's. We'd have a boxed bard, and we'd have a bunch of buffbots in, incase anything went wrong.

It was hard, but we could do it. That just goes to show how useless DPS classes are on that fight. You really don't even need them.

Yah, cleric can tank adequately, or at least absorb the blows. Since your respawn was not far away, and diplo buffs were irrelevant, running back to rejoin the fight was not a big deal (or battle rez when available). However, from a tanking perspective--and this happened more than once, since I was never *assigned* main tank on it--once you hit the Chicken enough to get a good hold on it, you essentially never are going to lose the hate. So when your main tank gets up and taunts, spams hate abilities--I could stop swinging, and the Chicken would still come back and stick to me.

The rift pretty much was your dps, but I think there was something a necro could do? At the point after the rift goes off, they have...something...that fries mobs under 20% health. I think we used it there. I never did it enough to develop animosity towards the encounter, but would have to agree it was more "inflated" than it was particularly interesting.

If PotA was tuned down and APW was tuned up, what would you say about placing the smaller, unkeyed raid areas (BoD, Vi'rak) to a level 50 for their beginnings? Maybe boosting some lesser overlands like Jagund to a higher difficulty?

I don't think the Necro's death touch worked on it, if it did, our necros were holding out. The only special thing we used a necro for was to artificially start up the runes on the chickens without necessarily dying (Since they can FD and use the pet/minions to start it up).

As far as everything else goes, I'm of the opinion we should leave them alone for now, and tweak as necessary if we decide it's better for the game to do so. I don't even know if we'll get approval from the devs to mess with POTA, I mostly just wanted to get my idea down before I forgot it.

Death touch was hardly used. I think its use was excluded a lot.
Can't remember the description exactly, but it either did x damage on undead and y damage on normals, when they were a certain % health left.
Most occasions it did nothing.