Dung Piles in General

[Kaishan]

Recently I have noticed that Dung Piles through Istaria do not produce Maggotts as they once did. Was this on purpose or by mistake? The way I see it today is that if I attack and kill 4 maggots then you have to sit down for quite a while twiddling your thumbs waiting for another maggot to spawn. The respawn is obnoxiously slow. I have noticed Noxious and the Vile outside delgarath to be this way.
Thanks

[Machaeon]

If you're after just the maggots, there's a place in Dralnok's Doom where maggots spawn with no dung pile to spawn them. It's right near the entrance so very little danger getting there, it's a great place to farm maggots for crystals, hoard, and experience. The maggots are pretty easy to kill for xp as well, even my squishy caster biped can kill those things for xp once he's in the range where he can use t4 and up spells.

[Azath]

Dung Piles are meant to spawn maggots, dung piles that don't are bugged (i only remember two piles that produce nothing).

[Kaishan]

The level 101-103 at the entrance don't have a pile yes, but they are only 103, I'm referring to the maggots from the piles deeper in the Noxious maggots 125-127 after you kill the 4 the spawn is ridiculously slow. Once your rating get's up really high, the Noxious are pretty much the only thing that give XP.

Today I can go down in doom to the Noxious pile and kill the 4 then with a weak little bi-ped kill the pile before more than 2 spawn during that time. That's sad, and yes I know I shouldn't kill the pile since that ends the spawn, but I'm trying to prove a point of how slow it actually is.

[Cegaiel]

From my understanding, the dung piles were never suppose to spawn 10 maggots at a time. That was a bug with how the AI spawn was setup. We've enjoyed this for so long, that we considered this to be the normal. Currently on Live Shards, they spawn 1-4 at a time. This was also setup wrong. It was suppose to spawn a min of 4 and a max of 4. So 4 all the time, not 1 to 4. The devs fixed it for next delta to spawn min of 4 and max of 4 (so 4 at a time, everytime). With some of the feedback on other posts, they did increase it to 5/5. So the initial fix was done, then the increase to 5, is in queue for next delta. There should be a client update tomorrow to Live Shards, this should not be confused with Delta. They are two separate things.

[Machaeon]

Sounds good to me, also both the faulty dung piles that didn't spawn maggots now do so.

I can say that the respawn rate on the maggots could be a bit faster... have a good few minutes once you murder the 4 that spawn before another shows up.

[Kaishan]

5 sounds good, even 4 isn't bad as long as they spawn. Unless something is changing, it's too slow. I'll see what it looks like after the next Delta. For now, I'm forced to kill the pile then run to the other pile then run back to the first pile and so on, but if there are people there then that's not really fair to them.

The spiders are a good 2nd choice for XP at 117-119 level something like that, but it would be nice to see the spawn rate increased on the Noxious Maggots as well. Also since they don't drop the Movement Crystal, it would be nice to increase the Rate on the Vile Maggots outside Delgarath as well so the chance of obtaining one isn't slim to none.

[Cegaiel]

The spawn timers on the maggots are 3 mins. I think that is more than fair and anything less would be a bonanza.

I should point out one thing. There is a loot timer of 3m also. This is for all mobs. This gives players in a group to have a chance to also loot, before the dead mob despawns. This 3m loot timer begins once you open the loot window or /loot. This is good because if you have a long battle (lets say a boss) with a few adds. You're trying to survive and not worried about loot until the battle is over. Without this timer, player 1 might open the loot window, just a few seconds before the mob despawns. He gets his prize. Players 2-6 were a little slow clicking it. They are out of luck. Mob has despawned and all of its loot. But with this timer, Player 1 has stopped the despawn (and its loot) for 3m, giving a chance for player 2-6 to get their share of the loot. Players 2-6 would be a bit upset they didn't get a chance to the loot (maybe it was a difficult item for a quest, maybe it is epic loot, maybe it's junk).

Examples of how this works:

1) You kill maggot and loot it right away. Lets say it took you 2 seconds, after the mobs' death, to loot. A replacement maggot will appear in 3m 2s.

2) You kill maggot and do not loot (nor open loot window). A replacement maggot will appear in 3m. 3m is the normal respawn for maggot. Since you didn't loot, the 3m loot timer didn't start.

3) You kill maggot but wait 1m before you decide to loot. Now you have triggered the 3m loot timer, thus delaying the respawn for 3m. Since you waited 1m before you looted, you now are now 'technically' waiting 4m before respawn.

4) You kill maggot but wait 2m 55s before you decide to loot (5s shy of when despawn/respawn would've occurred). You've triggered the 3m loot timer, thus delaying the respawn for 3m. Now you 'technically' are waiting 5m 55s for a respawn.

I know a lot of players, including myself, like to just kill everything in sight, then loot everything in sight later. This is counter productive if you goal is fast xp. You might want to adjust your tactics. Kill the mob and loot asap, not 2-3 mins later. Or don't loot at all. Both tactics would prevent extra delays for your despawn/respawn to occur.

[Garrick]

So basically, with the loot timer, every mob in the game has [U]at least/U] a 3 minute respawn timer. Given your above descriptions about delaying respawn by looting late i have to ask: is it possible to seperate the respawn from the loot timer? So the mob will respawn only on its own respawn timer without having to wait for the loot timer as well. I'm pretty sure i know the answer here as i can see problems arising from mountains of corpses that have not despawned combined with mobs continuing to spawn in the presence of those corpses. To be honest though, i would find it kinda funny to see the kind of scenario. It reminds me of some zombie movies, where the corpses get piled up to create a barrier, while more zombies keep coming.
While we are on the subject of loot timers i just have to say, in all my years of playing this game, i dont recall anyone ever complaining about not having enough time to loot a corpse that they actually wanted to loot. With perhaps the possible exception of the corpse that was buried under a pile of other corpses. That issue has been fixed though, with the new select next corpse text commands that can be easily hotkeyed. Corpse looting should effectively be a non-issue thes days.

I would support setting the loot timer to something like 60 seconds, or even 30 seconds. So that it doesnt interfere with the regular spawn timers. 30-60 seconds should be plenty of time to loot for those who actually want to do so, a proper hotkey setup helps a lot here. In pretty much every group ive ever hunted with we have always had a designated looter, whose job it was to make sure they didn't miss any of the partys loot, and divvy it up afterward, so even with boss fights we never had to worry about the corpse disappearing before we could loot it.

Just my thoughts.

[Machaeon]

Agreed, I reflexively loot the moment I see the mob die anyway. The time needed to loot isn't a problem even when I'm lagging and have multiple group members looting (epic fights anyone?).

I'm honestly fine with the loot timer and the respawn timer being linked, having thousands of corpses pile up would give bad lag for everyone involved. The 3 minute respawn is fine with me too, just feels like a longer time than it really is between kills when you kill things as fast as a dragon with GR I suppose.