The Palace Grind
For LM2 to LM12 level players there really is no way around it at the moment. You are going to wind up grinding at either the Palace or the Altar on the Ice Map. Either one of them is going to give you a bad case of "what the f... is going on here!", although I will suggest that the Altar is slightly easier to grind than the Palace.
This problem is fairly new. Around the time we got the last Christmas event patch from Indy21 quite a number of mob placements on the maps were changed. This isn't the only "new" difficult spot, it's just the worst of them that I've run into so far. I stopped playing my SpearDriver character for quite some time because I just couldn't stand the thought of this place.
The problem is that there are 4 mobs over 9 levels, all packed into a fairly small area. The high level mobs are level 169 and are easily aggravated. The level 169 mobs are the Gold Armor Escort, level 166 are the Silver Armor Escort, level 163 are the Ice Armor Escort and last of all, the Snow Armor Escort. You wind up running for your life from the Golds because like I said, they're all mixed together. You can see exactly what I mean in this partial screen shot.
Do you see how dense those mobs are? You can see each type of mob in that group.
Things are a little easier at the Altar, at least you have some place to run to. The mobs aren't quite so tightly packed either, so stay as far away as you can from the red mobs. Here's a screen shot from the Altar. It's mostly the same type of mob, but once in a while a red mob will come charging through a wall and give you a bad moment.
That is the grind spot for the lowest level mobs, the Snow Armor Escorts but you can see Ice Armor and Silver Armor mobs in that screen shot.
I learned to run for my life down those stairs behind me and and start hitting the dark blue mobs at the bottom of the stairs. I have hp ornaments on my spear. It's as good as meditating. The important part is, those higher level red mobs will reset before they get to the bottom of the stairs, so you're safe enough if you get away from them quickly.
As you level up, you'll be taking on those higher level mobs directly, and the lower level players will thank you for it. I regularly used the warrior Run'n Stun move as soon as the higher mobs were orange for me. The other guy could get away, I killed a mob and I often got buffed by a grateful player.
That's the other thing about this grind spot, everybody buffs everybody. Everybody has to, because that's how you're going to survive. Some hybrid hits you with buffs? Hit him back with a warrior YY damage buff! He'll buff you regularly if you hit him back right away.
Warriors always need buffs. If you're a hybrid or healer at the Palace/Altar, and a warrior takes some time out from running for his life to give you a YY damage buff, please look around for him and buff that player in return. They're going to appreciate it. They might even save your life later with a Run'n Stun move.
It took me a few weeks to level up and get away from this place. I did most of my grind outside of the event times because the easy-aggro high level mobs were easier to avoid in the non-event times. I used xp cards the whole time too, because I wanted to get out of this grind spot as fast as I possibly could. I'm back to using those xp cards at event times only.
This must be a wierd spot for nukers, and to be honest I didn't see many of them while I was grinding here. I would be interested to hear from a high level nuker. How do you handle this grind?
- SpearDriver
