Project 1999 - Question about hill giant population

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Question about hill giant population

I haven't run over to rathe to check this, but have the numbers of hill giants been put back to normal on green / teal, or is it stupidly sparse like blue was. I vividly remember on live quadding hill giants on live, while there were groups of varying size on both sides of the mountain pulling and killing giants as well as others quadding as well, and there was rarely ever a time when there were none up. It used to be anything that pathed on or around the hill was a ph (not the static spawns, and basilisks and drakes also having chance to spawn their associated named). On blue there were like 6 or 7 spawns and killing the pathing trash had no effect on them.

Find some proof, file a bug, and we'll have more hill giants.

Quote:

02/19/02

In article <fn757uggetf7m2044vu52vvu5arfuir6c4@4ax.com>,
bizbee <tub...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Yn erthygl <Wvpc8.6$0C1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net >,
>sgrifenws "Max" <max...@portvista.com>:
- show quoted text -
>The spawn rate seems to be related to the number of people hunting
>them... when there's no one around, there don't seem to be many
>giants, when the area is crowded, they're all over the place. I don't
>know if this is true, just an observation.

Basically everything that wanders around on the top of the hill in the
middle of the Hill Giant valley (Rathe Mountains) is a Hill Giant
Placeholder. Basilisks, lizards, giant skels, cyclops... If somebody
kills those, there will be plenty of Hill Giants spawning. If nobody
is killing those, then the Hill Giant spawns will peter out.

I spent some time there with my level 60 ranger leveling my low-40's
druid. I just wandered around on the top of the hill killing
everything that moved, and plenty of HG's spawned. Plenty for me and
for the other hunters in the zone.

As I recall when we used to hunt there in my 30's-40's, it was a real
pain to try to kill the basilisks and lizard men, because they would
run and randomly teleport around the zone. I think the pathing in
that zone has been fixed since then, though, since I didn't have any
trouble (granted now they don't really have time to run, since they go
down in a couple swings ;-P

Anyway, the HG spawn rate isn't really a function of how many people are
hunting them, it's a function of how many people are killing the
PH's....

Nancy

--
---
Nancy Durgin
Stanford University
n...@cs.stanford.edu

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt....g/tw-ZcQJMDzsJ

This next one is somewhat out of era but it's a lot more specific:

Quote:

11/16/04

Hill Giant Placeholder Theory *PROVEN*

Ok, so I logged into EQ and lo, me and an idle bazaar bot are my guild,
nobody is anywhere... things to do on a VERY quiet day?
I couldn't resist! Having not been there in almost a year, I galloped to the
rathe mountains, and naturally found myself the only person in the zone. I
was able to make the following unhindered observations:

* About 6 HG's were up
* After killing these, and not killing any placeholders, the number soon
went down to one spawning every few minutes.
* A small amount of PHer death resulted from the guards and from the
occasional stumbling of myself onto a KOS mob.
* This respawn rate was maintained for about 30 minutes until another player
logged in, a 41 ranger who I will subsequently refer to as 'the noob'

I explained the plan to the noob, who was most appreciative of being awarded
loot rights on all the fallen HG's and happy to contribute. At first we
avoided killing any PHers and the spawn rate remained low. Then we changed
to whacking everything in sight.

* within perhaps two minutes of this behavioral change, I was fighting 3
hill giants and could see another on my screen.
* Continuing to slay PHer's and HG's, I observed that I was continually
fighting more than one hill giant for about 10 minutes, at which point I
realised I had slacked off on the PHer's and the noob wasn't killing any.

At this point I communicated to the noob my plan to cease PH killing

* Within minutes there were no HG's up. After a little while 3 spawned and
were killed, then 2 a few minutes later, then 3 a few minutes later, then 2,
etc

The only weird part seemed to be that with two of us in there, neither
killing PHers, we seemed to get HG's in pairs more than the singles I had
been seeing, however I think this is more likely an illusion due to the fact
that the ranger had track, and so I became a aware of giants that I might
ordinarily have missed.

The reason, I imagine, why if you go to this zone you will see a couple of
hill giants up even if nobody's been there for days, is that a certain
amount of spawns will pathe through the guards, who will kill anything
except basilisks (non kos to them), hill giants and cyclops, (they are
killed by these). So that after a period of time all the spawns that pathe
through the guards will be basilisks, hill giants, or cyclops.

So anyway, for those of you who argued with dickheads for hours on end that
killing PHer's was the right thing to do, YOU WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG. No
surprise there.

The staggering thing is that those of us who did slay placeholders were,
with 100% certainty, lining the pockets of those who did not.

This completely irrelevant study has been brought to you by Kuloth -
answering the questions nobody is asking!

Cheers,
Kul

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt....8/OKImgXkq0ykJ

This has been on my to do list, but I needed more evidence first.

I found this comment a few years ago:

Quote:

I was running around with my level 49 enchanter pet killing all the basilisks, lizards, cyclopses, and skeletons to spawn more hill giants. I can generally get as many as 12 hill giants running around at one time by killing all the place holders

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...99306951786629

Thank you Dol for finding evidence....on blue someone had told me that the spawn rate had been nerfed the same way seafury gems were so I just accepted it, although its driven me nuts because I know Ive leveled many chars there quadding and grouping

While not definitive proof, there a tons of posts about how there are way more hill giants up than blue has ever had.
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...6&p=3#comments
RE: Basilisks

Quote

Reply
# Jun 14 2001 at 5:19 PM Rating: Good

paugod

Scholar

28 posts

The Hill Giant Valley in the South West corner of the zone is where most Basilisks hang out. I have heard reports that Basilisks are placeholders for the HGs but do not know this for a fact. I do know that when there are a lot of HGs around there are few Basilisks and when there are a lot of Basilisks there a few HGs. I have heard that Giant Skellys are also placeholders for HGs. The very best place to hunt is the North West corner of this Valley. You usually see the Basilisks on top of the Hill, near the tower and they sometimes wander down the side of the hill.

On the East side of this valley area there are also a lot of Bailisks but this area is very dangerous as HGs get bunched up from various pulls and you can become trained on very quickly with HGs, cyclopses, Giant Skellies and what not. The drake also roams this area. The reason for these trains is that Druids are very effective against HGs and they like to train them, dot them and kill them in packs. Sometimes they pull more than they can handle and they clear out leaving wandering problems for other groups. The North West area of this valley is the least vulnerable to this and there are pockets inside where you will not agro wanderings Mobs.

____________________________
Alarick
Paladin Lvl 45
Forbringers of Fate

Also quite a few people mentioning how they are in full groups killing giants....that would just be straight up stupid to do if there were only the 5 or 6 spawns we currently have.

Glad to see this getting some attention. I went there killing everything for an hour and was sad it didn't help and then stopped lol.

If I am not mistaken, there should be six spawns of HGs that then wander. Basilisks were then able to spawn HGs in addition to the six that are currently spawning on P99. However, I have no idea what the PH/HG ratios were. I did know that we tended to slaughter everything we could find to get more HGs to spawn. That area used to be able to support 2.5ish groups.

Ive seen more than 15 hill giants up at once, there used to be 2 or 3 full groups on each side of mountain on vaz, plus usually 1 or 2 (or more) druids / wizzies quadding them. Anything that moves on or around the hill was a ph, basilisks, bears, giants skellys, cyclops, lizards drakes....everything except static spawns were ph's

Can't add much from my memory banks other than on test server there were plenty of times where no hill giants were in RM at all. So there are certainly no HG only spawn points. It was common knowledge at the time that the basilisks spawned them near that hill area.