Povus

Overall I like Povus - the zone is beautiful and densely populated with points of interest and things to do. I know you have some changes in store for the nightly invasions, but I will still offer some suggestions.

Lamia:
Lamia are an interesting mob that says "screw your plans" by preventing you from using most of your bar - they make tanks highly ineffective until downed unless you have a combination of high burst and melee evasion which is a tall order. I like lamia b/c they make you more cautious and I think they really work in labs, but I think they need to be re-worked for Povus. One idea would be to give them another attack that isn't charm or give charm a fail chance on players outside of evasion or to just have them appear in smaller quantities. The issue w/ them in povus is because this is a timed event you need to move quickly, because its in a city you can't see every mob in the area, there are pats and respawns, and its not hard for a lamia or 4 to come in and slow you down by a lot. This is fine in the lamplighting challenge, but when looking at flapskulls I'm not sure they contribute much to this invasion.

Mob spawn rates for kill quests:
In certain encounters (megafauna, ratkin pest control) the biggest issue preventing a group from moving forward is spawn rate. It seems for the pest control that these tend to come in two waves potentially - that is at first the fumigators spawn and on the respawn wave there's a higher chance of pest control. I think I'd favor something like the orcish invasion where once enough orcs are killed reinforcements arrive from the east. Rather than waiting for pest control respawns, once enough fumigators are killed a wave of pest control spawn and rush the city.

Ratkin's "sense danger":
It seems ratkin were given a "sense danger" effect which I actually think is cool, but needs tweaking. Danger sense is what I'm calling the effect where a you're in combat with literally anything and a ratkin or 3 will walk 30 meters to the location of your battle to explore the area. I like the idea here, but I think its range needs to be slightly limited and it should be limited to only be ratkin to ratkin and not just general combat - or there should be certain zones where it doesn't apply (zones not controlled by ratkin). The other night I was doing lamp lighting in the annex fighting ghosts, lamia, and skeletons and there were some ratkin just outside the city who would "sense danger" and walk in to the annex to investigate. This felt so out of place - I think by the end I had to fight 3 ratkin while also keeping an eye out for lamia/ghost repops.

Animal Husbandry/genetics

I _really_ love the genetics system. I am currently level 80 arthropod genetics and have been having a blast running around documenting gene frequencies to figure out what's rare and how they're distributed. I was a little surprised that there is an optimal gene sequence outside of phenotype only genes, but honestly I'm grateful for this as a player as it simplifies things - it also seems that on the whole recessive is favored for all genes. It's a fun little side project that will keep us busy for some time. I posted in discord, but to recap:

I am mostly on board with "you can't trade pets and then breed them" b/c if that were allowed once people get "optimal" breeding pairs they could breed more and sell them and then there'd be ne point in hunting rare genes etc. But I think it would be cool if this only applied to captive raised pets and that wild caught pets can be traded for breeding. This would make a market for "gene hunters" who seek out rare genes and sell them

One thing I'm curious about with the genetics progression is how the xp scaling works. Every 5 levels of arthropod genetics I get +1 genetics level and +5 xp per successful analyze. I'm wondering if the +5 comes from the genetics level and will apply to future subskills or if it comes from arthropod genetics meaning each other subskill will have the same 9k analysis progression. If the genetics level determines xp that seems like later progressions will be too quick so I'm guessing its not this, but if each sub skill has a 9k kill progression that feels quite long. Particularly because there are certain zones where a species type is in higher qty and it will lead to higher level players camping lower level areas - I've already done this in serb hills/crypt. An obvious solution for that would be an xp decay on level of mob similar to anatomy, but then this 9k progression seems a little too unforgiving. I'm particularly concerned when we think of things like rodents where there really isn't high density of these.

The half way point for arthropod genetics is lvl 71 and by then you can analyze living bees/wasps and with a beginners analyzer are pretty close to being able to analyze FR bees/wasps so there's plenty to keep someone busy for the last half of the progression (especially since at this point almost 3/4ths of the genome is visible).

It seems that bees vs wasps have different gene frequencies, but I haven't noticed this on subspecies which I think would be very cool. I need to collect more data to be sure it isn't already implemented, but I would love for freeze wasps vs turret wasps to have different frequencies or even as far as "blood hunter bees are more likely to have key rare genes".

All in all I'm very pleased with it and enjoying the process