Update Discussion: August 25, 2019

[Tagamogi]

I only spent a few hours in the fae realm so far, and from what I've seen so far, the difficulty of non-elite mobs is spot-on. I had two duo groups - one with both of us around 58-62 fire/battle chemistry purple solo gear, and one with a 76 sword/79 shield in Gazluk Keep gear plus my wimpy alt at 59ish staff/battle chemistry. In the level 60ish group, we could kill most things fast and easily, without feeling it was too trivial. The mobs further south gave us more of a challenge - both of us could solo a winter soldier if needed but also die if we didn't pay attention, and the hippogryphs were better duo'd at our level.
The 70+ Gazluk Keep gear was definitely overpowered for the northern half of the zone - my chief contribution to that group consisted of watching him take down everything in a few hits. We still managed to die a few times to sheer stupidity - like ending up in fight with 5-6 spiders at once.

So, to me, it just seems like a pleasant zone to explore - not too easy, not too hard, and I like that you have to pay a bit of attention to avoid elites and not confuse winter soldiers with scouts.The only mildly negative thing I'd say about the mobs I've seen so far is that the speed debuff from the carnivines is really annoying as a melee - I'd love if the speed debuff was a bit less or lasted a shorter time, or maybe auto-disappeared once the carnivine is killed.

I like the size of the zone - it doesn't feel overcrowded and it feels like there's lots of stuff to explore. The zone landscaping seems fine to me - you got the trees and the ruins and the big fire hill, and it doesn't feel to me like it needs more variety. How far you can see is definitely fun - I like being able to see the orb from quite a way away.

I still think the overall atmosphere of the zone is great. My friend enjoyed the conversations with the fairies as much as I did, and got a huge kick out of Felmer asking him all kinds of weird questions about elves. I liked both the rakshasa and elf conversations, and I'm almost tempted to level up a human just to see what those fairies will say. My friend also promptly started leveling animal handling (from a previous level 25) because he was that inspired by the idea of a pet bee. My husband is less conversational, but seemed to enjoy the zone and commented that he liked how far away the fire mountain looked from a distance.

I think I like the royal jelly requirement. It seems they aren't too hard to come by but just rare enough that you have to think a bit about what you want to use them for next. I won 4 jellies in the casino (I like that the new fae items can show up there!), we got a couple from non-repeatable quests, plus the hourly pixie quest can reward jelly, so it didn't seem terribly hard to get started collecting them.I do like that they are tradable - we got to pool ours to get my husband uncapped sooner than he'd been able to manage on his own. Since it seems the jellies can be pretty reliably obtained solo, I don't think there's any need to restrict trading to control prices. If someone wants to pay exaggerated market prices to get 500 jellies RIGHT NOW, by all means let them.

The council cost of the training gets a "not interested" from me. My general feeling is that I can make money and making money can be fun, but I'm not interested in it currently and I'd rather play than worry about training costs. Worrying about affording the level 70+ training seems to much effort in general and then there is that discount...

The difference in the training discounts between players continues to have me sulking big time. It's possibly worth noting that I appear to be the only person thus affected, but it just makes me want to not train anything. I uncapped foraging 60+ for one character which I regret in hindsight. My current game plan mostly involves pretending high level training doesn't exist. Since it looks like we may finally get a semi-weekly trio group going, flat out not training may not be possible, but I intend to put all training off as long as possible and train as little as possible. Fortunately, I don't think the pace of our group will be very fast. I have zero motivation to level past 70 on my own currently.
I'm not sure what I'll do about my crafting skills - maybe in a few weeks, my sulk will recede far enough I'll be ok uncapping them slowly, but for now I'm putting on a one-person training strike to protest unfair pricing.

But hey, I picked up a piggy lemon yesterday and playing a baby pig does sound like fun...