This place is... simple, more simple than it looks at first glance. It's a dungeon that is dependent on mob drops and puzzle-solving to progress through that concludes with an artifact chest...
And I have a lot of beef with it.
So to start with the mobs, that are separated in two groups:
Minogons (and minotaurs)The minogons spawn in about 5 different breeds. They have interesting, obvious abilities, are well balanced, acceptable experience rate and drop a lot of junk, that if you have a STR character in the party willing to collect and sell the scraps, may be a lot of gold.
These are the epitome of good design to me. How to take the same mob and turn it into five interesting variations.
Also minotaurs. They are there, in a single area. Something like raw minogons without the actual abilities but higher offensive potential.
ArtificersThese. These are where things start to go south in the plant.
Artificers are auto-casting, heavy-warding, IGSM-spamming, Acid-sheathed wizards with true seeing. And they always have at least one Morderkainen Disjunction ready - usually, the first thing that they cast offensively.
Artificers come in only two variants. Artificers and Aritificer Leaders - the leaders being basically the same but in steroids.
In the 2/3 areas that you can freely navigate when you first enter the plant, artificers are a rare spawns. In fact, they may not spawn at all unless you have at least one character at level 30 in your party. This means they are easier to deal with at first, but: Problem.
When you originally enter the plant, it is a null-magic area (that doesn't affect the artificers, so bless you for trying to dispel their acid sheathes in vain).
Battle-casters of most sorts will find themselves mostly starting to hate life from this point. Personally I'm not sure if I'm particularly unlucky, or if the artificers have School Focus: Abjuration feats.
The deeper you get into the place, the more the minogons become a secondary spawn and the artificers, the primary. But at least, one you start going deeper you can actually breach their acid sheathes.
The puzzlesGetting started with the puzzles has one mayor problem:
You need two items to start opening way into the Minogon Plant, that are dropped by the artificers respectively. This means that if no artificer spawns at all, you simply cannot advance further initially.
But in the case you are less unlucky, you may get at least a set to disable the antimagic field and the place becomes less of a chore to deal with. Hurray! Provided you are lucky enough to amass enough discs to get through, you'll slowly advance through the back and forth of puzzles. (Oh, and make sure you don't stack the discs, or you may lose your whole stack in a single use, hee-hee)
Most of them are somewhat straight-forward.
There is a room that only favors characters with at least 20 base intelligence (and only slightly), and strips everybody else of their buffs (hi forced rest)
There is a room that favors stealther (in fact, using one may be the only way to get through).
It's generally just a back-and-forth of looking information and codes and figuring where to go next.
Perhaps the balista room holds most of my beef. This room seems to randomly shoot the people that try to cross the bridge with completely unavoidable, unsavable, unmitigable bolts. There is only one kind of character that can cross through without taking any harm...
I'm okay with the room requiring specific skillsets to have its defenses overridden. I'm not okay with that being only one set of abilities, with the bolts being completely ungodly and absolute as they are, or with the fact that in a world so full of magic and methods, there's no real other way to deal with this room but run through (and get torn open in the process) or have that kind of character.
And about the last puzzle/code:
I spent nearly 2 years and the lifetime of 3 characters taken to level 30 before I finally got the answer to the last code. Another little hint here would be welcomed.
Conclusion and reward: Even if you were to run exactly with a group that knows exactly what it is doing with the proper level set (mostly, high epic), this is a place that takes too long to run, which is still mostly dependent of mob spawns at first.
So let's say that you actually go through all the plant in the glorious effort. What's your reward:
One rich ore vein.
One rare gem deposit
One artifact chest
Oh yes, the minogon plant has an arty chest!
With a lock at DC 80, that in contrast to any other chest in the game and the spell description, cannot be opened with a Knock spell.
This is like dropping quicksilver in an open wound.
A lock at DC 80 means that you need absolutely a dedicated rogue.
That is to say:
33 open lock ranks,
43 ESF feat
56 dexterity
60 open lock daggers
80 with the open lock roll.
Or a few variations of skills, maybe with more dex, more gear and a Rogue's Cunning book
This is one of the hardest-to-reach artifact chests in the server, and it's unbashable and impossible to open any other way.
There's not a single other chest in the whole dungeon. There's no more resources than the above-mentioned vein. This is flatly one of the most painful places to visit in my experience. And short of coming to see it once in a RP-heavy trip, there is absolutely no other reason I would take a party through the pain that is this whole dungeon.
Not to mention, there's no portal out of the place. There -is- a portal out, but it leaves you within the same dungeon at best, still two maps away from the exit.
