1. Sorrow's Friend.
Wailing Bedina is beautiful.
The Void Escape is fun.

2. Skittering Precinct.
i like green, grappling hooks, and the Gilded Spider Daedra.

3. The Parch.
"I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere."
Being swallowed by a Duneripper is also unpleasant.
Though i do like Sellistrix.

Simple answer is that I get tired of being in dark areas all the time and The Parch is the brightest. I do love Ozezan though. #Ozezan for President

Chose Skittering as second because not having the relic doesn’t influence what path people take most of the time (in other words, people don’t get split up like with the sand walls) and Roksa is my RGB Gamer Bug. Skittering probably my favorite Skirmish too.

The Parch is controversial but good.
It is the most comfortable: by gamma, by atmosphere, by quests locations.
The most unexpected: by calamitous boss and skirmish mechanics, by deadly level of Sellistixm by dungeon with not-Zmaja.
The most boring after some time: this boring desert,and all these sand barriers that force newcomers to run miles around.

The Skittering is average.
The spiders minigame is not a puzzle. Meh.
The bosses are less interesting but good. The dungeon is challenging.
The skirmish has funny details, but the main phase is just messy.
The best thing here is the artifact that helps you to jump the roofs.

The Sorrow is gloomy and depressing.
The dark zones are not funny. You can jump down there from oasis and just die... veery interesting.
Some skirmish mechanics are funny, but the whole encounter is overtuned. Stones are too spammy. The top is the swordsman mini, who respawns fast and oneshots you with a big aoe from another end of the room because nobody cares to turn him away. Meh.
Ardent bosses' effects over zone are annoying. While big-wolf potions are simply OP, those mage clones aoe just terrorize you till you go and dig down that dirty "I exist in all of time".

Aesthetically I love Sorrow's Friend the most but I think the Skittering district overall has the best design. I am not big on the whole spider aesthetic as a draw but the Skittering theme feels the most interconnected, the relic feels fun and it doesn't feel overly frustrating to traverse the district before you get it, the lore tidbits and atmosphere are very nice and there are some fun easter eggs about, the minigames/race is probably the least tedious and the bonus combat buffs associated with all the parts of it are powerful and relatively easy to obtain alone compared to other districts. I hope it new districts down the line are on the table given NM lore, Skittering is looked to first for overall goals for those. I do think think some things could be improved in this district like the speed bumps or some of the quest marker locations, it has some things to adjust too but overall I think it's the one I'm most happy to spend time in.

I like Sorrow's Friend aesthetically. I love dark and light duality themes and it's got some very gorgeous visuals. I appreciate seeing Murklight in 2026 with mehcanics (sometimes) because there are a lot of old bosses I miss aesthetically and Murklight always had a cool gimmick that I am glad to see again. My problems with Sorrow's Friend that rank it below Skittering for me are mostly the bosses are some of the most tedious/annoying in all the districts (even if I like several of them aesthetically), a lot of the buffs in this district feel horrible and less powerful than other districts, the race is probably the least fun (buff from getting it is cool but also can troll you when you try to hit other synergies including the jump pad) and I would love it if the minigame in this district was completely reworked because it's genuinely awful. I do hope this district gets a lot of love before round 2 because it feels like a few adjustments could make it a genuinely enjoyable/fun experience and I'd love to want to spend more time in this district. Lore/story bits in the zone are still great though and I like them a lot.

Last for me is the Parch, which makes me sad because I do genuinely enjoy a lot about the zone and it has some of my favorite bosses. First, focusing on the good-similar to Sorrow's Friend, I love the bosses and was happy to see COA2 Ash Titan with mechanics/dialogue again. I also enjoyed Ozezan, Incineration Beetles, and some other fights. Myshka is probably my favorite of the three zone npcs and while I like the other two, he feels more interconnected with the zone's story/side quests than the other two. I'd love to see more from all of the zone npcs in the future. I find the duneripper fun and I enjoy the race/maze but the boulder minigame is just okay (and sometimes tedious, something could be said on how easy it is for a pug or group member to troll all the minigames). The buffs in this district are fun and decently powerful similar to Skittering, but they are often more tedious to get, especially if trying to do boulders alone. For the less good marks against it and why it's my least favorite there are a few things: I am not big on the desert/sand aesthetic and unlike the other two districts it feels a bit too plain (even the skirmish being up vs not is less aesthetically easy to tell than the other two districts), the relic feels the worst of the three (before getting it the paths are a lot more tedious/limited, after getting it it still puts you in an animation which while pretty self cc's you a bit and also and if you are dead you cannot traverse the sand walls making it feel more tedious than other regions for being in ghost state/resurrecting), and this district probably has the most "feels bad" moments. I do think pushing the theme a bit more and adding some aesthetic updates to make the skirmish being up more clear would help a ton for it and even as my least favorite district I like it a ton.

So yea, those are my thoughts on each overall. I can't say I dislike any per say, just want to see some things tweaked and continued to be improved upon. I also would love to see more districts/relics/themes over time that cycle in and out, because there is a lot of room to make Night Market cool and interesting and I've been enjoying reading about previous NM districts and themes and I find myself lore/story wise imagining other districts as I do stuff.

I might like Skittering more if it had a few more Grapple Points.

The Parch is reasonably easy to get around without dying, and the Duneripper is just plain cool (Excessive, but cool.)

Sorrows is meh in most ways. The oddity is the hardest to figure out but, paradoxically, the easiest to solo.

I like Skittering most because the grapple ledges also act as additional safe zones and the spider oddity and race are right near the entrance and reasonable to solo.

I like the Parch the second most because the calamity is fun, the race is easy, and once you have the relic it's easy to navigate.

Sorrow Fiend is just annoying because it is easy to accidentally die without the relic, although it does have the best of the skirmishes. Also the guiding light oddity is really annoying.

mixed, i dont think i have a most and least favorite lol

the parch:
pros: has easier minigames, generally better to farm in
cons: duneripper swallowing (i dont dislike the duneripper, but it shouldnt say for instance be able to go into the skirmish area), the sandwalls were also abhorrent for traversal until you get the relic, enemies have way too much stagger cc

skittering:
pros: has the easiest calamity boss of the 3 districts, minigame is not overly difficult but works better with a group
cons: race is not ideal, it should be something thats sectioned out from the district because it requires you to be either stealthed or kill all of the enemies, annoying skirmish

sorrows:
pros: calamity boss isnt too terrible (its only very annoying attack is the nearly 1 shotting blackhole when it spawns it underneath you)
cons: race is awful (basically impossible to do without a stealth build), skirmish is very annoying with the boss having 9 invulnerability phases (not total waiting invuln, but still slows the fight significantly), oddity minigame is kind of annoying and if you have a large group its basically a dice roll if you can even complete it with people needing to stamp the levers to get credit

all 3 districts:
cons: all minigames should reset quicker on fail

if i had to rank them, the least favorite would be sorrow for sure, but a tie for the other 2

I like both Skittering and Parch but i hate Sorrow's Friend because of the Hunt mechanic boss. It just makes the fight longer and longer and it also bugs out sometimes.

Sorrow:
- easiest bosses
- easiest calamity
- quest markers easiest to see due to the gloomy environment
- easier on the eyes if you play in a darker environment

Parch:
- bright environment
- easy to traverse / avoid bosses
- Some harder bosses
- easiest race

Skittering:
- easiest to traverse
- most annoying skirmish
- easiest oddity

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I like Skittering most because the grapple ledges also act as additional safe zones and the spider oddity and race are right near the entrance and reasonable to solo.

I like the Parch the second most because the calamity is fun, the race is easy, and once you have the relic it's easy to navigate.

Sorrow Fiend is just annoying because it is easy to accidentally die without the relic, although it does have the best of the skirmishes. Also the guiding light oddity is really annoying.

What is this relic you speak of?

The Parch to me is the worst if only for traversal through the zone before you get the wind fan. Soooo many doorways blocked off making you run the longest way around just to get to a boss, and then you have to run back around to get back. Not to mention crossing that giant expanse of nothing for the skirmish if you want to get to the other bosses.

Sorrow's friend is pretty normal honestly, nothing really stands out to me as bad or annoying like the other two. Which let me talk about Roksa the warped. That big bug goes everywhere and will interrupt every major boss battle you have in there. Wailing Bedina too, but Roksa feels way more prevalent than Bedina did while I was running around.
I did like the grapple points with the egg of Arac. That was cool.

The excessive use of null magic in skittering easily makes it my least favorite.

parch fights are interesting, and it has my favorite of the 3 dungeons. easiest of the races for me. Of the overland bosses Ozezan is my favorite

sorrows has the darkness mechanic which I really like, an interesting twist with shadowy flavor. I do NOT like how buggy the werewolf boss is.

for me it would be (parch = sorrows) > skittering

as a place to explore sorrows friend was more interesting. The parch was ok but running into the duneripper got extremely annoying. i liked going into the dark places of sorrows friend. The skittering got annoying with all the spiders but being able to go across rooftops was a nice feature.

I like the skirmish in Sorrow's Friend, which nudges that district just ahead of the other two for me. Otherwise they're about the same in that they all have little advantages and disadvantages.

I do wish we had more grapple poles in Skittering. I like having hordes of mobs start to converge on me, then grappling out of danger as I say, "not today".

Before you get a fan, running in The Parch with a group is painful.