Eratication - Add more rats to make it fairer?

[Egon the Monkey]

FInally got to do this one. Amazingly weird quest, creepy and amusing, interestingly flavourful loot, but the supply output is not great and it's horrifyingly dangerous compared to any other 3-8. Mostly because of the total element of surprise it has. It was interesting to do, but I REALLY see why nobody recruits for it.

• You have no idea what IC you're facing, and no time to learn how the enemies work.
• The enemies have a totally unexpected set of immunities and enemy type, given what they appear to be.
• The enemies have totally unexpected powers with no clear hard or soft counters. So you can't react to the problem with supply use.
• The enemies can straight-up stunlock you with an effect that's impossible to remove.

You can't prepare for it in advance IC and you can't react to it. So what happens is I barely ever hear anyone recruiting for it, it's infamous in #efu-main, and it's very much Metagame or Die.  Essentially I walked in, got swarmed (fine) then got blasted to bits by unique effects that didn't have an obvious bolt or trail leading back to 'that thing that is throwing out Horrible Attacks, so we need to kill it'. And a full combat log from the swarm attacks, so I couldn't quite spot what was happening until I was chilling in the Fugue.

Oddly, I think a solid improvement for this quest would be to add more enemies!
If there was a smaller chamber where you only had to fight a few at once, it would let you learn what the different enemy types are all about, and stop for an IC discussion of how to fight them. Or similarly, if the enemy types occasionally spawned in that bit of the Ashways themselves, so they're a known threat and you can say "Well it's <SPOILER> so we should avoid X and use Y".
Or just, you know, put an ammo limit on those KD spammers in the same way that Warlocks don't just empty their spells on 100% max range fireballs.

As it is, unless you have the OC knowledge of how brutal this quest is, you go into what looks like a moderately rough 3-8 short miniboss fight, then get utterly murked by all the surprise superpowers. None of which are telegraphed by the type of enemy, so by the time you learn what's going on, you're dead. And though the loot has good numbers, it seems to be largely gear, so if you already have gear it's a lot of risk for not much stuff you'll use. The gear is however, some really unique and good stuff.