I entered one of those areas last night at combat level 42 - I took two hits from an aggresive mob (a group of which pretty much made it impossible to move further than a hundred meters into the area) and got a quick ticket back to town
.I know we have some 70+ fighters in our guild, and they are still only fighting blue mobs (Malicious and Dangerous Cloppers for instance) - the Zerx mobs I ran into were orange.
I like the idea of a challenge and something to do at higher levels, but if the crafters will be unable to supply us with weapons/armor to actually make it to a level where we can protect those same crafters, something definately needs to be changed.
On the other hand, even though I have not really done much research on the whole material subject, I do know that there are several Tryker crafters making q70+ items, and I could have sworn I saw them talking about q100 or q99 materials last night. Might have been looted ones though - meaning no better than "fine" quality.