Curse

Steps_Descending · Dec 06, 2009, 05:49 PM // 17:49

First off, I know this is not exactly a suggestion, as such, feel free to move it if need be. It is an idea of how GW could have been made from the start. I don't intend it to be proposable for now. This is more a "would you have liked GW more if it was X"
And now for the post itself.

It's an idea I had while browsing the forum, hoping to give more incentive to do quests and reduce the farming urge (tought it would have appeared anyway).
Imagine this from when you started playing, on your first charater, when you didn't have a god-like lv20 Farming character to get you max equipement as soon as you leave pre-searing:
No normal mobs drop weapon, or at least nothing gives worthwhile weapon, only trophies and merchant junk. The best way to get them (even at lv 20) is throught collectors, quest reward* and bosses.

The quest rewards would be similar to Pre-searing reward, that means the reward would actually be good weapon : fully moded, max damage, maybe even "impossible" weapon (like the 55 off-hand) a couple of time in the game)

The bosses would keep droping greens the same way they do now, but also drop 6-8 magic (blue/purple/gold basically) weapons for any proffession. That means you'd see one for every human player everytime (for a full party). Kinda similary to how today's endchests ar ethe most reliable source of gold weapon.
Or simply drop 1 weapon to every human player, ignoring henchmen. To avoid soloing bosses for a LOT of golds.

What I have in mind for this is to give more reasons to actually give more reasons beyond exp to do quests and to reduce farming to making money only, tought the trophies could still be used to get collector wep.

A couple of problems I see :
That would make missions pointless.
Weren't they pointless in the begining? And that can be avoided if some rarer mobs (like stones summit in northren shiverpeaks, or shiro-ken/afflicted in mission where you don't only fight against them) have higher than average chances to drop good weapon. Or simply add enough bosses that they are worth it.

That would encourage SCs.
I know that, but what's worst : farming or SC. More precisely, SC in an environment without perma-SF. ALso, SC would look more like "boss clearing group" than SC, since I'm not suggesting adding chest to all the mission. Only bosses. And mission are most of the time just 1 path, so the splitting team SC would be pointless untill UW. Where this is just unrelated.

What about when heroes appear?
Short answer is : there would still be collectors.
Another possibility would be to add repeatable quest in NF which would give a random item every time. So you could buy the weapons or just repeat the quest untill you can gather the mods and skin you like. Compared to today,s methods which are... check in storage (still possible), collector (still possible), buy (still possible), default weapon (still possible).
An exemple of the quest I'm talking about : Take the Norn Tournament, when ever you repeat it, you get a random purple/gold max warrior weapon with random mods. The skin comming from a pool of 2-3 skin to add some variety.

Once again, I repeat I am not proposing of implementing that. I am musing about how the game could hav ebeen build from the start.
What do you think?

Xx Da Best Xx · Dec 06, 2009, 06:15 PM // 18:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steps_Descending

First off, I know this is not exactly a suggestion, as such, feel free to move it if need be. It is an idea of how GW could have been made from the start. I don't intend it to be proposable for now. This is more a "would you have liked GW more if it was X"
And now for the post itself.

It's an idea I had while browsing the forum, hoping to give more incentive to do quests and reduce the farming urge (tought it would have appeared anyway).
Imagine this from when you started playing, on your first charater, when you didn't have a god-like lv20 Farming character to get you max equipement as soon as you leave pre-searing:
No normal mobs drop weapon, or at least nothing gives worthwhile weapon, only trophies and merchant junk. The best way to get them (even at lv 20) is throught collectors, quest reward* and bosses.

The quest rewards would be similar to Pre-searing reward, that means the reward would actually be good weapon : fully moded, max damage, maybe even "impossible" weapon (like the 55 off-hand) a couple of time in the game)

The bosses would keep droping greens the same way they do now, but also drop 6-8 magic (blue/purple/gold basically) weapons for any proffession. That means you'd see one for every human player everytime (for a full party). Kinda similary to how today's endchests ar ethe most reliable source of gold weapon.
Or simply drop 1 weapon to every human player, ignoring henchmen. To avoid soloing bosses for a LOT of golds.

What I have in mind for this is to give more reasons to actually give more reasons beyond exp to do quests and to reduce farming to making money only, tought the trophies could still be used to get collector wep.

A couple of problems I see :
That would make missions pointless.
Weren't they pointless in the begining? And that can be avoided if some rarer mobs (like stones summit in northren shiverpeaks, or shiro-ken/afflicted in mission where you don't only fight against them) have higher than average chances to drop good weapon. Or simply add enough bosses that they are worth it.

That would encourage SCs.
I know that, but what's worst : farming or SC. More precisely, SC in an environment without perma-SF. ALso, SC would look more like "boss clearing group" than SC, since I'm not suggesting adding chest to all the mission. Only bosses. And mission are most of the time just 1 path, so the splitting team SC would be pointless untill UW. Where this is just unrelated.

What about when heroes appear?
Short answer is : there would still be collectors.
Another possibility would be to add repeatable quest in NF which would give a random item every time. So you could buy the weapons or just repeat the quest untill you can gather the mods and skin you like. Compared to today,s methods which are... check in storage (still possible), collector (still possible), buy (still possible), default weapon (still possible).
An exemple of the quest I'm talking about : Take the Norn Tournament, when ever you repeat it, you get a random purple/gold max warrior weapon with random mods. The skin comming from a pool of 2-3 skin to add some variety.

Once again, I repeat I am not proposing of implementing that. I am musing about how the game could hav ebeen build from the start.
What do you think?

I like the idea of only collecters selling good stuff. Maybe if you had to get materials that make you travel across the land and were very hard to get, and the materials were untradeable. In return, you could get something youd never get from a drop, ie a dual mod or something....Thatd be cool.

But the whole Boss Drop thing, not feeling it. Im sure thered be a way to abuse that.

Gennadios · Dec 06, 2009, 07:25 PM // 19:25

I'm not sure if I'm following the pre-searing reward reference. I understand that one of the quest reward swords have a very good set of mods for charr farming, but for the most part there's nothing there that you'll keep past your first character, except maybe the crystal longsword.

I like the idea of mobs only droping merchables, collectibles, and crafting mats though.

CronkTheImpaler · Dec 06, 2009, 07:39 PM // 19:39

I think i understand the whole idea behind the post, or at least the spirit of the idea. Frankly its not a bad idea. I think a VERY BIG part of the community would toss up their collective hands and bolt GW though.

I always thought Boss's really offered a unique opportunity to do some cool stuff. Make them spawn completely randomly, that would make them more valuable (greens) Make weapons unique to certain boss's, stuff like that.

All things being equal this isnt the worst idea and it would have added a very different dimension if it had been implemented from day 1. But theres the kicker.....it wasnt..

good topic

Cronk

Zahr Dalsk · Dec 06, 2009, 07:40 PM // 19:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steps_Descending

I know that, but what's worst : farming or SC.

Speed Clears, by far.

/notsigned

Farming will still be perfectly viable since the majority of drops during farming aren't weapons anyways. Farming is done to make money, not to acquire a shitty quest reward weapon.

Steps_Descending · Dec 06, 2009, 11:57 PM // 23:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by CronkTheImpaler

All things being equal this isnt the worst idea and it would have added a very different dimension if it had been implemented from day 1. But theres the kicker.....it wasnt..

good topic

I know. More an idea I was playing with today. It really wouldn't do any good now.
Still good to not have the idea shot down with the firsts posts. (Accept for Zahr Daslk(I seriously love you name Zahr!))

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gennadios

I'm not sure if I'm following the pre-searing reward reference. I understand that one of the quest reward swords have a very good set of mods for charr farming, but for the most part there's nothing there that you'll keep past your first character, except maybe the crystal longsword.

I like the idea of mobs only droping merchables, collectibles, and crafting mats though.

Well if you compare the pre-searing rewards with the drops in Pre. The rewards are Incredibly good, now if you put that in lv 20 content : fo vabbian quest you get something like a max Furious Vabian Sword of Fortitude with some random inscription. It wouldn't make the quests epic or mandatory, but I'd like that more than the quartermaster system (accept mybe in Vabbi, but, hey!, saphires). Maybe those mods would need to be non-salvageable.

The Drunkard · Dec 07, 2009, 08:38 PM // 20:38

In warhammer online they had epic quests (5 or 6 quests you had to do in a chain) and at the end you got pretty strong rewards with fancy skins. It was fun for me so I'll /sign on this as well.

DragonRogue · Dec 08, 2009, 12:58 PM // 12:58

I think the OP is a bit confused about what farming really is. SCing is farming, just for the end rewards. Its still farming tho. And this idea would still be farming in the SC form. Matters little if all the monsters drop items, the bosses do, that there is an end chest, or a required item for collectors. Whatever produces rewards will still be WHAT is farmed.

ChaosWarrior · Dec 08, 2009, 01:44 PM // 13:44

Well I agree when you say the bosses just have to drop a nice weapon...
Me and some alliance members went to frostmaw's dungeon and cleared it. The thing was some members got platinium items and then I just got a onyx gemstone. I was very dissapointed... We were in there for pretty long and my reward is just an onyx gemstone .

what do you guys think about that?

Yawgmoth · Dec 09, 2009, 12:31 AM // 00:31

This doesn't make sense and a system like suggested here would be just strictly worse than what GW originally was. There's much I would change in regards to drops and quest rewards at launch if it was up to me, but certainly there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with regular mobs being able to drop weapons. What you're suggesting is adding restrictions which don't bring anything good.

To make quests worth doing they should provide worthwhile rewards. Originally in Prophecies many quests rewarded SKILLS and that worked pretty fine. When it comes to items, a good idea is to make quest reward items DIFFERENT than what can be found as drops and still useful.

A major flaw when it comes to quests in GW what I'd definately change would be REMOVING REGRETS - a player should never regret completing a quest, a character shouldn't become permanently gimped of certain options because a quest was completed. Most common problem is the quests having special mob spawns which can be used for farming, in some cases it's farming things completely unfarmable without that special quest related spawns or just far far harder. There are other uses of special quest spawns than just farming. Solution: If the quest is not repeatable, the special mobs that spawn for it shouldn't drop any items outside ones related to that quest,

Another thing is that you want to focus farming on just the bosses, so that a common activity is boss runs. And the way you suggest they'd be able to produce absurd amounts of weapons. Haven't you seen what adding Green drops to practically every boss wandering just behind a corner outside an explorable did? Extreme farming. In 2006 bosses in Factions were farmed extremelly heavily and greens flooded the market. And they were somewhat rare drops, not like you suggest every boss drop weapon for every party member...

However without removing possible weapon drops from regular mobs, having a good reason to make BOSS RUNS would bring some new life to PvE. But I don't mean running 100x to the same boss sitting there in the same spot, a.k.a. boring grind, but I'd love a RANDOM element there. I'm actually a fan of Prophecies random boss spawns but it can be taken even further. One thing could be team runs clearing all bosses in an area, reminds me of great fun I had back in 2005 hunting Elite Skills with PuGs on Perdition Rock. It was awesome, the only thing missing was possible cool drops from those bosses. Another thing would be hunting for RARE boss spawns, with no guaranteed location you could check over and over, something like Maw the Mountain Heart but without a guaranteed spawn location.

Steps_Descending · Dec 09, 2009, 03:18 AM // 03:18

To dragonRogue : I'll admit the farming I had in mind when I posted was the old farming from prophecy era. When I think, most weapon came from that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

This doesn't make sense and a system like suggested here would be just strictly worse than what GW originally was. There's much I would change in regards to drops and quest rewards at launch if it was up to me, but certainly there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with regular mobs being able to drop weapons. What you're suggesting is adding restrictions which don't bring anything good.

To make quests worth doing they should provide worthwhile rewards. Originally in Prophecies many quests rewarded SKILLS and that worked pretty fine. When it comes to items, a good idea is to make quest reward items DIFFERENT than what can be found as drops and still useful.

A major flaw when it comes to quests in GW what I'd definately change would be REMOVING REGRETS - a player should never regret completing a quest, a character shouldn't become permanently gimped of certain options because a quest was completed. Most common problem is the quests having special mob spawns which can be used for farming, in some cases it's farming things completely unfarmable without that special quest related spawns or just far far harder. There are other uses of special quest spawns than just farming. Solution: If the quest is not repeatable, the special mobs that spawn for it shouldn't drop any items outside ones related to that quest...

At last a long reply, concerning the regular mobs. There is nothing wrong particulary with them, but as I was having fun I decided to add that for the heck of it. Since they generally drop poor quality weapon (in my experience at least), that also had the side effect of replacing the most useless drop by trophies (collectors) and leaving the remaining source more reliable and improving the quality. About regrets, this is why I tought of repeatable quest who could be used to recreate the non-impossible items. For the impossibles(like the 55 off-hand), I always felt that the "rareness"/once-in-a-game state added a little special value to them. (Maybe it's just me) For a game like prophecy, it would still be possible to get ran and regrab the item, or simply buy it. Of course in a game like NF, that would be simply painful to get into the realm of torment just for a quest reward, in a game like this they would need to be placed early or to allow runs.

Quote:

Another thing is that you want to focus farming on just the bosses, so that a common activity is boss runs. And the way you suggest they'd be able to produce absurd amounts of weapons. Haven't you seen what adding Green drops to practically every boss wandering just behind a corner outside an explorable did? Extreme farming. In 2006 bosses in Factions were farmed extremelly heavily and greens flooded the market. And they were somewhat rare drops, not like you suggest every boss drop weapon for every party member...

Concerning greens, the fact that bosses wouldn't drop just one weapon would at least make the farming a group thing. And since the weapon would basically be the same golds people get from end-chests, I'd expect the place of boss farming to be the same as what SCs have now.

Well having a boss drop a weapon for (nearly) every party member is kinda pretty much exactly what I tought about (remember I know that is unimplementable and all that). The difference I see with greens is that they would be the same random weapon you get from every monster on tyria : a jade brotherhood would drop between 4-8 weapon that jade brotherhoods drop right now in-game (for a 8-man group). Not so different from killing a whoe group to get 4-5 weapons, you'd kill the group's boss to get the same 4-5 weapons (divided in the party). By the way, where does weapon comes from if not from collectors and random mobs? If that would make a difference, where did youget your firsts set of weapon?

Of course, that would make mods and some weapon skin easier to obtain (is that a bad thing?). The more I think about it, the more 8 drops is probably too much, but for a 8 man party, if you don't want to have to make 50 runs to get the right kind of weapon you want, with the right mod, in the right party who accept to give it to you...

Actually the market wouldn't have changed too much, the elite skins would still be only obtainable from chest/bosses in elite areas/craftable only. What would change is that max weapon and mods would be easier to gain. Purple/gold rarity doesn't garanty max mods...

Talking about skill quests, does anyone remember why they removed them?