This quest is nigh impossible. It isn't even slightly adjusted for levels. 2 level 4s and a level 5 were all in the minuses with two hits upon them each. 2 were fugued and one was healed. He ran downstairs and got a level 7, who had around 145 hp, to help, who was quickly brought down to badly wounded. Then, we got 1 more person. with around 70 health, who was fugued within around 4 hits.

This was the Half-Orc, who does around 25 damage a hit. I'd like this quest to be at least scaled for who's doing it. Right now, you can get 3 lvl 3s who would all easily be wiped out in 1 hit, and even a group of level 7s would have immense difficulty.

These are wanted criminals that the Watch has utterly failed to bring in. The bounty boards even say that the criminals are incredibly dangerous. I think, that, for the quest to make sense, they need to be powerful.

However, this particular case does sound a bit out of whack.

He probably could use a damage reduction in favor of more HP or something.

If the quest is now finally working as intended (I haven't tried it for at least a couple of months), I don't think it needs to be changed -- at least not when it comes to the original bounty NPCs.

Somehow it was always very obvious to me that the NPCs you'd be going after on this particular quest wouldn't scale. I never expected them to, and I don't want them to, either.

As for the high damage output in this specific case, the half-orc happens to be one of the toughest NPCs you can go up against, so it doesn't surprise me you had casualties; but I can also give an example of an NPC that could very well be brought down by 3 level 3 PCs.

The only thing I'll point out is that the NPCs on this quest used to have a faction reset script so you could safely get away from them -- I'm not sure if they still have this. I realize there have been quite a few faction bugs with this quest in the past, and that this script may or may not have been the cause of those, but if that script has been removed, and can be added again without screwing things up, I'd suggest doing that.

This is working as intended. They are bad men.

It sounds like sending one person in one at a time after the other didn't work out very well. That's how they do it in the kung-fu movies, and it doesn't work very well their either. These extra dangerous bounties exist because one or two watchmen in their current state have not taken them down. You'll need an army, not just a fledgling ranger.

Unless this has been modified, I agree that this quest is stupidly hard. I once took this quest with a very strong lvl 7 character, with a handy sidekick. We nearly died, and being in an Australian time zone (and therefore DMless), and concerned that the beast would attack others that came down to *spoiler*, we decided to meta-kill it and dump the loot. We got it trapped so it couldn’t move after both nearly dying a dozen times. We then sat there and missile attacked it for what seemed like an aeon. It had a plus 25 AC, it drank a multitude of pots including blur, and just stood there eating arrows for well over ten minutes. Its fine if the quest is supposed to have bad maternal fornicators to fight, however these guys are much harder than any endboss from a quest, and I simply could not imagine a lvl 7 party that could win this fight fairly. Moreover, the quest is open to much lower levels, who could easily be newish to the server. Hell, even if you aren’t new, there is nothing in the quest text that indicates this is any harder than , say assaulting a fortress, or cleaning a mine full of gnolls. Moreover the reward is pitifully small.

When playtesting, I found I could solo all of the NPC's depending on what kind of character I had. Each bounty NPC has advantages and disadvantages.

I do want to do some changes to that quest (like issuing bounty hunting licenses), but I don't think that the NPC's will get easier. (I do have 5 new criminals I'd like to add as well.)

I've seen a lot of the NPC's get obliterated easily, which is pretty disappointing. Some are harder than others depending on how you fight them.

Never tried this quest, but judging by the comments, why not up the minimum level just a bit. That and/or repeat several times the dangerous nature of the wanted criminals. Redundancy helps getting a message across.

Some of the criminals are less dangerous than others. Basically, by reading the wanted sign, you can find out what they did, and a little bit about them. That can give some idea whether you want to go take them on, or possibly give a clue of how to take them on.

(I was able to solo almost every villain with a level 5 rogue when I was testing.)

My experience with this quest was a little different - I couldn't find the bounty to save my life!

Myself, a Lev 7 and two other Lev 6's spent the better part of two hours trying to just find the bounty - which we never did. The true concern, after the first hour, was that our bounty was either ;

A) Dead, and we couldn't collect yet be stuck with a quest.

or

B) Had just slaughtered countless innocents, that didn't know what stood in front of them.

So, without spoiling the whole thing - do these bounties have specific spawn points or areas? Or do they literally spawn anywhere you could imagine?

Bad guys with bounties on their heads should be in places that are difficult to find.

Thrawn Some of the criminals are less dangerous than others. Basically, by reading the wanted sign, you can find out what they did, and a little bit about them. That can give some idea whether you want to go take them on, or possibly give a clue of how to take them on.

(I was able to solo almost every villain with a level 5 rogue when I was testing.)

For that matter, I think it would be very nice if you added a courtesy level range on each wanted sign instead of just the whole quest, seeing as you can pursue different 'sections' of it, that really wouldn't even be near the level range in terms of difficulty.