Mid-range quests rewards feel bleak with large parties

[Pandip]

With EE and the resurgence of NWN that gives us 30+ people at any given time of the day, it's become incredibly easy to get a full quest group together. I've rarely been in a situation where we had to make the difficult choice of excluding a character from a quest. Most of these players are lower level orange cloaks or new players that don't have a lot of experience with EFU or even NWN. At lower levels, this isn't an issue because the quests are so easy and there's so much loot and most of them are practically soloable or easily two-manned that nobody bothers to take a full group into them. At high levels, the ~3 people that are proposing doing quests like seers, sahuagin, etc. can mostly handle the quest for themselves and any additional spawns aren't a burden compared to the contribution of more party members. Additionally, the split for high level quests typically feels fair in the end -- everyone gets a split of gold, the people who rushed in the boss room are given first pick of the good potions, and the newbies are given neat and rewarding items that the 'crushers' don't have a use for.


There feels like there's a discrepancy in quest difficulty versus reward at the 6-7 range. .Sometimes 8, but at that point you should probably be feeling the soft cap anyways. Quest rewards don't seem to scale very well versus the difficulty of additional mobs when you have a full group of people. It feels very selfish to go on a quest with a party max of 8 people and look at the three or four orange cloaks and say "sorry, you're not good enough to come with us." There seems to be an especially large issue with healing drops at this level range and an inability to come close to breaking even with larger groups, even including miscellaneous trinkets. I have on more than one occasion had several people in a group say that they just don't have any more healing while trying to sustain their health with cure minors during a fight. I don't know that there's really any way to come back from this situation outside of waiting for a Sanctuary wage or dying back to 4 to resupply.


A few suggestions for the problem:

   
• Give a flat gold bonus to every player at the end of a quest if there are more than x# of the max characters for the quest. Gold seems to largely be static for quests and is probably the easiest band-aid to fixing the problem of characters not having what they need to proceed at their level.
• Spawn a chest at the end of a quest exclusively for larger parties.
• Mix up creature drops so that larger spawns have a chance of dropping more items. I'm not hip on this idea because it promotes skimming corpses, but it could help.

Also, there are some quests in this range that I've noticed might need tuning. I do the weeping goblin quest once after every break from EFU and then I never touch it again for an extended period of time. While this quest's difficulty is listed as Hard, the rewards don't match up. It's a very demanding quest whose second part requires access to a specific spell to complete and the loot payout is typically a lot of "neat" but in practice useless necromancy-based items. Clowns has gone from being a gold mine to a joke. I don't really like this quest, but it doesn't feel appropriate that a quest that doesn't give any loot still gives the same amount of coins as any other quest at the same level, if not less.

[Howlando]

I agree this can be an issue. Please be specific about which quests have this issue. A per pc gold reward at the end seems like the easiest solution, and it's not difficult to set up.

Gloomy Goblin Camp & Clowns have had a per PC gold sum added (175 and now 150 respectively). If there are others that seem off feel free to make your opinion known.

[SkillFocuspwn]

Just did the City of Clay quest and got 28 gold and some fairly lacklustre trinkets; not  sure if this was just bad luck or a case of this, but thought I'd mention

[SkillFocuspwn]

Yes!

[ascendancy]

I can second the notions about mudmen. It seems this quest no longer drops a lot of the 'muddy scrolls' that it used to and larger groups can make the slingers particularly oppressive.


Also, not necessarily in the same vein of reward disparity, I've run Blood Tail Cove twice in the last couple weeks and both times we full wiped to an 18/12 AB hero spawn with a keen scimitar. Even before this, the second half of Cove is the only quest I've consistently seen groups full wipe on, particularly when they're in the 7-8 people range. This spawn is stronger than the boss itself and while I understand that both groups I went with in the last couple of weeks mostly comprised of a bunch of level 6s and 7s that perhaps hadn't done the quest before, this guy seems a little extreme considering the circumstances.


I know the desire isn't to make all the quests easier across the board, these are all just meant to be observations and attempts to bring things to the team's attention.

[Spartan]

Second the part about the Blood Tail Cove extended quest issue mentioned above. The last couple of times I was on it were also total party kills or majority party kills with one / two people diving overboard in time. I think part of the issue is the hero spawn + boss spawn keen scimitars. They are scoring enough critical hits that your main front goes down in a couple of hits. Combine that with the sheer number of crossbow armed kobolds using sneak attack means you can get a TPK pretty easily.

On a general point, believe this is a side effect of the awesome numbers we are getting now. Where parties used to be around 4 characters, they now are much more likely to be 8. Add that to newer players not being fully optimized for EfU and you get some very very difficult encounters from the spawn engine. Not saying its an issue overall, but in a couple of cases its turning pretty deadly.

Specific recommendation for this quest, look at giving them a different weapon (boss + hero) or at least taking the keen off it? Without the critical range of the scimitar this quest becomes far less of an issue.

[Talir]

Bloodtail Asabi can no longer spawn as heroes. That should help with the troubles you face.

[Spartan]

Awesome, thanks!