feedback: new mod

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

WARNING SPOILERS




General

(Note to reader: doing this on my level 8 TR monk)

I spoke to the lady first, then the man, and the man told me to speak to the lady, who I now couldn't... wasn't sure if I'd bugged something

EDIT: upon turning in the quest, this did confuse all the dialog but it seemed to advance okay...

Bargain Bazaar

Didn't manage to get conquest, although I'm sure I pretty much killed everything. Got ransack right about the right time.

Spinning traps were invisible sometimes!

Took me ageeeeees to find the lever to open the gates. Very frustrating!

XP was 462 + 462 + 231 + 2548 = 3703 for 23 minutes which is 161xp/min which is pretty pitiful. Understandably I wasted 10 minutes looking for the lever but even 13 mins is only 280xp/min where I can get a lot more from Tear of Dhakan (756 xp/min) at same level. I'm don't even count the run to the quest, which was around five minutes... The base xp needs a boost from 1540 up to maybe 3000 to compete at that level.

On a more aesthetic slant though, the scenery was nice, and the end boss was cool though

more to come...

Garth

[Zenako]

Actually the EXP rewards are right around the norm for level 7 quests.

7	1390	Old Grey Garl
7	1380	The Scoundrel's Run
7	2148	Free Delera-DT 3
7	4558	The Missing Party-DT2
7	1220	The Grey Moon's Den: Extermination-GM 4
7	1380	The Grey Moon's Den:The Trollish Scourge-GM 3
7	612	The Last Move: The way to Yarkuch
7	1252	The Last Move: Yarkuch's Last Stand
7	3940	Gwylan's Stand
7	1124	The Graverobber
7	7780	The Pit
7	3940	The Tear of Dhakaan

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Black Loch

Zombie pirates! cool.

Love the traps just past the green door.

Good quest, killing and finding keys and opening doors and killing. Found it odd I couldn't kill the end boss until I'd killed his waves of zombies.

XP: 259+2865 in 12 minutes = 260 xp/min which is better but still not good enough XP for people to go out of their way to do. I presume people will be attracted to these quests by the loot.

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Actually the EXP rewards are right around the norm for level 7 quests.

You can't take base XP as indicative of how much XP you can earn, you have to take the base XP and the time it takes to run the quest, like MrCow has done in his rather excellent diaries of a melee. Some of those quests above take significantly shorter to complete than 15 minutes.

Garth

[Zenako]

You can't take base XP as indicative of how much XP you can earn, you have to take the base XP and the time it takes to run the quest, like MrCow has done in his rather excellent diaries of a melee. Some of those quests above take significantly shorter to complete than 15 minutes.

Garth

Let me just offer that some of the discrepency in EXP/min you are citing is due to simply not knowing the quest well. You can complete Bargain Bazaar in under 5 minutes if you skip the optionals. I ran it a quite a number of times on Lamannia while testing. For people who KNOW quests like Tears real well they can zoom it fast, but others take alot longer.

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Storming the Beaches

My favorite so far! I love the landscape and the idea of the fort on an island. I took the 'sneaky' way in which was kinda cool walking up the cliffs and then surprising the pirates. I like that I will probably do this quest another two times to see the other parts. The fort really 'felt like' a real fort. Good job on the quest design. Also like that you get more XP as you kill more pirates.

Took me 17 minutes, but could have probably done it faster if I hadn't been admiring the view, so say 15 mins - XP was 3352 + 274 + 365 = 266 xp/min which seems around average for these new quests.

I didn't get a sigil, wasn't sure if it was because I didn't get the end chest or because I was just unlucky.

Garth

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Let me just offer that some of the discrepency in EXP/min you are citing is due to simply not knowing the quest well. You can complete Bargain Bazaar in under 5 minutes if you skip the optionals. I ran it a quite a number of times on Lamannia while testing. For people who KNOW quests like Tears real well they can zoom it fast, but others take alot longer.

Sure you might be right, I'll probably be running them again and I can post the xp/min when I zerg next time.

However, bargain has base xp 1540 and so to get up to around 600 xp/min (which is what it would have to be to compete with tear and gwylans) it would have to take less than 3 minutes. Considering the number of levers you have to pull and the deliberate way that the quest is designed so you have to run around to progress further, I think doing it in 3 minutes would be hard.

Black Loch is even more single pathed, because of the various keys you have to obtain to progress, so I doubt I would be able to do that much faster than, say, 8 minutes which still puts it in low 300s (if that)

I think that the main attraction of these quests will be the loot, and also they seem like fun quests - it's not all about the XP

Garth

[spyderwolf]

Sure you might be right, I'll probably be running them again and I can post the xp/min when I zerg next time.

However, bargain has base xp 1540 and so to get up to around 600 xp/min (which is what it would have to be to compete with tear and gwylans) it would have to take less than 3 minutes. Considering the number of levers you have to pull and the deliberate way that the quest is designed so you have to run around to progress further, I think doing it in 3 minutes would be hard.

Black Loch is even more single pathed, because of the various keys you have to obtain to progress, so I doubt I would be able to do that much faster than, say, 8 minutes which still puts it in low 300s (if that)

I think that the main attraction of these quests will be the loot, and also they seem like fun quests - it's not all about the XP

Garth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZZ9t6SFBQ thats a alittle over 3 minute run for bargain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnW8P5cBEro bloack loch 5:44

granted they was with a level 20. but anythign with firewall can do it as well. level 7 wiz level 8 sorc.

[spyderwolf]

i do think the jumpy one will be more difficult level appropriate than any other one. but its more of a niche quest liek pit or coal imo. so many wont run it often.

[Zenako]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZZ9t6SFBQ thats a alittle over 3 minute run for bargain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnW8P5cBEro bloack loch 5:44

granted they was with a level 20. but anythign with firewall can do it as well. level 7 wiz level 8 sorc.

And storming the beaches can be quickly zerged with a team that splits up to do the various objectives which are not lined up and ordered in a linear fashion like Black Loch is for example.

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

The Tide Turns

my favorite of the lot, because of the cool architecture, spectacular pyrotechnics, and the jumping puzzles (Yes, I love The Pit).

I won't go into XP/min here because I took it quite slowly, and I feel that I could probably speed up a lot next time I do it. Only point I was confused what to do was after opening the barrier I didn't see the way round the balconies so ran around a bit. I like the end reward you get choice of named item or sigil if you don't have one.

summary

Likes
- All the same level, so I don't need to stop running them until I level (like a few series, which can be annoying since I'm only running quests at level)
- Amazing architecture and quest design for all of them
- Good mix of melee and caster mobs
- The loot seems quite good, although I haven't upgraded any yet
- Multiple ways to do the Storming the Beaches for replayability
- Pirate Zombies
- Soloable, don't like quests I can't solo because of switches or stuff like that

Dislikes
- Seems lower XP than I would like for the level (see above)
- Bargain bazaar - took me ages to find the lever to open the gates and that really annoyed me but that's really a one-time thing.
- Unlike the Sharn Syndicate series, my quest log didn't seem to update to tell me whom to speak to next, I had to go around the NPCs a bit to find out what was next.
- hard to identify 'end chest' - when I didn't get a sigil, I wasn't sure if it was because I hadn't found it or because I was just unlucky... perhaps a unique chest design for this might be good.

Garth

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

so I luckily looted the bracers on my monk, and upgraded them to Jidz-Tet'ka so I do really like this mod now

Garth

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

spies in the house

And I levelled to 9 so I could do 'spies in the house' too.

Fun quest, took me around 40 mins to do it, I got to admit there seemed to be quite a lot of levers that I had no idea what they were doing, but I just pulled them anyway, and it seemed to work - it might have been nice to see where the levers went a bit more clearly.

there's two barrels at the end you can't get because you 'finish the quest' before you can reach them.

It would have been nice to have an exit at the end that took you somewhere cool - maybe the Searing Heights or something - right now you just end in an empty room.

It seems from all these quests I've been unable to get conquest each time. Is this because there are more mobs on Hard/Elite and I'm just not able to kill them? On normal on these quests I just don't seem to ever get Conquest - perhaps if there are more mobs on elite/hard then the conquest thresholds should be reduced to reflect this.

Garth