We're not supposed to repeat quests anymore because it might burn us out…

[Pyed-Pyper]

Tokens of the Twelve grind would be my nomination for amount of pain, frustration and bad design.

Playing characters going for their first TR and doing the Tokens is AGONIZING.

There's an intentional big jump in difficulty when you cross over into Epic content---that's valid! *When* it's the start of your journey to 30.

But a first time-to-20 character has no Fate Twists, only the beginning of a Destiny, and no epic gear. You typically go from owning the high heroics on H/E to not even being able to do H level 21s. There are few takers on N level LFMs, but you get destroyed if you get in on a higher difficulty party.

And there's only a small group of quests that drop Tokens, several of them pretty undoable for solo first lifers: the end fight for Epic Small Problems, the ballistas for epic Storm the Beaches."Dailies" groups (whose fate is now uncertain) assumed you can run the quests back to back with the map and fights already memorized, which is not yet true for many of us the first time we get there.

And all while you're longing to just make the first TR, so you can start over and become a stronger toon with better stats and gear.

The pain goes down once your main character has past lives behind them, but I wonder if some folks don't put aside their first TR and not come back.

At the least, it would be a huge boon if Token fragments appeared in the end chests of Eveningstar quests, so you could run a wider variety of level 21-23 content while trying to TR.

OR designate at least one more challenging quest to give a chance of full Tokens on N, like Devil Assault, so you don't end up crying and running DA 10 times.

Battle of Eveningstar, for example! You have to run three other Level 21 quests to flag, which progresses the "story" and could drop fragments, and the BoE story and structure makes it very attractive to have a group, so it would encourage parties.

There's gotta be something that could make things less joy killing for those who went from savoring the pleasure of hitting 20 and wanting to reincarnate to the current long, slow slog to gather the pink bits.

Someone once suggested (and I'm sorry that I don't remember who) that once a 1st life character hits 20, it would be auto-granted a true heart. So imagine something like the Korthos beach adventure + iconic level 15 gear box combined to create a quest to the Life-Giver and walk a player through their first TR.

If SSG is so worried about losing precious heart sales, maybe they could limit it to 1st time per server or 1st time per game, IDK.

Maybe one byproduct of the hardcash server will be that jaded vets will see what a rough time new players face when starting DDO.

[lordnelson1001]

Someone once suggested (and I'm sorry that I don't remember who) that once a 1st life character hits 20, it would be auto-granted a true heart. So imagine something like the Korthos beach adventure + iconic level 15 gear box combined to create a quest to the Life-Giver and walk a player through their first TR.

If SSG is so worried about losing precious heart sales, maybe they could limit it to 1st time per server or 1st time per game, IDK..

That seems like a really cool suggestion.

[Mofus]

Grinding todays quests is nothing like grinding the old quests, took me about 75 runs to put my first Epic Sword of Shadow together. Those old seal, shard, scroll quest were a serious grind, but I still enjoyed them.

[HungarianRhapsody]

Grinding todays quests is nothing like grinding the old quests, took me about 75 runs to put my first Epic Sword of Shadow together. Those old seal, shard, scroll quest were a serious grind, but I still enjoyed them.

How many quests will you have to run to get Racial Completionist?

Seems like the grind is bigger than ever - to make sure that the 1-5% biggest spenders stay spending.

[Inanout]

I think a record has been set on the HC server.

The amount of people rerunning level 1 quests.

[Yokido]

In my humble opinion, drop rates have already been generously increased with the release of reaper difficulty. Yes, it's hard to get loot from harder raids, but that's to be expected since it should be kept novel for some time.

There's always options. People can farm TRs/ETRs, or they can farm end-game loot and perhaps get similar rewards. How much effort/time does it take to farm out a Mythic +4, reaper +3 end-game item from Sharn as opposed to getting 6 million xp? To me, the OP item from Sharn is easier.

[tinyelvis]

Grinding todays quests is nothing like grinding the old quests, took me about 75 runs to put my first Epic Sword of Shadow together. Those old seal, shard, scroll quest were a serious grind, but I still enjoyed them.

This is so much the truth. The grind, and for better stuff, is so much lighter now than ever before. However, I think a good system would,

1. Have statistics for drop rates (perhaps catagories) where you know exactly what "expected" grind times should be.
2. Have a second system allowing not wanted loot turn in and exchange or a counter that alerts and allows for all possible end loot draw. This system is timed to coincide with a two or three standard deviations greater than expected time spent grinding.

Simple Math can solve all woes


Problem is, if a better system is developed, a thread a year from now will pop with someone whinging for even less grind.

[nokowi]

This is so much the truth. The grind, and for better stuff, is so much lighter now than ever before. However, I think a good system would,

1. Have statistics for drop rates (perhaps catagories) where you know exactly what "expected" grind times should be.
2. Have a second system allowing not wanted loot turn in and exchange or a counter that alerts and allows for all possible end loot draw. This system is timed to coincide with a two or three standard deviations greater than expected time spent grinding.

Simple Math can solve all woes


Problem is, if a better system is developed, a thread a year from now will pop with someone whinging for even less grind.

They should just make it their policy to delete any post using the word whining and file it under someone else making a request that is not important to the next person. Of course that doesn't make a request wrong, just an opportunity to label other people and to make no attempt to understand another persons position.

At 150+ lives, you will run content more than the 75 times that was mentioned to get that SOS gear.

Gear acquisition used to be a part of the end game scene, so if you played there, there was not much negative to the low drop rate being there. The positive was it kept a pool of players at end game - and this outweighed waiting for an item to drop.
Contrast this with today's game, where you have to give up progress (150+ lives) and XP (thanks SSG for the XP changes!) to go after that gear.

So there are some good reasons why drop rates being different do not have the same effect.

Lastly, there is a group of players that just don't enjoy rerunning content for items. Expressing their opinion is not whining. If one has to mislabel others to make a point, their point is not very good.

The suggestions for fixes are definitely appreciated.