Group, Solo, Zerg play idea plus a new crafting system

[Wolfgaar]

Hi.

I've read many comments on the forums about zerging, group play and solo play and how some are for it and some against. I can't speak for everyone, only for myself so I will try to explain my position on these topics and why I have them plus give an idea about how to adress them without penalizing people to much or make it so all get equal penalty/reward from purposed changes.

I solo play 99% and join the occasional party now and then, especially if there is a raid lfm up that i want to run.
Why? Because when I'm not on sick-leave (like now) i only have so much time that I can devote to playing and since I live in Sweden my playtime isn't optimal for when most players are online always. I don't like waiting around for long period of times waiting for a party to fill up. Then there is the issue of other people also not wanting to wait so if you get one person to join they will either prompt you to just run the quest or drop because it takes to long or another lfm strikes their fancy more then yours. Lastly, everyone else i have come across these days just want to zerg through, no optionals, ransack, conquest unless there is a reason for doing this or you get those bonuses anyway (like in streamlined quests where you don't have to run sideways to get breakables or mobs).

Now I don't care if someone want to zerg and not do optionals and stuff when I'm not in their party but when I play I mostly do everything in quests (except when I do favor runs on quests where I get no xp or some quests that I find boring or have kill mechanics on side stuff like traps and I don't have the trapping skills, in those cases i might skip a side area). I also don't want to rush, I want to take my time and don't feel the anxiety I get when i run with zergers. Now this might sound like I bash on people that are zerging and that is not how it is meant, it's a me problem that i get anxiety from zerging and people can play however they want. I can understand why some people want to zerg, I too have played this game since almost from start. Having done most "old" quests 100+ times it get tedious to do "everything" everytime and if you don't need the named loot from side chests or don't care about the loot in specific quests because you already have more platinum then you can spend it makes sence to skip some stuff. Plus many are just trying to get to the point where they can TR for their next life and don't really care about those bonuses from ransack/conquest or optionals on some quests that don't give lots of xp where theses bonuses really gives some xp.

Now how can we "fix" this? There are probably many way these things can be adressed and implemented without to much work for the devopers and coders. My idea though is solutions that adress all of these "issues" (and I put issues inside "") for a reason because not all will agree that there is an issue here at all).
To promote people not zerging and actually play through a quest fully my thought was that the conquest/ransack and optional parts of a quest should be a substanional part of the xp given (more then today) and if you choose to zerg through and do the bare minimal you also get the bare minimal xp.
Now this feels like a punishment for zerging, but i read somewhere that the developers didn't want to make more wilderness areas because there already were so much xp in the game to be collected that it somehow didn't promote players to do quests (why that matter I don't know unless they meant that people somehow wouldn't buy new packs if there wasn't an incentive to do the quests for xp). Plus IF you do bare minimum you should imo get the bare minimum xp for it.
This way people need to play through more quests to get thier xp to TR IF they zerg. There is a silverlining to this though and that is that it gives people an incentive to group up more so you can split parties up and do side stuff and then gather for finish. What about side chests then. My thought was to have all chests at the endboss. If you have done a optional that gives a chest it will spawn at the end instead of where the optional boss was, this will promote the splitting of parties and for those that want loot they don't have to run around to every corner of the quest to get them. If you soloplay you have to run everywhere anyway so it won't matter and it makes it so that you can't run into a quest to farm a specific side chest either which I think is good because that too is an incentive to have others join you to do the quest faster.

This can be implemented with another idea I have about crafting (I'll put that at the end for those that are interested).

I think this could open up for more group play and less short-manning for those that really wantr to get the most xp out of a quest and this should effect reaper xp too. I know that conquest/ransack already does give more reaper xp but for some people I have played with they only did the bare minimum (since you only need 10 kills to get reaper xp) na dif they killed a few more then the 10 it was only because they had to and not to get conquest. Now this was on reaper 1 and we got like 400-500 xp and with conquest/ransack we might have gotten 100 xp more so noone cared about that they just wanted to blast through wich was stressing and boring to me and are a reason for why I usually don't do groups anymore.

Now for my crafting idea.

I would love to see a whole new crafting system where you can actually craft useful stuff that rivals the named loot out there, raid stuff and end-game loot. Not saying it should be better but not that much worse either. The change I want is that all quests (old ones and new ones gives all the same material to craft including shroud, saltmarch, slavers, you name it. I mean all of them. The things you can craft should be all the "special" stuff you can craft on items today and some other special stuff only found on raid or end-game weapons/gear. The materials for this should drop only in enchests of quests andin raids there can be some materials in side chests as well so raids get you a big chunk of mats and for those of us that don't run so many raids or solo play we have to get these things the slow way or buy mats of AH (and yes the mats should be sellable to promote a use for platinum, I would prefer if it only could be sold on the platinum AH but if the developers feel they want to make people pay for astral shards to get more money to the game development so be it). Now since all quests gives the same materials what to do about getting people to play all quests and not just farm one or a few specific quest? Well we have the set bonuses and since there is no "blanks" in this system but you use the ordinary drops from everywhere to craft you can add the ability to add a set bonus from all sources (and come up with set bonuses for those quests that don't have it today) and to add a set bonus to your item you need specific crafting material that only drops in those specific quest or raids if you want make people run raids more. This way there is only 2 ingredients, the basic one and the set bonus one. To make it so that people will run specific content more there has to be a wide variety of set bonuses to be made, some for casters, some for melee and some for hybrids. Sme bonuses needs only 3 pieces and some 5 or 7 etc. This will make it more fun to get the just right combination for a character. Now since this will take away the usual cannith crafting (or you can keep that one too but it would be mostly obsolete) and uses ordinary weapons/gear/armor as base items to craft onto we can get some really nice combinations and this will also increase value upon gear with stuff on them that doesn't go away for making it blank (loke augment slots, silver, adamantine etc) and this will also increase use for platinum.

Well this was my thought and I do apologize for the long rant.

Hope you all are having the best time.

[Wolfgaar]

I forgot to mention where all named loot should be in the side-chests which might not matter that much if all chests are at the end anyway (this applies to if my suggested crafting idea was iplemented).

And I also forgot to add that doing conquest/ransack and optionals should also increase the chance for named items to drop as an incentive to do these things (and if the crafting idea was implemented the number of materials should increase if you have done these things too, do the bare minimum - get the bare minimum).

I thought of another thing about these crafted items. One thing that you could do with it is making it upgradeable to levels without taking away the effects on them and to not damp on the raid named loot they should be slightly lesser (like if a raid item is +15 theses should be +14 and if a raid gear gives +14 to a stat these would give +13, and raid items could have 1 extra effect on them or something so if you really really want the absolute best stuff you would still loot farm). Plus you would still have to do the raids to get the materials to add set bonus.