Caravans! No risk all the reward

Serukka

Caravans!

The idea is simple but brilliant, you load some goodies on a caravan and bring it to another town. The further the town the more gold you get.
People who come upon your caravan can either attack or defend it.

The previous day I destroyed a caravan with no one in it and sold the stolen crates for meager loot. This time I had a journeyman crowbar on me so I would get more stolen crates. Maybe this time it was worth it?
(You can also collect the commodities in your own caravan but thats just to much hassle)

Me and my friend attacked a caravan. The HP pool is massive and it regens. Fair it should not be too easy. The broken bit however was that this caravan was driven by a lvl 22 cleric. Periodically he would jump out, chuck his caravan a heal and jump back on, laughing at our attempt to destroy it. This heal also brought it to full immediately.
The cleric driving we could not attack, only the caravan. Getting him while he jumps out to heal was impossible as he did this in a second or 2. Out, heal, in and continue driving.

Realizing that caravans are actually very safe we decided to do one ourselves.
We rode our precious commodity filled caravan over the roads while getting attacked by every mob along the way. Even the big rock golems posed no threat. Chilling the whole way.

So my summary is:
Hard to destroy (fine)
Cant hurt the driver (fine)
Driver can heal caravan (not fine)
Driver does not have to worry about any mobs (not fine)
Driver can jump in and out in an instant (not fine)

Caravans arr basically free money at this point. Something a solo can do while watching youtube not having to worry about a thing.

My recommendation:
-increase reward for stolen crates
-make it so you have to deal with the mobs attaking you
-don’t let you heal
Your own caravan.
-put a timer on mounting the caravan.

What do you guys think?

Darsh13

Yeah I feel like we shouldn’t be able to “heal” a piece of equipment.. maybe there could be repair kits that require the caravan to stop moving and players to use the kits which would channel a repair ability when they consume the items. But getting attacked should cancel the channel and prevent anyone from repairing ect.

nanfoodle

I have defended a few caravans and got no reward did risk my neck.

Veeshan

you have 2 options when destroying caravans one give lesser reward while other give better reward, you did the less reward method.
You can crowbar the crates for small reward or
use the caravan beacon to summon your own caravan and pick up the crates and complete the run and this is a better reward.

Caravans risk time aswell as gold (last run i did was 1.2hours to complete and if it got destroyed near the end of the trip im out 1.2 hours) where attackers just get have basicly 0 risk with meager reward (aka crowbar) or minimal risk for a good reward.

Also just a though armor penetration might be OP agaist caravans since there have huges amounr of armor and magic resist gotta check at some stage :P

Hutchy1989

Next time you see a cleric doing that just jump into the caravan when he Jumps out.

Rym

The cleric healing the caravan to full is normal, clerics are the only class that can do that. The counter play is to dispel the buffs on the caravan which continuously heal it to full or kill the cleric when they jump out of the caravan.

Some classes will very likely have the ability to dispel buffs on enemies, these along with clerics will be indispensable in caravan content.

If you don't have that class with you, sucks for you. Get better prepared next time.

Caravans are extremely risky for the driver and would be a guaranteed waste of money if the attackers could just randomly destroy it when it's near it's destination node. Lose money, time, materials in your own bag and get XP debt while the attackers get to finish the run in 1/10th of the time with tons of gold as reward. Doesn't seem very fair now does it?

Currently defending a caravan also means zero rewards, so the only rewards are from attacking.

So, to me, cleric healing their caravan is a big ok. It also makes clerics indispensable in future caravan runs when the system is more fleshed out and defending is rewarding.

Caravans are also currently very squishy, they look like heavily armored turtles but they don't really have much damage reduction. By their build melee attackers should also get damaged from attacking them as they're literally full of spikes. 1 player is enough to destroy a caravan in 5-10 minutes. A quick run takes 20-30 minutes, a longer run who knows, 1 hour and 30 minutes.