Quests: Effort vs Rewards and How Do We Fix It?
For a small amount of background, I have been hard focusing on testing questing content in the game. I won't stand here and tell you I have completed more quests than anyone in the game, but at over 100 quests completed and documented I certainly stand from a position where I have a very strong understanding of the current state of quests in the game.
As many people are probably aware at this point, the rewards from questing in game are pretty rough. The amount of experience in particular is in a very bad state and what I want to focus on today. This problem becomes more prevalent the higher level you become. For example: there is a level 25 quest that is very difficult to complete, especially if you are not doing it as a group, that only gives 40,000 experience. For any of the levels above 20 you need over a million experience to level. This means that for a quest that takes several hours to complete, particularly the first time around, you earn ~2-3% of a level. To compare that to just some of the best mob grinding spots, you can get well over 1 million experience PER HOUR. The disparity there is clearly immense as you could complete every single quest in the game and you would BARELY get 1 million experience total. I don't make that claim as hypothetical as I have been leveling an alt by doing nothing but questing. The character has completed over 85 quests and is currently sitting less than 10% into level 12. That's about 800,000 experience.
Now what should the rewards look like? This is a pretty subjective question, but my opinion would be that it should be slower and a solid group AoE farming mobs for hours on end. I believe mass farming in coordinated groups should always be the peak of leveling speed. But I shouldn't be the ONLY way to level and as the numbers stand it is. It is physically impossible to level to 25 via questing, as I showed it doesn't even get you half way. Hell it doesn't even get you 1/10 of the way there. The total experience needed to hit 25 is over 16 million experience.
So what's the solution? Well in my opinion it is actually quite simple. In the same way gear is in brackets, so too should quests be in brackets. To prove this point, I actually think the leveling to level 10 via questing is in a pretty decent spot. It takes a good chunk of time, and many of the quests are not solo friendly but it can be done with a very reasonable amount of effort without feeling like you are irreparably behind people who choose to farm mobs. Its after level 10 that questing falls apart at the seams. So I would say any quest that is marked as a quest for level 10-19 should require you to be level 10 before you can even accept it. Once they are locked down by level you don't have to worry about the plunder incident from phase 1 where everyone goes and does a few high level quests and instantly get to level 6. Now you can massively readjust the experience values.
Let's work with an example quest here. Lets look at the quest "The Forsaken Defiance". This is a quest that is marked as recommended for level 18. A level 18 needs 959,100 experience to level to 19. The quest reward is 19,500 experience, 9 Dim Glint, and 8 Dull Glint. We will talk on glint later on another post as I really want to worry about the leveling via quests aspect, so lets focus on the experience value. This quest requires you to kill minimum 20 level 16+ 3 star elites to collect swords. Once you have the swords you need to go run around the north end of the Riverland's and complete a handful of other objectives, which is very time consuming. Now this quest can be done solo depending on skill, class, gear, etc, but in reality it is meant to be a quest that is done in a group. So after finding a group willing to do the quest, and taking the time to actually complete it what do you get rewarded? A whopping 2% of the experience you need to level to level 19. Now depending on group size, just the killing of the mobs will have given you around 30k experience. So I get 50% more experience just from the killing the mobs rather than the actual quest. This is just sad.
Now let's play with the idea that no one under level 10 could accept this quest to abuse a quest, or if you want to be more granular say no one under 15 could take the quest. What is a valid amount of experience? Is it 3 times? 5 times? Well lets look at some times and percentages to make it a little easier. What is a reasonable amount of experience per hour to earn? 5% of your level, 10%, 15%? I think this should be in the same vein that farming harder mobs yields higher experience. Can I do the quest solo in 5 minutes, well then maybe it should only give 1% of a level. Does it take me 2 hours with a full group with decent gear? Well maybe that quest gives 25% of a level. That 12.5% of a level per hour. That puts it at a perfect scenario you could go up a level per 8 hours. But are these good values and and a good leveling time? Lets look to past quotes.
Steven has said in the past that you should be playing around 225 hours to get to level 50. This averages out to about 4.5 hours per level, but obviously the early level should notably less time. So lets say the levels between 20-25 are all expected to take 3 hours each at that rate. To use the most extreme example we have access to, lets look at level 24 to 25. The experience needed there is 2,250,100. to pull of that 3 hour rate you need to make over 700k per hour. Now like I mentioned before, while difficult this is a very possible number to reach in a bunch of different locations. I've even been able to make nearly 600k/hr solo as a cleric out in the desert so it's not completely unreasonable to accomplish this.
Now back to our example quest. I would say, knowing what to do with the quest and with the expectation of doing this in leveling gear, you could finish it in probably about 30-45 minutes. But lets be generous and say 30 min. This means I got 2% from a quest, and around 3% from the mobs. So a nice 5% in 30 minutes. That is the equivalent of getting a level in 10 hours (which lets be fair, you are never keeping this pace perfectly due to how spread out quests are). This is more than 3 times the amount of time to level and that's at 18, not even at 24 where there are almost no quests for that level anyways. So by Steven same expected pacing that means we are at 775ish hours to max level if I want to avoid just mindlessly farming mobs. That is simply unacceptable in the long term. And even if Steven shifted to his mind to say this it should take 300 hours to hit max level, this is still 2.5 times slower than the expected speed.
So, what should a quest give in terms of experience? Well I already established that I think it should be notably slower than mob farming. To use the 225 hour as our baseline, lets assume that's how much time it would take someone leveling by mob grinding to make it to max. How much slower should it be? Ideally I would like it to be around 20-25% slower but for the sake of easy numbers lets say questing takes 300 hours (~34% slower). That is roughly 6 hours per level average, so lets make the 20-25 leveling speed be 4 hours per level. This means for 24-25 we need to hit around 560k experience per hour. If the average quest takes around 20 minutes this means we need to have each quest giving around 180k experience (~8% of a level). Back to the very first number I gave for a level 25 quest (40k), this is a 4 and a half times increase.
So with those same rough numbers how much experience should our Forsaken Defiance quest give? Well the quest takes roughly 30 min to complete. Lets say we want to maintain getting a level in 4 hours even though we are a little lower level. That is about 240k/hr at this level. So cut that in half for our quest reward and we should expect to get almost 120k experience. That's obviously a FAR cry from the 19.5k we are getting now. That is a six times difference. Now maybe this is a little too high for this bracket, and the 17-20 levels should take decently longer so maybe that should wind up closer to 100k. With that same logic at each new bracket you will see kind of burst in leveling speed that tappers off. So maybe 10-15 takes like 2-3 hours per level and then 16-20 is like way higher, around 5 hours per level. This still averages out to about what we would expect. So maybe you quest for 6 hours at the start of a bracket for a boost then at the higher end you shift to mob farming to be super optimal.
Now maybe you are sitting here thinking my examples are a lot of experience up front (I disagree but understand), so let's consider another idea. The amount of stand alone quests in this game so far is actually very low. Of all the quests I've completed the vast majority are chain quests. So if you want to prevent people from making these awkward little routes where they just do all these super quick easy first quest in the chain then move on, maybe we load the final quest in a chain to contain a bulk of the experience. So if its a 5 quest chain (this is a real example). Lets ignore the time this takes and just come up with a random number. Lets say the total chain gives 250,000 experience after completing all of them. So that's 50k per quest. Maybe the first quest in the chain only takes 5 min of work, well chances are that makes the quest way to strong. So lets do some adjustments. Maybe the first quest gives 10k, then the second gives 30k, then 40k, then 50k, and now the final climax of the story quest now gives 120k experience. So you could spend maybe 30 min and get the first 2-3 quests done for like 50-90k experience, or you can invest 2 hours and get 250k experience. This makes the quest line as a whole still reasonable to complete without making quests a whole potentially too powerful.
This is my 3 cents on the issue and possible solutions, but I need the Intrepid Staff to understand that this is a massive problem. I would love to hear what other people think. Are my numbers terrible but idea sound? Then what numbers sound fair to you? Is my idea pure garbage? Then what do you think would help fix this issue? I am aware this is talking about "balance in an alpha" but lack of bringing up concerns is how the game fails to improve so lets get this conversation moving before its too late.
