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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Quests: Effort vs Rewards and How Do We Fix It?
Lennox
Member, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
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.
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.
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Comments
In actual fact you have articulated yourself very well. I would like to touch base on the questing brackets and while that seems like a good idea I would also like to throw scaling quest rewards based on each level.
For example: level 1 quest gets 1 uncommon glint and 300 xp VS level 24 quest getting 5 glowing glint and say, 200,000 xp.
There’s no world where I’m going to do some long winded quest for fucking 40k exp at lvl 19 that’s absolutely pathetic and a complete waste of my time and effort.
Trueeee this is like a standard in every MMO even new world… how are we still experiencing this in 2025?!
Very true and something I forgot to mention. To tack into that there are also quite a few quests in the game the require mob drops. I'm personally chalking this up the a bug, but a lot of these quests don't share the drop with a group. This means if you need 8 items now you need 64. I pray this is just a big but if not dear God Intrepid please change it to be a shared drop.
There's a good reason to be pissed though and it's quests being plain broken half the time. I have at least 5 dead quests taking up journal space at all times and some of them have been there since early P2 with no resolution in sight. There's also the issue of missing out on quest rewards because said quests got updated after you've already completed them. If you think this only happens cause it's an alpha, think again. Steven did promise regular updates and I doubt they will be limited to world bosses and other level cap business.
With that said, there are 2 other quest types that come with their own issues: commissions and events (events are timed quests, don't go UM ACTUALLY on me). If you are gonna have us slay 20 boars, at least let us choose rewards that best suit us. I am talking the full package of EXP+glint+tickets or just one of them but doubled. Alternatively you can make rewards scale in real time based on the difficulty rating of targets slain. Killing 3 star elites in Carphin shouldn't give the same rewards as killing level 7-8 skellies west of Miraleth IMO.
As for events, getting a boatload of EXP and a pittance of glint doesn't sit right with me. How about increased spawn rates in the area after a clear, increased spawn + drop rates for a perfect clear and lowered drop rates + higher enemy stats for failure? If citizens are going to ignore a pack of wolves ravaging a farm or a band of highwaymen doing highwaymen things, it should affect them personally.
Just my 2¢.
This is what will naturally occur unless Intrepid fixes the actual root cause, which is the reward system and the factors included in regards to XP reward/number of group members/time. Either way, this was a great read and its amazing to see individuals are aware and have documented exactly how bad the system currently is.
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I agree that questing experience needs a dramatic overhaul and significant buff.
With the current rewards for quests, especially level 10+, it is actively disadvantageous to even consider questing. The value in terms of leveling progression is dismissible, the value in economic progression is laughable, and the power progression from gear is insignificant.
In most scenarios if I come across an NPC or Quest Item that may lead to a quest I would not even consider mentioning it, let alone suggest it, to party members out of a concern that the suggestion would be worthy of ridicule. A level 20 quest worth 25k experience, sure we could take an hour or two to trek across the map for that experience and 10 silver worth of glint OR....we can just kill these 10 level 20+ 3-star mobs and get the same 25k experience, along with 5-30 silver worth of glint per kill AND it only takes us 5 mins.
The current value proposition of quests are inherently flawed.
Now, the original poster was onto something in that quest chains having a progressive reward scale is MUCH more acceptable. It mitigates cheesy quest progression like the Phase 1 Plunder strategy and provides acceptable returns on committing to a 1-3 hour quest chain. If I know that my 1-3 hours of labor will reward me with some story as well as a competitive amount of experience I am willing to give up the raw advantage of mindless grinding because I am getting the value of the story and maybe a guaranteed rare+ item from the questline (the item I would still expect to be a little worse than a crafted item of the same rarity).
Alternatively, and I understand that the Story Arc system is currently in development, if there were sizeable amount of experience for completing individual arcs or sub-components of arcs that would also feel acceptable. Like completing a chapter in a book those content bookends would help bolster the value in that progression choice.
Add onto all the issues with its value in progression, now that there level brackets attached to the quests it means that if you don't actively harm your progression by engaging in the quests you lose out on the story and content that you may have considered returning to later.
I know that Intrepid prefers that testers provide the issues rather than make suggestions but the under tuning on rewards versus progression make me wonder if there is some fundamental misunderstanding from ether the player or dev perspective as to what role quests and quest rewards play in progression.
Would it help if quests were designated differently in their recommendation? I know this would be very difficult, but if I see a quest recommended for lv18, I'm going to pull my group to try it at level 12-13. At which point, the exp might be worth the time if we're comparing by percentage.
This would matter much more later in the game, if/when the solo restrictions get 'stricter'.
This might not be a particularly helpful question since I come from a mindset of the really old game type which auto-devalues 'receiving exp from things below your character level' but Ashes is also designed in a related way, so I ask.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
most people hate grinding espically mindless grinding and as long as braindead mob grinding is the fastest way to level up the sweats will only do that and so will almost everyone who will bother sticking with the game, and i doubt most people who paid for P3 will stay since there is no leveling experience and not much to do as is in the alpha
So this could be part of the solution and ties into what I said about brackets/tiers of quests. If the only requirement to accept a quest in the 10-19 range is that you be 10, then by all means take your group, your raid, your whatever and go smash out level 19 quests to try and leveling quickly. This sticks to the idea of being in a group is always the most efficient way to play the game, which I want and prefer. I don't need nor want the game to be any more solo friendly than it is tbh, but if an improvement to questing happens to help some solo players then whatever.
The difficulty of the quest should 100% be taken into account when considering the rewards given. That's why I tried to make use of examples in time and quote Steven on his expected hours to max level. Unfortunately even if you are completing quests well above your level at this point, once you are passed level 10 the percentage just isn't even slightly feasible. Even if you could go complete that level 25 quest I mentioned at say level 18 (this would be very difficult, especially at a fresh server where you don't have crazy gear), you are looking at a 40k reward when you need basically 1 million exp (~4%) . That is just a slap in the face for the player, especially since that quest is the final one in a very long chain where parts of it can only be completed as specific times of the day.
I actually don't really want to see nerfs to mob experience. Generally unless really warranted its rarely a good idea to nerf stuff. Nerf's pretty much just feel bad for everyone, unless it causes detriment to the health of the game I think the first approach should always be to bring up lacking aspects before tearing others down.
If you mean in terms of reward I am right there with you brother. But if you are talking quality of the quest in terms of how interesting they are I have to completely disagree. Sure some quests are the tried and true fetch quests, but overall there have been several very interesting questlines that I enjoyed a ton. They were fun, gave cool lore, and introduced me to interesting characters. I think the stories they are creating are right on the money and would say keep letting the devs cook.
1. Designed for leveling fairly basic quest that a mainly for earing XP so standard other form of leveling method
2. Collection quests this are kinda the same as above but mobs drop items and u can turn items in at this location to earn XP noobie area already has one like this where mobs drop trash items and u can turn 12 trash items in for a few thousand XP, it a good way to level while grinding mobs since the items will be dropping to turn in when you know which NPC will take them anyway.
3. These quests are rarer but more interesting they take some time to finish or thought process on complementing them however there rewards are nice or unique and some should have requirements to aquire the quest.Some examples
- These quests are harder or longer than the XP quests above but can yield you some ok mob gear that you can only obtain from this quest (goblin patchwork armor quest for example in noobies zone) Collect goblin trash find the goblin book bring it to the goblin have him craft the items into other items to hand in for the reward it more thought/requirment but you get something neat out of it
- one for the artisans classes, there could be artisan quests in the world that you can not pick up unless your like journeyman carpentry and you will probaly need help to complete it but it reward you a carpentry recipe like a bow or even boat/caravans component recipes, Something to get those crafter main out in the world looking for assistance from other players to unlock cool things that only they can make potentially
- another quest reward for the future could be housing furnature pieces they would make for some good trophies to display when housing systems get expanded on
Edit extra 4th one - Epic quest big realy long quest chain that takes alot of work to complete that gives you an epic looking pieces of gear, much like Everquest epic weapons quests for example would be cool to see the epic weapon quests brought back in a game.
I realize that I end up thinking that the exp-to-level values are inflated right now relative to the actual levels.
So basically I could imagine these exp numbers to be the required ones to get to level 50, but they're currently squashed into level 25, to help with testing/prolonging the leveling experience and timings.
I agree that 40k exp when you need a million is not really in-sync with the flow, but I end up with the expectation that the exp-to-level for level 18 might be more like 360k at release. And if the quest team has a different design document than the exp balancing, then it makes sense for them to put the quest rewards to be the future values so that they don't have to go back and update them all again later.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."