Reworked quests to increase availability of Legendary Dust

[Siegbert]

Hello everyone

As someone who only recently (recently being around 6 months now) returned to the mod after a very long break I find it very hard to get a foot into the current game economy with Legendary Essence being the go-to curreny for lategame Items. Just to put my situation into perspective, i have characters with 4 Digits IDs yet I missed the entirety of upgradeable legendarys in the past and until i returned I had 1 single legendary drop.
With that being said, I have pretty much no currency to engage in trading unless I loot something which I absolutely cannot use for any of my characters or I actually double-loot something so I can distill one while still being able to use the other (very unlikely). This of Course is purely luck based and as someone who can only play a couple of hours per day per week this is even more unlikely than it already is for someone who can play a lot more than me. The only other alternative to getting Legendary Essence is Crafting it through Legendary Dust, which is a fair way in my opinion, however the time it takes to loot 9 dusts is already insane. There might be People who get 3 dusts per run or Event, however I believe that this is the vast minority of people. Personally, I average around 1 Dust per week. With that rate it takes over 2 months to get 1(!!!) Essence which in turn means that it requires around 1 year of constant playing to have 6 Essence, which is the pure Essence value of high tier items. However even then you would not be able to actually trade one of those because those items are usually best in slot and very rare which pushes their actual value beyond the pure Essence value. Examples of this can be seen in recent trading history.
Buying dust for gold would obviously speed up the process, however dust prices are exploding right now which makes it less attractive and quite literaly less affordable.

While a lot of the problems I mentioned above might sound like me-problems, I would still like to suggest the following in hopes that it might stabilse the economy around the Essence/Dust meta as I believe there are other players with similar problems as mine. My believe is since Dust and Essence are practically currency there must be a reliable (not luck based) way to earn it.


My suggestion:

Rework the Quest-System to push the availability of Legendary Dust.

This might create problems of its own but I would suggest that certain long-term quests like the "In it for the laung haul" series or the "Defender" quests could reward Legendary Dust instead of gold and crafting materials. One could of course also create entirely new ones for that specific purpose. Those quests take a long time to complete and are very grindy, however with a proper reward, the grind might not feel so bad and in fact rewarding. In my opinion, it would certainly feel more rewarding than the luck-based grind of randomly looting dust every now and then. Maybe it would even be possible to make those quests account-wide and not character based so that any kill with any character would contribute to completing those quests. That would of course speed up the completing time so the reward needs to be adjusted accordingly. I personally do not have any statistics or estimates about how long it takes on average to complete those quests so as a beginning I just throw the following numbers in:


Normal
In It for the Long Haul - 2 Dust
Defender of Swadia - 3 Dust

Hard
In It for the Long Haul II - 3 Dust
Defender of Calradia - 4 Dust

Ragnarok
In It for the Long Haul III - 4 Dust
Defender of Midgard - 5 Dust



As an example, if you were to play a lot of Normal in a month and you would manage to finish both quests within said month you would cut the time to earn an Essence in half (assuming the 1 Dust per week drop). Only going from there, it would still take 6 months to get the 6 Essence, which I used as a example above, but I believe it would feel more rewarding and might add to the long term motivation of many players.


Please let me know what you think about this. I don't know if such an idea was discussed in the past, I just looked briefly over the Forum and could not find anything similar. If the topic is well received, I will add further (balancing) ideas to the main post.
I am also willing to provide my ideas of new quests or altered quest rewards for other existing quests, however before I put the time and effort into this, I first want to know if it is actually worth it .

[Hamsterino]

What about cav quests???
Seriously, this is a nice idea (especially since I had the same one), because Gold was replaced by Essence and is mostly useless now. The main difference to Rise From The Ashes is that the Gold Bars/Ink of Life you get from the Defender quests are still useful, because there's always demand for lumps of lead and you can't just buy them from the marketplace. So, replacing the Gold you get from those quests you named with Dust would make sense only if you keep the lumps, because that part of the reward is perfectly fine and doesn't need any changes.
That said, an idea I had reading your post is to use that issue to fix any afk-ing too. What do I mean by that? If there was like a 10% chance to loot a Legendary Dust from a combat xp (not assist xp!) line and the recipe to craft a Legendary Essence was changed to require something like 500 Dust instead of 9, it wouldn't just solve the issue of buying high-tier items being essentially luck-based (I remember one of our CN brothers looting 5 Dusts in a single run), but it would also finally give everyone a reason to not be afk, since then there's an actual reward for killing nords instead of just sitting safely behind a corner and watching YouTube. Also, I personally would much rather get 1% closer to crafting a Legendary Essence every day for 100 days than get 10% closer every 10 days, if you get what I mean. It's the same amount of time spent, but I like my progress to be many small but consistent steps instead of a few big but very inconsistent and random steps.

[Jean Badou]

As someone who completed the quests you mentioned quite a few times, I'd share my experience about these.

About the time it takes to complete these quests, it really depends on how many players there are on the run, I'm gonna share data I got from playing on solo and from the mission templates file for the full server.

On a solo Ragnarok, you get 5 of each wave 1 nords per run (3 on wave 1, 2 on wave 4), and 6 of the wave 3 minions, so it would take 140 runs for Long Haul III and 184 runs for Defender of Midgard to be completed.

If you compare that with a full run, which is more likely to happen, the wave 1 will spawn 16 to 18 of each mixed wave nords on wave 1, then from 8 to 10 of the previous mixed wave nords on wave 4. Bifrost guardians do spawn in a random number between 38 and 44. That makes an total of 24 to 28 of the nords you need to kill 700 times for Long Haul, per run, an amount which is usually shared between all the players on the server, which would give an average of 431 runs to complete Long Haul III, and 430 runs to complete Defender of Midgard. Assuming there's nobody to waste 30 seconds each wave to get those kills, of course.

I'm not going to detail it for hard and normal, as the spawn work a bit differently and are much more affected by randomness, but I'll just throw the average number of runs on solo/full runs with the same assumptions I made for Ragnarok. (adding Ragnarok to make it easier to compare the numbers).
Solo Normal : 150 runs for Long Haul, 157 for Defender of Swadia
Solo Hard : 191 runs for Long Haul, 138 for Defender of Calradia
Solo Ragnarok : 140 runs for Long Haul, 184 for Defender of Midgard
Full Normal : 382 runs for Long Haul, 360 for Defender of Swadia
Full Hard : 502 runs for Long Haul, 271 for Defender of Calradia
Full Ragnarok : 431 runs for Long Haul, 430 for Defender of Midgard

Statistically, it's a lot more complicated than just averaging the amount of nords that spawn and dividing it by the amount of players in the server, as some nords are harder to kill for some classes (infantry with shields for ranged classes, skirmishers/pikemen for infantry classes), and it also depends on a lot of other factors like the map you play, how effective you are at killing those specific nords and how effective your teammates are at killing these.

On a side note, completing Rise from the Ashes II always led me to complete "Defender" quests 3 times and "Long Haul" quests twice on each difficulty, on each of the character I've done that on.


Going back to the original post, I do agree that these quests should get an appropriate Legendary Dust reward considering how much effort they take to complete, but it wouldn't make any sense to change the rewards only for these as long as the two "Rise from the Ashes" rewards don't get increased as well.