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(Suggestion) LS4 and PoF Reward Restructuring.


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TL/DR - Istan and Thunderhead Weapons cost too much comparatively to every other released set. Map Rewards for S4 and PoF are too low. Let's have PvE Reward tracks like WvW for dead maps.

Long story short, I just came back from maybe 8-12month break from the game, and have been running my MC and alts through the game and LS maps, to catch up and clear them all. A few things come to mind from that experience so far.

Living Story 4 maps seem to be almost empty minus maybe the last 2 story maps, and a few things that seem somewhat out of balance compared to LS3 and HoT maps.

Domain of Istan - Before I left, Istan was a hive of activity, commanders would lead players around the map completing events, and successfully clearing the meta, everyone was having a pretty chill time enjoying the content, being rewarded for their time spent. I'm not really sure why the rewards were nerfed. Looking at the rewards vs time spent to satisfy the conditions of the meta chains, and then completing said metas, both great hall and palawdan is about on par with dragons stand or octovine, yet somehow the effort placed in Istan is not worth the same rewards for the time spent. Surely the map was being played as intended? Working as intended. Since back, the map is empty, there is maybe groups of 2-5 players now and then at a stray meteor, but atm I have 6 of my alts camped in Istan waiting for something as simple as the great hall to get the last PoI for completion.

Reward rebalance - The structure of Istan has been changed to the point of making it not even worth visiting, and the rewards that were readily available have now become a slow grind. Which brings up a considerable problem for new and returning players, Astral and Stellar Weapons.

Currently we need - 9190 Kralk Ore and 9025 Powdered Quartz for the complete set of Astral weapons (for basic exotic weapons)

  • 7900 Kralk Ore and 7075 Powdered Quartz, 15 Vision Crystals, 88 Deldrimor Steel, 87 Spiritwood Planks, 6 Elonian Leather for the Stellar Set.

I find it a little strange that the quantities needed for simple sets have reached such an astronomical (pardon the pun) height. Kralkatite Ore is not necessarily difficult to farm, if you had the standard 8 characters on your account (you know, 1 for each class), you can get 25 ore per heart per character daily. The problem comes from the Rose Quartz that currently has no means to obtain outside of meteor events, and you don't get alot of rewards or even successful meteors if not enough people are present. 483g is the current cost for just the rose quartz to cut the time needed.

Solutions: This is tough, we have a range of players that have completed and probably equally as many who haven't started. One of the first things I did notice was there is no other options for rose quartz to farm, There is no reward track in WvW for astral weapon selection crate which has been a common trend even in PoF. Even map rewards doesn't reward rose quartz. If anet intends to maintain the current state of the map, and not rollback the nerf, which we have no reason to believe they will. Perhaps halving the actual costs is the change that is needed. Another Issue to be resolved is stat typing. Most of the living seasons have worked towards the trend of maintaining stat selectable equipment as an incentive to farm on maps, Istan and a few of the LS4 maps don't follow that much more reasonable trend. Another option could be allowing the option of creating the Ascended weapon and unlocking in the process the exotic, so we don't have to double handle everything.

Thunderhead Peaks - Follows much of what I mentioned above about the Istani Weapon series. Dragonsblood weapons are even slower to farm than Astral/Stellar and require more time limited items, I am sure you can see a trend.

Currently we need - 80 laurels, 8k volatile magic, 48 serp. jewels, 960 branded mass. (For the Exotic Set)

  • 2400 Branded Mass, 48 serp. jewels, 80g, 16 visions crystals. 88 Deldrimor Steel, 87 Spiritwood Planks, 6 Elonian Leather (For Ascended)

Solution: Mostly the above, unfortunately farming hearts is less efficient than Istan for Branded Masses since they give only 5 per heart completion, and Exquisite Jewels, are gated behind the treasure hunting mini-task, which is ONLY once a day per acc, instead of per character regardless of how many times you do the meta etc. It also follows the trend of no reward tracks.

Jahai, and Dragonfall both are actually quite reasonable as far as crafting and progress on armor sets go, a complete contrast to the weapon sets.

LS4 and PoF Map Rewards - Comparitively to Vanilla gw2 maps the rewards are quite minimal, I would mostly go back to the 4-item reward pool. Increase Map reward from 5 to at least 25, and add the exotic components back. Your typical vanilla map would have 1 random reward between bl key and transmutation charge, 2 exotics, x-crafting material x 40 or map currency x 25.

The more I play with my alts, and clear Path of Fire and the LS, the more I think about my progress in WvW, and accessibility to reward tracks. Perhaps one of the easiest way to assist with maps that have become inactive to overactive reward nerfing policy would be to give players access to reward tracks in PvE as well, which would allow us to pursue the content that interests us in world pve, while gaining progress towards rewards from maps that are no longer active enough to gain rewards efficiently or at all.

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@kharmin.7683 said:Currently, there is a festival going on which oft times reduces some map populations.

Festival is irrelevant to almost everyone except new players as the content has been stripped to the barest bones. I have also been back about 2-3 months now (I gave enough time to not just claim empty maps for no reason). The festival also has 0 impact on the disproportionate crafting requirements for Istani and Thunderhead weapon sets. The festivals tend to only reduce population for the first 2 weeks marginally, then a short time when people do dailies. I appreciate the comment though as a slight factor during events.

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Ls4 maps are all very well populated on EU servers. The skyscale collection has helped, although none really dropped to worrying levels. Thunderhead has no content outside of the metas so is the exception.

Ive largely hated ls4 so im not trumping the cause here, but im not seeing any depopulated maps. I even went back to pof the other day and Riverlands was practically heaving with bounties and event groups.

Festivals can def have an impact, dragon bash prob more do at it provided the ls4 currency materials as rewards. It might have some impact during the current one too, although im not seeing it during peak time.

Basically, Im not in agreement the maps have a population issue, even though i could agree some items require too much currency.

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TL/DR - Istan and Thunderhead Weapons cost too much comparatively to every other released set. Map Rewards for S4 and PoF are too low. Let's have PvE Reward tracks like WvW for dead maps.I don't agree that they cost too much. Thunderhead weapons are relatively easy to obtain. Istani weapons aren't difficult to obtain, even if they are annoying: hearts in Istan offer 25 map materials, vs 5 in most other maps.

I think it's dull if all maps have exactly comparable activities and rewards. It's already hard enough to distinguish collection tasks, since there are so few basic building blocks (messenger, package delivery, kill 10 rats, etc.)

The structure of Istan has been changed to the point of making it not even worth visitingThis makes no sense to me. The Istani meta remains generous; it just cannot be repeated for the same benefit as the first time. In addition, as noted above, it's fairly easy to farm the hearts for materials.

The problem comes from the Rose Quartz that currently has no means to obtain outside of meteor events, and you don't get alot of rewards or even successful meteors if not enough people are present. 483g is the current cost for just the rose quartz to cut the time needed.The market price of Rose Quartz is inflated temporarily because of the Skyscale. For the year prior to the new mount, it traded at 0.5-0.8 silver. In May, it briefly spiked to 7s and now it's coming down again. Unless you're in a rush, 100g is a more realistic long-term value.

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@Randulf.7614 - I can't speak for the state of the Eu servers, just my observations from doing world completion through these areas on NA servers. There are some maps that are active (corresponding with skyscale of course), Sandswept and Jahai tend to have a decent pop but they have rewards that are proportionate to the rewards gained on the map. I would say that Sandswept isles, Jahaii, Dragonfall, and Kourna all have rewards proportionate to the state of their maps, they remind of how season 3 maps were structured, they all had quite reasonable and attainable gear, none were heavily dependant on vast material sinks. Even the Armor sets from DF and Jahai weren't difficult to obtain value wise.

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@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" - On your first point, about easy to obtain, anything is easy if you are swimming in gold, you can for the most part bypass most of the gates imposed by the sets themselves.

As for easy, to fully complete the set to ascended rating, you need more than 176 ascended materials, whether you use your own daily crafted material or buy it, the value is somewhere in the range of 1200g. But that is just the ascended materials, not the rest of the requirements.

And while some might say that you are getting an ascended weapon, I think most people who want to finish off collections are thinking "why is anet suddenly making sets to ascended tier". Nobody really wants to flat out make 16 ascended weapons that don't even let you choose the stat you want. Let alone just to unlock an upgraded skin. I would argue most players who get to the point of collection farming already have a few ascended sets.

We get to the crux of the issue - making two nearly identical sets with slight differences to their end effect.

We have already seen this too:

Awakened > MordantElonian > SpearmarshalHoT sets like MachinedEven wvw has variations of exotics that will allow you to upgrade to ascended without requiring ascended to be the final iteration of the item skin. Like the mists weapons.

All of these followed a much more reasonable pattern for collection completion. And none of them required almost identical requirements between exotic and ascended.

Another thing to be noted is that neither the Istani or the dragonsblood sets are part of a collection. There is no incentive outside of completion for collectors like myself for finishing them.

If we at the most minimum want to complete both istani and dragonsblood weapons you need in the area of around 350 ascended materials lol. Ezpz.

On your 2nd point about Istan - The meta reward for Palawadan and Great Hall was never in question, what made the map worth playing was that you always were rewarded for completing the chain as intended not just gated to 1 reward a day. With the meta reward changed, its hard to deny that the map is empty in comparison to what it was. Hell I spent an entire day, logging into my alt 15m before every palawadan to see if anyone would do the meta, and not a single player showed up, there was no lfg, nothing. It was dead except a few wayward souls probably stuck trying to get that damn PoI on amaras backside. I personally find it a shame they nerfed the map because it was quite enjoyable.

Point 3. My issue isn't that rose quartz is expensive, but that it is not reliably farmable. It's not like other maps where you can just goto a harvest node and get some In the open map. It's entirely tied to meteors. You mentioned lack of variation, yet this is not something you are bothered by? The very idea of spending the days waiting for meteors to spawn or running numbers with the calculator to determine the best time to buy isn't what I would call exciting and varied gameplay.

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@Sernius Alathar.6538 said:Nobody really wants to flat out make 16 ascended weapons that don't even let you choose the stat you want. Let alone just to unlock an upgraded skin. I would argue most players who get to the point of collection farming already have a few ascended sets.If you don't want them, don't make them. Easy.

There's skins and items in game that are quick to get, and those that require you to invest (sometimes a lot of) time/resources/whatever. There's players that prefer to get their shiny quickly, and those that like them as the carrot to farm for. The game has something for everyone. You have to find the shiny that you both want and agree with the aquisition method, not demand the game to change to your preferred playstyle (to the detriment of those who enjoy having a long-term goal in farming those weapon sets).

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@Rasimir.6239 said:

@Sernius Alathar.6538 said:Nobody really wants to flat out make 16 ascended weapons that don't even let you choose the stat you want. Let alone just to unlock an upgraded skin. I would argue most players who get to the point of collection farming already have a few ascended sets.If you don't want them, don't make them. Easy.

There's skins and items in game that are quick to get, and those that require you to invest (sometimes a lot of) time/resources/whatever. There's players that prefer to get their shiny quickly, and those that like them as the carrot to farm for. The game has something for everyone. You have to find the shiny that you both want and agree with the aquisition method, not demand the game to change to your preferred playstyle (to the detriment of those who enjoy having a long-term goal in farming those weapon sets).

Except we have the long term items - legendary equipment. That said, the point was missed, the requirements are disproportionate to the quality of the items, and sure people don't have to farm them, but most people like to finish the collections of weapons without spending the equivalent of 3 legendaries, especially when nobody will actually use those weapons. It's not like I am suggesting to cut the cost requirements to 1 of each item and done, that would be stupid, but compared to HoT weapon sets, that were actually well thought out and designed with utilising the map in mind, this has gone the way of actually making players use already heavily time gated and valuable resources for gear that doesn't even have stat selection. (which means you would need to manually change every item again to the stats you want).

It's been awhile, and i dunno if people remember how the system for machined work, but for the base weapons, it required currency from 3 maps, etc. 250 airship parts/aurillium and ley crystals. Then stage 2 was a collection + another series of map currency. The currency was proportionate to the drop amounts of each map.

I always wonder why anet chooses to trend away from systems that actually worked well (if it ain't broke don't fix it, as they say). They could of easily implemented a similiar system using the first 3 maps of ls4 for Istani sets, then the last 3 for Dragonsblood.

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I was like you, just come from 6 month brake. First think i did was finish storyline to obtain the skyscale. I mostly finish the hearts and have complet maps which rewards you with enough mats to finish the achievement.Bloodragons weapon are easy to farm and obtain them, if you do the meta everyday and mine plus some hearts you can obtain all the 6 weapons very fast. Extingush Jewelry drops also from boss or hidden chest at least I got them from there.With Astral Collection i agree, still need 1500 ore in order to craft the last 3 weapons but i just make the meta which is available afternoon and evening time for me( +3 UTC)Also you can find groups that are farming meteorite so you can obtain them faster.

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@Sernius Alathar.6538 said:the requirements are disproportionate to the quality of the itemsPoint is: there's no such thing as fixed proportion between requirements and quality (or useability or rarity or whatever else you want to measure items in). The ratio of requirements to reward is individually chosen for each piece of content, and on top of that very subjective and may vary widely between different players.

@Sernius Alathar.6538 said:most people like to finish the collectionsI'm sure many people do, but the game has such a vast amount of content and so many different people playing that there are "unreasonable" requirements for each individual all over the place. It's necessary to have enough stuff in game to keep the vast majority of us busy, which leads to a lot of content that is "unreasonable" for many.

Making each and every full weapon or armor set achievable for a vast majority of people playing will automatically leave those that have a lot of gametime and like to fulfill time- and resource-intensive goals without stuff to do, so the occasional set that rewards expensive fluff only is necessary to keep those players busy and playing.

Accept that not everything in game is meant for you, and that some goals may require bigger investments than you are willing to make, and set your goals accordingly. It'll make the game much more enjoyable than repeatedly complaining about things that have been complained about in countless forum threads before.

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Rose quartz isn't too bad, actually, you can also farm home instance.

That said good luck getting any meta in Istan done on a zero-effort basis. Unless you find a meta train, or persuade your guild to do it, or sometimes at reset, it isn't happening. At least in NA. The farmers are in Dragonfall. Even just tagging up and putting yourself in lfg won't cut it.

RIP Istan.

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