Here's something that doesn't make sense to me in some Overseer quests: they require an agent of a certain rarity, and a better agent won't work. For example, a quest requires an Uncommon Spy. And I cannot use a Rare or Elite Spy for it. My better agents are somehow unable to do the job that an inferior agent can do. Can we change that equal sign to a 'greater or equal'?
To be fair though, what makes you think anything would be wrong with it? Take a spy for example, An elite spy would be fairly recognizable. The notoriety alone would mean they may fail something that means spying by having a casual conversation. People would be more likely to let something slip to a stranger than someone that is on every wanted poster in norrath. It all would depend on the type of task. If they were just hiding in the shadows, they would be better, but if they had to do a simple task they would do far worst. Same goes with trade. People may be more willing to haggle with a commoner than the head of a trading guild. In real life would you be more willing to have a conversation with a mayor, or the president to discuss something going on in your town? Im not saying any of this is their intent, but their would be precedence at least. Now would it make it easier if you could use the higher, yes definitely. Would i disagree with them allowing it, no. Im just saying it was likely a design choice.
Overseer newbie here, so take with a giant grain of salt..... So far, I'm only using the conversion quests with agents which I have dupes of. So, I never lack for the abilities of an agent once I get them. Obviously, I'm progressing slowly, not getting higher level agents as quickly, etc. But, since I'm concentrating on collection items, there's no point to rushing to harder quests, since you don't get any benefit from doing harder quests. YMMV.
Sometimes its pretty weird: If for example, I get a spy-quest to discover what mayong mistmore is up. and I use my best spy: guess who: mayong mistmore himself, then its not an automatic win, completed in 5 seconds... How come? even more ironic if he fails... Mayong: mayong mistmore reporting in sir! Me: so what were you up to? Mayong: I have no clue, I must have been drunk while spying on myself... Me: shame on you!!!! Some Iconic agents, should give a 100% trivial success-rate with specific quests...when the quest is about themselves
In this case does the rare/elite agent have a higher spy job skill than the uncommon one? I don't have any elite so I can't check that but I do see rare agents with a lower job skill than an uncommon one if that is the low job skill for the agent.
The scenario we are discussing, is when the elite agent does have a higher relevant skill than the common agent. Hyper competence in the relevant skill should be rewarded, but it isn't in this case.
Are you certain of that? The post makes no mention of the job skill of any of the agents just mentions the rarity of them which is why I asked the question. It would help if it could also list the job skills of all agents and what the quest is asking for. Screen shots would also help provide more information as well. In the end the developers are going to need more of this information in order to determine if what is happening is a bug, an oversight or working as intended.
It's a whole other ball of wax when you are punished for having level 2 or 3 in everything. Up to about 1/3 of the missions I cannot even do because the 180ish agents (about half uncommon, common) aren't able to do a GREY task. Some of it might be bad luck, but apparently bad luck is all I have.
I would pay real money to be able to "de-level" all my accounts back to level 1/no xp in all Overseer stats and then turn off any xp gain. At least that way I know all the quests I would get could be done by the common agents I have. I would prefer to have the recruitment tasks that give me 5 commons rather than the targeted single agent recruitment quests that require agents of skill level I don't have, but I don't get those anymore. There's zero reason to level anything in Overseer because the rewards at higher levels are practically the same as the lower level ones. Maybe you get an extra silk here or an extra poison component there, but it's really not worth it.
The only tasks that I have ever seen specify the level of agent is the Recruit tasks or the Conversion tasks. I'm pretty certain that's what they want … and it seems okay, if not frustrating at times. Are you saying there are other tasks that specify the level of agent, not just the ranks in a job? The Recruit tasks definitely need to be more consistently given considering the fact that you often cannot do them. We'll see if the patch improves this.
That is a trap I fell into as well. And the issue of better agents being unfit for simpler tasks is only a part of it. As you level up and acquire better agents, the game starts offering you harder quests with higher risks. It looks like those Elite agents are more prone to get incapacitated, and for longer times too. And forget about recovering them - not paying 500 dbc to heal Emperor Crush who got wounded (again! he gets wounded more than a common orc legionnaire!!). The worst part is that the rewards don't scale up with difficulty. But the difficulty is forced upon you. You get more done with a bunch of Common and Uncommon agents early on than with Rares and Elites after leveling up. And there is no way to go back. I would gladly trade my fragile and often useless Elites back for lower ranked agents, and de-level to the beginner quests.
Do you have the name of these tasks? I am not level 5 in all areas, but I have yet to see a specific level in anything other than Recruit or Conversion tasks.
Those are the only ones that have tier based requirements on the agents. The rest of the quests use the number system and allow you to exceed that number for additional benefit.
So, am I the only one who never chooses the recruitment quests? They eat up a quest i could be running which would get me something I want, and about 25% of my quests give a critical success, so I'm getting more agents anyway. Just curious what others are doing. Also, the stats page lists a category for "Recovery" quests, and I did do one during the tutorial, but I have yet to be offered a recovery quest outside of that. Are they just that rare?
i don't know Tatanka. i'm doing overseer on two accounts and i take every recruitment quest that pops up as a priority and i have been happy with the results. Critical successes can nab you an extra random agent, but the recruitment quests can win you specific, very good agents, or a bunch of agents at once. And i'm not 100% sure on this one, but i could swear i got a critical success on a recruit quest and got like double the number of agents as a reward. i am approaching Overseer as more of a completionist and less as a maximize everything as soon as possible, so bare that in mind.
I really hate this aspect, as well. This little side game is tiring, even if I only check it once a day. There’s no sorting of the missions by reward or category. You have to manually go through each task and figure out, if you have any agents that apply. If, I do find one then I have to keep going through the list to check if any of the other tasks are going to use the same agents. It’s just not worth the 8-10 minutes.
There are overseer quests which ask for 'Uncommon X' or 'rare X', and using a higher rarity doesnt give the full bonus (though it will give in general a 1-2% bonus over the baseline, which also could be due to a display bug (it takes forever for some success % to update to the correct value). For skill: Elite (Purple) - 5/3/3 Rare (Blue)- 4/2 Uncommon (Green) - 3/1 for iconic and 2/0 for normal (theres a few places youll need those non-iconic for bonuses though, for non-monstrous elemental of one type and for drake on another). If it asks for a (2) skill, its doable by any primary green or better or secondary blue, with a minor (again, possibly display issue) bonus to using an agent with exactly 2 skill. You start seeing this more often at higher rarity as levels go up. . Theres a few green 12h quests that start to expect specific agents, similar to one of the gnome exploration commons but MUCH more limiting, where only 1 agent for 2 or 3 different spots has the 3 traits and exact rarity the quest asks for, and the difference for having those agents and using filler agents is 20-25%. . I think its only blue and above quests that -need- specific rarity though
I don't have specific names, but it happens at least one quest rotation a day, sometimes two, on all accounts. Usually, in any rotation, there's at least one quest of some sort that requires a specific rarity, but not a specific skill level. Almost always, no matter what agent I pick in that job, there's almost no improvement in the success rate. It's essentially a dead character slot for the quest, making it not worth doing because of the low chance of success (they usually start with a very low chance to begin with). Sometimes there are multiple quests in a rotation that have that type of requirement.
