After reaching level 4 and now 5 in some of the quest types, I'm really starting to wonder if the risk vs. reward is out of whack. I haven't taken the time to go through the numbers, but I'm going to give my experience with the system. Now, I tend to really spend too much time on this kind of thing and write a book when a two page essay would have sufficed, so you can skip down to the TL;DR heading if you'd like and scroll back up for details if needed. Higher level quests give higher amounts of numerical rewards (currency and xp), but the same is not true for discrete rewards like collection fragments, ornaments and such, unless it was a critical success, which will give two collection fragments instead of one as well as the free common agent. I haven't changed level in the quest types with tradeskill component rewards, so I don't know if you get more materials as you level up in research, crafting, and harvesting quests. Same with recruitment quests. I've been level 5 in that since well before they changed them in the recent patch, so I have no idea if level 1 recruit common agents gives less than the 3 you get from level 5, for instance. Higher level quests seem to have more agent slots and more bonus traits listed. Especially after the recent changes. Some quests will have an agent slot with three or four bonuses that are particular to a specific rare or elite agent. Whereas no other agent will have more than one of those bonus traits. Higher level quests (level 4 and 5 in particular) have much higher chances of incapacitating an agent and for longer time periods. Agents become incapacitated when you hit the "collect reward" button, so a quest could have finished its timer hours or even days earlier, but the agent's incapacity timer starts with the click of the button instead. With a new rotation, it checks to see what agents are incapacitated and offers you up to 2 recovery quests based on what those agents are (common, uncommon, etc.) and their incapacity. Here are the issues I see from the way these features work: 1&2 - All reward types should scale with level in some way. Alternatively, if it is simply easiest to make the numerical ones scale well with level, then add some of the other rewards to the overseer merchant. Such as being able to buy a set of tradeskill materials for an amount of currency similar to what those quests will give if the currency option is chosen. The reasoning behind the above is that 3, 4, and 5 show that there is considerably higher risk and difficulty in getting the higher percent chances of success in the higher level quests. There is no option to stick to lvl 2 quests once you level beyond that, so there needs to always be a clear benefit to being higher level. The recruit quests especially still need work. The level 5 common recruit workers quest should not have an agent slot that only the Avatar of Tunare can gain more than one bonus for (as far as I can tell, all of my other harvester(3) agents can only get one bonus. I have 170 agents, not counting doubles I haven't converted yet on that account). To top that off, there is then a 15% chance of being incapacitated for 36 hours in a quest that gives you three common agents. So, it takes an elite agent working with 4 other agents, also with high incapacity chances, to round up 3 common workers? The recovery quests also still need work (in addition to fixing the known bug with some rare and elite recovery quests not having the "recover agent" reward showing up). When my Avatar of Tunare becomes exhausted for 36 hours after working on recruiting 3 common workers, which starts when I click to collect reward, rather than when the timer for the quest is up, I won't get offered a Recover Elite Exhausted Agent quest until the next rotation comes around, which could be nearly 12 hours later. Then the recovery quest takes time (I'm not sure if the exhausted elite recovery is 3, 6, or 12 hours). So, it could be over 20 hours to recover an incapacitated Avatar of Tunare that takes up both and active quest slot and a completed quest slot when it is collected. Oh, and whatever agents were needed to run the quest that isn't guaranteed to succeed, and those agents have a small chance to become incapacitated from the recovery quest. I might be better off just letting them recover on their own. TL;DR The first two points are about whether it is really enough of a benefit to increase the level in a quest type. Gaining character levels is always clearly a benefit. Although I remember sacrificing myself to a necro many times to drop from 54 to 52 so I could go on a Vox raid when Kunark was still new, but otherwise, more levels are always better. I expect no less from overseer. Those last two points have me thinking that neither the recruit common or recovery quests are really worthwhile at all. Well, if I'm really impatient and want to do a specific quest that requires one of my incapacitated agents, I can always use DBC to rush that along, but maybe that's the point of setting it up this way?
The risk vs. reward on the common recruitment quests now are simply not worth it. They typically require too many agents with a very high risk of incapacitation for maybe 3 commons...that's a pointless quest now. Better to just run shorter quests and work the agents for a high success rate for a better chance at a crit success (and free common agent). I would really prefer that they go back to what they had, with the 36/48 hour quests for 5 or 7 agents. And the recovery quests are just useless at the moment. Across 3 accounts, no matter what type of recovery quest I run, or the level of the quest...the option to recover an agent simply isn't there. It just gives recovery xp and that's it.
You mean having one agent lost for 18 hours and three agents lost for 36 hours, like I got yesterday, isn't a good deal for a few commons? Yeah, they went overboard on those a little bit to be sure.
Yeah i was getting more collection drops before I leveled up all my skills. Now it just takes 3 times as long to find the best guys for the same or less benefits. Going to save up enough coins on my 6 accounts to buy new weapon ornaments and not bother till I see weapons come out.
