I've been doing the Hero's Journey which is generally very well done with an interesting story and decent rewards. But I've also been recording some of the ridiculously bad designs. In particular, the way they make certain trivial items incredibly rare which bogs down the entire quest into a boring slog. Here is the latest. In the quest,Save the Queen #4: Parts For a Cure it says: Loot 1 Snake Fang from a mountain snake 0/1 (Blackfeather Roost) The problem is this is very rare, which means you have to grind for hours to get even one. If you're in a group, most members will be out of luck. So why bother? The overall problem is that by forcing people to grind through hundreds of snakes, or bears in an earlier step, they outlevel the quests, so that by the time they get the gear as the reward, it's kinda mediocre. Fortunately, there's a simple answer. The next time there's a patch, change that little number that decides the drop rate. Also, have a dev read zam.com about their quests and when people are complaining, so you can fix it quietly we don't have to come here to tell you about it.
It was probably intended to be Large Snake Fangs like in the first Madu quest. But, hey, I just did this recently and was getting at least one regular Snake Fang per 50 or 60 kills on the nine snakes that can drop these in Mesa, so, I mean... right?
I see you are actually referring to a different quest. I had this problem with snake fangs in the "More Stuff for Madu" or whatever it's called quest step where you have to loot Snake Fangs instead of Large Snake Fangs.
The problem with the hero's journey and altering things like this on live is it will mostly likely be an across the board change meaning it will also change how it works once the TLP servers unlock these quests. If we remove all of the difficult RNG items or make the RNG trivial it could have a negative impact on those players as they will quickly run out of things to do. I would suggest just skipping these quests if you are doing them while current level and come back and mass slaughter things later to complete the quest arc. I have 5 boxed about 80% of the hero's journey with mostly only raid stuff left to complete. Some of it is very time intensive and others not so much.
I've actually just finished these quests, attempting to finish the Hero's Journey for the second time (complete). As a level 110 PAL, these were obviously easy. Besides the constant running from far away zones back to CR, it wasn't bad. I guess it's just RNG? My problem right now is this quest: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4137 You have maybe 10 beetles in this entire zone, it's pretty big as well. I've cleared every beetle for about two days now without one wing, about 3-4 hours per day just sitting in the zone. I don't remember anything ever taking me this long to get, especially for a collection type quest.
One of the purposes of the Hero's Journey is to give you good gear appropriate for your level. I don't think coming back at 110 and nuking the zone was really what the designers had in mind. I'm not asking for them to make everything easy but it should be part of an overall balanced game design. Sticking really hard RNG in the middle of a quest story line just causes people to not finish the quests. There are times and places for hard stuff. Remember walking very slowly through giant country with your pockets full of copper to get jboots? Now that was well-designed hard stuff! The reward was worth it.
Having said that, I suspect they may have listened to what I said and increased the drop rate. That is something that is pretty commonly built into a game. I had way better success today after a very frustrating experience yesterday. Then again, maybe I sacrificed some goats to the RNG witch....
