suggestion: Heartwood revamp
In a recent thread, @Lord_Nythrax has suggested that the Heartwood hunting quests be upgraded to offer more challenge and variety. I agree, with the additional suggestion that the hunts scale to player skill level. Don't send a 60-skill warrior to fight balrogs, nor send a grandmaster mage after ettins. Ideally, player could tune their quests, with perhaps an easy/medium/hard quest setting added to their options.
I could have added the above to the original thread, but since my suggestion goes further, I started this one to avoid possibly derailing the other.
Hunts should not be the only type of quest which scales. The crafting quests are extremely frustrating. They have little variety, and expecting them to help you train is almost an exercise in futility. Bowyers can use them to train if they dismiss the large majority of offered quests, but Carpenters, Blacksmiths, and Tailors are simply wasting time hoping for certain recipe drops which seem to never come. If they could gain skill while doing so it wold not seem like such a waste of time.
Regarding recipes, it felt like each craft had maybe five recipes which would drop often,
and getting another sort of recipe was a very rare event.. I.e., maybe 99.5% of the time a recipe drops, you would get one of the frequent ones. (What the heck are you going to do with 3 of the same recipes which all drop in the same session??) That other 0.5% chance contained all the other 10 to 30 recipes for that skill. I'm not saying some recipes should have the same drop rate. Rareness is fine. But the current design is the textbook definition of "a grind" which would make other games blush. Fit the rare recipes into maybe a 7% probability window. Then at least one recipe in 16 might be new and useful to that character. And in the meantime he is gaining skill, building a variety of things besides stools.
So, basically I am suggesting all quests, hunting and crafting, be upgraded. Have them scale to the player's current skill level. This will change Heartwood from a gloomy place of dread to a place where players enjoy visiting.
Rock (formerly Imperterritus VXt, Baja)
Comments
Kill 10 Rats
haven't seen that since MUD days!
kirthag.blogspot.com
http://www.uoguide.com/List_of_Quests
A number of years ago I spent a lot of time pushing the "Last Object" key to cycle the quest givers for Heartwood and Sanctuary attempting to determine who gave which quest. Think I forced each NPC 100 times? I'd have to check my spread sheet. Anyway, UO Guide already had a bunch of it, but I was able to gather and add lots of data, especially for Sanctuary.
Since then someone else has gone through and reorganized it all and put it into sortable lists. 100x better now then it was. I still use the Quests list a lot.
The UO Guide list is not grouped by difficulty like the UO.com list, but you can view the Mob target and determine difficulty for yourself.
Good Luck!
P.S. Looks like Elder Onallan the Wise is in Sanctuary, not Heartwood (CRTL-F FTW!).
Like a magical talking dog that says insults when it sees a player die.