Heal Wounded Rangers quest - a failed design

robai

Reasons why Heal Wounded Rangers quest in Mount Hotenow has a failed design:

1. You shouldn't be forced to cheat (i. e. swap instances) in order to complete a quest.
   
2. Other players shouldn't be able to interfere in your quest in any way (this is a very old problem in Neverwinter, for example some quests in Icewind Dale also have the same issue).
   
3. On top of that, if you don't have that quest you shouldn't be able to Heal Rangers (it's annoying when you misclick on a Ranger while doing other quest).
   

plasticbat

1. You don't have to cheat. There are enough Rangers. And, they re-spawn fast enough too. It would take longer time to switch instance, ride to the location and search again.
2. So far, nobody interfered me for the 9 characters I play.
3. This is worse than you described. You can heal Rangers anytime but this is a minor issue to me. You can heal Rangers with the quest but without the heal potion and you don't get credit for these heals. If you don't pay attention, you would not notice.

robai

plasticbat said:

1. You don't have to cheat. There are enough Rangers. And, they re-spawn fast enough too. It would take longer time to switch instance, ride to the location and search again.

You're right, they respawn faster than I thought at first, but it's still very annoying to wait when it happens.
For this reason I swap to an instance with low number of players and do all those quests for the weekly cap, it's well worth it.

plasticbat said:

2. So far, nobody interfered me for the 9 characters I play.

I also play 9 toons and it happened to me several times so far. It's not just that, at some point I didn't see any Rangers at all, because I checked some locations and didn't come back to check again, only later I realized that they were missing because other players freed them (I thought that my memory is wrong).
Now I've learned some of those locations and it became easier to complete those quests, but swapping instance to a low populated one is still a must in order to do those quests efficiently, at least for me.

The main reason of this topic isn't just this specific quest. I hope Devs will pay attention and never make such quests in the future since it a bad design: having other players nearby should be always a good thing, not a bad thing.

The quest Fey Runaways (Rescue Sprites) is tolerable since other player can help kill mobs and you both get the credit, but it's still faster to swap to a low populated instance since it's faster to find those sprites (killing mobs isn't a problem anyway). Such quest isn't in the best design, but at least it has a situational benefit of other player (unlike in Heal Wounded Rangers quest - here other player is a bad thing for you).

plasticbat

robai#6206 said:

The quest Fey Runaways (Rescue Sprites) is tolerable since other player can help kill mobs and you both get the credit, but it's still faster to swap to a low populated instance since it's faster to find those sprites (killing mobs isn't a problem anyway). Such quest isn't in the best design, but at least it has a situational benefit of other player (unlike in Heal Wounded Rangers quest - here other player is a bad thing for you).

IMO, this one is the worst because there are less sprites than (say) Rangers. It also takes longer to spawn. i.e. in average, it took me longer time to do the sprite quest than the ranger quest.

robai

plasticbat said:

IMO, this one is the worst because there are less sprites than (say) Rangers. It also takes longer to spawn. i.e. in average, it took me longer time to do the sprite quest than the ranger quest.

True, but for me visibility is also important (it's yet another reason why I don't like Heal Wounded Rangers quest):

1. Rangers are hard to see (also I always try to click on that Expedition member for some reason).
   
2. While mobs surrounding a Sprite stand in a circle, and I clearly see that group from a distance (as for the Sprite it's even harder to notice than a Ranger, but there is no need to see it and often I don't even see it).