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Avernus Hunts: A disappointment
adinosii
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 4,294 Arc User
So, we got the hunts yesterday I had really been looking forward to them to fill the gap between now and Sept. 15th when Milestone II starts.
But oh, boy...what a disappointment.
Now, we first got hunts in Chult - a good idea, but flawed, with many issues that people complained about - the tropies and lures did not stack, it was RNG on top of RNG, meaning that you could spend a lot of time farming T1 hunts and then T2 to finally get a T3 lure for just a chance of a good reward. Now, some of the bigger issues did get fixed, but I would not call the Chult hunts good - "tedious and frustrating" would be a better description.
Then we got the Barovia hunts, and from my perspective, they were a massive improvement. Fewer layers of RNG and many more worthwhile rewards.
So, I thought Cryptic had learned from its mistakes with the Chult hunts and the Avernus hunts would incorporate those leassons and we would get some fun and engaging content, maybe like the Barovia hunts.
But no.
It is Chult all over again - just worse.
Now, I have not done all the hunts, only 4 of them - but here are the issues I have seen with the Avernus hunts:
So, overall, sorry, but the Avernus hunts are just not worth my time. I guess that until Sept. 15th, I will only be logging in briefly to collect my daily stuff and then do something else.
But oh, boy...what a disappointment.
Now, we first got hunts in Chult - a good idea, but flawed, with many issues that people complained about - the tropies and lures did not stack, it was RNG on top of RNG, meaning that you could spend a lot of time farming T1 hunts and then T2 to finally get a T3 lure for just a chance of a good reward. Now, some of the bigger issues did get fixed, but I would not call the Chult hunts good - "tedious and frustrating" would be a better description.
Then we got the Barovia hunts, and from my perspective, they were a massive improvement. Fewer layers of RNG and many more worthwhile rewards.
So, I thought Cryptic had learned from its mistakes with the Chult hunts and the Avernus hunts would incorporate those leassons and we would get some fun and engaging content, maybe like the Barovia hunts.
But no.
It is Chult all over again - just worse.
Now, I have not done all the hunts, only 4 of them - but here are the issues I have seen with the Avernus hunts:
- The Manes. They spawn in 5 locations, and are the real bottleneck of the hunts. Everyone is just driving between those 5 spawn points and killing them within seconds of their apperance. Worse yet, the Trophy drop rate seems rather pathetic. I managed to kill 11 manes yesterday - got a grand total of two trophies. Considering what others around me are reporting, I suspect I was unusually unlucky, but still. This part is in no sense what I would consider "fun and engaging gameplay" - it is a boring, tedious grind, and an extremely annoying bottleneck.
- The other targets. There are 20-30 locations where the other targets spawn, so it's not that bad....in fact, you can collect their trophies fairly easily. Now, the "not-stacking" issue did not get fixed, so they tend to take up an annoying amount of space, and because you need one trophy from a mane for every trophy from something else, we are back to the Mane bottleneck.
- Variable difficulty of T1 hunts. In Chult, the T1 hunt targets were easily soloable. Here, the difficulty is more variable - some can be fairly eaily soloed - others are significantly more challenging - more what I would have expected a T2 hunt to be like (soloable only by really good players, but best done in a party).
- Lack of rewards. So, as I said, I have only done 4 hunts - and did not get any worthwhile rewards. Why should I bother farming trophies if the chance of getting a reward is this low? That was a part of the "RNG on top of RNG on top of..:" issue with the Chult hunts.
- The Armor drops. Although I did not get any of the primary rewards (the armor drops), some other people did get things like The Balor bracers and so on. Now, those items are not all bad - several of them are desirable transmutes (and fortunately they are BtA, so you can share them with alts), but as for actually using them - well, the issue is that their bonuses are mostly uniformly bad, and many players who are able to do the hunts will already have better pieces. (Consider Goristo's Horns, for example.... a temporary 1% bonus to Critical strike? I would not be surprised if most players capable of doing the hunts had that maxed out already ... now, it it had been a 1% bonus to Critical Severity, that would have been different - any chance this is just a typo?). At any rate, the armors are not that great, but maybe the T2 and T3 rewards will be better. Maybe.
- The T2 trophy issue. Considering that the hunts seem based on the Chult hunts (unfortunately), I would have expected the T1 hunts to drop Trophies to make T2 lures. Well, that is not happening, and I suspect that is because the T2 hunts are not active yet.
So, overall, sorry, but the Avernus hunts are just not worth my time. I guess that until Sept. 15th, I will only be logging in briefly to collect my daily stuff and then do something else.
Hoping for improvements...
17
Comments
Manes are annoying af
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
In chult the Rex was fixed to all player hitting the hunt get a fang and he has som good HP, can see a fix for this one to be honest, (i would rather just remove the mane trophy needed) but i dont espect to see this happening...
A pity i tought the Hunt wuold be a nice place to spend time but is not the case...
When I compare my green blessed set with full upgrade within green (item level 1146) with orange Legion Guard set, the disadvantage of the full green blessed set is losing:
1. a few stat points. May be around 100 in total.
2. One offense slot and one defense slot
3. the 2nd modification of the off hand
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
And as i know, you can get no reward if you will not do enough damage (compared to ppl that help you) while setting the lure alone and others nuke the hunt... By the way ... shouldnt hunts encourage to do it as a party content ?? Not doing any shady moves just to get things in solo again ?? To be honest, if i would like to do solo things i would go play a singleplayer game... not mmo...
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
My main question is... why the hunts are not divided evenly, i dont think about the drop rates and spawn rates that are other topic to discuss. I am talking about rare mobs distribution...
-Swamps contain 2 types of critters: Horseman and Demolishers
-Docks contain 3 types of critters: Succubus, Interrogators and the most rare of all Scout of Stygia... lets simplyfy it as a DOG
-Scrub contains 1 type of critter: Searing Hezrou...
Alsoooooooo the Scrub is swarmed by hell hounds and considering that Scout is also a dog ... it could be a rare spawn out of them... and moving Scouts to Scrub had another layer of logic to even the numbers of rare mobes types on every part of the map... or maybe killing the haunds make the Scouts appear but in the other side of the map
There are people who easily farmed over 700 T1 lures just in Milestone 3, alone.
What lacks here is the understanding that Hunts have and always were a social content, meaning that you need to have a party of people to work together to achieving a specific goal. But it needs some form of organization in order to work efficiently and profitably. Without it, you will lag behind a lot.
The RNG exists so that we do not get people simply farming a single, solitary spot. Which even now they do!
If you think about it, it is actually pretty smart to have Manes appearing randomly on one of the locations, rather than always appearing on the single place where someone can oneshot them.
This means that active gameplay, communication and organization is rewarded, which in my opinion is the sole concept of playing an MMO game in the first place. That is a great way to bring new and old people together!
With a team of people I managed to farm quite a bit of Chains from Manes. I managed to make a few T3 hunt lures, and sell quite a lot of Demon Remains. And everyone in the team GOT Demon Remains which we could sell on the AH, making a small, but satisfying profit. Our involvement was rewarded and everyone, and I mean everyone involved got something out of it.
Regarding Manes, small ones appear on each 8-10 sec, so you'd basically have a chain on each 1min20sec on average. With an active team you can easily farm pretty much anything, and if that doesn't help, changing the instance surely does. There is also competition involved, too.
After the milestone 4 ends, and we get the new content, the RNG of the items will increase. For the time being, RNG is perfect. Not too long, not too short, just about right.
Chultan hunts were WORSE than Avernus ones, and here's why:
In Chult you had to slay a smaller dinosaur only to spawn a bigger one after several minutes. There were three in total per instance of 30 people. Furthermore, there were only three spawn locations and often would need 10+ people to even meddle in attacking T-Rex. We'd had to lookout for either Bridge/River, Thayans or Mid. By the time you even get to a spawn location, you'd have a competing Guild already killing the Rex. If you were lucky to even hit, awesome. If now, touche!
It was slow, tedious and not rewarding, but even at that point simply exiting the party would bring each person that slightly attacks the Rex a valuable component, resulting in many components over 5-10 people who actively hunt in a team. You could spend one day hunting T-Rex only, but then comes a tedious process of hunting Smilodons, Scorpios et cetera, which HAD a RNG at the time. RNG was later fixed when content wasn't highly rewarding anymore, and you could easily farm a T3 lure in Chult in a single day. This was not heard of back in the days at all, we had to have entire guild helping, crafting and everyone wanted to have a go at T3 drops to get Amiculum and Corona. This is a fact.
What I understand from the topic is that you don't have the organization behind nor a viable strategy to hunt the manes, which many people face these days since game practically became a single-player experience. I'm glad that T3 hunt is somewhat challenging as it will bring more people together. If it was easy to play, nobody would play it.
Much, much bigger bottleneck is finding Exalted Cambions and finding the Hezrou, so you end up having to buy these from the Citadel merchant. Manes are so fast to spawn and obtain.
I will repeat, this is a team oriented content, with a heavy focus on team gameplay.
Sure, you can go solo and find an instance where someone is farming maps perchance, but they'd often leave rather soon. With a team you can cover more, get better in figuring out where manes are and so much more.
Whoever hunts even a few of the Chains or T1 lures can earn around 40-80k AD by converting to mop4. This is allowed by developers, it is even encouraged, and trade chat finally became a bit more active. How is that not a success? How is that a failure?
If it was easy to obtain everything, and easy to defeat there'd be so many topics laughing about how easy it was to obtain the hunts and how Cryptic doesn't care. That is also a fact. Which is why I disagree with the premise of the topic, no offense.
The only real downside to the hunts was a time-gate, but other than that this is only sub-par to Barovian hunts which were absolutely perfect, but completely different from the scale of these ones.
I play with newcomers, and old friends alike. Newcomers that started maybe a few weeks ago. And it's great income for them. I gladly helped them to earn a few extra AD on the side whilst they're learning how to play the game (still).
All "sweaty" types usually buy chains as they've enough AD to do so since they can't really bother to hunt for hours.
Cryptic u decided to lead to way to an endless grind cycle for ppl willing to spend their whole daytime on this game...grats!
For guys like me: with a job and money but no time to farm 10 hours+ a day there is no chance to compensate with my money so there is no reason to spend any...
btw. is the droprate "Mask of the Hellbringers" close to zero? ...the spawn rate is already extra lousy but that damn thing never drop a Mask...and we need an separate hunt rider in our inventory...tons of different maps, lure types which dont stack...annoying big time!
...and those awfull lags all the time and the most annoying thing is: we all could live with BoA but wt...f u hate ur player base that much that make near all BoC? What is ur reason for that very silly decision? BoA is already enough to keep stuff away from AH...BoC is pure chicane towards the playerbase, nothing else! ( I know thats ur way to make money...but stuff like "Token of Achievement" from event - which genius decided this has to be BoC? Grats!
It's like a 3 pull slot machine where the 1st pull might get you a "bonus" game. The T2 hunt is like the bonus round. Imagine a bonus game in a slot machine that gives nothing most of the time... with just a small chance for getting to the "big wheel" for a chance at something great. The 1st and 3rd will be exciting, but the 2nd will be negative, emotionless, unrewarding.
Recommendation: T2 hunts should have a 33% chance to give a T3 trophy, and a 66% chance to give Gore Covered Chains.
When t3 hunts were spoken of as being for more than a party, I expected the mechanic would allow for a queue group to get the rewards, as was initially the case with the Avernus hunts. I am disappointed this issue was not addressed before the t3 went live. Those in the party earn some reward and have the chance of a good loot drop, but why is it expected some players would need to come and give up their game time to help for no reward. This seems both inconsiderate and unfair.
Could we please have the mechanic adjusted to grant basic rewards to a queue group, with the extra loot drop remaining with the party setting the lure. This would help us to get more players involved in this community event, thus working to get the t3 lure and being more widely engaged with the Avernus mod.
First plus point, you don't need to kill a wave of mobs so that only after that the mob that drops the lure appears with the chance. This reduces the rng on top of rng, as it was not guaranteed that after killing the wave of normal mobs would come the mob with chance of drop.
First and foremost negative point, it was a bad choice to place the primary item for all tiers 1 at different points and with super rare drop chance. While in Chult you needed to join a group to be able to defeat the T-Rex or even to cultivate, now you spend most of the time having to change instances and keep looking for it, it is more boring and tedious than the first style of hunting and does not make the players unite for a common goal.
Second downpoint is the chance of equipment drops, how can I do 10x the same hunt and fail to win an item I was looking for? 10x the same hunt to win only 1 T2 lure? Why not implement something like reward currency, in which case no drop gear or lure after an X number? of hunts you could exchange in a mysterious marketer as in barovia? (e.g. every hunt, I win 1 coin of this hunt, with 5 I buy 1 gear of my choice, with 10 the lure) I know the time is to reduce and unify the stores, but this would be casual to campaign and similar to what is already in the game.
Second Positive point is the option to acquire fighters through the coins of the event, not everyone has the time to cultivate the 2 and when 1 help in another, it is very rewarding to realize. Last positive is Boss T3, it's really a challenge. I went to help a member of my alliance on this hunt and was impressed by your difficulty. The equipment that fall from the T3 is mostly Bis and this makes everyone have to go through this challenge, but for the most part the suffering is in being able to gather the components for this.