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Guild Stronghold's and Adventurer Shards
keaton1
Member Posts: 34 Arc User
One of the hardest shards to get in the game is the adventurer shards. People are always doing dungeons so there is an abundance of dungeoneering shards. Heroic shards are easy enough to get doing missions in the stronghold. Adventurer shards are a bit more difficult since only four missions provide them. These being the support missions in the Well of Dragons, Dread Ring, Icewind Dell, and the Stronghold Support (three heroics). There was at one time a Sharandar support mission which was removed when the new Sharandar was introduced. That eliminated a quest every fourth day which gave use shards.
As there has been very little in the way of updates toward the stronghold holds for a long while I wanted to offer this into consideration. Every week Sybella gives use legacy quests. Could Sybella not give as an additional reward adventurer shards? People are doing these missions every week and it would be a great boost to the guilds who struggling to advance.
In addition there used to be leveling adventures which could be picked up in the stronghold. On one's way from level 20 to 79 you were asked daily to do two missions. One was complete four missions in a level appropriate area. Many of those areas were removed when the level cap was adjusted back down to twenty. You were also requested to kill X number of enemies in a level appropriate area. Why not bring those back and do not tie them to certain areas? A level 20 character could go into campaign appropriate zone and kill 50 enemies to complete this mission. Characters leveling from 1 to 19 could do these two missions it in whatever current leveling zone they are in.
In addition the stronghold's need to have a reason to draw players into doing these missions in the first place. While the master crafting and the vendors for it are somewhat of a draw for certain players, others seem to have no reason to come to the stronghold at all. This would change the gear on the mysterious merchant and most especially the guild outfitter were updated to contend with gear in the game. No one wants to spend guild marks on gear which is a 540 item level, such as the guild gear, or on 900ish gear as is on the mysterious merchant.
These two minor changes would go a long way toward showing some love to the strongholds and guilds. Especially now days when there are so many of them dying since new players want to come in and jump straight to a level 20 guild. There is no incentive to assist smaller growing guilds.
Motodo/Tumal
Fool's Brigade
As there has been very little in the way of updates toward the stronghold holds for a long while I wanted to offer this into consideration. Every week Sybella gives use legacy quests. Could Sybella not give as an additional reward adventurer shards? People are doing these missions every week and it would be a great boost to the guilds who struggling to advance.
In addition there used to be leveling adventures which could be picked up in the stronghold. On one's way from level 20 to 79 you were asked daily to do two missions. One was complete four missions in a level appropriate area. Many of those areas were removed when the level cap was adjusted back down to twenty. You were also requested to kill X number of enemies in a level appropriate area. Why not bring those back and do not tie them to certain areas? A level 20 character could go into campaign appropriate zone and kill 50 enemies to complete this mission. Characters leveling from 1 to 19 could do these two missions it in whatever current leveling zone they are in.
In addition the stronghold's need to have a reason to draw players into doing these missions in the first place. While the master crafting and the vendors for it are somewhat of a draw for certain players, others seem to have no reason to come to the stronghold at all. This would change the gear on the mysterious merchant and most especially the guild outfitter were updated to contend with gear in the game. No one wants to spend guild marks on gear which is a 540 item level, such as the guild gear, or on 900ish gear as is on the mysterious merchant.
These two minor changes would go a long way toward showing some love to the strongholds and guilds. Especially now days when there are so many of them dying since new players want to come in and jump straight to a level 20 guild. There is no incentive to assist smaller growing guilds.
Motodo/Tumal
Fool's Brigade
2
Comments
Tyranny was impacted when they revamped the tyranny of dragons line. No Portal to Tuern quest, fewer tyranny rewards. Boons were adjusted, but stronghold requirements were not.
Rather than make new content, Sharandar was revamped. This took away the adventurer shards, but also you can't make vouchers now, you have to be at least near end game ready to earn anything donatable, but this is in conflict with getting the higher level gear when you are working on getting ready for VOS. Are they going to revamp Dread Ring next and make those vouchers go away?
There was the long period where surplus equipment donation was broken when character level was changed. This eventually got fixed but can still be annoying. Yes, you can donate any blue item, but that takes literally a hundred mouse clicks to donate 1000 surplus, if you happen to have the 50 blue items accumulated. Epic was nearly reduced in half, so now surplus takes more effort. As an example, if you upgrade your stable from rank 2 to rank 3 (a small upgrade), it would take 6,650 crafted items, so you really need to farm epic items. This upgrade used to be a bit under 160 epic items, now it is almost 270 epic items for the same upgrade. We used to be able to craft surplus equipment, but no more.
Which professions items can be donated was just nerfed so now you MUST farm items to donate. I am guessing the intent was to make this not another 'donate gold' tab, but consider the playability factor of this. That means you need to interrupt your action game play (what most of us are here for) to go gather things from your crafting box. What used to take about 3 seconds, now will take about a week of waiting, emptying the box. Then wait some more. Then empty your box. Wait a few hours more. Empty your box... This has all of the enjoyment of watching paint dry. But you must watch that paint dry if you want to upgrade your stronghold.
New players don't always want to join a guild, even if they are welcoming new players. Some enjoy trying to upgrade a guild with their friends. Could you please consider quality of life and how you are impacting your players when you make these changes?
When 'old' Sharandar was replaced by 'new' Sharandar I expected the Sharandar Support quest to provide Fey vouchers for killing enemies in the New Sharandar as it did in the old. I know they modified the currency so something could be donated, but as I have no characters that can play in 40 iL areas I have no personal experience with this. I do see the Fey shard totals go up, so I assume folks are donating something from the new area. But the quest for Adventure Shards should be re-activated.
As for the two other Master of Coin quests "Doing the Rounds" and "Keeping the Peace" I would be afraid they would greatly reduce the number of Adventure Shards awarded per quest much like they did the Guard/Worker recruitment quests. I always hesitated to do them because they XP rewarded pushed the player out of the target zones faster than they could complete the rest of the quests in the leveling sequence. If you were in a rush to get to lvl 70/endgame you were happy, if you wanted to do all the quests and enjoy the game story, you ignored them.
And... I said when they re-packaged Sharandar as new content they would do Dread Ring next, I was half joking and half not. Something inside me tells me they're just going to cycle through all the older mods and re-do them in the same way. Part of the reason might be to save $$$ on creative talent designing totally new content (and what happened to the 9 layers of hell? We only got one) and $$$ investing in more servers to host that new content along with the already existing. Another part of it might be connected to a comment from a dev I saw when Sharandar was released that they wanted better 'visual fidelity', inferring that the existing content looked bad (it does not, it's beautifully made and executed) but what I see when I run around Sharandar is actually the sub-par stuff. Textures look like something from the Unity store sold for $5 (and placed in lazy unnatural ways), walls which are supposed to be worn down after countless years have totally sharp edges all over them like minecraft, the lighting is sub-par, map layout doesn't look real or natural, it has a blocky synthetic feel to it, and the overall sharpness of the textures and harsh flat lighting makes it look extremely fake. (One way to compare is to go to the new Adventurers Guild and then go to the Emporium, you'll immediately see the difference, the Adventurer's Guild doesn't have that aged look you see everywhere else to make you feel you're in a time-gone-by, and the lighting is overly-bright and flat as a pancake and makes no sense for this time period. It looks like a different game.) When you zoom into textures on the old content it doesn't have an extremely high resolution granted, but when you look at the same textures when playing the game normally and running around it has a soft look which looks natural and real and the effect/illusion works well and gives Neverwinter it's unique look and realistic feel like you're really there. I fear that over time the game will eventually morph into something entirely different and what sets Neverwinter aside visually from all other games will be lost. And then if that happens, who cares... people can find the same thing in any of the other multitude of games out there and there'll be less reason to call Neverwinter home.
There have been rumors of an upgrade coming to the stronghold for almost two years now and still nothing in sight. I just want to get the attention of Cryptic and see if we cannot get some player feedback to give them ideas on things which we as players would like to see occur. They have made changes to the game but failed to keep the stronghold current with the changes. I know right now two of the missions from the stable cannot even be completed since the races take place in the Blacklake District and Pirate's Skyhold.
They are going to have to address many things before the game comes down to just a handful of active level twenty guilds and hundreds of dead lower level guilds. There is no incentive for new players to help build a new guild up as it takes years to do. They want to jump right to a level 20 guild and the end game. There has to be a way to help the smaller guilds build themselves up.
There are several other ways to get the 10 Adv, Sh. doing 3 quests iWoD, Dread Ring and IWD.and you can also get 10 Adv. Sh.. for doing 3 HEs in the Stronghold. Completed dungeons pay 15 Dung. Sh. (50% more) If 5 guild members do 1 dungeon that's 75 Dung. shards.
Our Guild made level 15 last Sunday. We have only a few players donating, but those who do donate keep pitching instead of whining.