I was reading a post on BG (I know, mistake #1 right there) about how the new beginner quests actually give *gasp* experience points for completing certain tasks (but no fame). In total, they give you 1800 experience. Not really gamebreaking.
Comment #10 – “so…..low lvls is like WoW now?”
Leading up to this, there are a lot of ‘about time’ and ‘really could have used that 4 years ago’ type comments, but this one stuck out the strongest to me of all of them.
My personal feelings are ‘who cares anymore about leveling up’. Anymore, leveling to 75 is just a chore, especially after the first time. The second, third, fourth, fifth, etc 75 just become a larger chore than the one before it (this comes from someone who has 4 75’s, a 61, and 2 53’s). I welcome anything to make this task go faster.
With that said, there is nothing wrong with having a npc assign a task to (for example) go and kill 20 rabbits, then give you an experience points reward equal to around 1/3rd of that of killing 20 monsters, maybe a small money amount, and perhaps a reward based on what you killed. Actually, such a quest does exist, aside from the experience points part. While you can buy the items from the AH, I think the idea is to go kill a number of monsters in that family, help you learn what they drop, as well as provide guidance to lowbie leveling targets. See the quest The Seamstress, and its follow up quests Lizard Skins, and Black Tiger Skins. The final result of this 3-stage quest is a Tiger Stole. Not an amazing item, but not horrible either.
So the goal of the quest (I assume) is that you kill a few even match monsters, get 500-600 exp per quest, turn it in, get a few items and some money. Now add on the quest giving you a 300 exp per quest bonus too. For quests which are much harder, or more time consuming, like the warp 2 quest, perhaps a 3000-5000 experience points bonus would be appropriate. Something that helps take the edge off of leveling. I also think that as you get higher level, the monsters should give more experience (I do realize this was increased at least once already, I believe it should be increased again, but have the base exp per kill raised instead of the potential exp from a larger level difference). I’m not saying that at 70 every monster should give you 4000 experience and you should level in 10 kills, like at level 1, I’m just saying that maybe 500-600 experience per kill (from the same monsters that now give 150-200) isn’t a bad thing either.
Lets take what would be a higher level quest. In the early 50’s, you get a quest from some npc in Rabao to ‘help clear out kuftal’. It gives a bonus experience of 2000, and 15K money (or maybe an item along the lines of a Jaeger Ring). Suddenly killing a bunch of crabs in Kuftal is a little bit more bearable. Once this became the norm, groups could pick their leveling area based on the quests they could get as well. There would need to be enough quests to match the number of leveling areas — we don’t need even more parties up at Greater Colibri. Maybe a “Go kill 200 weapons in sky, come back for a 10,000 exp bonus”. Sum of experience (assuming 200 exp per weapon no chain) is 40,000, plus the exp bonus, brings the total to 50,000 experience points (approximately). It could get more people into old leveling areas, and make it worthwhile to level there again.
I understand this has the potential to create more ‘high level n00bs’. Well, they will be created anyways, might as well not torture everyone else trying to prevent what cannot be avoided.
The main problem with this is a big one though. There just aren’t enough quests to allow for many level 75 jobs. After 1 or 2, it would be back to grinding for you (depending on how many of these quests were repeatable, and how often they were repeatable). However, since the game is as old as it is, this sort of change would bring new life into quests, and help with the 3rd or 4th 75 job that people would otherwise probably not level.
