legendary quests are too difficult

When I hit level 40, what’s the path I should be following? What direction does the endgame pull me?

Is it level 40 repeatables? Right now you are far more likely to get Vendor trash than anything even remotely worthwhile here.

Elite Quests? Why? The rewards are inconsistent and frequently not worth the skill the quests require. I’d say the rewards aren’t much better than regular repeatables, in my experience.

Legendaries feel like the only consistent way to gear up where effort more or less equals reward.

For me, I think the rewards for those first two stops need to be increased fairly dramatically to make them attractive options on the way to Legendaries. Repeatables should be a consistent source of high quality Rares and occasionally Epics. Elites should be a consistent source of high quality Epics and occasionally Legendaries. And Legendaries should always have good reward in Coin, Gear or EP.

I picture a fresh 40 using repeatable Cypress and Babylon quests to gear up and practice Macro fundamentals, then moving on to the harder Elite quests that really test your Macro but don’t bury you in difficulty from 2:00 in. Finally, that player, geared in a reasonable amount of Epics and a smattering of Rares and Legendaries is ready to tackle Legendary quests.

Quests should, in my opinion, always feel rewarding for their challenge level. I shouldn’t be opening Pine Planks on an Elite Cypress quest, or any grey vendor trash on a Repeatable. If the concern is flooding the game loop with too many rewards, I’d say increase the quality of rewards in the Repeatables and Elites, but lower the Qty of chests received.

Going from fresh outta 40->Repeatables->Elite->Legendaries should be a natural feeling progression encouraged by the games reward structure.

TL;DR: Make Level 40 Repeatables and Elites more rewarding for fresh 40s.

 

Thanks. Now is a very good time to raise these concerns. Things are brewing backstage.

 

Yes that would be awesome, 1-2 easier, leg quests with fewer chest, lesser gold rewards.

Yes i copy that. To play the game efficient, you need to adopt some playing style, use some advisors, unit type, learn map strategies, practice the best performance macro.

The the top legendary quest are gear dependent, even many elite quests... the less experience or the more average player you are the better gear you need to be able to put in good performance. The best microing veterans can perform amazing. But for a slower, average skilled player need to be significant better geared than being a fresh lvl 40, so they can perform well in a legendary quest.

Useful Epic and Legendary gear drop rate is extremely low even in leg quests.

In the last half year i finished more hundreds of legendary quests most of the time with objectives done. I still didn't find many top legendary gears yet.
And i had plenty of time, imagine those newbies who go less time, it is very discouraging.

To be honest i won't mind still playing the game if i had all the max legendary gears on all of my civs. I play a game because i love to play it and gear for me is only a tool to play it more smoother or more efficient. I play a game for the game experience not playing for a set goal to get x y z gear.
(If you see my other post i was raiding world of warcraft on private server in maximum gear on more toons for years. We were raiding the same instances with daily reset, not weekly, daily reset.)

I don't like game breaking high drop rates, but some boost would be fine.

For example a rotating boost... For this week Cyprus and Greek legendary quests, for next week Norse Egypt and Babylon quest got boosted... by twice chest drops or they only drop legendary items. Or make every legendary quest quaranteed to drop at least one legendary item.

 

I am total agree.

For a newbie average skill level player some Elite quests are impossible hard, they are simply very gear dependent. But when you are so well geared... then you won't do those quest, why would you do?

Gear drop is so low if you are able to play a few hours a day you need a year to get geared up from legendary quest drop.

If you want to geared up from shops... they are so expensive you need to grind for many years.

Let's chose a 300k item...
for a newbie doing Elite quests... probably takes 30-60 minute one for 1500 gold.
Let's have 2 hours playtime a day, then they can make 6k gold the best, and to get that one item, he needs 50 days. Nearly two months, to gear up fully a civ and 6 civs from shops... by purchasing from earned gold possibly takes dozens of years.

While for example a fresh lvl 40 average skilled player can solo Marion. So there is no reason to do Elite quest.

On contrary to COOP everything is doable even as a fresh lvl 40 who knows the map specific strategy.
COOP difficulty is fun. But most players prefer to play solo.


I think... it could be solution.

1, make Repetable and Elite quest drop significant more gold 10X, those will be the GOLD farming source to be able to gear up from game shops.

2, make legendary quest drop at least 1 guaranteed Legendary Item or they only drop legendary items (they can have less chests).

(But for a game experience... playing a weekly legendary chest... get 15 chest and they are all miserable loot... it's disappointing, better just get 1 chest with a legendary item loot.)

Or add a rotation buff... 10 X gold drop from all Repeatable and Elite quests on the afternoon from 2 pm to 6pm and make the evening hours from 6 pm to 10 pm double chest or guaranteed legendary loot drop from legendary quest. And the Spartan bonus hours. (For PVP fans.)

The difficulty is fun to play, the rewards needs to be rewised.

 

One caution with that is players then to play what gives rewards most efficiently instead of what they find fun. Really rewards need to roughly equal with effort, that way players can go play anything they prefer and don't feel they need to do X more in order to get most rewards.

Its a case of thinking 'I'll just grind this a bit more until I get myself geared up, then I'll do the stuff I enjoy' but by the time gearing up is done, which can be almost never completed, they won't find just doing the other quests purely for fun, as much fun.

It isn't easy to make the rewards roughly equal to the effort though, thats a tricky thing to get right.

 

We are actively working on revising quest rewards across the board. But just so we set expectations, please remember that Elite quests drop between 1500 and 2500. Legendary Quests drop between 750 gold and 25,000 gold. Therefore, we will not be increasing the Elite quest gold drops so they drop 15,000 to 25,000 coins.

For that matter, there's way too many coins in circulation as it is. I do not expect coin rewards in quests to be buffed. They will almost certainly be nerfed in Legendary quests. We probably would not nerf the coins in Elite quests, though. So Elite quests may become a very good source of coins for new players.

 

I know for me after just hitting 40 it was hard to know where to go to get geared for some of the really tough legendaries. Maybe the OP is trying out the legendaries hoping to get some gear and a foothold but struggling because he's accidentally picking the hardest ones. The tiers right now are not granular enough of a difficulty rating (for a fresh 40 who doesn't know all the tricks and specific strategies for the legendary quests).

As an idea what about putting a difficulty rating (1-10 as a number, 1-5 stars, etc.). I know we don't want power creep, so how about adding either some set bonuses for combinations of purple items which make them almost as good as having basic legendaries but no where near as good as having a full set of optimized legendaries.

You could also give elite quests or some of the easier legendaries a very high percent (maybe 40%) to drop a static piece of gear (either really good purple or a low tier legendary). Fresh 40's could run each of these quests to collect all those static drops (which would be shown a long with the difficulty preview in the quest info). Might have to do each of the quests a few times (by the odds) to get their basic set put together which would allow them to break into some of the harder lengendary quests.

This would definitely devalue those static drop items (so make sure none of the chosen ones are literal BIS items). It would also be nice to be able to search or sort quests in a list showing thier difficulty (maybe it just gets integrated into the quest log or something).

Aside from the incursion quests, the road to 40 is already smooth and gradual so this stuff is only aimed at smoothing out the progressing from "fresh 40" to "seasoned 40" without causing power creep... at the cost of devaluing a few non-BIS items.

 

The two reasons quest rewards are bugging me are 1, is the overpriced shop items 2, some good performance legendary items (for example wall of the architect) basically 0 drop rate.
(There are really a very few legendary items wroth some grinding.)

Other solution could be to make many shop items significant cheaper by 90%.

The shops im talking about Cyprus, Delos, Rhakotis, Carthago, Farfara Oasis. Most of their legendary items are so extremely overpriced nobody buys them.

I would love to see a statistics about those and the most times purchased shop items.

If you put some effort into the game, at the time you would grind the massive amount of gold those items needs you will be in a state that you won't need to buy them anymore. This simply makes those items and shops useless.

Im talking about you will find many same performing epic items or you could buy them for a few thousands gold from the global market.

It is an extremely bad game design from MS anyway. It's another multimillion dollar premium CEO's idea, you can be sure about it, it's about to artifically create a never achievable game achievement "to get all the top gear in the game". Who does not want to run every civs all in golden items ? Sure everybody. But after a hour a newbie get a 1k gold and figure it out he need to make it 300 times... may probably cost a year to get one piece of gear... and he beed dozen of those then to level and gear up the 5 other civs... will take like 100 years better just quit the game and invest their time somewhere more rewarding their efforts.

It's discourage newbies.

What about veterans ? All who can grind the legendary quest ? Well they are not needing those items anymore. They got the performance and the upgrade is so insignificant it does not worth even 1 / 10 the effort they cost.

Basically those gears only give 10% upgrade on the similar epic items, meaning 1% game performance upgrade for a cost of ten or hundred times more gold, is extremely irrational. Simply does not worth the effort. It feeling not rewarding.

If you compare it with world of warcraft's endgame gearing up where you make 50% item level upgrade and you get at least 100% more combat effectiveness.

Also if you compare it with another game like Dota, what hundred of millions of player playing. Where you are starting the game with maximum gear and doing all the same map forever. And players does not burn out ? Variety, PVP vs humans means every match are different.

I don't know about how many new players trying this game, these ideas about to benefit and encourage the newbies.

On contrary im sure some daily grinding veterans love this game concept and making reasonable better drops or cheaper legendary items prices will disappoint them at some level.

I don't know the statistics how many hardcore veterans and newbie players we are having. Probably knowing that veterans-newbie ratio stats would provide a good odds for optimal changes.

I do not know how many new players are trying Co-OP ! And how many players are prefer single player mode.
Why is it important ? Because of game difficulty setting.
If player prefer COOP then they can be any difficult, because 2 players can overcome anything together.

But what if most of the new players prefer only single player quest ? Then we would need significant easier elite and legendary quests, so even newbies can have the end game experience.

Hope my thoughts help you guys a bit.

Love the content you added it's pretty amazing, i can't wait for the Romans!

 

Regarding playing solo vs co-op, to me it's normal that the emphasis be put on co-op in an online game. There's offline mode for those who don't like to co-op.
A new player cannot have the end game experience because they don't have the end game skills. Legendary quests are supposed to be the hardest mode pve has to offer in this game and they should stay like this. I don't understand why a new player would expect to be able to solo legendaries.
I also don't like the distinction between newbies and veterans, like they were 2 different classes of players. Veterans being called "elites" etc like they've been selected and they've been awarded privileges or something. The reality is we've all started as newbies with lv 0-20 civs and empty inventrories. Veterans become veterans by committing time and effort to the game. You say the system is discouraging to newbies but that's not true. I've been a newbie once and I did not get discouraged. It's some people's attitude and unrealistic expectations towards the game that will get them discouraged, rather than the economy or the state of the game itself.

 

Allow me to let you into a little dirty secret: There's no shame in co-op. Experienced players do it all the time, even when we are more than capable of soloing. It provides a safety buffer compared to going solo. Even the co-op partner who builds 2 castles instead of 2 Town Centers at beginning of game are still useful, since the experienced player could take advantage of it and be even more greedy. Then, if I get paired with someone experienced, we split push and finish the legendary in 15~25 minutes.

If I ended up pairing with someone new, I get to teach them stuff, as long as they are willing to learn. If I get paired with someone even more experienced, I get to learn stuff from them and can improve my gameplay even more. My only reasons for going solo are:

• Doing it once to prove that I can do it.
• When I can’t find a co-op partner.

 

I think, and I've said this before, making an elite version of a legendary quest like Marion would allow slower players to learn the quest. They could sharpen their skills while learning the way the quest spams. Eventually gaining experience and skill to tackle the legendary version.

 

More repeatable normal and elite difficulty quests would be really nice. Personally I don't really enjoy playing legendaries, as much as I respect the PvErs that do and I realise they need the challenge.

 

There's a reasonably good balanace of hard and easy legendaries (something for everyone), if you can't enjoy or finish the ones you're doing, choose different quests until you're better and more appropriately geared for the tougher content. Gear only matters to a point, if you're gonna play super casual you can't realistically expect the AI to bend over for you because you want an easy game. There are quests that are super easy that offer great rewards(RNG aside) for the time investment, so it's not like you have to miss out by not playing the hardest quests in the game.

 

Only use hamachi as a last resort. Forward ports 1001-1005 UDP and use either the default/NATP setting, or the Manual setting.

 

There have only been a select few people that were unteachable in this game since I started playing it 9 or so years ago. Yes, the legendaries are difficult, as they should be. I remember when Marion, Soloi, and Paphos first came out. It took some of us weeks to figure them out, and not for a lack of trying. The first people to figure it out never even had legendary gear to do them because legendary gear wasn't even a thing when the legendary quests first came out.

A buddy of mine that no longer plays, Crayon, would coop them with me while using only rare gear. Nothing better than blues on anything. Thing is, he is a better player than me and we would fly through the legendary quests in coop. JEINX and I can do them pretty easily too.

If people are willing to teach and others are willing to learn, and vice versa, there shouldn't be a problem doing the legendary coop quests. My son was doing them with me last year and he was 10 years old at the time. He is about to turn 11 and he is getting a gaming computer for his birthday. He wants to get back to doing legendary quests and Crete with me. He isn't the best or fastest, but he learns strategy very quickly.

It is about strategy and macro, and a lot less about gear.

 

Nailed it

 

Yes, this game is not for relaxing, and the sheer amount of strategy options is impressive. I think I'll keep learning until I stop playing, or dying ;-) What ever comes first