unnerf the starting experience

[Moonlighter]

i took a break for about 6 months, came back recently and everything gives less exp, gold, and supplies. where there is stuff it's now hidden behind search checks (a high investment skill that is useless once you get past ring 95) and in general if i do the entire lowbie circuit and have one bag of dirty yellow ash and like 300 gold to show for it it seems like really bad design. not sure what happened here but it sucks. not sure why EFU does this all the time but it generally makes it really hard to get started

[Moonlighter]

oh and removing cheese quest sucks, that quest owned bring it back

[Richørd]

I have to disagree.

Having recently died (FD) multiple times I had to go through the leveling experience multiple times.

Plenty of quests give you 50 groats just for turning them in. Others even more, one going up to 150 guaranteed gold just for passing a few skill checks, their DCs being so low that you can even pass them without investing into the skills.

Are the loot piles mostly locked behind search checks now? Yes. But the search DCs are all low enough to where a character with 0 points invested into search can pass them.
But I do think you are heavily exaggerating the results of a full run of quests.
Even with Cheese Alley's quest now removed there is still so much to do, so much to see. And so much to loot. There is no way you could end up with only "one bag of dirty yellow ash" at the end of it.

In fact I find the road to level 6 too easy now. I can do it in two to three resets without having to talk a word with anyone in-game for 95% of the time doing it.

[Moonlighter]

I have to disagree.

Having recently died (FD) multiple times I had to go through the leveling experience multiple times.

Plenty of quests give you 50 groats just for turning them in. Others even more, one going up to 150 guaranteed gold just for passing a few skill checks, their DCs being so low that you can even pass them without investing into the skills.

Are the loot piles mostly locked behind search checks now? Yes. But the search DCs are all low enough to where a character with 0 points invested into search can pass them.
But I do think you are heavily exaggerating the results of a full run of quests.
Even with Cheese Alley's quest now removed there is still so much to do, so much to see. And so much to loot. There is no way you could end up with only "one bag of dirty yellow ash" at the end of it.

In fact I find the road to level 6 too easy now. I can do it in two to three resets without having to talk a word with anyone in-game for 95% of the time doing it.

are you playing a human who can go into the peerage ward or nah

[Ironside]

We are aware that there may be some supply issues with the low level experience.  Let's try to be chill in the thread about it - discuss away though.

[creme bulette]

A lot of the hot and easy quests are locked behind the Peerage Ward or the Groat and are outright inaccessible to monstrous characters. I don't think it's unreasonable to run the circuit as a non-human, non-app subrace and run into Peerage Ward to do it. Lots of people do this. Nobody pays the halflings and dwarves jumping into the Druthers any heed.

There were more lowbie quests added to the Ponds. I would check there.

This seems like a meme, but the loss of the cheese quest is genuinely super rough for low level characters.

Going through the sewers or the Scraggleways trying to find this lowbie content can be difficult or deadly because they tend to appear as explorables and rats are ravenous for low HP characters. God forbid you see a Lesser Cube come out of nowhere at you. If the sewers is going to be where most of the lowbie explorables spawn, the area could do with being less dangerous. Beetles and oozes standing outside of max 4/5 quests is a bit oof.

I don't love the need to have Search. It's literally everywhere in the lowbie circuit - you can't really get loot other than gold without a successful search check. It's more common in higher level content so I don't think Search itself is necessarily bad, but as a low level character it's rough when you get through a quest and have nothing but a few groats to show for it.

I would not mind if there were two or three quests that were very easy to find for all PCs (monsters included) that had a 1-time take limit that give a good amount of supplies to start off with. Getting over that hump seems difficult if you're not really chugging through the circuit every reset.

As it stands, a new character has to intentionally twiddle their thumbs for several resets before they can really get going. This isn't very fun or interactive and it hurts the players who aren't "in the know" about all the quests and how to run the circuit.

[wundyboy]

i dont think having a three week entrance to be somewhat kitted is a fun / inviting way to play EFU

the issue lies in that you can essentially skip this grind if you hop in with whoever is bumping at the time, and already doing the 8/9/10 limits

but if you're not in that circle of EFU, like being in ticker when ticker is dead, then you're going to struggle, and that's not fun

i do agree that the low level stuff should be reworked to at least get you to 6 very quickly, with a moderate amount of supplies, in less than a week

this is coming from me, who has lived on both sides of the coin (being a peer man and getting to 8/9 in a week, compared to my current pc which is still struggling to hit 8)

but i know doing quest reworks is boring and probably on the low side of the list, so i'm not jumping in my seat to see this reworked any time soon

[Mia]

I think in general there is more variation on available quests then when the chapter started.
But the common lowbie reward pool has become more saturated with arguably more junk as the chapter went on. (For example, the addition of seven rags that make a cloak)

I don't think the solution is upping the gold rewards of these quests.
But perhaps add piles of ash to some of them.

With the way how big crits are at higher level (lots of x3, x4 weapons) I don't think an oversupply of yellow ashes are going to make that big of a difference in high level deaths. But it really helps survive the mid level quests for new characters.

[putrid_plum]

I personally have no had issues with this.  I play non-humans 99% of the time and have had over 2,000 gold by the time I make level 6 with decent supply.   Tweaks could always be made of course, I do know healing drops were adjusted not too long ago at an attempt to balance what was an overwhelming amount of healing supply people were accumulating.

[Electrohydra]

Part of the problem I think is that many of the new lowbie quests that where added grant a lot of XP compared to how much gold and supplies they give. This means PCs reach level 6-7 with less supplies then they used to. Burgage quests come to mind a lot on this, they give a lot of xp for lowbie quests but only a small amount of gold and no items.

[Black_TopHat]

I play a -lot- of Goblins/Kobolds so doing soloable lowbies (and running away) makes up a solid chunk of my playtime. I also die a lot on other PC's so I've done the circuit quite a few times. On a goblin with next to nothing in search in a reset of doing 2-3 lowbies I've found it very easy to acquire gold.  Same with other supplies.

I'm in agreement with Electrohydra here in that the quests give a bit too much xp so it really does encourage you to sprint around 99 picking up your circuit. I havent done Peerage in a longwhile but Ticker having everything in reach of each other makes for a quick 6-7.

[Bio]

the main thing is just turning every lowbie quest into search checks kind of brutalized not having search as a skill as early level, and I think overall just not a fun or good change. I havent had a what if of everything on a character in so long because I dont have search lol

[Egon the Monkey]

• Drips diseases can be a complete killer if you don't have Heal or access to Glumdrum Hall. Because it hits CHA, sorcs and bards can't rest it off and just use ash. They'll lose spellslots. My suggestion here is to just slap Cure Disease on the Pitter Peter ponds priest, someone in the Peerage (if that isn't there already) and someone in the Kobold Lair (because goblins can use the Ponds priest but it's not exactly near the kobold lair)
• Search piles are a pain because so much of the loot is trash. Meaning even if you pass most, you still have no guarantee of finding healing. This could be balanced out by just placing a weak Crates of Supplies placeable in lowbie quests. That way, everyone is guaranteed a reasonable mix of stuff, not yet more spare whatifs.

[Nazey]

I think there's a bit of a distinction to be made; as a character with access to all hubs, including the Peerage Ward and Ticker Square, the starting experience is an absolute breeze and you can get level 6 and a healthy amount of groats and equipment in just a couple of days.

• If you don't have access to Ticker or the Ward, it's a little slower, more so without access to the Ward.


• If you're an outcast character with access only to the Ponds, the experience becomes significantly slower and more difficult.

I don't think any of this is mechanically inappropriate; it stands to reason that outcasts should have a tougher time.

My suggestion is to add one or two max 5 or max 6 quests in the Ponds area, focusing on an XP reward more than anything else.  This should also help the recovery of outcast characters who level down.

[Dredi]

I think we have to be careful about adding more low level quests, especially with the plethora of quests in ring 100 now.

It might be worth marking certain new quests as "Pond Faction / Outcast only" - so only those who either start as pond based can partake, similar to the Velstra bath-house matter being peerage only. This then helps the characters more likely to be restricted to a single faction without helping those with access to everything.