Making PVE Worthwhile

Food for thought @Chris

Okay so enchanting an item is under alchemy and requires a crafted equipment, 10 Mandrake Root, and 5 Gold Ingot.

I say you add a new resource and replace the Gold Ingot with it: the essence of a monster. You have like a 25% chance (50% in single-player offline) of every time you kill a normal monster of getting its essence. For high-level monsters (like bosses) it should be way higher (and guaranteed in single-player offline). Remember the point is to make PVE actually rewarding: making the essences too rare would be contrary to that. Plus in real economies, SOME stuff ARE commonly found.

The player can then sell the essence, give to an alchemist to enchant it, or enchant it themselves. You can keep the 10 Mandrake Root and the crafted equipment requirement. So basically Enchantment would cost:

Crafted Equipment
10 Mandrake Root
Monster Essence

(For normal monsters you can add more monster essence to try to make the enchantment stronger but only one boss-level enchantment may be added at a time)

The monster essence you pick determines how strong the enchantment is: a dragon essence should obviously grant a stronger enchantment than that of a zombie BUT also has a stronger chance to break the item. You can also use the monster type to influence the RNG one way. There's many ways to play with this system.

So now when someone goes to kill a dragon they know that they'll get a strong enchantment out of it. And low-level players and mid-level players can keep improving their equipment as they come across better enchantments and stuff.

You can thus protect the player market while making adventuring better (and profitable). You can also tie some monster essences to the quest system rewards.

 

This is already planned for Ep2. They will have monster affinity for weapons where x kills with a weapon of a type of mob will net it specific abilities against that monster.

 

Affinities are cool and all but not what I'm asking for in the opening post. Nobody's going to be like "oh cool I guess my weapon now has an affinity to kill dragons...but still no real reason to fight dragons." But if the dragons dropped an essence that could create an enchantment that gives +15 Strength (just an example lol) or something then people would be like "the loot is worth killing this dragon!"

 

I'd be more like, "sigh, now crafting is even MORE dependent on fighting." It already is too much so.
Not saying there's not merit to adding desirable things to the loot tables, especially boss loot tables, which are still downright insulting 99% of the time, but I don't think muddling up the existing enchant/mw systems is the answer.

I'd rather see kill achievements that unlocked small but stackable bonuses as a measuring stick for PvE, instead of more random loot chance crap that you ultimately need to grind a ton of.

 

I've suggested something similar a few times actually.

The way I've been suggesting it is to have these essences allow to pick a specific enchant from the current pool of enchants/masterworks, and not generate new ones.

This way, Craftrrs could still roll for a cheap enchant, or use these essences to get a specific one. This would allow custom orders, without making normal crafting out paced, considering the cost of essences would be higher.

 

Not sure I understand this post.

I get the idea, but I don't get that PvE is NOT worthwhile currently.

Now there was a time, a very long time ago, that there was no point in doing high level PvE content compared to low level PvE content, but those days are far behind us.

I certainly make more return on my time doing PvE than anything else. Crafting, not even close; gathering, only could compete if i was prepared to multi-box it; brewing/agriculture probably close but gets old and boring very quickly; PvP maybe if you can find enough victims to continually ransom (unlikely).

Not sure where you got your Cabalist Hoods, Artefacts, Tier 3 components (which already achieve what you are suggesting), Gold, etc, but mine were definitely from killing things (PvE).


Regards
Spung

 

Well if your fighting anyways, giving you a crafting reward for fighting should surely be nice then. But like you don't have to fight. You can buy essences from adventurers. Just like I don't have to craft in online mode: I can buy equipment from other player vendors. Small stackable temporary bonuses don't solve the problem that PvE isn't rewarding enough for adventurers. Trust me, I don't want to beat any tough monster on a map (regardless of tier/level) just to get a small temporary stackable bonus. Especially "small".

Well, one of the common complains I read from other people, not going just by my own personal casual experience with SOTA, is that PvE rewards could be better. Personally I find PvE to be sorta (but not really) rewarding in single-player offline since the loot drops are better and the NPC merchants give a better price than in the online modes. Maybe that'll change as I get deeper into the game. And I hate crafting so this solution is actually a compromise for me lol. I'm happy you like PvE but if this game wants to be more than just a super niche game and achieve some level of success beyond its current dedicated playerbase, PvE loot not just in high-level but throughout the game needs to be re-evaluated and this is one way to accomplish that while keeping true to the spirit that crafting matters.

(Seriously when I left the Outskirts on online mode while buying all the skills I could, I had like 1,000 gold. Leaving offline mode while buying all the skills I could, I had like 10,000 gold.)

 

I'm not against better loot, I'm against making crafting even more reliant on adventuring drops than it already is.
There is no money in crafting from the npc "faucet" and little demand in player to player sales except for consumables.
A crafter makes no money to be buying components from adventures because the resulting item doesn't sell for what the materials do.
A crafter already has to adventure to get recipes from bags, (or money to buy non-bag recipes), to finance fuels, and has to fight to gather resources pretty much everywhere.
We already have salvage crafting components (a 'chance' for an item from a 'chance' at a drop) and you need several of anything to pass the exceptional check.
We already have 'rare crafting materials' from 'boss monsters' and obtaining them with the current drop rates is extremely tedious.
Crafting needs more ways to sustain itself, to develop itself, in its own sphere instead of additional dependence on fighting.

If anything to "make pve worthwhile" I'd suggest more consistency/incremental benefits (we've seen some strides in this direction). IE, instead of something having to kill something 1000 times to maybe get a drop, make each kill more worthwhile, so you can 'work toward something' instead of relying on the slot machine of luck.

 

Hasn’t everyone made suggestions over and over time and again? I think the devs have their plans on this already. Episode 2 will definitely include the key to making crafting, pve, pvp and everything else worth wild, we just have to wait. It’s in all the release notes at the end with hints of what’s to come plus more.

 

No ones said anything about loot attenuation?

 

Why didn't they just make it all worthwhile for Episode One? Look, if Episode 2 happens and it does all those things, great. But people keep making those suggestions because despite years of development AND Early Access, it's been a whole year since launch (I think) and so far it hasn't happened. And since the forums are supposed to be about providing feedback, I have provided a solution. It's up to the devs to take or ignore my advice.