Very disappointed in Tenebris Harbor Questing :(

Zone: Tenebris Harbor
Quest: Hidden Loot Keys puzzle

This whole quest to find keys all through Tenebris Harbor is basically a total waste of time.
To find the last location & get a pretty crappy chest of the same old, same old?

This was a very challenging zone for us. It started out as all "yellow" enemies & the became "red" enemies.
(We have just turned Level 70 & wanted to do something fun instead of grinding Double XP.)
The amount of running around we had to do (with a "No Map for this Scene") was tiring & frustrating.

We LOVE questing, but this quest is not fun, we would have felt that the quest was great & challenging, if the Reward matched the time & effort we've put in

Just prior to coming to Tenebris Harbor, we did a quest in Desolis/Epitaph which was supposedly a Tier 5 zone also.
It was EXTREMELY easy & the reward was great!

To be honest, we will be happy if we never go back to Tenebris Harbor again...

Come on Dev's.... @DarkStarr & Team
Make fun quests, provide a map to help us out
& give us reward for the time & effort we put in PLEASE?

 

I have to agree. It was really neat to see the key quest - you basically just stumble upon it via exploring and note reading, which I liked.

It has you exploring the whole zone and trying out various chests, which I also liked.

Then you get to the end (it is a much longer quest than the “official” quest in the zone for the old prospector) and there is what appears to just be a random chest that spits out gem fragments and gold, just like any other chest in an adventure zone.

So a big thumbs up on putting in a fun side quest, but a big thumbs down on the end reward.

Please think through quests and reward versus effort - quests do not always need epic loot, but they should always make the person who did them feel accomplished. My guess is this was a little quest just added on a lark, for bit of flavor. But it feels like a bad joke just because of the throwaway ending.

I know more and more quests are getting things added like art, banner, virtue armor, emotes, etc.and you probably cannot do that for every single quest given the dev and art time to make them. But this key quest just highlights the unsatsifying state of non-supply bundle loot in the game, which is not so great as a quest reward.

 

Oh I was hoping that we would not keep seeing this happen. It was like that in Oracle Colossus for me. I did the area with a special friend and we were so disappointed to get to that chest room and nothing special happened.

I just loved the area and the challenges of it and then getting to the room with the chest just sitting there to open and get General loot and that was it. It wasn't even the amount of loot or anything like that it was just a let down. And yes of course interesting loot would have been helpful but it wasn't just that. We did not have to use lock-picking and the chest didn't blow up or do something surprising like A spirit jumped out of it or a secret door opened and we could hear scary growling in the distance from a brand new boss like creature who wants to fight us for the treasure. He may even be yelling you can't have it this treasure is mine.

 

In same cases, the puzzle solution leads to a banner or blessing.
But a lot of the puzzles lead to a chest of common & relatively worthless loot.
For the puzzles that do not already award a special item, I would like to see special loot for the first time you solve a complex puzzle, such as one of more of the following:

• XP reward (player chooses if XP is assigned to adventure or producer pool)
• gold cotos (Maybe 1 or 2)
• an essence
• a unique banner, deco item, or equip-able
• a pet
• An emote
• 5% chance of an artifact or other rare

For the pirate theme zone, how about these special awards: an eye patch, hook hand/gauntlet, peg leg, pet parrot that sits on your shoulder, a Jolly Roger Skull & Crossbones banner, swashbuckler emote, or cutlass of the swashbuckler?

Maybe some better loot for the puzzles will be added in the future, but I think better loot will make solving the puzzles far more satisfying and worthwhile.

 

Now these ideas are worthy of the effort & time put in to do this quest!

 

Well said Hannah

 

Yea it was a pretty meh reward for all the running around. BTW any of you guys manage to figure out opening those 3 chests in a row on the dry dock ship?

 

Tenebris Harbor had a prominent spot in this release, with both a major makeover and new quests.
I too was a bit shocked that Port didn't make the extra effort to be certain it had a working map, given it's prominence in the release.
I know they only have so much time in order to do things, but this oversight should not have happened, IMO.

 

I think it should be a pseudo unique generation of avatar reward, based on you level, virtue, activity factors, that casual players will get really good reward + deco and buff and guys like me - just deco or buff. I think it would not affect economy but will motivate players to explore, really give Rise type chests rewards to chests in 5 level zone for 1-2 times on a character, third time chest -10 times less reward history rewrites each month. From my point of view it can be good solution.

 

No... We assumed they were a "Red Herring" (or just an plain annoyance, depending on your point of view)

 

i suspect if you complete the battle royale at the dock the boss might drop a key. can't do it on my own, though, and asking the other people in the scene if they'd try it was met with dead silence.

 

Some of my guildmates did that to no avail.

 

I'm wondering what this quest is I randomly stumbled upon the mini wave event at the docks managed to kill the captain and got a key for the chests on the ship but it broke after the first use and the chest had a whopping 60 gold 1 amethyst and 1 or 2 pieces of food (not stat food) in it

 

Well guess the key drop from the waves is RNG. The quest we're referring to is in some of the homes there are locked chests with notes with clues on them that run you around the map.

 

Wow.... That really is truly disappointing! I am even more glad now, our Duo Team, gave up when we did.

Even through I/we cant do the actual quest again, I sincerely feel that the drops for the quest & defeating the Boss need to be improved.

Risk/Effort/Level/Group & Time spent doing things in Shroud should equal a comparative Reward.

I can see that I would have to go in a large group to defeat the Dock spawn & ultimately the Boss,
to get that key reward for the ships chests. This not only lets down 1 player, but a whole group of players.

If one player is too Uber & could possibly Solo the Dock Mobs & ultimately the Boss, then difficulty scaling is something that needs to be brought into the gameplay or the reward scaled down accordingly.

One of the "100 tool-tips" states, that grouping with others increases the rewards. (or something to that effect)

A lot of factors led to the very slow demise of Ultima Online & apart from being extremely "dated",
one of the main additions was making single players too overly powered
& able to play Solo to defeat challenges & content, that was initially designed for Groups.

UO has become proportionally a Solo game, played online, allowing these players to be able to "farm" items,
that are sold for exorbitant amounts of gold, hence losing the Social aspect of the game & skewing the economy.

Shroud already has the ability to play offline & Solo everything, should that be a players Personal preference.
The online game should be geared towards grouping, for the hardest content with appropriate rewards for all.

 

The problem I had was with other players in the scene. First, that caused some chests to already be unlocked, so I got keys out of order. Second, that caused some chests not to open at all, specifically the one on top of the lighthouse, when I apparently already had the key. Then when I finally got to the final chest, it was empty because presumably someone else had already emptied it. One time I tried to switch match modes in front of the final chest, and then it was empty, probably because of that 2-minute timer that causes chests to be empty if you haven't been in the scene long enough. I eventually got the final chest open, and seeing only "normal" chest loot, wasn't even going to bother on an alt.

Then this morning I tried getting an alt through the prospector quest and didn't get the emote. Later I found out today was when the temporary stuff had been removed. Five days is a rather short time for something like that, I had hoped for at least a full week.

 

Pretty sure you know by now how the three chests work. There are three waves terminating in the mini boss on the docks. Each time you kill the boss he drops a key. It will open one of the three chests and break. You can get two more keys by beating the next wave and mini boss. Note that you have to use the key to get the next drop ie: you cannot have two keys in inventory as the boss will not drop a key if you already have one in your pack. The few times I have done the waves, the chests did not drop anything significant but hope remains that rare drop is possible.