@o-louth

I'm sorry but this is such a bad take. "It's been like this forever" isn't a good enough reason to keep it that way.

In 2001 I might have agreed with you, but I also had unlimited free time to pour into the game. But as I have acquired the annoying parts of aging called responsibilities I find my free time is much more valuable. I don't think it's wrong of me to think that the game should better respect not just my time but also the time of everyone else who has also grown with the game.

Again, this doesn't suddenly make you able to rest on a whim. It's a quality of life change to smooth out some of the more oocly annoying aspects of the game.

I also don't like to be accused of metagaming. The same seven spells can get you and your party through 99.99% of the content on the server. But if I suddenly need a different selection of spells for RP reasons, such as a non-combat investigation into some plot this is where it gets to be the most annoying. This is what most frequently happens when I say that a situation has changed. It's not necessarily that I'm going from one quest to another, it's that the tone of what you intend to do has shifted entirely. Smoothing out that transition a bit helps everyone, not just the caster.

That sounds neat, but also sounds a little too good to be true.

Reducing the timer by just a bit is basically just a quality of life improvement. Going from 32 minutes to 24 minutes of wait time isn't going to create a situation where Wizards are able to, at a whim, change up their spells but it does help mitigate the aforementioned pain of having to waste my (and the others who might need to wait on me) real life time a little bit.

It also makes the early game a little less painful as any caster, because then there's less downtime between when your hour/level buffs wear off and when you can next rest and get back to playing the game.

We could probably develop a curative if we managed to kill and dissect one of the creatures, if we wanted to involve ourselves without directly involving ourselves. This would be an acceptable course of action in my eyes.

Though I'm not against hunting them down if they did indeed poison an entire city- Even if it was to little (relative) effect.

-Laz

The watchtower quest seems to swing wildly between two extremes every time it gets looked at.

I don't theoretically have a problem with these quests getting harder but there was a point in time that the boss of the watchtower quest was casting Wail of the Banshee and tpking entire parties with one spell. So if I had to choose, I'd say too easy is probably where I'd prefer to be of the two.

Though if it does get a balance pass I would suggest trying to include a few new enemy types to help try and break up the monotony and add a little bit of Target priority requirements to the quest as well. Maybe these enemy types could give a better indication of what was going on and more solidly link it to the south horn? I think it's a treatment a lot of quests could probably stand to get, but that is neither here nor there I guess.

Again, the issue mostly is that the tight constraints put upon these 'tiers' that are put in place are made tighter by the limited range that the server suffers from as a whole. You have almost zero wiggle room between the floor you have set (mundane loot) and the ceiling (presumably +1, with a little extra) and this is where the struggle takes place.

To be clear- I don't think anyone's asking to move the ceiling all that much further up. But I think opening up to the prospect of giving out things like better +ab bonunses (These no longer break DR,) attribute bonuses, better 1/day spells, bonus feats, and other interesting options will likely help broaden the scope of what can be made available to players.

I am saying this as someone who absolutely has been on the receiving end of what I can only assume is some of the best loot that's ever been given out to a PC in the current version of the server. It wasn't worth the effort, especially since I never got to actually use it because the server died a week after I got it. This is the main problem, in my eyes. Because of how restricting the range is, the most interesting variations of loot are restricted to the completion of major plots and often by that time you are finding that your character is nearly complete, or that it is so much work that it deflates the usefulness of said loot.

Opening up the range to be more than a little more rewarding during the beginning and middle sections of a story I think lends itself better to how the game is normally played.

@prof-misclick I really like how you took an entire thread of people criticizing how inflexible and unfun your system is and, instead of addressing the things people are talking about (namely, how your system doesn't work and leads to unsatisfying results,) took the one post that said that they like the loot they got and unironically used it to say "See it's fine we're doing it right after all!" It might be the funniest post of the year. Honestly, bravo.

A lot of this problem stems from how bad the loot levels on the server are in general. This has, ostensibly, gotten better over the past year with the changes to crafting and the addition of pureclass stores. These solutions however require weeks or months of grinding in addition to whatever else you're doing ingame or a very specific class type. You're left in the lurch if you don't have access to a crafter who spent six weeks grinding out smithing or aren't a Pure Fighter/Monk/Whatever. And if you're playing a very niche class combo like I currently am you're just never going to get the support you need because in order to give me the things I need to function they would need to go around THE MATRIX and that would just be unacceptable.

This part just isn't fun for me. Getting DM loot should be fun. Giving DM loot should be fun (and by all accounts, of which I have many, it absolutely is not.) I play on this server because the stories that our Players and Storytellers are pumping out at a frankly remarkable pace are great uses of my limited time, which they also respect that I am choosing to spend here. But I also wish that the end or continuance of these plots wasn't spent trying to min-max the system in an attempt to give out loot that is both interesting from a flavor perspective and able to back up that flavor mechanically. It shouldn't take me months of my life to get good loot.

I have to say that removing heads (or the bounty for heads) from this quest will place it solidly in the "Not worth" category for me.

It's boring, there's no lore besides the cringe dialogue at the start and absolutely nothing inside the quest other than "There are orcs in a cave."
The loot is largely worthless, and there's not really any gold or consumable loot to make up for it.
It's mostly just a slog through encounter after encounter with very little else going on for it.

@sharkinajar

I'm pretty sure what happens here is that the mobs are using the charms that they drop, but I've never been paying attention enough to notice if they do.

I think its important to understand that 8 in game hours is just slightly over a half hour.

It's a lot of real life time to waste if you, say, accidentally prep the wrong spells or your circumstances suddenly change and you need new spells. Reducing it a bit won't necessarily make these problems go away, but it does ease the pain a bit.

There is a mob on a 6-9 quest casting chain lightning and acid sheathe? And it is... Not even the boss?

Is it April 1st already?