Seasonal Quests/Quests In General

[Bubby]

To preface, I really enjoy this game. It has a lot of unique elements that make it a breath of fresh air. HOWEVER, I do think the quest system could be improved quite a bit.

In any roguelike/lite you will have RNG play a factor in a run, and any fan of the genre knows this, but the quests in this game force you to play into RNG in a very forced way if you want to unlock anything at all in a timely manner (or get season experience). Trying to find 1 specific item to use will likely take multiple runs and while this is normal for the gameplay loop and balancing, it makes questing very tedious.

My suggestion to improve this issue? I believe some sort of RNG manipulation being added in a couple of potential ways could make this system feel fun and rewarding as opposed to how it is currently.

A new area could be added that can appear in runs where you can offer kwillings and glyph globules to increase the odds of finding a specific item in a run. This area could even be tied to the current areas (such as improving sea breaches as they currently feel a bit too random to be worth taking half the time). You could scale the costs based on the rarity of the item and how early in the run it is. This shrine wouldn't let you outright buy the needed item, but it would vastly improve your odds of finding one throughout the run.

If this seems to overpowered for the intended vision of the game, I understand that. Another way to fix this, would be increasing the odds of finding quest related items UNTIL that quest is finished. You could limit this to the tracked quest (which I believe more than 1 quest should be able to be tracked at a time but I believe that is already being worked on) so that there isn't a weird strategy of leaving items unlocked to have them spawn more frequently.

Along with this, I believe there should be a spot in the Carver area where you can buy a random fish as this would improve fish related quests (the current seasonal one has not been kind to me) and would add another thing to consider purchasing at the carved.

I believe all of these would be concepts that can be balanced around and would improve the game in more ways than initially thought.

[TheVampire100]

There is already RNG manipulation in here with rerolling but by rerolling just to get a specific augment/binding/vestige will cut heavily into your economy in the long run, not to mention that you cripple yourself by taking something that might not be optimal for your build.
Some of those are also ridiculously specific. Bromeo and Julian has some really absurd prerequistes like inflicting daze to a very specific enemy that only appears occalsionally and runs away after two turns or the one where you have to bring a very specific vestige to a specific biome and then a specific place inside that biome.

But I think what hurts the current quest system most is that quests have to be done in a specific order. You cannot finish an act of a seasonal quest until you have done the previous one and while you can do the quests inside the acts in any order you want, you still have to do them all before you can take the next ones. The same happens with the introduction to new "books" for seasonal quests. Why do I have to finish one book before I can do the next one? Check Apex Legends for an example, quests also get released over time (instead of them all appearing at the same time) but you can do the next batch even if you haven't done all from the previous week.

I would also suggest to "mark" items that appear in quest requirements when they appear in the run. For example if I need Heartstone, put a small "!" next to it so I know it's part of a quest regardless if I have selected it to track it or not. That would ease up all the doublechecking for players at the moment.

[Bubby]

Originally posted by TheVampire100:

There is already RNG manipulation in here with rerolling but by rerolling just to get a specific augment/binding/vestige will cut heavily into your economy in the long run, not to mention that you cripple yourself by taking something that might not be optimal for your build.
Some of those are also ridiculously specific. Bromeo and Julian has some really absurd prerequistes like inflicting daze to a very specific enemy that only appears occalsionally and runs away after two turns or the one where you have to bring a very specific vestige to a specific biome and then a specific place inside that biome.

But I think what hurts the current quest system most is that quests have to be done in a specific order. You cannot finish an act of a seasonal quest until you have done the previous one and while you can do the quests inside the acts in any order you want, you still have to do them all before you can take the next ones. The same happens with the introduction to new "books" for seasonal quests. Why do I have to finish one book before I can do the next one? Check Apex Legends for an example, quests also get released over time (instead of them all appearing at the same time) but you can do the next batch even if you haven't done all from the previous week.

I would also suggest to "mark" items that appear in quest requirements when they appear in the run. For example if I need Heartstone, put a small "!" next to it so I know it's part of a quest regardless if I have selected it to track it or not. That would ease up all the doublechecking for players at the moment.

I agree with everything you said here. I would say I do not think re-rolling is that good of RNG manipulation especially once you unlock all the items as the pool is so deep that, like you said, you basically tank your economy for the run.

I think this is probably my least favorite part of the game (questing) and it could definitely be touched up, but im sure they have already been looking into it.

[TheVampire100]

Thy imrpoved already rerolling for stats (that you don't get the same stat selection again), I wish they would do this for all selections and make it that rerolling removes items completely from the pool for that selection. But maybe the devs fear that players will do this to only get their perfect setups every run, IDK.