Flagging v Convenience

[Bjond]

I ran "Locked Away Part 1&2" (Chill of Lamordia) recently, but this time what really registered was how nice it was to be able to chain-enter the very next quest directly from the previous quest.

It fed the time-efficiency part of my brain at the very same time that it tickled the story-flow center AND it did this without the insane annoyance of adding a flag forcing me to run quests in a particular sequence or criss-cross a map 20 times.

I'd LOVE it if every single quest was chain-linked in this fashion to deliver full sagas in "story sequence". SSG has mostly given up on flagging, but they seem to have given up on time-efficiency, too. Ubiquitous quest chaining would enhance BOTH story & efficiency.

 

[saekee]

They did this when they fixed the Catacombs chain—still flagging but at least you go right from one to the other

 

[Hireling]

They did this when they fixed the Catacombs chain—still flagging but at least you go right from one to the other

Was gonna say this.
Catacombs rework is so good; it makes me wish for Sorrowdusk and CO6 rework.
I think some other older chains could have this done to them and be "epicfied or made legendary" at same time.

 

[rabidfox]

How Catacombs and Delaras chains work isn't my idea of "good". Sure, they advance in a straight order, but if you want X item from a chest, it sucks. You can't just rerun one quest over and over; you have to do workarounds to farm the same quest. Locked sequences like that worked back when the chain quest giver gave named loot as an end reward, it doesn't work well since the loot was moved into chests.

 

[woq]

Yeah, not being able to access a specific portion of a chain even if you've made it that far before is lame.

I love the idea of a dungeon elevator - where you can dungeon delve as deep (to any level / depth of the chain) as anyone in the party has gone before, or you can go as deep as you've gone before yourself. Elevator straight to the quest Ravenloft style - except elevators feel more grounded to me than teleporters even if they behave exactly the same. Just an elevator to the depths and some proper dungeon delving in quests with full redboxing access. And at the end of a quest there is a way to keep going if you choose, or an exit to the elevator.

Rant tangential to the topic:
The % of time spent running around in slayer areas has gotten so high since 2019 with every expansion with the exception of Vecna involving a rather significant amount of "pointless running" after the first exploration tour, starting from Feywild - and makes the stories feel more disjointed than they need to be.

Edit: On second thought maybe it's always been that way and now that I mostly run expansion content I just run that content more relative to the other stuff. Sands & Red Fens were also run heavy.

 

[Bjond]

You can't just rerun one quest over and over; you have to do workarounds to farm the same quest. Locked sequences like that worked back when the chain quest giver gave named loot as an end reward, it doesn't work well since the loot was moved into chests.

Ugh, yeah, I was not advocating for a locked sequence, simply a nice fast flow when all you want is the saga. It's very important to be able to spot-farm a single quest out of an entire chain.

I do recall there is a way to do it with Catacombs, but it's irritating.

 

[droid327]

How Catacombs and Delaras chains work isn't my idea of "good". Sure, they advance in a straight order, but if you want X item from a chest, it sucks. You can't just rerun one quest over and over; you have to do workarounds to farm the same quest. Locked sequences like that worked back when the chain quest giver gave named loot as an end reward, it doesn't work well since the loot was moved into chests.

The ideal configuration is probably, weirdly, the Depths chain in House D

All four quests can be run in direct series, but you can also pick any one quest to run out of sequence too

 

[seph1roth5]

They did this when they fixed the Catacombs chain—still flagging but at least you go right from one to the other

Catacombs is a bit better with thaddeus, but it's still overly clunky and easy to mess up. You can forget to talk to him or not talk to him enough, and wind up red dooring the next quest