Dusting off the old "Rambling mathematical wall of text" on the new username.
The difference in experience is significant. Let's look at the following situations (looking only at the first time complete and conquest bonuses to avoid complication, since those are the only bonuses being changed):
First time completing a quest on elite, no kill bonus.
First time completing a quest on elite, onslaught bonus.
First time completing a quest on elite, conquest bonus.
Gonna ignore repetition rewards, because to be honest most of the time when you're repeating quests you don't care about experience, you care about loot. Hypothetically, it *is* better to have this change if you grind the same quest, but that doesn't conform with what I have experienced with regards to experience farming, nor basically anything that I've heard from other users except ones who are basically just calling other people losers for not killing everything which is a pretty toxic take to be honest.
| Elite, no bonus (current) | Elite, onslaught bonus (current) | Elite, conquest bonus (current) |
| 100%+45%+0%=145% | 100%+45%+15%=160% | 100%+45%+25%=170% |
| Elite, no bonus (proposed) | Elite, onslaught bonus (proposed) | Elite, conquest bonus (proposed) |
| 100+0%= 100% | 100%+???%=???? | 100%+70%=170% |
Looking at this table, it's obvious why there are concerns. If you don't get the bonus, you drop up to 70% of experience. Now, I ran five quests today and two quests yesterday looking for as many monsters as possible, and without something I missed, I would have lost out on this bonus.
Raven's Bane: Solo heroic elite, hunted all the scarecrows I could find, still only got Onslaught instead of Conquest (messed up the kill order on the last three brooms but not sure if that would matter since Conquest requires 260 according to the wiki and I don't recall what I had. I assume it's possible if the wiki has that information, but the fact remains that I spent an additional three minutes hunting down every single scarecrow (suboptimal pathing because I don't normally hunt every scarecrow).
Sunrise: Solo heroic elite, got Onslaught bonus. From the wiki: "To get a kills bonus may require killing respawning zombies." Don't know about you, but waiting around to kill respawning zombies is not "ordinary play" for me and leads to my primary concern (coming later).
Ruinous Schemes: Two man heroic elite. Got Onslaught bonus. I know this one is doable for conquest because I have done it, but it requires waiting for respawning enemies. Again, not necessarily something someone not familiar with the quest would do (which my teammate was not). Waiting pads the duration of the quest, which... I mean, I guess how long you wait relative to the conquest bonus is "worth it" time wise, but it leads to a concern I'll raise later.
A Sharn Welcome: Two man heroic elite. Complete run (all notes and optionals), pretty sure it was just an aggression bonus but I didn't check this one. Wiki only lists an aggression tier, which might mean that it's not possible, but I didn't check so not sure here.
Red Rain: Two man heroic elite. Picked every fight possible and eliminated all enemies. Onslaught only.
Best Laid Plans: Two man heroic elite. Onslaught, even with making it into the room quickly. Pretty sure there aren't any optionals to miss there or fights to avoid, but to be honest it's a bit labyrinthine of a layout and I could have missed something... but I'm not spending a few minutes hunting a lost mob in a corner.
Disciples of Shar: Solo heroic elite. Onslaught, even with the optional mountain lions, cultists down that one dead end, and the wolves by the rest shrine which tbh I'm not sure whether they're "optional" or not but figured I'd mention it. Did kill the owlbear before four wolves because I forgot they spawned and they had pathing issues and didn't reach me, so I think in ordinary play I wouldn't have gone looking for them to get kills.
So, yeah. Basically, of my last seven quests, I got conquest on... none of them. There are three reasons why, and they come down to the following concerns:
1. Sometimes conquest relies on "skipable" or repeating spawns. This basically means that in order to get conquest, you need to run every area in the quest, pick the most combat heavy options (including sometimes fighting mobs that can be bypassed by an optional objective), sit around waiting for monsters to respawn, or otherwise approach the quest in a way that increases the base time to complete or ignores other routes and options. Any quest that has two pathways, one combat and one trap/skill check based, now
*only* rewards the combat route with a significant portion of the quest experience, meaning that you need to clear both paths, sacrifice a bunch of experience from one route or the other, or sometimes pick decisions that lead to increased enemies and pad the time of the quest. All of these states fall into a category of "Things that take more time than they should and exist only to run pots and pad the length of quests." When this is 10% of the bonus, that's an elective choice based on how quickly you kill monsters. When this is (depending on the gulf between aggression/onslaught and conquest)
70% of the bonus, that's no longer elective. In some quests, this literally means sitting around waiting for respawns to get the conquest bonus, which is tedious, boring, and anti-fun. It is bad game design, and I will say it bluntly because it is a patently an anti-player high friction element of some quests. Some of it might be intentional, some of it might not, but it will ruin any non-combat alternative routes and make "streamlined" runs a lot longer than they are now, basically sucking more time for the same experience, which is a major decrease in
experience per minute. If the experience payout is the same, but the time it takes increases by 10%, that is a reduction in
experience per minute, even if the numbers work out to be the same in theory.
2. Some quests have ways for groups to "fail" conquest. There are a lot of quests in which the number of kills needed for conquest are only marginally lower than the total number of monsters, and these often come in as adds during the final boss fight. This means that players will need to ignore the boss monster and kill adds to make conquest bonuses happen, and if someone happens to kill the boss, that bonus is lost. I will be as polite as possible in saying that
I have seen people ragequit because someone re-entered a quest immediately and the group had to leave and restart wasting fifteen seconds. This community, as much as I love it when it works well, has plenty of people who are one grain of salt away from declaring war and harassing another player away from the game. Having to re-enter a quest is not nearly as disruptive as getting your experience bonus yeeted because the New Guy™ didn't realize that the boss needed to die last and you had one Filler Trash Mob™ that had to eat an arrow first. When one mistake, or missing spawn, or missed cluster of enemies down a sidepath, can ruin the experience payout of an entire quest, that's a big deal. When it's 10% of the bonus, that's rough. When it's up to 70% of the bonus, that's actually huge. Even soloing, I managed to miss two sets of mobs during final fights, one because I screwed up and did too much damage to the boss (rough life, I know) and one because of a pathing issue where they didn't enter the fight until after the boss was dead and I moved to grab the loot. I would say that I'm a pretty experienced player- to err on the (extremely cautious) side, I'd say I've run both quests way more than ten times, and I screwed it up. A newbie could easily screw up without intending to do so. Losing out on up to 70% of the experience because a DoT burned the boss too fast or the new kid didn't wait to kill an add is not fun, or fair, or rewarding. It's frustrating, in a game that really doesn't need more frustrations.
3. Not all quests even have conquest rewards. I don't need to explain this one in full, hopefully, but that basically means that some quests are getting a hard experience nerf equal to whatever the differential is between the highest aggression/onslaught bonus possible in the new system and the current bonus possible of first time + aggression/onslaught. That's just a nerf. Without knowing the numbers, it's impossible to say how big a nerf it is, but it's still a nerf, which makes it hard to stomach the whole "it's not a nerf" line. This is especially true on lower difficulties, where bringing partial groups into quests reduces the numbers of spawns, so someone soloing on normal or hard will probably have a hard time hitting the bonus. Admittedly, that's less of a bonus to lose, but it's still a massive nerf.
Not trying to be a jerk. But this is a stupid change. A stupid idea. I get that it "meshes with how most of the community plays the game" in so far as most groups do enjoy killing as many monsters as possible because we're all horrid murder hobos. Fair enough. But it
*doesn't* actually preserve current experience payouts, it forces some very specific playstyle choices like waiting for respawns, zerging every last monster in every last corner, some quest specific speedbumps like clearing multiple routes in order to clean up every monster, and even just actually shaves off rewards in some quests where there
*aren't* any ways to get conquest bonuses.
I can only think of two ways to fix it:
1. Universally deflate the number of kills necessary to get the conquest bonus to match the actual "standard" kill rates (probably actually adjusted down a bit further to account for Reapers, optional routes, fight avoidance skill checks, etc.) which would require either sloppy automatic data application from player kill counts or manual adjustments based on the number of monsters in the quest along the "primary" line.
2. Increase baseline experience to account for the fact that experience payouts are going to get hit for any group that doesn't murder every last kobold huddled in a corner crying for their dragon mommy to come save them.
Unless you have a really valiant intern or really confident data on kill counts by which to adjust the conquest threshold for every quest in the game to be reasonably obtainable by an ordinary group playing as average players do this is a nerf to a bunch of quests and anyone who doesn't choose
violence every quest. To be honest, if you do have data on kill counts, assuming every group basically gets conquest bonuses every time would be an extremely baffling decision given that it is fundamentally not accurate to my experience both soloing and in groups and while I understand selection size bias is a thing I am one of the aforementioned murder hobos looking for every last quivering kobold to stomp and waiting for enemies to respawn to squeeze out a bit more of that sweet sweet experience juice. In my last seven quests I got conquest a grand total of nope times. It also further encourages one specific playstyle which ignores some of the really good quest design in some quests that allows for other ways to progress, like skill checks, hidden paths, etc. I get that it will encourage people to not just drag hordes of trash mobs throughout the dungeon (which is leading to pathing, which is leading to lag, which is the problem being addressed, I assume) but it's using an atom bomb to target a single building. Yeah, that building is going to be absolutely gone. But it's also going to take out the entire neighborhood, nerf a ton of quests whose only problem is having unobtainable, opposed, or finicky conquest completion criteria, and pad out either quest times or number of quests to grind for anyone who is playing a build that makes hunting every trash mob inconvenient.
Actually, I take it back. It probably won't fix that, because for most of the players who are doing the whole drag hundreds of mobs through a dungeon, they either still will and then just nuke them all at the end (a problem fixed by a different proposed change to AI pathfinding) or they'll just... still not kill the mobs because it will still be faster to just run through even though you're getting less experience, but you just have to do it more times to level up. Which means, instead of less pathing lag, you get the same or more, as people do the exact same thing again.
Anyway, I know I've written a book, so I'm going to stop here, but basically tl;dr this is going to nerf a bunch of quests in which conquest is impossible, force certain routes and playstyles and introduce drag on running through quests since you now need to smack every kobold or you're forfeiting a bunch of experience, and make you spend more time in quests for the same (or less) experience since you need to be 100% certain you get conquest or you lose a bunch more experience than before.
Reposting here from a thread in discussion for visibility, sorry that it's spammy but I wrote it out before realizing that it would probably be more visible and therefore useful here than there.
