Hunting is one of the most frustrating professions. Originally it was difficult to level up, but now that I have levelled up, it kind of feels like it has only gotten worse.
Warning; rambling ahead! You can skip to the actual suggestion at the bottom.
I'll start of with an outline of the things that bug me when hunting:
1. It is RNG which hunts you get. Yes you can reroll, but rerolling is (broken) RNG too; I have had it happen multiple times that I reroll multiple of the same hunts. Plus rerolling is limited per day and gets progressively more expensive.
2. Unless you get 100% success rate, succeeding is also RNG.
3. Impossible synergie compositions: On many hunts, hitting all target synergies is downright impossible given the currently available companions and wolf breeds. This is vexing for lower levels, as it makes it really hard to level up. But having leveled up, it only gets worse! I am now at lv45 hunts that have more synergies required than I can physically cram into a team, even if all the teammates ticked every box they could. There is literally 24 synergies required, and I can get only 15 (3 per member, 5 members).
4. Specifically for the lv45 hunts, the level requirement is (currently) also impossible. 100 levels. 5 teammembers, current max is lv10. That means I can at most reach lv50.
5. Hunt duration: the lower level hunts don't take very long and I can cycle through them just fine, but after level 10, the hunt durations start taking massive leaps. 5 hours for a lv25 hunt. 2 whole days for a level 45 hunt?
6. Apart from fully depleting the stamina bar of the members and taking a while to complete, hunts also require a lot of food as an additional investment, on top of the special tokens often necessary to do a hunt. Again lv25 requires 500, and lv45 requires 1000 stamina points worth of food.
All of this combined with the often mediocre rewards for a hunt, make it very frustrating to keep hunting. At first it is difficult to level up, and unlock new hunts, only to be confronted with impossible hunts that take tons of investments and have only a slight chance to rewards some small things.
There is too much dependence on RNG. I like the idea of having to fit a team to the hunt's requirements to improve your chance of succeeding, however with the required synergie compositions in the current hunts (which often are simply impossible to meet) and the fact that you are very limited in your teambuilding (a maximum of 2 companions and only companions currently equipped to the wolf that is also on the team) it becomes frustrating. Add onto that that you only have so much agency on which hunts you can choose from.... Too much RNG.
To give a very practical example: I currently have 3! impossible hunts to complete that are high level and take a long time to complete. Two level 45s and one lv25 hunt. Then I also have 2 lower level hunts that luckily don't require any additional food, but which are also impossible to get 100% success chance on. Now I've used up all my rerolls, so I can't manually reroll. That means I have to wait until tomorrow for new hunts and hope I don't roll too many of the same. OR I can do the hunts. But 2 of these hunts will take 2 days, require a ton of investment and have at most a ~56% chance to success (and that is a very big if, needing to have the right companions equiped to the right wolves all at lv10) So these will most likely just result in wasted resources. The lv25 hunt is the same although slightly less investment and only 5 hours of waiting. The two lower level ones I can do without too much pain if I fail, considering they only require the stamina bar and maybe a token and about an hour or so to wait. Oh and not unimportant, while I am waiting two days for these hunts doomed to fail to come to an end, I can not use those wolves in any other hunt, so let's hope no new hunt shows up that require that wolf/companion combination!
Now I already have a professions balancing suggestion floating about the forum somewhere, that for hunting includes things like
1. Have all unlocked hunts available to choose from, but instead limit the amount of hunts we can do simultaneously. The limit of the simultaneous hunts could be expanded with level up and perhaps also purchased (with pebbles!) as an expansion.
2. Allow companions from a certain level to join a hunt regardless of whether they are equipped to a wolf on the hunt
3. Lessen the required investment for a hunt. The stamina on top of the food on top of the time on top of the required token feels like way too much in exchange for the mediocre rewards
4. Improve the rewards based on the requir investments.
5. Change the synergie requirements to be actually possible given the limitations of existing companion and wolf synergies.
6. Levelling up in hunting automatically adds some success chance (similar to how cooking ups the cooking speed with level up)
> End of rambling
Specifically for this thread however, I wanted to suggest the following:
Giving the NPCs some use! Given point 1 of my previous suggestion, the manual pebble-costing rerolling would become obsolete. However, I see a great way for the NPCs to be involved in hunting and give a pebble sink: Hiring them to join you on a hunt! You can either hire 1 of them to add 10 levels and 3 missing synergies to up your chances of success, or hire both for 20 levels and 6 synergies added to your party (or perhaps because coco is a pup 15 and 5 ..) Much like the other 'hiring of NPCs' this could become progressively more expensive over time.
While it might be odd, I do feel it should be necessary to hire them for multiple hunts at the same time, otherwise it would only be a teensy bandaid for the multitude of problems players experience with hunting. (Plus if you are willing to pay the pebble price, why not?)
Alternatively I can see you bribing them with food (like the farming NPCs) to hire them for a specific duration. Or you can bribe them (either pebbles for a single instance or food for a specific time) to add additional slots to your hunting party.
I will say that this is still only a bandaid, because even if, in the most ideal situation, you hire both NPCs for 20 levels and 6 additional synergies, that means you still have a ton of investment required (now plus additional pebbles for hiring the NPCs), need the exact right combos of wolves and companions at lv10 and wait two whole days to have a 78% to successfully complete a lv45 hunt. And the question remains whether the rewards are worth that amount of wait and investments. So I do not at all assume that this issue would fix everything, and very much suggest the previous listed improvements on top of this. But I did want to throw this idea out there to see what others think of this way of hiring the NPCs.
(For those interested: here is my original generic professions rebalancing suggestion: Forum - [Professions] Balancing and improvements (lorwolf.com))
Cealygosa
