Last night I did a pretty hard fail run of Lost Vale. We spent forever trying to pick up three players and the second tank crashed just before the spider boss. We had a pretty decent RR70 Runepriest healing but he hadn’t run LV in nearly a year. There was also an Archmage healing and running LV for the first time. The thing that threw me off, and more to the point of this upcoming ramble was the Knight wearing three Darkpromise and Three Sentinel pieces that came with us. Truly a PvE player, he boasted a paltry RR22. Now I’m not sure why this is striking me odd now, instead of back then, but isn’t having a low Renown rank kind of counterproductive?

Ultimately, the only reason I can even think of needing a Career Rank in the first place is simply for the PvE. What if we did away with it entirely? Base all of your skills gained on Renown instead for the first 40 levels and have all the associated bracketing work along with that. Sounds like a radical shift away from all the PvE in the game, but I’m pretty sure WAR could hold it’s own on that, especially with how the bracketing has been extended. One more step to implementing cross server scenarios, and I think you could reasonably say you would have accessibility to PvP no matter where you are. This isn’t to say that PvE would be pointless, at least not any more pointless than it currently is. There’s still PQ’s to be done, quests to finish, tome unlocks to find, and influence to be earned. :sigh: As usual with one of my rants this is just leading to an overhaul of some system in the game I suppose.

So, what is Renown?

–noun
1.
widespread and high repute; fame.

Thank you Dictionary.

Running around killing squigs certainly should never get you renown, but what if you kill a hundred of them? What about a thousand? Ten thousand? Certainly there’s some point where, even in PvE, your actions would earn you widespread and high repute or fame. With the new system Tome Unlocks granting renown, at least some small amount, would be pretty cool. Especially if they scaled upwards with different unlock levels. For example, a 100 Witch Elf kills unlock is reasonably easy to achieve by the time you leave T1. 1,000 is fairly do-able in T3 somewhere, but 10k and 100k are almost definitely something that will be accrued at R40. I think a 100k unlock would be pretty damn well served by a 100k renown reward, this would be equal to about a full night of RvR for me. Tome unlocks granting renown, and on a scaling level for RvR-oriented unlocks, seems like it would be served well under that definition. After all, even the exploration unlocks could be considered a small bit of renown gained as you could relate to others with knowledge of that location.

PQ’s work quite well under the influence system as it stands, but they need some way to be re-earned, and definitely need tweaks to the rewards available. Also, I think finishing each stage should grant a decent bit of renown which would be tied to the tome unlock from finishing those stages. 

A new type of system would have to be devised for Quest givers. Perhaps a secondary more aggressive Influence system where turning in quests not only earns you the paltry rewards, but fair chunks of influence as well? Maybe instead of gold, they give out tokens that can be redeemed to get your hands on the other PvE sets.

The vast number of random Hero and Champ con mobs that are out wandering the world with hardly anything on their loot tables, I think they should be equivalent to the T3 RvR lake Gutter Runner. Probably not as extreme in the rewards department, but some sort of tangible reward for defeating them.

Lastly the dungeons in each Tier already grant armor pieces, which is reason enough for players in T4 to grind on them. I think it would do the lower tiers well to NOT gain XP as they’re trying to get hold of their armor sets, as it would give them more time to use them anyway. Anyone who has finished off their Gunbad set will tell you they were in T4 and working on Ruin/Bloodlord by the time they were done.

Yay for rambling and ranting! Hope you all have an enjoyable holiday. I hope scenarios are fixed, because I’m really looking forward to running Eternal Citadel with the new matchmaking system functional. Cheers!