Herb Collecting Quest

[spamgoose]

Just a small thing, but I think it would be good for the Herb Collecting quest if you could offer to forgo any kind of reward (at the beginning) if the old man would teach you how to recognize the herb.

Definitely does not have to become completely known but even if it you could recognize it sometimes it would be helpful, and a good way to gain a foothold in herblore. Even just a temporary boost to herblore so you have a chance of recognizing it would be nice.

I've done the particular quest about 10 times, and I've never known the plant in question. You can work it out deductively, but that always feels very gamey. Even if getting the knowledge beforehand feels too overpowered (and easy to just not bother with the quest), it would still actually be a nice reward at the end. Doesn't solve the problem, but would feel very appropriate.

Edit: Another less powerful approach would be if the old man told you where to find it (You can find it by cliffs, my boy!). That would at least feel less gamey than going straight to the wiki.

[PALU]

I've felt the quest answer route of saying you're not good at herb lore ought to lead you to get pointers as to where the desired plant grows, as per the edit, and I don't think you should have to give up the quest reward for that, as the old man ought to actually want to get his plants, so he ought to give his replacement legs and ears as much help to achieve that as is reasonable, which I definitely think a few words on where to find the plants is, and possibly how rare it is (bog beans is a pain for that reason).

[spamgoose]

Yea. Knowing the plant (before mission completion) might be too overpowered, so getting pointers is definitely a good way. It can be a surprisingly hard quest (at least on the eyes) if the plant happens to be displayed as one of the really faint ones. I don't know if the image always matches the name but in my game "fancy grasses" were nearly invisible. And if it's rare (as you say), that makes it really challenging, at least to the human playing the game.

Learning about a plant as a general quest reward might be nice though if the quest was relatively tough (not 160 branches hah). I haven't done much analytical thought on the rewards you get for the plant quest now... but really good herbal blends seems already like quite a good reward... maybe once in a while it could be that he teaches you about the plant (Like how others teach you about stealth or ritual tricks) after the quest. I had a couple characters with really good herblore but even then learning about plants was often challenging.

[PALU]

My experience is that the "unknown" image of a plant is always the same, while the name is random. Thus, I'm usually able to recognize heather (but that's about it) even when my character isn't.

I typically find that my characters can't get 100% herb lore, as they eventually run out of things to train it on. In general, I consider skill increases to be very good rewards.