+1
+1
It's certainly better but I still wonder who designs these quests and designates the rewards, I don't think I'm in need of love potions or damescene hammers, why not finally solve the banners problem and reward a few of those. The crystal reward seems balanced enough if there's going to be more mini quests in future.
It seems to me 3 whole quests to get just under 2 crystals is not very balanced at all - if the shards are coming in from other places not so bad I guess.
The buffs might not be best in game but there's no need for them to be fairly useless, love potion is superseded by a celebrity comes to town which you get from excelsior short letters and the damescene hammer buff you can barely give away on TO because those who buff use better or longer. Two exotic fruit baskets would of been better but being as you can do short letters very early on and receive far superior buffs the level of the quest is pretty irrelevant.
I used to test and give feedback regularly in years gone by, but it never lead to anything. I'll give it another go.
What is the old fashioned way, exactly? A 1% drop chance in explorer search?
The bottleneck is because they don't want you to be able to grind Excelsior content, take Evil Queen for example, and get all blueprints in 2 weeks.
The shard stuff enables them to give rewards of less then 1 crystal.