I agree, why was this changed in the first place?

Well, the first quest is designed to prove your worth--it should stay where it is. The thing that needs fixing is this minimum rarity limit (i.e. it has to be as rare as x or rarer). That's utterly absurd. I mean, c'mon, it's Thrundarr's first quest for goodness' sake! You can get it at level 6 if you really want! In addition, it doesn't make any sense to have it be so rare because then people can rarely take the second quest because you have to explore beyond the AF before then [unless you are getting super grindy, which it would be bad of the game to encourage], and you only have 50/50 chance of not entering AF and screwing the quest in the first place, not to mention sometimes DH is untraversable.

Anyway, I guess choice one; I mean, really, why not just choose a monster of x DL (i.e. all monsters up to x DL) at the rate they are spawned? That would offer plenty of variety and not screw people most of the time. Maybe that was previous behavior, but the previous behavior was a lot better than this. If not that, I guess a max rarity limit, but that makes the quest more of a formality than anything.

Yeah, as a quest from him, my level 7 character got assigned a stone statue. Not a stone golem, no, a stone statue. I didn't even realize that was a real monster at that point - needless to say I never found one. My DeRa UNE last week had 2 in his killed monster list - that was after diving down to D:69 to kill Filk.

There should definitely be a "maximum rarity limit" as well.

I think that slaying a random monster is, in general a slightly pointless and boring quest, that must lead to frustration in more cases than not, and in the not-cases it goes unnoticed as in those the monster is found quickly.

I'd vote for removing this assignment completely. Put one of the new mini-quests from the resurrection campaign there, instead or such.

Or maybe make the first quest partially static with choice of mid-tier monsters being the pool. For example, a quest to kill:

-a red dragon
-a black dragon
-a stone giant
-a Dorn Beast
-a giant boar

killing one of those appears as a nice rite-o-passage and all are readily available in the wildneress map

These monsters don't appear in the wilderness until you have reached a certain level (15?), making the quest extremely difficult for trolls.

oh, they don't? I always felt like they appear earlier

Yes, they don't appear until a certain level, and that level is not that trivial (also much higher than 6, which is the level you can take the quest). His first quest should e super easy and able to be completed before you even do the Pyramid, imo.

Maybe dealing with an orc camp on some branch level of CoC? Dwarves and orcs hate eachother and orcs are fairly low-tier challenge [a competent class level 6-7 character can easily dealwith orc vaults]

I'd be in favour of replacing this quest completely as well. Hanging around in one level waiting for a specific monster to spawn just isn't fun. I'm on the verge of suiciding my current character who has been looking for a ratling warlord without success for about 6 levels now.

From the previous Thrundarr quest RFE:

So if I understood correctly, there had already been a rarity limit - you get nothing rarer than a vapor rat or cyclops, both of which have the same rarity value. The only thing that got changed was the danger level rating of assigned monsters.

I'm 100% for restoring the previous behavior regarding the first quest.

I'm quite certain you are misinterpreting that, Laukku--minimum rarity refers to as rare as x or rarer, not as rare as x or more common. Thus, vapor rats and cyclops are the most common monsters you can get.

I have gotten some really common monsters such as zombies in 1.1.1.

I have, as well (giant rats, even). That is no longer the case since this has been fixed, however, so there is definitely a minimum rarity now, which works as I've outlined in my previous post.

The way I read it was that TB described old behaviour in his first two sentences, and the bits starting from "I have tuned down slightly..." was what he changed.

Supposedly only the maximum monster level was changed, but empirical observations do not bear this out. I would quote my own experiences, but grobble did an excellent analysis himself: http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...5358#post75358. As you can clearly see (and this is at level 6, not level...8-12 when many players first get it, which ups the DL a bit), nearly all the monsters are a real pain to find.

My personal conclusion is that the old behavior was something of a bug--clearly, there was no minimum rarity. I'd rather have that then the current system, though.

It's actually quite vague. It could mean that it has a minimum frequency of occurrence, or that it has a minimum difficulty of finding. After all, if you were to describe rarity in terms of a ratio - like, 1 in 30... do you consider the "rarity" to be the 30, or 1/30? If the former, then a minimum rarity would mean it has to be that rare or more rare. If the latter, then it means that it can't be more rare than that.

I don't think it's vague at all--if you read the statement, it excludes 'very common' monsters, which means that the 'minimum rarity rating of rare' must mean this rare or more. What I can't figure out is why we're discussing this at all--I don't mean to be rude, but I am correct in interpreting its meaning vis a vis its current implementation. A number of people have played the new prereleases and expressed their frustration with the rarity of the monsters assigned and grobble has even done a well-sampled analysis of the monsters assigned. It's simply unhelpful/off-topic to discuss the meaning of 'minimum rarity rating of rare' when it's clear from the implementation.

(and, really, even if I were incorrect, it wouldn't matter because then the implementation would be foobared anyway. The real point of discussion isn't what may or may not have been changed in what way and how we can interpret what we are told was changed, but what we can observe--and what we can observe just isn't fit for the first Thrundarr quest. again, see grobble's analysis and then decide for yourself whether the monsters assigned should be changed in some way)

Actually, the fact that he specifically added that "very common monsters" are "excluded" after saying that there's a minimum rarity could be interpreted to mean that he wanted common monsters, just not the 'very common' ones - that is, perhaps including gnolls, but not giant rats.

The fact that it doesn't have this behaviour doesn't necessarily mean that it's not what he wanted. It's easy to, for instance, get an inequality backwards in a code, if you're even slightly distracted enough, or if the code is abstract enough (if you coded Rarity and ReqRarity as a variable and a constant, and you forgot that you coded them as integers representing the inverse, it would be easy to type Rarity > ReqRarity, thinking it requires the frequency to be large, when you really wanted Rarity < ReqRarity).

I'm fairly certain that Vortices are more common than vapor rats or cyclopses, yet Vortices had to specifically be ruled out, and we know the boundary is at "vapor rats and cyclopses". Perhaps someone can confirm this one way or the other, from that - are Vortices more or less common than cyclopses?