[LaurnaRose]

Aruspex, Dreamcookie, and the rest of the Diplomacy Team:

I hope this is taken as constructive critisism, as I love diplomacy and mean no ill will to the DTeam.

Playing my Varanjar diplomat today I was met with extreme frustration. I got to skill 42 and was sent on my horse quest. The quest which actually gives the horse as a reward asks me to parley with 3 npcs and travel with a time limit of 40m. Fine. However, when parleying with the first NPC he is skill 75. This starts the parley off with him at 6 and me at 12. I found it impossible to get pass the first NPC so I decided to go back to Halgarad to level my Dip skill a bit before continuing on.

Once I reached Halgarad, I was met with the unfortunate reality that the lowest parley started at 75. I finally found a quest (one quest only) that would give me an additional piece of dip clothing to add to my arsenal. I got past the first 2 parleys and was met with "You must have 7 noble presence"... I only had 6. So I asked around how to raise my noble presence and was answered with, "parley". Back where I started with not enough skill to parley for presence. When I did try to parley with the skill 75 NPCs I found myself once again being met with impossible decks to counter and NPCs that were simply too strong for my lvl 42ishness.

My suggestion is this:

Put in quest givers for the middle skill ranges. It would be nice to have the ability to level from 42 to 75 or at the very least 60 or so so we have half a chance of winning a parley. The faction hits for each failure simply are too steep to risk the loss as it is.

I would love to see one quest giver for each presence available in each city. Someone who would send you on arrands to parley with other folk of similar status (noble, crafting, domestic, soldier). This would allow us to level our diplomacy to a more reasonable skill level before trying to take on the world. This would also be a nice way to gain presence in these areas. These quest givers could hand out presence specific equipment or maybe even a permenant presence bonus after a long drawn out quest.

Something else that I would suggest looking into would be separate tabs for adventuring/diplomacy/crafting quests. It gets too cluttered when you are active in all three spheres.

Not sure if any of this is a possibility, but something HAS to be done. As it stands, diplomacy is great fun ... until you reach civic diplomacy. There needs to be an alternative to civic diplomacy ... some of us just want to have fun with it.

__________________________________________________ ____________________________

I went back on the game and looked around a little more at the parley opponents scattered about. I found that if i backtracked to the starting area there were in deed a few (very few) opponents who were skill level 50. Unfortunately, the faction hit + the stacking of the cards on the NPCs side + the timer lockout + lack of reward = not fun any more.

Look at adventuring and how many options we have there. As an adventurer, you can go out solo or in a group or in a raid and work on quests that give you rewards, experience, faction that scale in difficulty. As well, you can go out into the wilderness and solo for base experience - lacking reward, but you still get the benefit of leveling while you are out there.

It appears with diplomacy that once you reach skill 40 or so (hit civic level) that you are forced into one way of leveling. I think that the civic diplomacy is a really cool concept, but I also think that civic diplomcacy should be the equivilant of a diplomacy raid. There should be other quest givers that allow small group and solo diplomcacy as well, hence the idea of the presence specific diplomacy quests. This would allow us the ability to continue experiencing diplomacy in a questing fashion in a manner that affected US and not everyone else. As well, there should be base diplomacy on almost every NPC allowing you to simply have a conversation with someone to increase your skill.

I know it would be extremely difficult (but im not sure why it wasnt done in the first place, maybe you can explain), but you might want to look at the sphere and see if there is a way to give us experience and levels as oppose to simply skill points. Adventuring and crafting are set up that way. it kinda confuses me why diplomcacy, which is a sphere of its own beast, was done so different. As it is, we get a skill point with every parley. I would much rather the quests be scaled in experience by difficulty.