The launch of s11 brought some much needed changes to shipwrecks and the naturally spawning island captains, and my crew is always happy to drop anchor and hard turn to grab the king's loot when we see it. However, the changes to these emergent encounters have led to other emergent encounters (megs, skele ships, the kraken) feeling lackluster. The new bottle quest system, while quite enjoyable when it works, has frequently disappointed us with an abundance of cargo runs that don't give any progress towards king's loot turn ins, skeleton orders that drop a single king's skull and several corrupted skulls instead of the occasional nine king's chests we can get from the x marks the spot or guaranteed three from a random riddle, and possibly the most disappointing of all, ashen skeleton lord orders that just drop the normal voyage loot with absolutely no king's loot whatsoever. Finding bottles should be at that same level of exciting as seeing a shipwreck is, in my opinion.
So, my suggestions are:
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Megs should have an extra drop of 1-3 king's items added to their drop pool, making them valuable targets when they appear.
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The Kraken should drop only king's loot, to incentivize defeating it instead of fleeing and to actually encourage looting it afterwards
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Skeleton Ships should be guaranteed to drop a bottle quest, to make looting them more attractive compared to just continuing a voyage after sinking them.
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Bottle quests should be looked at again, there's no reason for the random skeleton lord orders to be less attractive than a set of random captains. Ideally I'd like to see the merchant cargo runs (from bottles and the em quests) replaced with a special lost shipment voyage, but I understand that may be difficult with the em quests being lost on lowering. Replacing the captain's cabin on bottle quest ones with a few pieces of king's loot (and diamond crates), as well as making a new king's variant of the manifest would be incredible.
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This is more of a bug fix than anything else, but bottle quests in shipwrecks and flotsam in the Devil's Roar currently don't generate ashen bottle quests, instead generating quests for Devil's Ridge or Kraken's Fall. I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement a fix for this, though.
Overall, season 11 has been great about getting my crew interested in the game and all the old content we used to find exciting again, so I'd love to see that be expanded to some of the content that was skipped over on the initial pass.
