My first point is related to some troublesome feeling I had the last day of closed beta. The final day I had already achieved what I wanted to, with a lot of hard work, that was reaching Rank 3 in the Cleric class, so I decided I’d mess around with a new Archer character. It felt terrible, and I’d say other people felt like this too. From the fact that there’s no account-wide storage to Adventure Journal progress being character based I got the sad impression that the game did everything it could to deter players from making alts. I can appreciate dedication and maining one character, because that’s what I do as well, but I also like to make alts and experience the game’s diversity. So please consider making Adventure Journal Rank progress team based instead of character based.
This rewards dedicated players who have gotten far into the content without making them feel that a new character is just not worth it. Separating Journal rank on character progression feels like a method for people to stick with their main and that’s okay, but it’s just used as a measure tool right now, there’s no merit to going through all the hassle again for a new character (unless you want to use it as an artificial mean to force players into spending more time playing, which would be a very F2P-ish thing to do).
One could argue that Achievements should be shared too, but I feel that this isn’t necessary as Achievements are set tasks that have some sort of reward and motivate the player to unlock them, while the Adventure Journal isn’t.
My second point is about the very specific issue of monster records in the Journal. You can only get the monster info if you last hit the monster, so it becomes a little unfair for support classes. I played a Cleric that I wanted to focus on support, but because of the nature of the game right now I had to go melee if I wanted to progress as any other normal person. I believe tanky oriented characters have a similar issue since they aren’t looking to be a damage dealer. My suggestion would be make these monster records contribution based in the form of Skill assists. I couldn’t get a record for any Field Boss I found for this same reason. For a party oriented game it gets too unfair for the supports.
I’ll add the suggestion @rofldat made in the discussion, which was fantastic
I think what would be better is that if there’s a Team Journal in addition to adventurer’s journal, that tracks what achievements each characters in the team have found.
And when you log on to any of your characters, their journals would have lists of acheivements your other characters have done but not on this one.
Then you can have the game use the Team Journal for tracking leaderboard.
Having two types of Journal, one character and other team based, would make it easier to keep track of the overall progression made and compare between different characters. It’d also alleviate the burden on people feeling they’re starting from scratch with their hard work being disregarded.