Nice suggestions!OK - I'm trying to stay positive and turn the questions around. Can we find a strategy that will make these quests pay out?
I eventually managed to convince myself this was possible with the inventing quests. So now for break-down quests...
My initial response has been to ignore these as being unworkable, but:
Hunting snakes in Elya Plains North: they drop a shield that you can break down, and a snakes-head that you can combine with a bought sword (the shop is also in Elya Plains Nth) for 1k gold to create a sword that *can* be broken down. Based on FI1k (24k) and RF175, I that gives about 2.7 stam + 3.3 gold per item (+ walking, repair & buff costs). With RF300 that becomes 1.88 stam per break-down, which would turn chewy's DQ into "pay gold to turn current stam into reserve stam". Even RF400 leaves Lou's quest as an all-round loss.
So has anyone come up with a better way to deal with break-down DQs? It seems to me that direct hunting will never pay, as the drop rates are always very low. Inventing items based on resources, components of quest items is likely to be better becuase RF and QH boost those drop rates much more than FI does the normal drop rates.
What I did was raid the guild store as some of our new players filled it up with junk they found and I also hit up my own inventory. I also shopped the AH but I did break down and killed some rats and natives. I guess one way to do this is to store some junk and ask guild mates to do the same after hunts. Whom ever gets the DQ gets the junk. Make it a team effort although I imagine everyone bps are full of ZBs at the moment ;-p