Oh boy, here I go posting again

Make a post in the wish list forum and see what comes of it.

 

Well the reason I didn't is because I felt having a 30% drop chance on all artefacts could be too high. I'm asking things because my experiences cannot be universal. My issue is that many people don't address the issue and just tell me to just do X scene and then you'll have enough xp. Which is not the real issue. The real issue is access to silver and gold, which is crazy expensive. When I was collecting silver I was seeing 1000 silver ingots for half a million. That's not in range of a casual player, and even for a dedicated player that could well be a massive investment of time. The real issue as I see it, is that crafting is already the real barrier to entry when it comes to clearing higher level content, and as such players who may have been playing much longer but in a much more casual fashion won't be able to craft their own, which makes the issue worse as then crafting becomes an insurmountable hurdle to that late game content. Alternatively they have to commission what they need which is again subject to the whims of players who make high level gear. Relying on guilds to make up the difference doesn't fix the issue long term, it just kicks the can down the road as you're now relying on players to play until the game closes which is a fallacy. Crafting isn't to everyone's taste, grind or no grind, but considering SotA doesn't have level or stat requirements to use any gear, in theory a new-ish player could be given top end stuff and it would carry them till they broke, and even then they could pay Coto's to full heal their stuff. This is assuming all builds are equal (they are not) and as such you lock players into a mega grind to make the gear they need to even survive high end content assuming their skills are already at the "right" level to face it. So these players will either have to pull together massive amounts of in-game currency to pay someone else for the resources which doesn't improve their crafting skills, and then try to improve their own gear. The game is already a grind, and scrap recipes should in theory be about reducing that, but for silver and gold scrap recipes that is not the case. So I was theory crafting what could fix this without crashing the silver and gold markets as I know that there are some players who do make in-game bank doing so.

 

Not to mention that gear would just randomly explode. Those were the days.

 

It's insane. It literally killed the game, and even despite that fact that people on the forums will just continue to blindly defend it as they have for years. They need to fix their scaling issues. When you play games with competent level scaling you understand how bad it is in this game.

 

Did you not read my first post?

 

I did... but I must have been high or something my apologies! That's a solid idea and I really like it.

I wish they would add multiple faucets for gold and silver scrap. I really don't understand why it's been such a scarce resource for so long.

I didn't mean to argue with you. And to answer your question on why it's easier for others to acquire gold/silver ingots compared to yourself - it's probably 1 key factor. It's not so much meticulous collection. It's more about speed and getting from node to node as fast as possible. I built my character to mine, so I have super fast movement and I blink constantly. Air specialization is great for mining. And with the stuns I can start a node before killing the mobs. I stun the nearby mobs and start mining before they are dead. My air elemental finishes them off while I'm mining. That's how I do 200+ ingots worth of ore in an hour.

Thanks for bringing up this topic again, maybe the developers will finally do something about this issue!

 

This is the main thing that dragged me away from the game. After something like 25,000 hours played time and billions of experience dumped in the relevant skills, you still can't reliably make the gear you want without wasting 95% of the resources and if you're looking for high end gear, expect to burn through thousands of ingots for a "maybe" on a single piece. If you're trying to get what you want on something like an epic artifact, lol prepare to spend months of your life.

There's been lots of great suggestions over the years, such as removing the RNG to give more control over the inputs (less waste) or come up with a meaningful salvage/consumption of the output instead of just having it be complete waste of your time, all on deaf ears. I've decided that for me, personally, spending several hundred hours to get a piece of gear in a game just isn't something I'm willing to do anymore, especially since even if I do this, unless I play one of the tweaky pretzelfinger builds even with the godly gear I can't be as effective.

It wouldn't even be so bad if it was progressable. What I mean by this is, if the devs decided you needed 5000 gold and silver ingots to get the perfect piece of gear, then simply make that the price, and get rid of failures and RNG. I will grind it. But grinding it and not even having the guarantee of getting an item at the end? And then the item is subject to durability loss as well? Hard pass.

 

The "godly" tier that you would want to produce has very few uses. In normal environments "casual" equipment is completely sufficient.

So if you are going to wear your best for that PVP fight or against that superboss monster in a party - simply get one of the buffs that protects durability, like the Blessing of Maintenance.

 

The simple matter is that history has shown that if the devs provide that option, players will hard grinding until they all have the mathematically best gear and once they've done that, what's the point of continuing to grind? The economy would grind to a halt, well, more of a halt.

 

I agree with this. The only thing I think they should change is to give us more ways to get gold and silver scraps.

 

This was why I suggested that artefacts give some, does this sound like a good idea?

 

So, assuming the devs are satisfied with the current balance, this would mean that either artifacts should drop slightly less often to reflect their increased value or upgrading gear should be a bit more pricey to upgrade, maybe a second ingredient like another reagent depending on type. On top of that, artifacts on vendors should probably roughly double in price since they now are both worth more and folks have an increased incentive to break them down, reducing supply.

 

Yeah, I really like that idea.

 

Given that most recent dev stream, I don't think they are going to make it even more expensive to craft. At least I hope not.

 

I agree, but I don't think they are going to make it cheaper either, which making gold and silver scrap more common would do. You can already farm them if you know what to break down.

 

Is it a super secret?

 

Gold Goblets, Silver Candlesticks?

 

But where can you find them?