Making Legendaries from your Crafting Schools

Over time you can get epic material recipes on all civs and you start building up a lot of the materials. The standard epic materials, that you can be build 8 workshops for in each civ end up being fairly cheap on the market place a lot of the time, they go up in price around season events that allow you to hand in the materials for season event points.

However the advanced epic materials, that you can build 2 workshops per civ of, are the bottleneck for these items. As the proportion of workshops normal to advanced is 8-to-2, but the proportion used in the epic and legendary recipes are 9-to-6, so it drives the value of the normal epic materials to near nothing, at the moment you can buy some of those for just over vendor prices.

As quick example, if you produced the 6 stacks of the advanced materials, you would have also produced 24 stacks of the normal epic materials, but you only need 9 of those 24 stacks, leaving 15 stacks that can only be used for seasonal event points. There is some cross selling of those materials to other players who might be short a particular material type, but they would in turn be producing materials they don't need. So the net effect is that 62.5% of normal epic materials only have use as storage until a season event or vendoring for 240coin a stack.

Producing the items to sell is pretty much never worthwhile, if you make an item with below max stats then you will be selling it to compete with other people doing the same, so the sell price will be slightly below cost price, in effect becoming a way to sell the normal epic materials in bulk. Unless the recipe price is very low you are unlikely to ever make money off it.

How I use the recipes is to make the item when you want/need it yourself, and then use Empire Points to to reforge the stats to what you need for yourself (item can't be sold after its reforged). If you're storage is getting full and its a long time until the next season event then make some items and sell to free storage space, though just selling the advanced materials and vendoring the normal epic materials might be easier.

In theory, if you had a huge coin pool, you could make lots of items and have decent chance to get a near max item that you could sell, but I doubt that would be effective money earner.

If the recipe material requirements were changed:
FROM 9 normal, 4 advanced, 2 advanced TO 9 normal, 3 normal, 3 advanced
Then the proportions would match production, but you'd have variations in demand due to some items being desired more than others. Or if we didn't want to exactly match it, leave some scarcity in the advanced materials, then proportions could be: 9 normal, 2 advanced, 1 advanced, in which case you'd have 12 stacks of normal materials by the time you produce the 3 stacks of advanced materials that you need. That would mean just 3 out of 12 stacks of normal materials would be event handins or vendor trash, reducing such waste from 62.5% to 25%, which would still let prices move towards vendor price, but much slower and maybe not before the next season event seeps up the price difference. Also could just make this change for just the Legendary recipes, leaving the epic items with the original proportions that would add some additional scarcity to the advanced materials.

 

The extreme difficult in crafting legendary items is very intentional. Legendary items had always been reserved for loot and stores. For us to allow players to create legendary items, we need to balance that extreme power with extreme costs. Otherwise the market would be flooded. We do not want to let our recipes dampen people's incentives to quest, either.

 

I don't mind difficulty or cost factor, just the unbalanced use of materials. Would be fine if material cost was increased instead to: 18 normal, 4 advanced, 2 advanced, to give a 25% waste factor of normal materials instead of the current 60% waste factor.

 

We want you to have leftovers to keep it from being a perfect system. Use the market and buy and sell, cooperate with others, etc.

 

Ah, but the overall system produces the waste, the selling/transfers between players just moves it around but doesn't change the overall numbers. 62.5% of all normal epic materials have to go to vendor or season event hand-ins, they can't go anywhere else.

 

Or as Jeinx said above:

Now the problem has just shifted to the other side. The normal epic materials are vendor trash. I just think the proportions in the Legendary recipes should be adjusted, maybe bit by bit, to find a balance where value doesn't go to vendor price.

 

If there were 4 seasonal events and all had the hand-ins then that might be sufficient, but if thats going to be a bit random, or have long gaps, then adjusting the recipes makes sense.

BTW, this isn't a big issue, just a pet peeve of mine, don't like bad system design

 

then you would have hated the system we inherited. again, we don't see extra resources as bad system design. we want rough edges.

 

It might be improvement (and i know proportions are same as original epic recipes) but can't call it good when over 60% of the normal epic materials can't be used no matter how much you want to use them. You can buy stacks for 500c at the moment. The season events were a fix, but if there will be a 9 month gap without that solution (halloween 2019 to summer 2020) then that means the system is not good for large part of the year.

The Leg recipes fixed the demand problem, as the original epic recipes didn't have enough demand to use up the overall material production supply. But it also exposed the proportionality problem, thats the next fix needed.

 

Another solution is new recipes, perhaps in between the old epics and new Legendary ones, in terms of materials needed. There are some item gaps in the drop tables where there is no lvl 40 epic items (like scout spyglass) could make those crafted and have a different proportion to the existing recipes. That would really mix things up and you have a more complex economy. Make them require say: 200 normal epic material #1, 200 normal epic material number #2, 200 normal epic material #3, 100 advanced epic material (those are just made up numbers but you get the idea)

 

sorry for hijacking this thread a bit BamBam, was going to make a post about this next week and kinda jumped in here a bit instead.

 

We also have future uses for materials planned and want to leave room to rely disproportionately on other materials then, too. It all shakes out.

 

Fair enough, I do trust how you and rest of the dev team are making changes, so don't mind waiting, just wanted to point out what I felt might be a problem that could be improved.