Updating gear for lvl 1-39

Document is private.

 

With the number of marketplace slots and the amount of gold a new player can pay for these items, sadly this is often not worth the time. Like, I would give them away freely if I don't have to spend my attention span to do it, but at least now it involves spamming the trade channel.

 

Fully support this, store prices for items have always been a bit silly.

However, it was never intended design for players to buy gold for real world money, the only means for ever doing that was through third party gold sellers(the bane and annoyance of many a MMO), at least as far and best that i can remember (and i remember those chat flooding gold sellers).

 

Fundamentally, new players cannot really afford anything worth more than 1k gold. From my point of view (and that of many experienced players). It's not worth my time selling things for less than 1k gold. This fundamental fact won't change. If you make items desirable enough that they are worth more than 1k, it locks out new players. If they aren't worth more than 1k, I will just vendor them. Any solutions to this problem will need address this fact. This is why I suggested in game store as a fix.

 

Having a closer look at the different stores, it seems like that a lot of the expensive stuff were in fact added by Celeste, as most items from MS are uncommon/rare and hence has significantly worse stats. Even their epics and useful rares are generally cheaper, with a few exceptions. While I still argue that even the MS are still too expensive when taking into account of the speedier leveling, the biggest outlier right now is probably Well of Urd. The level 35 axe is sold for 3k, while an Amun's Axe of Ferocity is often listed at the GM for 1~2k. The blue arrows as well when compared to Pharaoh's Blessed Arrows's GM prices. The armor is mildly better than Chiton of Jackal in HP, but without the damage (I am not going to bother with the 1.1% move speed since it's so small that it is insignificant), and I see the Chiton being sold at 1k on GM often enough.

I can see that the Athenian and Well of Urd stores are meant to shore up some of the lackings in pre-40 offerings, but the prices are not pre-40 prices. Even if we don't want to go crazy in slashing prices on all shops, dropping the Well of Urd price by 1/2 and Athens by maybe 1/3 would keep it much more in line with MS. Moving the shop out of Well of Urd would also help once the prices are readjusted.

Ironically, searching through the shops, the cheapest level 35 epics I could find were in fact the two in Argos from MS, for 900 coins each. That should probably be the starting point to see whether things are too expensive or not.

I am going to refrain from discussing non-legendary level 40 store gears in this discussion so I don't conflate the conversation too much, but I have similar thoughts on prices on many of them as well.

 

Might be about time to consider reverting the old nerf to the cost reduction gauntlets to, even at 10% cost reduction it just doesn't offer enough to justify using them over ramses or similar items(cost goes up, but that doesn't matter when you're getting dmg and health out of it). Back in the old days, at 18.6% reduction whilst ramses was still the better item, they at least made for a cheap, more significant and decent craftable alternative. I honestly would like to see them at 25% reduction(or say 20-22% for epic and 23-25% for the leg craftable), i'd still choose ramses/masters 90+% of the time personally, but it would make them a major consideration before you've got the bank to kit out any civ with the droppables(ramses / master assassins, etc) and create a desire for people to craft and use them.