Rapid gear decay

kirbus

Just add repair tab in each respective crafting station! with a mat cost of bars/cloth/leather/wood

babylon

kirbus wrote: »

Just add repair tab in each respective crafting station! with a mat cost of bars/cloth/leather/wood

Only problem is these guys have no idea how to price things in the game - they'd probably charge us a whole 100 stack of metal bars just to repair 10% damage

Darzil

Darzil wrote: »

On level 36 monsters at level 38, with level 30-36 gear, I'm seeing 0-1% hits on weak monsters like Wolves, 1-2% on normal monsters, and 2-3% on harder monsters like Trolls. Ice Wraiths were normal, but doing 2-3%, so maybe some monsters cause greater decay.

Also, if hitting things that others do too, I get the same decay hit if I have done enough damage to qualify for loot/xp, but not if I do not. Even though I'm usually only getting 1g because I haven't hit much, I still get the full decay hit.

I guess this is the thing they are looking to address in a future patch, as killing monsters with others seems to be (bugs notwithstanding) very gold negative as an activity.

Epona222

kirbus wrote: »

Just add repair tab in each respective crafting station! with a mat cost of bars/cloth/leather/wood

This, it makes absolutely no sense that I can make a full set but can't bash out a few dents. I'm a NB with bugged skills and no cash to respec so die fairly regularly.

Sakiri

I notice now that ma main is in vet zones his repairs are nowhere near my alts.

What gives?

babylon

Sakiri wrote: »

I notice now that ma main is in vet zones his repairs are nowhere near my alts.

What gives?

I think it's because we kill slower in vet zones, so kill fewer mobs overall in the same time it takes a low level alt to plow through a ton of mobs. So the decay rate appears slower during that play session, because we haven't killed as many mobs.

Guldendraak

babylon wrote: »

I think it's because we kill slower in vet zones, so kill fewer mobs overall in the same time it takes a low level alt to plow through a ton of mobs. So the decay rate appears slower during that play session, because we haven't killed as many mobs.

This does make sense.. Since hitting VR levels on my Templar I have noticed the rate of decay slows down - unless I run a public or group dungeon and then I can guarentee I'll exit the dungeon with broken gear ;p

Just out of curiosity, are there any other MMOs out there that have this sort of mechanic.. I've been playing various MMOs for 10 odd years now and can't recall ever seeing this sort of thing.

babylon

Guldendraak wrote: »

babylon wrote: »

I think it's because we kill slower in vet zones, so kill fewer mobs overall in the same time it takes a low level alt to plow through a ton of mobs. So the decay rate appears slower during that play session, because we haven't killed as many mobs.

This does make sense.. Since hitting VR levels on my Templar I have noticed the rate of decay slows down - unless I run a public or group dungeon and then I can guarentee I'll exit the dungeon with broken gear ;p

Just out of curiosity, are there any other MMOs out there that have this sort of mechanic.. I've been playing various MMOs for 10 odd years now and can't recall ever seeing this sort of thing.

Nope, no other MMO has tried to pull such a punishing decay mechanic afaik. They really need to tone this down a lot, and make the game more friendly to normal players.

Anarchos404

Sakiri wrote: »

I notice now that ma main is in vet zones his repairs are nowhere near my alts.

What gives?

Everything is linked to the exp you gain from killing mobs.
At 30-50 you gain A LOT more than the measly 42 exp per mob you get at veteran levels, hence the insane durability decay prior to the veteran levels.

Quest and exploration exp does not seem to cause durability decay as it is.
Those are my observations after I created this thread.

What I first thought out to be a bug, was just a severely flawed idea of punishing the normal player for actually playing the game.

So the good news are... once you hit veteran levels you can actually invest in gear, repair as needed and still save up for bag spaces.

Epona222

I'm convinced it has gotten worse recently, as I mentioned in a previous post I took some bugged skills (I thought DW NB sounded great! It ought to be great, and I'm sure it would be if everything worked!), and my repair bills are massive, I am lucky to break even any day. Sure I shouldn't end up the wealthiest person in the world in an MMO and wouldn't expect to, but it would be nice to feel that I was steadily going a little bit forward instead of backwards, in terms of finances.

kasain

Ausare wrote: »

The bill was even higher in FF 14

No. in FFXIV you could repair our own armor and it ws cheap when you did. That is one thing that encouraged crafting. Some people are trying to buy a horse. And guess what later people will want a house.

Repair bills have a bug. Why craft if I can't enjoy my armor. Repair bills should be cut from the game period. They can reduce the bonuses. You can redo these.

This is the first MMO I ever played where armor is pointless. It is for fashion only. And what is the point of fye, if your armor last thirty minutes?

For a death penelity they could od a five minute weakened status like ffxi. This would actually be more useful. Vs die, and rekill mob over and over. Crafting is pointless, armor is pointless. As a Vet 3 I only used armor twice for maybe one hour each. That shows you how meaningless it is.

A player can't even enjoy the game as they have to /stuck die with armor loss. Or they run into a zone where monsters have not even loaded up, and die. Then receive punishment for a bad server or game.

Kallion

Speaking of decay, I went to Camlorn with my sorceror. Normal faction level (13), nothing special, but gear up to level (light armor, carefully specced for damage and 2 daedric minions). After the courtyard I did a full repair on my armor and went in. I didn't die once and received very few hits. Armor decayed to 88%. I entered to fight Falochu. He didn't even touch me (Storm Atronarch & Clannfear) and voila, armor down to 84% durability.

Feels like my characters wear wax armor and walks inside an inferno. I'll start simply running around and monitor if there's any damage taken by the air molecules attacking me!

MMO economy works a lot different than in single player games. As I described in a different post, devs should cease making everything so expensive as they're feeding the need for gold spammers which they're trying to limit.

Addition:
I have noticed the following...
It does not really matter if one gets hit or not. The moment I engaged in combat by casting a spell from distance, I took immediately a duration hit (from 76% to 75%). It's not a full 1%, but it shows that once in combat, everything decays depending on how many moves one does. So the longer the combat and moves, the more decay.
Now combine that with the amount of grind required to maintain the pre-required level advancement...

orablast

I just upgraded my gear from lvl 50 to VR2 and now I see what all the fuss is about. The rapid gear decay is so much worse and I'm a ranged NB who rarely takes dmg.

The gold we receive from quest rewards & selling vendor items is barely enough for us to break even from constant repairs. I see no end in sight when it comes to saving enough gold to buy extra bank & bag spaces in the 20k + range.

I have only spent gold on repairs, empty soul gems, and bribing quest NPCs, which seems to leave me hovering around 22k gold saved.

It would appear that we are forced down the path of farming crafting mats and selling gear in the guild stores if we hope to have a snowball chance to make enough gold to achieve the coveted bag spaces & special motifs.

Not that I would ever buy gold online, but I can definitely see why the gold farmers have such a strong foothold in this game. We can barely afford the basic utilities through questing.

Ausare

Imagine what happens when you run out of quests

oxygen_boarderb16_ESO

I haven't posted on this in a while because I gave up on you guys. But I do enjoy the commentary of people who can't break even on their repair bills. Sounds like you're almost at the root cause.

orablast

oxygen_boarderb16_ESO wrote: »

I haven't posted on this in a while because I gave up on you guys. But I do enjoy the commentary of people who can't break even on their repair bills. Sounds like you're almost at the root cause.

There is probably some truth to that, if we're not selling items in the guild store. I'm guessing that is the vision of the game developers.

I work on clothing - medium, woodworking, and alchemy. I breakdown my medium gear, staves, and bows. I sell everything else to NPC vendors. If I receive a blue or purple item that I cannot use or breakdown for my crafting, then I place in our guild bank for others to use. I'm in a small family style guild where we all try to help one another. The idea of joining a large trading guild never appealed to me, but it appears I will need to sacrifice fun time for work time to get ahead of the gold curve.

After upgraded my gear to VR2 last night, I spent about an hour questing with guildmates in public dungeons, I never died once. My repair bill was 1.8k and I profited around 2.6k from vendor sells. So technically, yes I am doing a little better than breaking even.

Darzil

orablast wrote: »

There is probably some truth to that, if we're not selling items in the guild store. I'm guessing that is the vision of the game developers.

Selling items in the guild store just moves money between players at a loss. The repair/income equation is separate from that. At present, if you can survive it, not repairing and working with broken equipment is at least twice as high in income as repairing (varying with playstyle/level)

EdonilTebaun

babylon wrote: »

Nope, no other MMO has tried to pull such a punishing decay mechanic afaik. They really need to tone this down a lot, and make the game more friendly to normal players.

Obviously you never played WoW before Burning Crusade came out. Melee and tanks especially were constantly scrounging for coin to make repairs because dropped coin was miserable and vendor trash sold for little. The current decay rates and the cost of them definitely reminds me of WoW and I'm not sure if that or what we have in ESO is worse.

Fortunately, my guild only ran MC on weekends. But I had to spend the rest of the week in pretty basic armor farming for anything I could get my hands on to repair my armor for the next raid. Not exactly fond memories.

traigusb14_ESO2

Cheap repairs update.

Still a bug here. My costs still aren't hitting what people are reporting.

Did all of the Rift zone (including bosses, delves and anchors ) for EP (started with about 500 gp after buying a bank upgrade). Levels 39 1/2 to 46 and 1/2 (plus the end of the fighter's guild, mage guild lines and getting the amulet quest for main story... the story quest was grey when I did it so no loot off of mobs). Did every dungeon but the 3 leveled private dungeons for this tier. I did do the public dungeon 3x.

Orc Templar, heavy armor, axe /shield both weapon sets. Sold everything to NPC vendor that was not Blacksmithing, Enchanting or Alchemy (which I broke down). Sold all cloth, leather, jewlery, and wood drops, except a few shields which I equipped. All harvested crafting mats went into bank to be shared with alt (didn't sell any bars or cloth to anyone, or NPCs. I may do so, but these numbers don't reflect it). Didn't sell food to NPCs, waiting till 50 to mass-craft and sell all my 40s stuff. (So I have maybe 3-4k of mats I could vendorize. or make more if I wasn't so lazy and sold to players.)

Final profit (excluding stuff I did not sell as listed above) after repairs, ~74 k and change. Bought a 20+ k bank slot (my 2 chars alternate buying bank slots) and a 20+ k bag slot as I was leveling and I'm a little over 34 k in for a horse right now sitting in cold harbor. I may buy another bank upgrade instead.

I can't imagine how much money I would have if I didn't vendorize everything and still belonged to trading guilds. The only way I could make less money is if I bought NPC made potions and food instead of crafting my own.

---

Something is definitely busted with repairs. I know people in the Rift who have much less bank and bag space than I do and bleeding gold all over the place, and they aren't playing really differently than I am. Hell, most of them actually sell stuff and make more money than I do trading and crafting.

I have 110 bag slots, and travel with about 70 free. I go to town when full and repair / bank etc... average repair is ~375 gp.

Cernow

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

Something is definitely busted with repairs. I know people in the Rift who have much less bank and bag space than I do and bleeding gold all over the place, and they aren't playing really differently than I am. Hell, most of them actually sell stuff and make more money than I do trading and crafting.

I have 110 bag slots, and travel with about 70 free. I go to town when full and repair / bank etc... average repair is ~375 gp.

My EP Templar just finished The Rift and just dinged level 44 by the end of it. I have 90 inventory space, 100 bank space, my 'free' Imperial Mount levelled to 34% speed and I have 29k in gold. So not poor, but hardly rich compared to what many are reporting. A full respec would put a big dent in it.

Most of my money has been drained by repairs - not from deaths (I don't die much) but just normal wear and tear from adventuring. I don't grind mobs, I do all the quests I come across. If I tried to grind mobs I would have even less gold.

Until level 20x I was deconstructing everything. But since then I vendor all white items and ornate green items and deconstruct the rest.

Because of repair bills I have had to adapt how I play the game. I no longer take on fights I don't need to, I see packs of mobs as something to try and avoid, stealth or run past instead of attack (which is silly in a combat game). I avoid Dolmens completely. I avoid dungeons. I don't go to the rescue of other players in trouble anymore in case I die also. I've even tried a bit of naked adventuring, which whilst viable just angers me that I should even feel the need to consider it.

All in all, I am not playing the game as I want to, I'm playing it as I'm forced to by the gold supply. And yet everywhere I go in the game world I see naked bots farming farming farming and a chat box full of gold seller spam. This is complete game design fail.

Morthrax

I did a full repair of my gear, walked out of town and killed one monster without dying, came back into town, and I had a 90g repair bill. Basically it cost me 90g to kill one monster and I didn't die doing it. Something isn't right here.

Darzil

Well, it's still a bit buggy (which seems to be on first character load sometimes, and it looks like condition can drop to 0 briefly when zoning for some reason), but those having odd issues, the linked add-on will display all durability decreases with % lost and cost in chat. It might help to identify what causes odd losses.

http://www.northshield.co.uk/darzil/DarzilSpading.zip

My first add-on, so not great, but works well enough to show when stuff degrades. (Feel free to pm with solutions to the issues if you find them!)

elvigy01

Just as an experiment, I fully repaired my level 48 Templar's gear and went into the Village of the Lost dungeon in Coldharbour. I ran around in there with a group of 3 or 4 people (it varied as people came and went) for about an hour completing the quests and getting the skyshard. I didn't die once. When I left, I had 3 pieces of equipment completely broken and the rest in not much better shape.

My repair costs were higher than what I earned. Basically, I lost about 300 gold doing those quests. Granted, I did deconstruct most of the gear since I am also trying to level crafting. Even so, that seems wrong. The choice is to ignore crafting and sell the gear to break even, roughly (maybe make about 50 gold or so in profit), or lose money by using the stuff for craft deconstructing.

Darzil

Did an Anchor with a bunch of others. Used ranged attacks and Siphon to heal others. It was a level 36 Anchor, I was level 38, with level 29-34 armour. Took 139g of durability damage, gained 7g in gold, and got a blue drop with a sell value of 19g. So an overall loss of 113g from a few moments work, during which I didn't come close to dying.

Edit - Repeated the Anchor with another bunch of others, used ranged attacks but not Siphon so I didn't heal others. 71g in durability damage, 2 husks for 14g and 2 thick leather strips for 4g. Total loss 53g.

Malediktus

I got 236k gold and a 42k horse and I am only lvl 41
maybe you should try some trading and bartering with other people, it helps a lot. You will quickly stop caring about these fees.

Darzil

Malediktus wrote: »

I got 236k gold and a 42k horse and I am only lvl 41
maybe you should try some trading and bartering with other people, it helps a lot. You will quickly stop caring about these fees.

Trading and bartering with others doesn't bring money into the game (indeed, it moves it out due to taxes), so that doesn't affect the overall game balance. If you have that much gold from trading and bartering, then others must have made a lot of money somehow.

Gillysan

Malediktus wrote: »

I got 236k gold and a 42k horse and I am only lvl 41
maybe you should try some trading and bartering with other people, it helps a lot. You will quickly stop caring about these fees.

That still doesn't address how gear decay penalizes you even if you play well.

I do a little trading so I'm doing OK. Also, I'm close to but not yet at VR. Almost dreading going VR after reading the info here.

On top of that if you read all the posts here instead of skipping to the end you will find that there are some people that appear to be bugged. Which is what prompted this thread. This however has lead to the whole system being looked at.

Guldendraak

Malediktus wrote: »

I got 236k gold and a 42k horse and I am only lvl 41
maybe you should try some trading and bartering with other people, it helps a lot. You will quickly stop caring about these fees.

You know.. It's just no longer worth trying to get bugs resolved, mechanics explained or try to get the game improved.. Trying to get a response from the Devs or Customer Service is on par with the trolls who jump in and say "I'm fine and if you're noticing a bug or having a problem, you need to L2P".

Cernow

Guldendraak wrote: »

Malediktus wrote: »

I got 236k gold and a 42k horse and I am only lvl 41
maybe you should try some trading and bartering with other people, it helps a lot. You will quickly stop caring about these fees.

You know.. It's just no longer worth trying to get bugs resolved, mechanics explained or try to get the game improved.. Trying to get a response from the Devs or Customer Service is on par with the trolls who jump in and say "I'm fine and if you're noticing a bug or having a problem, you need to L2P".

Indeed. This thread currently has 26k views and 778 comments. Many legitimate concerns have been raised, but the only response we've had is "working as intended".

Well, today was the day when I had to decide if this game is "working as intended" for me as a paying customer. After chasing some bots around like a puppy dog trying to catch up to them and report them, I returned to town to listen to gold spam whilst paying a 879g repair bill for around 45 minutes of adventuring (quests, no grinding,1 death). I decided I feel sufficiently strongly about bots, gold sellers and unreasonable gold sinks (which are not unrelated issues) that I will vote the only way I can - with my feet.

Ausare

My vote with a purse:

You have successfully cancelled your subscription.
Welcome!

You have 3 days of game time remaining. Click here to setup your renewal.