Rapid gear decay

Shillen

Bottom line is this game drastically needs some gold sinks. Once you have your bags/bank/mount maxed out repairs are the ONLY thing to take gold out of the economy. Gold will be worthless in 3 months if they don't do something about it.

Garrett_hardy_ESO

I don't die and my repairs are through the roof. Of course I am a tank and take all the hits. But jesus. I go out questing with my friends and an hour-2 later I pay 2k in repairs and I probably only made 1800 in that time. Not complaining. I just figured gear would break down more form deaths and I don't die cause I have a healer and it breaks down at the same rate as if I was dying.

Darzil

Shillen wrote: »

Bottom line is this game drastically needs some gold sinks. Once you have your bags/bank/mount maxed out repairs are the ONLY thing to take gold out of the economy. Gold will be worthless in 3 months if they don't do something about it.

At the moment this stopping me from getting those gold sinks! Level 27, 13k gold in the bank and saving for a horse. Only bought the first tier of bank and bag upgrades.

Mix

I have no problem with repair costs, even after this latest patch. I do play a ranged light armor character and repair every time I hit town/sell stuff for around 500g. If I have died a lot it can be 1500g but this is chump change really. I have no idea why people complain so much about it. There isn't much to buy right now anyways. Bank slot, bag slot, horses...motifs/recipes if you want them. Maybe some gear or mats. Respec costs are high but that is to prevent people from respec'ing every 2 minutes and take some time to think about what they want to put points into.

tl:dr repair costs are fine, have to have something common to sink gold to keep the economy from ballooning.

slayer7800

The repair costs aren't worth it now. I just deconstruct the armor when it gets about 50% and put on a quest piece or make new armor. If it is to the point that people are not even going to bother repairing gear, then it isn't working as intended.

b101uk

I wander if letting armour degrade to far before repairing is part of the problem, as from at least 100% down to 90% or 85% there is no actual loss in resistance countering attack damage, once you get beneath <90% or <85% the armour resistance value starts to drop which will lead to you dyeing more often, as each attack on you deals more damage through the armour which in turn accelerates armour decay thus cost over X time?

It’s also worth remembering that weapons don’t get blunt and degrade, so a weapon that dose 100 damage always dose 100 damage, the only thing that degrade on weapons is any optional enchantment charge which dose damage etc over and above this value, which just cost 1 level appropriate sole-gem to recharge fully (or multiple lower level sole-gems) or a new glyph adding which also gives a full charge (unless the padlock icon is shown denoting the enchantment cannot be changed)

Slash8915

I hit VR2 and made a full set of blue VR2 gear. After a bit of questing with minimal combat (i use sneak alot) and no deaths, my repair bill was 1600g. I think I'm going to take a leave of absence until ZOS fixes this issue, so I can avoid bankruptcy.

The honeymoon phase for this game is over, and things like this are really starting to *** me off.

raglau

The cost is a PITA but it's the tedious trips out of the questing zone, to a wayshrine and back to town to repair\recraft gear that *** me off. It's like they said, "here you go, a grindless MMO..BUT...we're just going to suck all the fun out of it at the last moment, for the sheer hell of it".

Slash8915 wrote: »

I hit VR2 and made a full set of blue VR2 gear. After a bit of questing with minimal combat (i use sneak alot) and no deaths, my repair bill was 1600g. I think I'm going to take a leave of absence until ZOS fixes this issue, so I can avoid bankruptcy.

The honeymoon phase for this game is over, and things like this are really starting to *** me off.

starkerealm

Mix wrote: »

I have no problem with repair costs, even after this latest patch. I do play a ranged light armor character and repair every time I hit town/sell stuff for around 500g. If I have died a lot it can be 1500g but this is chump change really. I have no idea why people complain so much about it. There isn't much to buy right now anyways. Bank slot, bag slot, horses...motifs/recipes if you want them. Maybe some gear or mats. Respec costs are high but that is to prevent people from respec'ing every 2 minutes and take some time to think about what they want to put points into.

tl:dr repair costs are fine, have to have something common to sink gold to keep the economy from ballooning.

The issue isn't the repair costs themselves. Or at least the specific cost to repair a piece of gear at a given condition. It's that our gear is disintegrating at the slightest provocation.

On the whole, on my level 10, I'm seeing ~3-4g worth of damage for every enemy I kill. At level 10, most enemies will drop between ~1-5g worth of loot.

Yeah, short term, or with questing, that's fine. I go into a quest zone, I come out with 100g damage, and I can eat that from the quest rewards. But, if I just wander around, poking things? I can't. It won't break the bank immediately, but over time, I'm simply going to run out of gold.

If I'm getting ornate drops, that helps alleviate the loss for a longer play time, but this is to keep the amount of gold on a level 10 character even, it's not going to let me feed my horse, continue with research, expand my inventory or bank because, I can't save enough cash to do that without saying, "f--- crafting, I'm going to live off drops."

More than that, this actually invalidates upgrading your inventory. Because you're never going to be able to quest for more than a half an hour to an hour without needing to repair your gear, you're never going to be in a situation where your base 60 inventory slots have filled. This is seriously messed up.

tl:dr learn to read.

SuperScrubby

lol an interesting tl:dr

The only way to really earn gold in this game is by doing questing only with some group dungeons. That way you can get gear to replace all the time and get gold to cover any damage to gear you incurred while questing.

If you try to go exploring and farm then you're punished basically. Purple drops in a dungeon will give you alittle more money too, but all in all the repairs costs are too much and pigeon holes you into questing for exp and only exploring if there's a quest in the area.

raglau

Yes it's basically, "Play your own way. But make sure you're near a wayshrine at all times and don't have too many random encounters. But it's your way, trust us, would we lie?"

SuperScrubby wrote: »

l
If you try to go exploring and farm then you're punished basically. Purple drops in a dungeon will give you alittle more money too, but all in all the repairs costs are too much and pigeon holes you into questing for exp and only exploring if there's a quest in the area.

starkerealm

SuperScrubby wrote: »

lol an interesting tl:dr

The only way to really earn gold in this game is by doing questing only with some group dungeons. That way you can get gear to replace all the time and get gold to cover any damage to gear you incurred while questing.

If you try to go exploring and farm then you're punished basically. Purple drops in a dungeon will give you alittle more money too, but all in all the repairs costs are too much and pigeon holes you into questing for exp and only exploring if there's a quest in the area.

Yeah, that's kind of true. But, looking back a week ago, if you were exploring, your repair costs would be around around 10-20g on a character like that. I'm estimating, because I wasn't keeping a careful eye on gear degradation before my repair bills started to skyrocket. On a 25, I saw them jump from 36-50g for wandering around the zone for hours to 250g-300g for every quest. If you're exploring and killing things in an unstructured way, 50g is a pretty easy mark to hit without much effort, and still allowing you to make progress.

Ratcheting up the deterioration means characters are (somewhat) tethered to merchants, so exploration is now more risky (from a gold sense), you might find a chest that pays for your excursion, or you might just be eating the costs.

If the intention is to make the world outside of just rushing from quest to quest more hostile and imposing, than this does that, but it also runs against the idea of "play how you want", and it pushes against the idea of getting out there, wandering around, and finding new things to do. Which in turn makes finding new quests harder.

Again, if the earlier poster's "friend" is right, and this is an anti-bot mechanic, it's seriously off the rails, because the bots don't care, they'll just quest naked. But, for players? Yeah, we're the ones suffering from this.

raglau

Yes, this is what's annoying. A staple of the TES series since Arena is simply getting off the beaten track and seeing what's out there. For me that's what's got me hooked on every TES game and this one is taking it away for some odd reason.

starkerealm wrote: »

If the intention is to make the world outside of just rushing from quest to quest more hostile and imposing, than this does that, but it also runs against the idea of "play how you want", and it pushes against the idea of getting out there, wandering around, and finding new things to do. Which in turn makes finding new quests harder.

Morkulth

But But the stitchings in my linnings need to constantly be tightned back together even though I don't get hit. I agree gear needs to decay at 1/2 the normal rate. This is going to make Trials a lot of fun with who brings repair kits and repairs all their gear before starting attempts .

raglau

Basically before long everyone will just be running around nude like it's 'Caveman Simulator 2' or something

SaibotLiu

babylon wrote: »

SaibotLiu wrote: »

babylon wrote: »

SaibotLiu wrote: »

Ive yet to see you address the fact that many players are having no difficulties saving money as it is.

I'll address it - the people having no difficulty saving gold aren't the ones who will be affected by gold sinks anyway. Gold sinks only affect the poor.

Keeping gold sinks high for basic things like repair bills will only widen the gap and make a bunch of people (those who don't play the economy in games) very unhappy.

Which brings us full circle, we should make the game easier so that everyone is the same...

Cool story bro.

I'm not your bro.

No it isn't about "making the game easier" - way to divert attention from the real issue by throwing insults and irrelevancies instead of directly addressing the issue I raised...that gold sinks only affect the poor.

The repair costs are too high for the amount of gold a normal person can make - that is one who does not spend their game time playing the economy. If this game requires people to play the economy to survive in the game then game design is at fault.

I'll try to make myself even more abundantly clear this time. I do not "play the economy". That is part of end game for me, Im not max level yet so I dont do much with it. I quest/grind/explore in equal measure. I craft tons, so I deconstruct a lot. This takes away a large part of income by not selling loot. Im sorry if you dont consider this "normal person" gameplay, but what am I supposed to do to make myself more average? I guess play like an idiot and buy motifs until Im broke. I have 100 bag slots and 100 bank slots, I could afford the most expensive horse right now if I wanted. Am I supposed to believe that other people are incapable of saving money when I see evidence myself that it is possible without really trying?

No Im not going to believe that just because you said so. Forums are notorious for blowing crap out of proportion like this, the whiners will screech to the high heavens that their gameplay is being ruined/infringed upon while the rest of us just play the game without difficulties.

There is no game design fault when it comes to the economy. Its one of the things theyve done well. People like you just want to make it like every other MMO. You'll eventually get your way and make this game idiot proof, and thats when we can put the nail in the coffin.

Wait and see.

starkerealm

SaibotLiu wrote: »

Wait and see.

That's what I'm doing, it doesn't mean I have to be happy about it, though.

On blowing things out of proportion, maybe; but if an issue is making the game not fun, I shouldn't feel like I'm under some grand obligation "to the cause" or whatever to log in.

Obviously, you do end up with people talking about the editic memory bug being gamebreaking, but, feeling like I'm getting punished for playing... I'm sorry, that's just not fun to me. It's not the end of the game, but I find myself not wanting to log in.

And, yes, that's punished for playing, not punished for failing to play well. I can enjoy a game that punishes failure egregiously, but this doesn't, that we're taking damage from dealing damage means every move we could possibly make is the wrong one.

Mauzi

Pages of players complaining and not a single statement on the matter from ZOS, which in my view either shows that they don't dare to reply or don't care at all.

So, to make things easier for everyone, especially those who claim to have no problems with item wear, here's my take on the situation which is mostly from own observations:

• The ridiculous damage to your gear seems to be related to the weapon you wear, melee weapons
• Wielding ranged weapons will reduce your repairs to low levels
• Damage to your gear seems to apply already just for gaining XP if you wield a melee weapon.
• PvP death doesn't cause any repairs
• Death penalty on gear is low compared to damage from combat and hardly worth a soulgem most of the times

As said, this is what I found and discussed with friends, and I don't claim that I know all about the game mechanics.

All of this looks 100% tailored to the current standard bot setup, coincidence ? I doubt so - but it for sure is a truly silly way of countering them since considering there's groups of 10-20 around most dungeon bosses, even naked bots can kill bosses using spells or ranged weapons. Plus, if must be they could always add a healing bot in addition - but as everyone knows, the current setting has no need for such at all.

On the other hand, the people needing a gold-sink are hardly affected anyways: PvP costs no repairs (time for a change, right?!) and dungeon crawling in high-levels makes plenty of money no matter what.

This goes along with the bots mainly being of lower levels, causing right those levels to suffer the most - which mainly affects innocent players. Way to handle a problem, reminds me much on the recent banning of hundreds of innocent players along with the real culprits.

Knottypine

Any dev input on this by chance? Would be nice to know something. There seem to be some people ok with it, but it definitely hinders some players that don't have blooming bank accounts and are trying to save up for storage upgrades.

This may also begin to lead to more people farming certain areas for loot drops to sell, just so they can keep up. Although their armor will still degrade in the process. A vicious cycle.

starkerealm

Mauzi wrote: »

• Wielding ranged weapons will reduce your repairs to low levels

This one's not 100% accurate. The character I was doing my last bout of tests on was a bow wielding nightblade, and I was seeing deterioration from attacks and power usage.

It's possible they tried to implement deterioration to weapons and borked it, but I don't know.

Mephane

My personal opinion - they should completely remove gear decay from all sources other than dying. A punishment for failure, yes; a punishment for just playing, hell no.

Not gonna happen, of course. The best we can hope is that they drastically cut down the item decay, to, let's say, 10% of its current speed.

slayer7800

I was talking to someone about this yesterday and we both agreed that our repair builds were high. I didn't realize there was a change until I read this thread. I've been telling everyone in my guild today to stop repairing and just use quest drops or craft stuff because the repair bills aren't worth it. Other options are changing your play style to a ranged character that rarely gets hit so you don't have to wear armor at all. Doesn't decay in PvP either. Really needs to go back to where it was.

starkerealm

slayer7800 wrote: »

I was talking to someone about this yesterday and we both agreed that our repair builds were high. I didn't realize there was a change until I read this thread. I've been telling everyone in my guild today to stop repairing and just use quest drops or craft stuff because the repair bills aren't worth it. Other options are changing your play style to a ranged character that rarely gets hit so you don't have to wear armor at all. Doesn't decay in PvP either. Really needs to go back to where it was.

That's the issue with this bug, it's hard for players to actually notice it's happening unless they're paying attention. Which is probably why we aren't getting any comment on it... even though it's a serious issue.

starkerealm

Knottypine wrote: »

Any dev input on this by chance? Would be nice to know something. There seem to be some people ok with it, but it definitely hinders some players that don't have blooming bank accounts and are trying to save up for storage upgrades.

This may also begin to lead to more people farming certain areas for loot drops to sell, just so they can keep up. Although their armor will still degrade in the process. A vicious cycle.

The more I think about it, the more the silence really worries me. There's nothing about this in the patch notes, but if this was a stealth nerf... I mean, that freakin' Oats thread got a ZOS comment, and this has 1k more views without a peep. Hell, that Khajiit avatars thread has one, and it hasn't broken 100 views yet.

lehereseb17_ESO

Just started new alt. To my shock i cant afford my repair bills. I need to craft new gear bc repairing old one is unreasonable.

Juponen

lehereseb17_ESO wrote: »

To my shock i cant afford my repair bills

Yeah, someone there really wants us to become customers to the goldsellers.

babylon

SaibotLiu wrote: »

Wait and see.

I think we have already seen - people are finding the armour repair costs too much.

starkerealm

squicker wrote: »

Basically before long everyone will just be running around nude like it's 'Caveman Simulator 2' or something

So... Rust?

slayer7800

So I got a message today that my gear was damaged. This was immediately after turning in a quest in town. Seems that it may be tied to experience and not just combat. Also, I crafted level 4 armor for my level 32 DK. I have been wearing that or white 30+ armor off of drops. I'm making decent gold now and haven't had a problem in combat yet.

redwoodtreesprite

LOL, yeah. For my characters collecting resources, I made very low level medium armor, so as not to waste any ore on heavy pieces.. No XP from mobs, so why get massive repair bills just for running around and getting resources.