Why Prosperous is Preposterous

code65536

TL;DR: This trait is so bad that you're better off with a different trait even if you want to farm for gold.

Prelude: How armor degradation works is ESO

Armor degradation in ESO is not very intuitive, and most people don't realize exactly how it works:

Every time you earn combat XP fighting a PvE enemy, a random piece of armor takes a small amount of damage. Every time you die to PvE or environmental damage, a random piece of armor takes a large amount of damage.

This has several implications:

1. How many hits you take and how much damage you take are completely irrelevant (unless you die, of course). It means that, in a group, a tank taking a beating on the front line takes the same durability hit as a healer who stands in the back and is never hit by the enemy.
2. You suffer zero armor damage when fighting enemies that are so underleveled that you are earning no XP (unless you die, of course).
3. You suffer a lot of armor damage when you are grinding for XP. This is also why armor degrades so quickly in the Imperial Sewers, as that is typically an XP-dense area.
4. Since any kill that has a chance of dropping gold is also a kill that grants combat XP and damages your armor, armor damage is a mechanic designed to be a gold sink counterweight to gold looted from kills.

That final point is very important, and to quantify this, I use the Ledger addon; it lets me see exactly how much gold I've earned and spent, and what the sources/sinks of gold are. I had some writ surveys to do in Wrothgar this morning, and I took the "scenic route", killing anything that crossed my path for about 20 minutes. The result was that I looted 100 gold and suffered 95 gold in repairs; I never died, so there are no extra repair costs from death.

This is with my usual combat gear, this is the baseline without any Prosperous traits. 100g does seem pretty low, though, and I'll explain that next...

The real source of gold: Killing mobs is lucrative--just not in the form of direct gold drops.

Of course, anyone who's grinded mobs for XP or gold will tell you that there is a lot of gold to be made. But most of that is in the form of vendor goods. I'd usually come away with lots of Foul Hide worth 9g each. Lots of trash gear that's worth anywhere from 20-80g each. Ornate items that are worth hundreds of gold. These items pile up, and their sell-to-vendor value comprise the bulk of what people earn.

Most of the gold from mob grinding doesn't come in the form of dropped gold, yet the Prosperous trait only increases the amount of dropped gold, not the chance or value of dropped loot.

To illustrate my point, this is what I have across all my characters in the 4 days since I've installed the Ledger addon:

• Gold looted from kills: 1750 (from 308 corpses that had gold drops)
• Gold from sell-to-vendor: 20263
• Gold lost to vendor repairs: 9983

Now, I will caveat that this is a bit of an extreme example since most of my combat time in the past 4 days was spent in nSO, vSO, and vMA--more than any other content, the 12-man trials skew away from direct gold drops towards vendor goods, and vMA has no lootable corpses, just chests at the end of each stage to offset the repair costs, which is why the repair costs skew so high. But the point remains that the gold from vendorables make up the bulk of what I get.

Prosperous vs. Impenetrable: One of these traits was removed from the Undaunted chest, and the other was added.

The original Sturdy trait reduced the degradation that armor took. With the recent trait revamp, the original Sturdy has now been merged into the new Impenetrable trait.

Each Impenetrable piece takes 50% less damage (regardless of gear color). Each Prosperous piece increases gold earned from kills by 5.5% at blue and 7% at purple.

Remember my 20 minutes in Wrothgar this morning? I'd consider this to be a more typical scenario (unlike trials, which skews towards repairs, and group dungeons, which skews towards gold drops).

At the baseline, I gained 100g in gold from kills, and lost 95g to repairs, for a net gain of 5g (again, this is not taking into account the value of mats and vendorables).

If I ran with 7p Impenetrable gear, I'd have gained 100g in gold from kills, and lost 47g to repairs, for a net gain of 53g.

If I ran with 7p blue Prosperous, I'd have gained 139g in gold from kills, and lost 95g to repairs, for a net gain of 44g.

If I ran with 7p purple Prosperous, I'd have gained 149 in gold from kills, and lost 95g to repairs, for a net gain of 54g.

However, Prosperous is useless for anything besides mob grinding, whereas Impenetrable is the best PvP trait. If you want to grind mobs, just put on your 7p Impen PvP gear, and you'll do just as well as wearing 7p purple-quality Prosperous!

The irony is that ZOS has added Prosperous to the loot table for monster shoulders and headpieces while removing Impenetrable.

Update: More data, from grinding PvE enemies for a few hours in the Imperial City/Sewers...

More data from a classic grind, in response to certain critics who say that I didn't have enough data or that data from trials shouldn't count...

I had a romp today in the Imperial City and Imperial Sewers for a few hours, grossing around 12K stones.

Total gold from kills: 1128g
Total gold from vendorables: 8395g
Total repair bills (with 5p Impen): 971g

(Vendorables are white/green trash armor/weapons. I deconned my glpyhs and also deconned any non-ornate ancestor silk and rubedo leather pieces, and those were not counted towards the vendor total.)

1. Yes, Impen does work. During one of my repair sessions, my Impen gear had around 50g each in repair costs, while my non-Impen gear had around 100g in repair costs.
2. Impen saved me around 50% in repair costs on 5 of 7 pieces of armor. If I had no Impen gear, my repair costs would've extrapolated to around 1510g. Wearing 5p Impen saved me around 539g.
3. If I had instead worn 5p Prosperous, I would've gained 35% more gold, or 395g.
4. So, when grinding PvE mobs in the Imperial Sewers and City, 5p Impen outperformed a hypothetical 5p Prosperous by 144g. Oh, and Impen also helped keep me (mostly) alive during the few player encounters I had.
5. Of course, the big elephant in the room is that 88% of my gold gain during this session didn't come from gold drops at all--it came from all the dropped trash loot that I vendored--the value of the vendorables so greatly overshadow gold drops that even if Prosperous could outperform Impenetrable, it would still be irrelevant.

What needs to happen: Though by this point, I've given up on ZOS listening.

Right now, Prosperous is nothing more than the original Sturdy trait in a different dressing: they both increase the net value of PvE kills--one increases the positive side of the equation while the other decreases the negative side. I already said this over a month ago during the PTS feedback period, to no avail. The old Sturdy trait was so useless that ZOS scrubbed it from endgame loot tables when IC was released and later eliminated it by merging it into the much more useful Impenetrable.

Yet, here we are, with a trait that is just as useless as the original failed Sturdy trait, and I'm seeing this trait everywhere in endgame content rewards: vWGT, vICP, vSO, Undaunted chests, etc.

At this point, Prosperous needs to be completely reimagined, because even if you want to grind mobs, you're better off with a full set of Impenetrable than with a full set of Prosperous. Not that it matters anyway since direct gold drops are overshadowed by vendorables.

In the short term: Please replace Prosperous with Impenetrable in the loot tables for Undaunted shoulder/heads and for SO/MoL/ICP/WGT. People want Impenetrable for PvP. Plus, it does the same job as Prosperous.

In the long term: Reimagine Prosperous. Making it increase the chance of loot drops or the chance at better quality loot drops would make it far more useful than it is now. Direct gold from kills is just too insignificant to be worth an armor trait.

code65536

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom @ZOS_RichLambert @Wrobel At the very least, you should get this trait out of our loot tables and bring in Impenetrable.

rotaugen454

Yeah, it seems strange that I can take NO damage, yet have all my equipment degrading while grinding. Found gold is essentially worthless compared to selling loot, so this entire trait is a waste.

Asmael

Just finish it. Just remove this trait entirely, replace all existing drops with Impen until a better solution is out.

Hell, even this would be good enough... Just... Hnng... Just get rid of it. Seriously.

llSRRll

Just makes the drops on monster set stuff a little more difficult and I'm ok with that. I think the game needs useless traits makes the good ones worth more. Now that you get 100% drop rate on monster gear with gold keys, 50% with silver, and 25% with bronze I feel getting a worthless trait is not that big a deal. Im probably in the minority but I dont even use a monster set on my main character and I do just fine in PvE and PvP.

PurifedBladez

Yeah its insane that's it's even a trait anyways. Such ***

SirAndy

The simple answer is to run naked while grinding for gold. No repair costs to subtract.

ContraTempo

Awesome analysis, great write up. 100% agree.

On the humorous side, I can imagine Prosperous becoming Preposterous, with characteristics somewhere between an Infinite Improbability Drive and a Wabbajack.

Ep1kMalware

xD I've been calling it preposterous since db hit live,your post cheered my up man.

Sasyk

If they CBF changing prosperous, at the very least remove it from all loot tables and leave it as crafted only.

rotaugen454

SirAndy wrote: »

The simple answer is to run naked while grinding for gold. No repair costs to subtract.

I'm actually tempted to try this with my Sorc.

mtwiggz

Good work.

Bananko

code65536 wrote: »

Why Prosperous is Preposterous

Perhaps for the opposite reason why Preposterous is Prosperous?

NeillMcAttack

Really well laid out argument, well done. Give yourself a pat on the back from me. And thanks for the great info.

LunchBoxChewy

8 out of the 9 pieces of monster set gear currently in my inventory from the last week of daily dungeon runs is either prosperous or training...

PS4_ZeColmeia

Actually just reinforce the OP's point that the bonus decreases the more damage you take. This means by time you've done a long run you've made more likely less with prosperous vs impenetrable.

They need to up the value to meet a better play time aggregate or add a small value of amor amount and degradation rate. This way it doesn't encroach on those 2 traits but makes prosperous function properly.

Joy_Division

Just to remind everyone again, ZoS went out of their way to remove Impenetrable from loot tables and instead give us Prosperous (and training) even though more than 90% of feedback on the PTS forums indicated this was a bad idea.

PS4_ZeColmeia

Joy_Division wrote: »

Just to remind everyone again, ZoS went out of their way to remove Impenetrable from loot tables and instead give us Prosperous (and training) even though more than 90% of feedback on the PTS forums indicated this was a bad idea.

i hate when there is RNG and known crap prizes. Just because you polished a turd doesn't make it more desirable it just left you with a polished POS and a crappy shine rag for your effort.

Soleya

Each piece of Prosperous should decrease your chance of getting prosperous on pickup gear by 15%

That would be truly prosperous.

Solariken

code65536 wrote: »

In the short term: Please replace Prosperous with Impenetrable in the loot tables for Undaunted shoulder/heads and for SO/MoL/ICP/WGT. People want Impenetrable for PvP. Plus, it does the same job as Prosperous.

In the long term: Reimagine Prosperous. Making it increase the chance of loot drops or the chance at better quality loot drops would make it far more useful than it is now. Direct gold from kills is just too insignificant to be worth an armor trait.

I agree with your short term solution, but the long term solution needs to be the ability to re-trait gear via crafting.

AFrostWolf

What a good read. Very interesting. I like that they started making traits better and think this is a step in the right direction. They need to keep making the traits better and better so there is no clear best in slot trait as a blanket and make them all niche.

UltimaJoe777

Here is what they should do:

1. Change the base quality of Prosperous to grant an extra 100% Gold from looted enemies, +100% more every extra quality leading to a 500% increase at Legendary Quality. As it stands no one in their right mind would ever use Prosperous because it does literally nothing beyond giving us, AT MOST, 1 or 2 extra Gold, and 2 is a stretch.

2. Replace this trait with something else the community could use. Perhaps something relating to Damage Shields?

de_la_Dude

I like the concept of the trait, but as OP shows, its worthless in its current state. Instead of remove it lets buff it up!

It should give increased gold from all sources instead of just kills. Vendors, quest rewards, undaunted and pvp mail, chests (what am I missing?). Then it might actually be worth having in the game while still maintaining the concept of the trait.

Maybe we make an exception for stolen goods cause fencing is already profitable enough..

SirAndy

rotaugen454 wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

The simple answer is to run naked while grinding for gold. No repair costs to subtract.

I'm actually tempted to try this with my Sorc.

If you see a tiny female Bosmer who's only wearing her prison shackles running around Wrothgar or Hew's Bane, that'll be me.

Dromede

Well, i think that Prosperous might be viable if the % increase in gold looted was higher - say, double of what it's now. I can see this trait being a hit in low level zones and grinding locations. I'm even ok with it being in loot tables as long as Impenetrable also gets a comeback.

I think it's good that there's a way to play a Treasure hunter style in this game with all Treasure maps, passives to increase gold and quality of items, and awesome costume to match the concept - i'm actually considering making an RP character just for that purpose ( the one that will hit like a wet noodle while at it lol) . I just wish the armor trait was there to back it up.

Teridaxus

Great trait revamp, isn't it?

Sharpened now wins in most situations for dps, tanks are forced into sturdy and imp is still the surpreme trait in pvp.

ContraTempo

Dromede wrote: »

Well, i think that Prosperous might be viable if the % increase in gold looted was higher - say, double of what it's now. I can see this trait being a hit in low level zones and grinding locations. I'm even ok with it being in loot tables as long as Impenetrable also gets a comeback.

I think it's good that there's a way to play a Treasure hunter style in this game with all Treasure maps, passives to increase gold and quality of items, and awesome costume to match the concept - i'm actually considering making an RP character just for that purpose ( the one that will hit like a wet noodle while at it lol) . I just wish the armor trait was there to back it up.

The problem with this is that most people who are playing end-game have plenty of gold or know how to get it. It might make sense on lower level stuff but for end game it's trash. And for PVP it's trash.

MasterSpatula

Well-reasoned, well-presented, and with a delightful title. You have my applause, sir.

damarky

Sasyk wrote: »

If they CBF changing prosperous, at the very least remove it from all loot tables and leave it as crafted only.

agree with the OP and if you really want prosperous after reading OP pretty sure that would be less than 1% of players than just craft you some gear in prosperous.

I vote get rid of it from our monster drops and bring back impen. I don't want to waste my AP on buying Impen stuff.

timidobserver

My first choice would be to remove them fro the game entirely, but since they won't do that, i think they should merge Prosperous, Training, Intricate, and Weighted all into one trait.

code65536

if you agree that Prosperous is a horrible trait that should be replaced by Impenetrable in the loot tables, then please go voice those concerns in this thread.