Resource acquisition unbalanced?

MindOfTheSwarm

I feel that resources are very unbalanced in terms of their market value and usage. First let’s look at market value.

Ancestor Silk vs Rubedo

This should be obvious to most, but Ancestor Silk is far more expensive due to its increased difficulty to farm and as such should be more valuable. However, it isn’t… why?
Well, Medium Armor is now a very valid and in some cases better choice than Light Armor for Magicka characters. I myself have a Mag toon that runs Medium for the extra spell damage and Crit damage. My parses increased when I made the switch. Mag recovery took a hit but in trials and dungeons it’s a non issue thanks to shards and orbs. When I solo I just have an alt ring with infused recovery on it.

This creates a problem, as I have noticed other players switching over to Medium especially when they craft a set. As it is just easier and cheaper to do so with very little lost and so much gained. This effectively reduces Ancestor Silk value compared with its usefulness. Why bother spending so much or farming for hours when I can get the same or more value form Rubedo.

Next let’s look at usage issues:

Dreugh Wax vs any other Golding mats.

Dreugh Wax due to the ease of acquiring raw leather can be used far more liberally than the other gold mats. On the surface this is fine, but as ZoS often changes sets either through nerfing or adjusting it just makes the other gold mats too risky to use. Especially Chromium! I know many players who simply refuse to gold out jewellery in case the meta switches up. Which it invariably will.

What’s the solution?

Refusing changes in the game is not an option. The game needs to be kept fresh and changes need to happen to keep the game alive. To keep everything unchanged will indeed increase gold mat usage and their value, but at the cost of the game becoming stale.

The only other option as I see it is to increase the drop rate of gold mats and non Rubedo craft mats. At first, the market value of these items will take a hit, but in the long run the market value will increase again as more and more players use the mats and aren’t afraid to gold out gear. This will in turn get the market economy rolling again.

bmnoble

Never had an issue selling out of any of those mats within a few hours of listing on a guild trader, someone is clearly using them.

oldbobdude

Like @bmnoble, I’ve never had an issue moving any gold mats in guild store. I keep enough for my own use and sell excess. Jewelry takes longer to gold out due to time it takes to accumulate mats though. It is true though, that the difference in price is a little wacky.

PeacefulAnarchy

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

The only other option as I see it is to increase the drop rate of gold mats and non Rubedo craft mats.

You mean silk? Because rubedite and ruby ash are super cheap right now. Silk has come down quite a bit in the last 6 months to reflect its lowered use, though it's still higher than the others due to its relative rarity. Platinum, for the amount needed to craft is not expensive either, especially in the context of the ridiculous prices for platings.

For gold mats Wax is still much more expensive than Rosin or Tempering Alloy, so whatever ease of farming it has is cancelled out by its increased use. Probably because the latter are used primarily for weapons. I don't think anyone golding out leather is armor is restraining themselves from golding out heavy armor or weapons.

Jewelry upgrade prices are their own separate issue, those do limit people using them due to the grain system.

Arunei

Uh...Rubedo Hide in my experience is much harder to get than Ancestor Silk, seeing as the former only drops from certain mobs in small amounts and only from 2 traps from Clothier surveys (and obviously from deconning Medium CP 150-160 gear, writs, and hireling mails). Meanwhile Ancestor Silk nodes are everywhere.

PeacefulAnarchy

Arunei wrote: »

Uh...Rubedo Hide in my experience is much harder to get than Ancestor Silk, seeing as the former only drops from certain mobs in small amounts and only from 2 traps from Clothier surveys (and obviously from deconning Medium CP 150-160 gear, writs, and hireling mails). Meanwhile Ancestor Silk nodes are everywhere.

The boxes in the surveys give a node and a half's worth of mats, and while only some mobs drop hide they're reliable and easy to farm. Silk is everywhere, but more spread out. If you just randomly walk around the world killing things and picking nodes you'll probably end up with more silk than hide, but if you actually want to farm it you'll get much more hide in a given period of time than silk.

Also, writs use silk more than leather, so writ crafters who farm will end up with much more leather than silk.

ixthUA

Silk comes from running overland and collecting plants, leather comes from killing furry monsters in dungeons, both materials can be farmed if needed.
Price inflation is due to everyone farming (or buying?) gold and noone farming mats. A year ago when i ran around maps i would rarely see valuable mats (silk, ore), now they are everywhere, something has changed.

MindOfTheSwarm

Maybe it’s a platform issue then. Currently on PS4/5. A stack of Rubedo is about 5k. Whereas a stack of Silk is going for 20k that’s even if the store sells it.

hafgood

One of the things you are not considering is writs, there are 2 days of silk writs per day of rubedo, those doing writs on multiple characters have a silk deficit and have to buy silk, they never have a rubedo deficit as what they get back from writs and dungeon drops more than covers what they need.

They have to either farm or buy silk, most of those that I know who do multiple writs prefer to buy as the writs themselves take so much time they don't want to then be spending the rest of their playing time gathering silk

MindOfTheSwarm

Interesting feedback. I never bother with writs and simply sell them. I got an Epic quality jewellery writ that I want to sell but finding it hard. Never mind the stack of witch festival writs I’ve got.

Necrotech_Master

leather is much much easier to obtain, basically just farming an area with things that drop it (most animal type enemies do, even clannfears, so even some dungeons during 1 run can net 50ish unrefined leather for doing nothing other than running the dungeon)

so i can easily get leather without trying where as for silk you have to actually farm material nodes or decon light armor drops

most of the reason jewelry tempers are insanely priced is because they are the only tempers in the game that have "unrefined" versions

so for jewelry, most things even decon only give you 1 grain, and you need 10 grains for plate
every other mat just gives you the mat directly such as dreugh wax

i also see dreugh wax as more expensive because you need that to upgrade both med and light armor (if you have 7 pc of med or light, that is 56 dreugh wax for a full rebuild), blacksmithing tempers are usually used mostly for melee weapons and heavy armor, and woodworking is ONLY used for shields and ranged weapons

tmbrinks

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Interesting feedback. I never bother with writs and simply sell them. I got an Epic quality jewellery writ that I want to sell but finding it hard. Never mind the stack of witch festival writs I’ve got.

They're not talking about master writs.

They're talking about the daily writs. Which are the easiest way to get a boat load of gold improvement materials. But they run at a silk deficit.

As far as the argument of "medium being viable on mag toons" while I don't disagree, it has pretty much nothing to do with the market of the materials (other than Wax)... since players almost universally run dropped sets rather than crafted, so they aren't using those materials at all.

I remember when ancestor silk/rubedo/rubedite/etc ONLY dropped in Wrothgar, or from the deconstruction of gear drops from IC, and you got 1 piece back per piece of gear. Boy have we come a long way. (You can still buy those T10 mats with telvar in IC... not that they're a good deal... but you can )

Necrotech_Master

tmbrinks wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Interesting feedback. I never bother with writs and simply sell them. I got an Epic quality jewellery writ that I want to sell but finding it hard. Never mind the stack of witch festival writs I’ve got.

They're not talking about master writs.

They're talking about the daily writs. Which are the easiest way to get a boat load of gold improvement materials. But they run at a silk deficit.

As far as the argument of "medium being viable on mag toons" while I don't disagree, it has pretty much nothing to do with the market of the materials (other than Wax)... since players almost universally run dropped sets rather than crafted, so they aren't using those materials at all.

I remember when ancestor silk/rubedo/rubedite/etc ONLY dropped in Wrothgar, or from the deconstruction of gear drops from IC, and you got 1 piece back per piece of gear. Boy have we come a long way. (You can still buy those T10 mats with telvar in IC... not that they're a good deal... but you can )

going along with this, i personally use a ton of reconstructed gear now (my overall gear collection is 73%, so most reconstructions are not that expensive), so im only using tempers and transmutes

i remember those days when a single ruby ingot was 300g each (and the deal to buy them with tel var WAS at the time comparative with the effort to get them)