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Can we do something about refining points?
frishter
Member Posts: 3,522 Arc User
Quite frankly, the rp system sucks. It seems to me that you have cracked down on bots, which took long enough is great since they profited from automated gaming which isn't exactly fair to the developers. However they were the ones that sold whole stacks of refinement items and actually sold them for a somewhat decent amount of price depending on demand and took a lot of work away since they were sold as stacks.
Without those botters here are some ways to level up artifacts:
* Buy flawless sapphires (gems don't crit) from bazaar, 30k each which will give you the low cost of 23,085,810 ad per artifact to legendary
* Acquire 1026 (-crit chance) greater marks of stability/power/union. Considering they're usually sold singularly on the AH that's not really achievable and to farm them will take 3 years or so due to a 1 per day cap unless you got lair keys which is a waste of resources. Also that's per artifact again.
* Blood rubies from the zen market, 25.6509 blood ruby packs for 51,302z so $500 per artifact or 25,650,000 at 500ad/z so worse than the flawless sapphire price even in the triple pack.
There are other gem stones, but bots were the only ones to actually give us the supply to match the top end players needs, still not effective for the ones who don't earn as much though. If everyone used them for rp because they had to resort to do that, the supply would dry up fast.
Now we will realise that we have space for 3 artifacts and new artifacts appear to keep coming out so people may want a new one. Plus people have multiple toons. The fact bots existed allowed us to ignore the underlying problem of a bad system that makes it hard to get rp. Auctions sell single or small stacked items, rp was only affordable to the minority because of botting boosting supply. Also the fact that you can only slot 5 items at a time is also a frustrating and limiting way of refining along with removing pres wards from the slot on a failed upgrade instead of keeping a stack in. Honestly the only thing that made the new system better was the removed ad costs for removing enchantments and the reduced coal ward requirement for weapon/armour enchantments. Now that coal wards cost 5 times the amount, we're left with a system that is worse in practically every way to the old system. The old system was simpler, had easier entry requirements for weapon/armour enchants and didn't need space taken up with all these refinement items even though inventory space was meant to be improved due to the new system. Though I am kind of a hoarder.
Basically we need a cost effective solution that doesn't require the hassle of buying tonnes of single stacked items from the AH whether it be by reducing flawless sapphire prices or give new farming opportunities. The drop rates of black ice tank 5s form the skirmish and HEs was a good first step, but something needs to happen before it becomes a problem and the gap between older geared and newer players widens.
One suggestion: Add a a new refinement item that gives a bonus when used on weapon/armour enchants (most viable for expensive ones such as plaguefire that has no shards and barkshield which is pretty expensive per shard) and another for artifacts and other enchantments (maybe most notably for bonding runestones, fey blessing, tenebrous etc, but most importantly the artifacts). These items can be acquired from different game modes for example:
* At the end of a skirmish you get a refinement item, or a chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of a t1 dungeon you get a refinement item, or a chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of a t2 dungeon you get multiple refinement items, or a higher chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of an eligible foundry you get an rp item (or introduce foundry tokens.
* You can exchange glory for a choice of rp items (this can be bop to reduce botting, the other boe to allow others to buy from each other and focus on what they want.
That way you have different options to earn them. Alternatively you could also increase the drop rate of existing gems maybe giving a chance to drop the higher ones too.
Without those botters here are some ways to level up artifacts:
* Buy flawless sapphires (gems don't crit) from bazaar, 30k each which will give you the low cost of 23,085,810 ad per artifact to legendary
* Acquire 1026 (-crit chance) greater marks of stability/power/union. Considering they're usually sold singularly on the AH that's not really achievable and to farm them will take 3 years or so due to a 1 per day cap unless you got lair keys which is a waste of resources. Also that's per artifact again.
* Blood rubies from the zen market, 25.6509 blood ruby packs for 51,302z so $500 per artifact or 25,650,000 at 500ad/z so worse than the flawless sapphire price even in the triple pack.
There are other gem stones, but bots were the only ones to actually give us the supply to match the top end players needs, still not effective for the ones who don't earn as much though. If everyone used them for rp because they had to resort to do that, the supply would dry up fast.
Now we will realise that we have space for 3 artifacts and new artifacts appear to keep coming out so people may want a new one. Plus people have multiple toons. The fact bots existed allowed us to ignore the underlying problem of a bad system that makes it hard to get rp. Auctions sell single or small stacked items, rp was only affordable to the minority because of botting boosting supply. Also the fact that you can only slot 5 items at a time is also a frustrating and limiting way of refining along with removing pres wards from the slot on a failed upgrade instead of keeping a stack in. Honestly the only thing that made the new system better was the removed ad costs for removing enchantments and the reduced coal ward requirement for weapon/armour enchantments. Now that coal wards cost 5 times the amount, we're left with a system that is worse in practically every way to the old system. The old system was simpler, had easier entry requirements for weapon/armour enchants and didn't need space taken up with all these refinement items even though inventory space was meant to be improved due to the new system. Though I am kind of a hoarder.
Basically we need a cost effective solution that doesn't require the hassle of buying tonnes of single stacked items from the AH whether it be by reducing flawless sapphire prices or give new farming opportunities. The drop rates of black ice tank 5s form the skirmish and HEs was a good first step, but something needs to happen before it becomes a problem and the gap between older geared and newer players widens.
One suggestion: Add a a new refinement item that gives a bonus when used on weapon/armour enchants (most viable for expensive ones such as plaguefire that has no shards and barkshield which is pretty expensive per shard) and another for artifacts and other enchantments (maybe most notably for bonding runestones, fey blessing, tenebrous etc, but most importantly the artifacts). These items can be acquired from different game modes for example:
* At the end of a skirmish you get a refinement item, or a chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of a t1 dungeon you get a refinement item, or a chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of a t2 dungeon you get multiple refinement items, or a higher chance depending how much much it grants you
* At the end of an eligible foundry you get an rp item (or introduce foundry tokens.
* You can exchange glory for a choice of rp items (this can be bop to reduce botting, the other boe to allow others to buy from each other and focus on what they want.
That way you have different options to earn them. Alternatively you could also increase the drop rate of existing gems maybe giving a chance to drop the higher ones too.
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You're missing the point. The system was bad, but the bots made the system work. Players set prices due to availability and desirability. The bots give us a lot of supply and bots generally sold things in stacks as opposed to players that sell things individually or in small stacks. Obviously the zen price is meant to be there as an option to tempt you to do, but the price is way out of whack, if you don't see that, then I don't know what to say... Also I'm not sure players have enough supply which is kind of an issue.
Likewise noone gave a **** about the coal ward zen pricing because it wasn't relevant or worth considering. Likewise the rp issues weren't worth considering as bots provided a way to make the system easier and at times more affordable, though less so after mod 3. If you want to farm it, you're not going to compete against the top pvpers for quite some time if ever. If you buy it, then you have to resort to horrible prices and/or buying an insane amount of single stacked items on the ah which if you've ever bought multiple items from the ah, is HORRIBLE. As for profession hour, they nerfed the nodes already which was already bad. Lots of people dont loot nodes for a reason you know, it's just not worth the time. I've actually been stubborn and looted loads of nodes, and agree that it's not worth the time for just some rank 3s...
You DO know that you can put things other than Refining Stones into those things, right?
ANY Rune/Enchant can go into an Artifact.
For instance, all of those stacks of Black Ice enchants that you build up while doing Icewind Dale.
Or all of those assorted ones that come from the Leadership Profession Chests.
Or the ones that drop from the Tymora's Enchant or the Fay Blessing Enchant.
They all add up.
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Of course I do. There were plenty of stacks of rank 5s up all of the time. They ranged from as low as 45k pre mod 3 or something for a stack and went to 130-150k the other week upto over 200k with the new module arrival. Now we don't have that option of buying stacks so we have to buy items individually. The bots gave the game a huge supply and without that supply it has a huge effective on the game. As for tymoras enchantment, I don't find that worth it, and the fey blessing isn't that special either, especially for classes such as DCs and GFs who don't often get the last hit in dungeons and skirmishes. I event said the rank 5s in icewind was a good start. When the bots were around, it could still cost 5m AD to refine an artifact to legendary, which I find to be a high but fair amount. I'm really not sure how anyone can miss the blatant insane costs or the effort needed to buy items individually which is a pain on the ah, and would also drain the whole supply if people resorted to it. Of course we shouldn't be buying from bots, but you're ignoring the point that they give us the ability to get rp at a decent rate which you'd need to either earn via in game play or by paying. It wasn't too high. Cryptic needs to focus on providing rp for a similar amount of work. Ie something actually achievable within the games lifetime.
Basically I'm trying to write this thread early before people actually realise how much of a problem it is.
Well I'd agree it is indeed a hassle and I would hope that if their intention is to truly provide a more efficient one, they'd let us stack tons of enchants and use all of them as refining points in one click.
However, I think Cryptic also puts a premium on that
And like the Coalward, it's likely Cryptic wants to make their refine stuff at the Bazaar and ZEN-store a viable option.
Let's assume there will be zero bot supply. If you wanted to upgrade your artifact asap, you'd have to buy refinement points directly or off various lockboxes. That's basically pay to accelerate and matches many other areas of the game.
I'm not sure a 1:6 RP:AD is a reasonable rate, but I could live with it if there was a chance to actually grind your way to a legendary. And that's the thing: It really takes too much time. There have to be better ways of farming RPs or acquire RPs while playing the game.
Yeah that's not true.
These are valid points indeed. Let me just add that getting artifacts to purple is easy, the fun begins at LVL61 when you invested 300k RPs and still have 3.5M to go. More than ten times as much.
It's a neverending debate how much time is appropriate to get a character from zero to BiS, but this game is so grind-intensive that I already thought Cryptic might have envisioned only very few character to actually reach full R10 and Legendary status. Without botting and several exploits/dupes we might be talking about 4M per R8, not R10.
I'm really no MMO veteran so I can't say how other titles handle that BiS status. Is it something every character eventually achieves or limited to these very active and/or big spenders? But again, looking at everything, this game seems to have never been designed to reach BiS on multiple chars in the first year.
I agree that part of the problem is that you could get a Legendary for what? 2-3M before Mod3? Telling those that they might have to pay 23M in the future of course is hard to swallow, but if that's what the devs wanted all along one would maybe have to argue a different question.
Yep, because the players raised the Coalward to 500k all by themselves and Cryptic played no part, right? Don't be naive, they work behind the scenes / look at their data all the time to make adjustments to markets (that said: it's not exclusively negative). There is absolutely no explanation needed because it obvious and basic.
That was one of the points, another part of the hassle is instead of buying a single transaction of a stack of 99 rank 5s, I'd need to buy 99 single rank 5 enchants since people don't often sell in stacks. The old system was simple, the new system is an inconvenient mess.
The old system had a similar cost for rank 10s and was greatly beneficial to weapon and armour enchants since there was a reduced number of coal wards required. Since coal wards were made bop, the savings are vastly reduced, yet make the entry level even harder to get into. Basically at this point, I'd rather have the whole old system back with 100k wards but keep the gold remove cost. 5m per artifact is an extremely high price, but is achievable with a lot of grinding. Anything above that is just over the top and no new player will ever be able to compete against the top pvp guilds who already took advantage of the botters. Also it's not that I'm lazy, getting stacks of rank 5s made the system more copeable. It still had the flaw of having to move the enchantments in 20 times per stack which is a bad mechanic, but less of a hassle than what it is without the botters.
If we didn't have the bots then sure the levelling field wouldn't be so uneven except that it would still take a ridiculous amount of time to achieve the top rank. Also something you may not be aware is that getting level 100 requires a huge spike of rp. You can get 12 artifacts to epic before getting just 1 to legendary. Of course the ones who can justify an insane cost (lord knows why when it costs $1.5k for 3 legendaries when using the zen store) don't need to worry about the grind. And so it should be possible to reach that point through grinding so that the game isn't counted as pay2play (which I hope people won't start going into too much and get this thread closed). Also when buying stacks of enchants, you still had to work hard to earn the ad, hence the 5m (give or take) cost of upgrading each artifact. However it should be possible to buy it from a merchant or other players for that amount. However real people just can not match the supply the bots managed and so that's why something needs to be done to make it possible. I actually made a suggestion that would still require grinding that gave you rp points like you do shards from a chest.
Getting to l60 isn't the hard part, getting to 99/100 is, yet that's still a big difference in stats that make a huge difference in pvp where balance is key.
While I agree that the extra stats from artifacts have allowed dungeons to be easier and allowed gwfs and hrs to scale higher with gear causing extra issues that may otherwise not exist to the same extent, there'd still be the same issue of lack of content for older players. They're not going to do vt/mc because of bad drop rates and bop on half or most of the stuff that does drop. That leads with the same old t2s and CN. The only difference is that people would probably get bored earlier since they have no goal to reach towards. 20k GS is very hard to achieve though, GF no longer have a feat to buff their gs, GWF are possibly the only one (that I can think of) to get that high and that requires a lot of maxing out possibly including epic companions with added stats for the active bonus.
Feeding the bots cash is obviously a bad thing, but they still provided something the game didn't deliver and now that void needs to be filled if they want the game to remain healthy. Not sure too many people will be happy with spending any more money than they already had to, and they were the big spenders.
Coalescent wards? I work my free Zen with the surveys, slowly open lockboxes for the tarmalune bars, and then get coal wards that way.
Loot skill nodes during the Professions event. It's good to run something like Dread Ring daily dungeons for it, or the Sharandar. If you're a lowbie try the Grey Wolf Den.
Run through Icewind or Dwarven Valley on the dallies (don't worry about the heroics so much), and that gives you plenty of enchants.
If you're nice and help others kill monsters more can drop too. Work together.
ETC ETC ETC...
Really it's not that hard to refine things if you put in some casual effort.
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But the increase from epic to legendary on the blood crystal raven skull is 75 Recovery, 150 stamina regain, 20% temp hp, and 20 secs on the cd. This means that it's a very small return on the investment of the rp. That means it can pretty much be done last. My characters are all kinds of screwed right now so I can't link one, but before I took a break I had put 5 artifacts to purple easily by farming with a fey blessing. It took some time and some farming but it was easily do able, just put the tv on and watched tv while I slaughtered weak mobs. This is the kind of thing mmo's are built on.
Once I get my characters straight I'll be back to that, slowly building them to legendary. It's a time sink, that's all. Buying your rp just means that you are bypassing the time sink with a currency sink. Personally I dislike that the currency option is there at all but it's what a lot of the f2p model is built on.
From the ah you still have the time sink except you were exchanging currency for your time in exchange for rp that other people gained from their time. As is was, bots gave a passable time/rp rate that most people still wouldn't expect to get legendaries. Now that rate is expected to go up since there is just not enough supply.
Personally I'm conflicted whether I want to stay. On the plus side they've appeared to deal with botters and ad sellers, dealing with exploits. Things I don't really care for, but set an example. On the minus side they've made coal wards and rp harder to obtain and forced us into repeating the same old content with new content being forced and repetitive. In some cases they seem to move forward, in others they seem to move back. Which is irritating when the game has potential. Anyway I guess that's off topic anyway so I'll l eave it at that...
I guess if you ever want to have anything over rank 8, leg artifacts or perfects, you better act very fast, because that ship seems to have already sailed...
Given how not incredibly useful most armor and weapon enchants are (soulforge and vorpal really being the only constant in usefulness) you are almost better ignoring these altogether, make a lesser and be done with it. Most good players don't really need these, in fact good players compete pretty OK against people with high end enchants. Lots of people just have these to make up for lack of or are too lazy to play and just want to button mash. Granted those that have them and are good players, well just accept defeat and move on.
To keep on track though, I can't say I disagree, the refining system is a bit of a pain, since unless you spend money odds are you are feeding rank 3 and 4 enchants into something and once you hit Rank 8 and higher it takes and absurd amount of time to fill them up to the point of upgrading. I think there can be a better way but for now it is what it is.
I'd personally like to the weapon and armor enchants just flat go away and be replaced with another slot for other enchantments, they seem more useful than armor/weapon ones overall. Admittedly the vorpal is nice on crits if you have a high crit toon.
Most of what I have been doing is since IWD came out i've been making Rank 8 black ice enchants which aren't all that bad really. Putting them in pretty much ever slot I have, doesn't totally make up for loss of stats from switching to black ice gear but it seems to make up for it some. Overall my CW has a pretty good survival rate in black ice gear with rank 8 black ice enchants. They drop like candy in IWD so its really easy to make higher end enchants if you have the AD to get the marks of potency.
In the meantime IWD is a great way to get a ton of refining for artifacts and as someone else posted the best RP/AD out there still is the lesser fay blessing from sharrandar they are 20k for 25k in refining points. pretty **** hard to beat. You can use them on other things as well but i think the refining is only 12k if put into something other than an artifact or other fay blessing.
They stopped the exploit that allowed cheaters to pull up the old refinement window and use that to refine using a dev command instead of having to use the new RP system , that's probably where most of the stacks of rank 5's with zero RP left over were coming from , no idea if they did anything to bots too.
I don't believe the bots are gone. As becks mentioned, the old refining window is gone. This means Rank 4 stacks will be the new Rank 5 stacks. That means refining just got waaaay more tedious.
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But.................
that would mean that the new system is far worse for players than the old system, and Cryptic made a huge mistake.......
The thing about rank 4s is that you need 3 of them to fine 1 to be able to upgrade and then you need 2 500 AD marks to upgrade it so basically the old way had the same r4 requirements minus the marks. Overall I think the cost from refining from rank 4-10 was about the same as how it used to since you no longer need 4 rank 9s to make a rank 10. The real benefit was that you needed a lot less coal wards for armour and weapon enchantments. With coal ward costing 5 times as much, it's now much more expensive to make a lesser and a small amount is still saved when making a perfect, but it's not really worth all of the negatives imo. The new system was supposedly to make more people get weapon/armour enchants, but my guess is that they've ended up pushing a lot of people away. The 2 things adding convenience to upgrading enchantments is upgrading them whilst slotted and removing enchants for a small gold cost.
Instead of streamlining it they made it more of a hassle. Kind of the opposite of what you should aim for when designing a new system.
My first greater Plaguefire, I started with a normal I had fused under the old system and two lessers. All my peridots and pearls, etc. got consolidated into this. Took a while, but it was doable. I guess the trick for me is bulk. I have 11 characters, all of whom are to some degree enchanted and geared. I was running 3 Dread lairs per weekend per character for a while, and all those purple gauntlet peridots everyone complained about really do add up, plus all their leadership boxes, plus their weekly coffer.
There was one day when peridots were so cheap to buy that even tightfisted me decided to go for it and finish off a perfect Bronzewood and make a second greater Plaguefire too. So yes, weeks and months of farming pre-empted by the investment of several 100k ADs.
This was before the Mod 3 RP inflation from the new artifacts though. Buying RP was already more expensive than I was prepared to pay when Mod 3 hit. I'll quite miss the cheap rank 7s though... loved those.
I'm about a 6th of the way to a perfect Bilethorn using the consolidation method, though I did also feed this project with shards when I was able to get them cheaply. Still, the greater I'm filling has been 100% refining stones. It's much slower since I've not been doing Dread lairs at all, but if I wanted more RP I could pick it up again. It would be good for my artifacts too.
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You get 1 peridot per dread dungeon right? Say it takes an hour on your 11 toons, thats 11 perdiots. Alternatively you could run CN split runs 1 or 2 times and get an entire stack of 99 depending on what drops and peridot prices. The dread dungeon is just not rewarding and that's why I completely dropped farming it a long time ago. You shouldn't be forced to run 11 toons for minimal reward. I've been playing this game to have fun and reach achievable goals, but instead it feels like a chore with them constantly reducing rewards by decreasing supply which was only supplied by exploiters, making everything bop, and releasing new forced and repetitive content that you're over and done with and never want to do it again. Games are meant to get better as time passes, but for every step forward, I see more steps back.
For bilethorn, although sometimes the shards can be somewhat expensive, as long as they're less than 4k, they're probably worth using since thats the 1ad/rp mark. Peridots at 100k a stack was 2ad/rp and can't crit. That's why peridots should've only been used on the more expensive items such as plague fire. The thing about the old system is that you didn't need to farm at all to make a greater plague fire. You just got all the lessers and combined them with your cheap 100k or free coal wards. Though on the plus side you only need 3 coals now for a gpf. Even though the 5 you needed before only costed 500k compared to 1.5m for 3...
I personally have:
1 g terror fully refined
1 g holy avenger fully refined (used on an outdated gwf now just to have something)
2 gpf
1 g bilethorn full refined (plus another that I've sort of been trying to sell that I got in a trade, 1 emperor beetle I got for 1m AD for a g bile and cockatrice
1 perfect vorpal
several lesser soulforges (plus a normal?)
Also 3 epic artifacts (not near the max level) on my main while a lot of blues on my other toons coz I'm fairly cheap as well as rank 7 enchants with the odd rank 8.
But that was when I bought 20 or 30 coal wards for 100k at the time before mod 2 and bought stacks of peridots when it was feasible, and I farmed so so much, along with working my leadership a lot. What I achieved just isn't practical for most players and they won't have the opportunity to get a hell of a lot of wards for as cheap as I managed to. I did also earn enough so that I could actually max out 1 or 2 characters, but like I said, most players wouldn't be able to get that opportunity And even with the AD the system is still messy.
I was actually pumped for mod 4 being glad that the short term playtime of mod 3 didn't matter, but it's kind of getting hard to be motivated to keep playing. I know for sure that if I wasn't a beta player or have so many hours played early, then I wouldn't have kept at this game.
I agree that buying RP was more efficient if you had the AD resources to do so. But I also suspect that it wasn't intended for people to be rocking the high-level enchants and artifacts that they are so quickly. They seem to be things that were intended to be built up over years of play, not under a year, or in no time flat if you had the bankroll.
The problem is, since there are people that do already have all that stuff, because they were able to capitalize on... well, everything... making it less accessible for newer players really does make their gear situation look hopeless, when they are comparing themselves to people who already have all the stuff, and are at risk of being excluded from PvE content for being undergeared (by player standards, not game requirements) while at the same time get thrown into PvP content against the overgeared. It's an ugly imbalance.
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Either way, upgrading lesser/normal regular enchantments was always incredibly messed up under the new system. Kind of surprising exactly how inefficient it is.