Companion Gear Trade-In Vendors

jmiller84 · October 2019

I've chatted about this with my guildies for the better part of 4 years, pretty much since Mod 8 Underdark was released, the need for trade-in vendors to get items you're grinding for but RNG has prevented you from getting. The worst case of this was Fane of the Night Serpent to try and obtain a Ring of the Shadowstalker +4/+5. It was incredibly frustrating going in there week after week with 5 toons to only come away with +1's and +2's. Granted eventually I did get a +5, but took the better of a year or more. What would've been better for everyone involved was another way to get the +5. Given that everything +3 and above was BtA, the best way to go about this would been something similar to the old refining system of doubling up to go to the next rank. Something like:

5x +1 = +2
5x +2 = +3
5x +3 = +4
5x +4 = +5

That'd have been easy enough since the loot table for Fane of the Night Serpent was only 5 items, but what to do about the new plethora of companion equipment? There are more than 200 pieces of new companion gear by my count, possibly close to 300, and the 990/1010 items are gated behind Warden Expeditions (2 available every other day) and Zok boxes. There should be a Trade-In Vendor to be able to get the pieces you're trying to get. This would be my suggestion:

5 pieces of same IL companion equipment gives you a Companion Equipment Choice Box of the same IL.

This would give people an incentive to continue running Expeditions and continue farming Resonance because they know they're making progress towards the item(s) they desire. So many players have given up running Expeditions because everything is RNG-based and there's not a massive difference between IL 990 rare companion equipment and IL 990/1010 epic companion gear. They get a piece they can use and occasionally do Expeditions just to test their luck, but they don't put it as a priority any longer because they've got a piece or pieces that get the job done.

I'd do the same with Shirt/Pants they drop from Fragment Expeditions. Or maybe even better yet, much like when unlocking Tower of the Mad Mage and getting a choice of 2x Offensive/Defensive companion equipment, give a box for completing 4x FE that gives you a random piece of 1010 IL companion equipment. At least then people know every 12 days they're guaranteed a piece of 1010 companion equipment, which means there's a reason to continue doing Stardock dailies for awhile.

It's all about a light at the end of the tunnel, knowing that the time and effort you put in is actually going towards something you need and not just a waste of time Rejuvenation Potion and a 900th Goristro vanity pet.

Unknown · October 2019

This content has been removed.

sagakaiyume · April 2020

Well, since everyone has been at home and they've been a bit more generous as of late, something like this may be willing to get another look at. I've personally spent the last 8 months looking for a single companion piece with absolutely no luck. This one piece means the difference of having my pally healer capped at both crit avoid and crit strike versus over capped on crit avoid and low on crit strike. Just within the same guild I'm in, there are at least 2 others who are looking for that piece that I know of.

Some type of exchange or quest reward for a double stat would really be appreciated, I've gotten a dozen 12k defense pieces, 8 12k combat adv pieces and so forth. RNG to find one item should not take me 8 months...and counting.

drago · April 2020

After more than 150 Expeditions I own now around 50% in 1010 quality. Implement Trade-In have my full support. The Gear is to important and especially as Tank you need to cap more stats. Your RNG luck decides if you are able to do The Infernal Citadel or not. For example if you lack 20K Crit Avoidance - good luck. Maybe after another 100 ME's. Lately they avoided such mistakes.
Lionsguard Armor -> Farm
Lionheart Weapons -> Farm
It's hard - If you don't have them yet, you can plan to have them. It motivates. RNG drops belongs in my opinion to the Auction house. I remembering a friend - he quits - want 12k Crit as healer. I dropped them twice, don't need it. He dropped Crit Avoidance, don't need it. Maybe remove Account Bound and the problem should be solved.

darkstarrfoff · April 2020

drago#3250 said:
After more than 150 Expeditions I own now around 50% in 1010 quality. Implement Trade-In have my full support. The Gear is to important and especially as Tank you need to cap more stats. Your RNG luck decides if you are able to do The Infernal Citadel or not. For example if you lack 20K Crit Avoidance - good luck. Maybe after another 100 ME's. Lately they avoided such mistakes.
Lionsguard Armor -> Farm
Lionheart Weapons -> Farm
It's hard - If you don't have them yet, you can plan to have them. It motivates. RNG drops belongs in my opinion to the Auction house. I remembering a friend - he quits - want 12k Crit as healer. I dropped them twice, don't need it. He dropped Crit Avoidance, don't need it. Maybe remove Account Bound and the problem should be solved.

Exactly, this is the part that's frustrating and why I refuse to grind MEs. It's all RNG with no hope of eventually getting what you want/need except by pure chance.

motu999 · April 2020

It would be awesome, if old gear could be made useful again - by exchanging it for new and better gear.
After all, this gear is still in the loottables of the "old" dungeons and instances, those most of us happen to run every day after day after day ... in the random queues.

However, I would prefer that such an exchange system be as simple as possible and as easy to implement as possible.
I would therefore suggest something similar, along the lines:

- re-introduce a modified version of salvage,
- that lets us salvage old gear for "legacy gear tokens",
- that can be exchanged for (better) gear at a "legacy gear vendor"

This should be rather easy to implement, because the code for salvaging (for AD, not tokens) is - very likely - still around.
One only needs to change the part of the code, that hands out AD, so that it hands out "legacy gear tokens".
Then you need to make a "legacy gear vendor", that combines the gear vendors of all but the most recent mod into a "legacy gear vendor".
The vendor code is already there, so this should be quite straight forward to implement.
In order to prevent abuse, all items bought from the vendor could be made bound-to-account
Same for the tokens (could also be bound-to-character).

For me, getting tokens for outdated gear and the option to buy better gear (not the best gear, but up to gear of the last mod) would greatly alleviate the frustration of getting junk from the chests in practically every random queue I run.

Companion Gear Trade-In Vendors

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