Cost balance between low and high lv items.

[searcher15]

I didn't see a thread dedicated to balance between low and high end of the ML scale. Please point me to relevant discussion, if one exists.

There is a huge discrepancy in power between ML 1 and ML 34 items, but nearly no difference in costs whatsoever.

Example - Int item:
Int shard - 100 essences, 15 ceramic bowls, 5 house sealed letters.
ML 1 shard - 10 essences
ML 34 shard - 340 essences.
Unbound ML 34 shard - 780 essences.

Lv 1: item of int +1, cost 110 essences, 15 ceramic bowls, 5 house sealed letters. Required craft lv 100.
Lv 30 (34): item of int +15, cost 440 essences, 15 ceramic bowls, 5 house sealed letters. Required craft lv 340 OR buy unbound shard for 340 more essences and get it done at craft lv 100.

The only difference between an Lv 1 item and Lv 34 item is a 330 essences and 240 craft levels (or just 770 essences if we get unbound shard).
This may seem alot, but compared with amount of collectibles needed, it's but a fraction of the price. It's even less, if we assume all 3 shards have been filled in.
If we compare the shards only, we can see that lv 1 character paid the same price as lv 30 character, but got item that's 15 times weaker! Add to that fact, that new lv 1 player has but a fraction of the resources that top level
has, and the cost becomes ridiculous.

Comparing to the old system:
Int +1 shard - 2 essences, required craft lv 13.
Int +6 shard - 64 essences, 3 chipped bone talismans. Required craft lv 100.
Int +15 shard - does not exist, but I estimate the cost to be ~1k greater essences + some collectibles + purified eberron shards. Required craft lv way above 150 I guess.

We can easily see, that for lowest level players, the price has increased by the factor of 100(!).


The system was designed to allow easy scaling of effects - that works OK, but there's nearly complete lack of cost scaling. To make it viable to lower level players (or viable below top level at all imo), all shards cost should scale appropriately to player level. ML shards are supposed to provide some kind of cost scaling, but their price is too small compared to effect shards to really matter. And ML shards are main source of xp for levelling, so if you increase their cost significantly, we won't be able to level at all.
Alternativelly, the effect shards could see a greatly reduced cost, to make them possible to be crafted in bigger amounts. It will still not solve the problem with having to pay same price for +1 and +15 to stat, but at least make it less painful.

Right now the price is "OK" for crafting lv 34 items, and ridiculous for items below 20.

[KanzidStonebreath]

Totally agreed, this here is the biggest issue I've seen with the system.

[Tebaco]

Totally agreed, this here is the biggest issue I've seen with the system.

Agree and I already wrote some posts about it. Also I thought how to solve it. And as I wrote earlier that they should introduce some kind of new shard (weaker and cheaper version for lvl <14), now I think that it is not happy solution.
They can stay just with same kind shard that is curently in lamania game but:
Scale number of shards needed for each level of item.

So recipe for lvl 1-3 item should need 1 shard
for lvl 4-6 - 2 shards
for lvl 7-9 - 3 shards

etc.
But collectables cost for such shard must be reduced..

[rikkitikkitarvi]

Agree and I already wrote some posts about it. Also I thought how to solve it. And as I wrote earlier that they should introduce some kind of new shard (weaker and cheaper version for lvl <14), now I think that it is not happy solution.
They can stay just with same kind shard that is curently in lamania game but:
Scale number of shards needed for each level of item.

So recipe for lvl 1-3 item should need 1 shard
for lvl 4-6 - 2 shards
for lvl 7-9 - 3 shards

etc.
But collectables cost for such shard must be reduced..

I really like this. I would go each shard costs 3/1 collectible (So reducing the overall cost by 5)

Then have the number of shards required go up based on level.

Lvl 1-6 =1 shard
Lvl 7-12 =2 shards
Lvl 13-18 =3 shards
Lvl 19-24 =4 shards
Lvl 24+ =5 shards

This would allow lower lvl shards to be crafted at a much more manageable collectible ratio.

[Axeyu]

The simplest solution would be to just make normal shards only scale up to level 20 and add epic shards that scale from 20-30.
That would also solve the problem of high end loot (collectibles for lvl 34 gear) dropping in low level content that a level 20+ character should have absolutely no incentive to run due to how trivial it is by making sure that the epic shards use the higher tier collectibles.
So one fairly simple change to solve the two biggest issues with the new system.