Sausaletus Rex

If you're keeping up on things (and it shouldn't be too hard, it's not like we've got 50 new threads a day or anything) you'll know that Spooky's finished his little armor data-mining project. He's collected the values and costs of each and every craftable piece of armor currently in game. And the results point out some things I've long suspected.

At the moment Spooky's results are private (I'm trying to get him to post them but we're understandably worried about such content being swiped before we can publish it and, I think, still figuring out just how to put the data up as something other than a block of text.) but you can get a rough idea of things by looking at KT's just updated listing of all the lv20 armor here. There are other armor guides but none of them are as up-to-date.

Anyhow, the problem is basically this : cost versus benefit.

You can easily figure out the actual cost of a piece of armor because all you need are crafting materials, gold, and the required level to make one. Gold is a set price, of course, the level is a set amount of xp, and the crafting materials can all be traded - bought or sold, in so many words - so you can fix a price to them as well. If it costs you 2 Iron and 2 gold to make a lv5 helmet and it takes 2 gold to buy an ingot of Iron, then anyone who's leveled to 5 just needs 6 gold to make a helmet. Enough to buy, sell, or trade to get exactly what they need, in so many words. Dedicated traders are concerned with profit, but the casual trader only wants fair value, and given the ceiling and floor provided by automated resource traders there's a clear one for most crafting items and a passable guess at that which can't be bought at an NPC. If you can walk into a deal with a set resource and walk away with the apparent value, that's good enough for our purposes here. If you can buy that Iron for 2 gold a piece then you can trade it for at least an item or amount worth 2 gold, basically, and you've neither gained or lost on the deal just transfered your assets.

So, with that as a given, that equivalent exchanges are possible, knowing the crafting cost of an item can let you figure out the relative values. Those values obviously shift, responding to the market, if a lot of people buy up Iron the price will rise and gear crafted from iron becomes more valuable. So armor costs aren't "fixed", not in the absolute sense even though the merchant's asking price is static because two people starting with an infinite pile of gold and an empty inventory will have different results if they try to craft the same piece at different times. And it's arguable that we haven't seen a stable and functioning ecconomy and the realistic pricing of crafting materials has yet to be seen. However, the general idea of just how much things will cost shouldn't fluxtuate too much, just the specifics. You can't push the price of things like Iron much lower than what they're at now, for example. It's cheap and abundant. And it's the price of iron that determines things like the price of steel and the price of most Warrior armor.

I need to check my figures exactly and this is treading close to NDA waters so I'm a bit wary of posting *exactly* what everything csts at a given point. However, I think it's alright to work up some generalities. For example, you could get a full set of Knight armor (4 pieces and the headgear of your choice) - 128 Iron, 32 Steel, 400 Gold - for around 3k Gold. If, say, Iron costs 2 Gold then Steel, which takes 10 Wood and 20 Gold in the form of Coal and 10 Iron and another 20 Gold or 10 Wood, 10 Iron, and 40 Gold, will cost around 80+ gold depending on the price of Wood. All told, walking around with Knight's armor means you've got about 3000 gold on your back in the worst circumstances (You'll never recover that cost, but that's certainly what you've paid for it, even if you don't realize it).

given the statistics of various armors you can figure out that sort of cost for each and every set, if you know the cost of the crafting materials. While I haven't run the numbers on everything, and I'll leave it to someone else, the numbers I have show that various sets are widely priced, within professions and between professions.

But, beyond that they show that the real suckers are those that craft that lv19 armor. That's because while you can get it sooner and for a little bit less than your lv20 armor, you pay nearly as much. If the lv20 Captain's set is 128 Iron, and 32 Steel, and 400 Gold and the lv19 Soldier's set is 88Iron, 24 Steel, and 300 Gold then it's nearly 2/3rd of what it takes to get your lv20 armor. And you get ot use it for all of one level. Why not make do with what you have and save your resources? Because, it's not very likely that you're going to get 3k worth of resources in the time it takes you to hit that level, is it?

Simply put, the mid-level gear is overpriced or the lv20 gear underpriced. Perhaps it doesn't make ecconomic sense, but there's no incentive to get those middle level gears, there's every incentive to save up for that end-level gear. Crafting all the steps in between is something only the extremely wealthy or connected can manage. The middle armors, then, become superfluous. Overlooked and underused. Whereas, I'm of the belief that armor is not simply a bonus, it's a requirement. Blame it on playing a War for so long, but armor is something necessary for you character to function, there shouldn't be such an incentive to skip a few steps here and there, armor should either be enough of an advantage that you want to upgrade, want to seek out those places where you can upgrade, eacha dn every level, or it needs to be cheap enough that you can.

A character should have gotten the raw resources necessary to trade or buy what it would take to craft the armor of a given leve by the time they reach that level. Even if they've crafted the previous level's gear. So, if, say, lv17 gear is 72 Iron, 24 Steel, and 200 Gold, then not only should you have that amount or what it would take to get that amount of crafting materials by the time you hit lv17 just by going through the progression of level that would get you to lv17 but also, by the time you hit lv19 you'd have gained enough for another 88Iron, 24Steel, and 300 Gold.

At the same time, that shouldn't hold true for the lv20 gear. The lv19 gear should be *just* this side of good enough for serious play that you wouldn't be out of place on a PvP team wearing it. It should only be a few AL points off of the lvv20 armor, which is generally is. But the lv20 armor should be priced a lot higher than the lv19 gear for those few more points. The lv20 armor is the last set of armor you need. The last set you'll "earn", it needs to be worth it. A sign that you've spent the time and dedication towards getting to it at the same time that it's really not all that important if you don't have it because you can have something almost at good. People who like to PvE will work to get that lv20 armor just to have it, people who like to PvP will work to get that lv20 armor for that slight advantage it might give them. Someone who's worked to lv20 will be able to have their nearly as good lv19 armor but will have something more to work for, if they want to. So, the lv20 armor needs to cost a lot more, relatively, than everything else. It should be possible to go from lv19 armor to lv20 armor the way it should be possible to go from lv17 to lv20.

Anyhow, that's what I think. Anyone else have any ideas (Or want to figure out the exact prices of each and every set of armor)?

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In my day, we didn't have virtual reality. If a one-eyed razorback barbarian warrior was chasing you with an ax, you just had to hope you could outrun him.