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The costs of combat
Galt
Member, Beta Testers Posts: 305 ✭✭✭
So, I posted in hate about sketches being a pain. I asked which other professions have similar costs and a few outliers came up, like Shaman.
I figured rather than derail hate with discussion about the gold and time costs for preparing to fight as specific professions, I'd start a thread! The big cost for bard is sketches - A sketchbook takes either 5 or 10 pieces of wood, and can produce 50 sketches. Sketching itself has no inherent cost but time, but using inks on them is necessary. Cost for this can range from 140 gold per sketch if using the cheapest inks, up to 810 at the most expensive. Each sketch allows for 50 attacks, or 200 with the 350cr quill artifact.
That works out at 2.8g to 16.2g per sketch attack without the artifact, or 1/4 that with the artifact. I don't have an accurate time on hand, but sketch balance feels like it's between 3-4 seconds. At around 15 attacks a minute, that's anywhere from 42g to 243g per minute just to use sketches, assuming sketch balance averages out to 4 seconds.
This is to say nothing of the time cost of getting a full set of sketches - Even finding all the professions to sketch right now can be awkward.
What are the gold costs like for other professions? Both in terms of prep and resources like sketches, dusts, etc?
I figured rather than derail hate with discussion about the gold and time costs for preparing to fight as specific professions, I'd start a thread! The big cost for bard is sketches - A sketchbook takes either 5 or 10 pieces of wood, and can produce 50 sketches. Sketching itself has no inherent cost but time, but using inks on them is necessary. Cost for this can range from 140 gold per sketch if using the cheapest inks, up to 810 at the most expensive. Each sketch allows for 50 attacks, or 200 with the 350cr quill artifact.
That works out at 2.8g to 16.2g per sketch attack without the artifact, or 1/4 that with the artifact. I don't have an accurate time on hand, but sketch balance feels like it's between 3-4 seconds. At around 15 attacks a minute, that's anywhere from 42g to 243g per minute just to use sketches, assuming sketch balance averages out to 4 seconds.
This is to say nothing of the time cost of getting a full set of sketches - Even finding all the professions to sketch right now can be awkward.
What are the gold costs like for other professions? Both in terms of prep and resources like sketches, dusts, etc?
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Bone in Antioch is 50gp
I do not have the info from other councils and cities. I also know this price is largely adjustable, but so are other commodities anyways.
1 bone is 10 bone dust.
This means each bonedust is worth roughly 4.5 to 5gp.
To colorize 30 dust, worth 135gp to 150gp, requires one ink. While ink will always be a static price unless some goober sells it in their shop for way cheaper somehow, we can err on the cheaper side and say bone dust is 135gp. This means...
Red bone dust is 20gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 5.16gp
Blue bone dust is 40gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 5.83gp
Yellow bone dust is 80gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 7.16gp
Green bone dust is 160gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 9.83gp
Purple bone dust is 250gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 12.83gp
Gold bone dust is 400gp for the ink, 135gp for the dust, which means each is worth 17.83gp
Now that we've established a temporary floor for bone dust costs, why don't we evaluate which skills get used the most, on what timers, to calculate gp/m round?
On speed: almost all Shamanism attacks are universally around 1.55s as an L1 statpack. There are outliers I will detail later. With that out of the way, what are Shamanism skills that use bone dust at this speed?
Numbness - 1 red dust - This means each numbness costs 5.16gp
Drain - 1 blue dust - This means each drain costs 5.83gp
Disfigure - 1 red dust - This means each disfigure costs 5.16gp
Reckless - 1 blue dust - This means each reckless costs 5.83gp
Slick - 1 yellow dust - This means each slick costs 7.16gp
Jinx - 1 yellow dust, 1 purple dust - This means each jinx costs 19.99gp - Important to note here, Jinx is a high priority affliction to be cured, meaning it might be cured a couple times during a fight, costing you 19.99gp every reapply.
Confound - 1 red dust - This means each confound costs 5.16gp - Important to note here, Confound lasts for roughly 20s, meaning you are spending 15.48gp every minute to keep Confound rolling.
Inhibit - 1 red, 1 yellow, at 2.45s - This means each Inhibit (sometimes a 'spammed' skill to achieve lethargy or just a front load of afflictions before their next balance) costs about 10.99gp per cast. I could go back and count in a log how often Owyn or Dyron might throw out an Inhibit, but I feel that might be disingenuous for the sake of this discussion.
Cover - variable cost depending on damage type. It costs 1 of any of the above listed dust, meaning that in order of least to most expensive, this defense costs:
FIRE - Red < COLD - Blue < ELECTRIC - Yellow < POISON - Green < PSYCHIC - Purple < MAGICK - Gold
Interesting notes ..
Shamanism Resurrect costs 10 gold bone dust, which means each resurrect costs roughly 178.3gp. Sometimes the rezz meta can be expensive!
All of this is before we talk about Bonecasting costs - simple defenses cost:
Dove (Berkana) - 3 yellow ink - 240gp
Owl (INT Jera) - 1 purple ink - 250gp
Elk (Algiz) - 1 green ink - 160gp
Keeping these essential defenses up costs roughly 1.35gp per minute collectively
Advanced/luxury defenses cost:
Bear - 1 gold ink per item - 400gp
Fang - 1 gold ink per item - 400gp
I place bear and fang on my scalemail and shield, costing me 1600gp every 480 minutes. This means using these luxury runes collectively costs roughly 3.33gp per minute.
I can opt out of this expense outside of combat by freezing the duration on any of my boneimages, meaning that I can pick and choose when these expenses come out of my pocket. This stretches my investment to days or weeks (unless I'm an idiot and forget to turn them off)
I think what we really should do is re-evaluate gold sinks, ask ourselves why they exist, then line up our criteria against existing ones. I think MAUCTIONS were a good step, if anybody gave a **** about the benefits of those items.
Why should the burden of profession-based gold sinks fall entirely on certain professions and not others? Toxins, for example, used to be a huge pain to make - requiring sacs even in a lab, and latter it still took a minute or more to make one vial of a toxin. It was ridiculously slow and awkward, so it got made easier over time. What's happened is that the time and gold costs of preparing have fallen or been eliminated entirely for certain professions whilst they've increased or remained in place for others. Bard in particular has always been expensive to play, but sketches now stand out because so much else has been made easier.
If you want gold sinks, make them apply to everyone equally. Profession gold sinks don't really do anything to balance most skills, and primary attacks and oft-used skills shouldn't be stuck with such severe ones as sketches and bonedust. Stuff like traps, however - those are balanced by having a cost, because otherwise people could carpet areas in them.
It's really a trivial problem. I mean, I see where you are coming from, there is an inequality, but meh. Even my hunt-hating behind can make 10k in an hour without much effort and that's laughably small compared to Kabaal's gold generation capacity.
Our general economy and how it functions definitely needs a look at, but meeeh. I'd much rather this be weighed -below- addressing the pain of harveting/shopkeeping and the death of RP support in this game and that comes below basically all combat related mechanics, so....
The "Other things matter more" fallacy doesn't really hold any weight, here - Since this is likely something that would be covered by classleads, so any changes I suggest in that regard will happen then. Though I feel like it's worth trying to figure out ways to reduce the costs like this for classes that have them.
Maybe a bard should be able to turn ink into a bunch of pigment, or just use one ink to fill ink the colour on a bunch of sketches at once? For Shaman, increasing the dust amount per bone and the amount of bone one ink can colour might help?
EDIT:
Also how is harvesting painful? It's not like it takes long for most herbs.
'I don't feel like bashing for my gold' is not a solution
Since Kabaal was used as an example. Kabaal in a week probably makes enough gold for his entire city to use as combat gold for an entire RL month...covering all curatives, poisons, and other whatnots. If one person can do it in a week anyone can do it in a day
I mean, we could make using Outrider icewyrm cost a few thousand gold per fight in icewyrm treats to even it out. Not a problem, right?
3.33(cost per minute) x 60(minutes in an hour) = 199.8g
199.8 x 24(hours in a day) = 4795.2g
No one is going to be logged on and using everything 24 hours in day(12 hours a day if you're not a filthy casual, so.. 2.5K). @Galt, you aren't going to be blowing sketches every minute outside of combat. And 5K gold can be bashed/quested up in less than probably 10 minutes. If you want play 12 hours a day, you can do ONE decently paying quest and pay for your entire day's upkeep.
While typing up this response, I did have a chat with @Sarrius..
The amount is trivial on both sides. It is trivial to charge players that and it is trivial for players to pay it. So, why does it exist? It is a 'gold sink'. But such a tiny soft one, that I can with confidence say that it has little impact on the economy. And again it is so trivial that it really wouldn't dent the pockets of an aspect at all. I had the same thought as @Krysaliss when reading this, of all the things we could see an improvement on in this game, this is probably one thing that isn't big on the list.
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
2017/08/08 04:29:02 - Sarrius has been slain by a crystal infused ogre.
2017/08/08 05:08:06 - Sarrius has been slain by a horrendous wight.
2017/08/08 06:56:59 - Sarrius has been slain by an insane banshee.
2017/08/08 07:13:03 - Sarrius has been slain by an intimidating wight.
2017/08/08 07:14:52 - Sarrius has been slain by a morbid banshee.
Ink pouch, for example. It's not an unlimited supply, but you sink some credits into it and never have to buy inks again (potentially).
Profession specific example would be Summoner tarot deck. Not only do I not have to buy the stuff for tarot, but I don't have to sketch cards mindlessly.
Lowering cost of stuff makes the artifacts less appealing, and I think that's a problem for the business side.
(Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
Tarot cards are 10 per without the arti deck.
I could make a whole new thread about this issue, but in short, it is a thankless, tedious system that is a necessary evil for the game to function. Those of us who do it and don't have the 1000 credit artifact have to spend a pretty large chunk of our time doing it to keep a shop stocked. There is nothing fun or rewarding about it. At all.