Concern about the real cost of death.

I am aware of the design concept behind the current system for repair kits - more valuable items cost more gold to repair. In theory that's a great idea but I feel that it's current execution is not optimal. Currently, it's not economical to use anything better than vendor-purchased armor. The reason for this is, if you die and take a durability hit to your armor, you are paying through the nose to repair it. Each 5 points of durability on an "expensive" (i.e. any crafted) piece of armor costs you 100g to repair. So, when you die and lose durability. which is also a great idea on paper, currently the durability damage means each death is costing you roughly 700 gold if you are using a crafted shield, crafted set of armor and crafted weapon.

You can mitigate this cost by crafting your own repair kits. If you are at a moderate producer level and you have lots of points towards mining and field dressing, they are fairly simple to make, but consider the following: Fully repairing a crafted item from 1 durability with repair kits currently costs 40 iron ingots and 40 leather. In fact, each single death costs you roughly 14 iron ingots and 14 leather.

Compiled on top of the incredible (current) expense incurred by gear becoming damaged at death, there are currently plans in the work to make you drop whatever loot you gathered since loading into the scene when you die. Recovering that loot will require you to get back to the area, win the fight you initially lost, and hope that you have enough repair kits on you at the time to patch up your armor and weapons so you're not going into a fight you already have a disadvantage on (obviously, since you died the first time) with even more of a disadvantage due to damaged or broken gear, plus having to wait out your two minute debuff.

I honestly feel as if this is a bit too much. I know that death should have consequences and that they should feel very real - I am simply saying that we should take steps to mitigate the current economic impact that repairing crafted gear currently has. The current in-game design encourages players who PVE to simply purchase basic gear from a vendor and replace it when it becomes damaged. Even with repair kits repairing more durability to cheap items, it's currently still far cheaper to buy new gear. Even when repair kits are intended as an emergency-only repair system, if the formula for calculated repairs remains the same you STILL currently need to occupy 30 stones of inventory space on repair kits (not to mention 3k gold), and that's just enough to move crafted gear from red to green. You can simply leave your dungeon and return to town to fix your expensive crafted gear, but that defeats the purpose of having repair kits be your "emergency repair" in the first place.

My proposed solution would be to simply drastically increase the amount that Repair Kits repair (At all levels of value) and to make them cheaper. Once we have crafting skills and the ability to repair items at a crafting table, I'd think it would be safe to assume that repair kits could be removed from vendors entirely, so players would have to interact with other players to get their gear fixed, or learn how to do it for themselves.

Also, I feel as if the durability lost on death should either be significantly reduced, or done away with altogether, considering we are getting another (VERY steep in lots of situations) death penalty added in the near future.

My 2 cents.

 

Chris has spoken in another thread that they are hoping to add the ability for crafters to directly repair equipment/weapons soon (well he said by next release). Repair kits are meant for emergencies, not the solution.

 

As I said several times in that post, this I understand. However they still do not even fit that current design objective. Say you have 7 pieces of broken crafted gear - a full suit of armor, a weapon, and a shield. It would take 28-35 of your repair kits just to get them back to green from red. For an item that's meant for emergencies, you sure do have to carry an awful lot of them to make a difference.

 

No one says you have to repair to green and if you let it go RED you have waited to long anyhow

Crafter repairs when they come are the way to go.

Sorry you have to learn to look at your stuff, not just wait until a warning comes up

Any good fighter takes a look at armor and weapons after every engagement

 

Oh goodness, you've taken my example situation and assumed that's what I do when I play. This is a theorycrafting thread based off of current in-game systems, not a discussion of the approach I take to adventuring.

The point is, repair kits do not even adequately serve their intended purpose, except for on vendor-purchased gear. Which means that players using crafted gear do not have a suitable emergency repair system with the way that repair kits currently work. When we eventually get the main repair system in-game, if repair kits remain as they are right now, they will be effectively worthless for anyone using decent gear - by this I mean, it would be economically foolish to do anything besides return home to get your gear fixed.

In the future, we will not have /zone commands for instant travel. In the future, I might be deep within the confines of a dungeon or adventure scene, half an hour from completion, when my gear hits yellow. In said future, my options are to A) Use 14+ repair kits to be able to top off my crafted gear for another 10-20 minutes worth of combat, or B) Work my way back to the entrance and find my way to the nearest town.

I propose the following for a solution: Make the Repair Kit a tool that uses resources to repair gear, and make it repair the same amount of damage regardless of item vendor value. Even using the current lowest repaired damage of 5 (and, say, 1 spool of thread, 1 ingot, 1 board, or 1 leather per repair) this would be much less of a time/resource sink to maintain, while simultaneously increasing the value of processed raw materials.

I also think that, when we eventually get the crafting skill trees fleshed out, at least one skill in each "production" tree should affect the total amount of damage repaired on gear by 20% per point with a max rank of 5. But that's just wishful thinking.