The power creep is getting silly.

I've been back playing this game for a few months now and for the most part it's been the most positive experience I've had with it. In the last month or so a bunch of changes have come online that I think are taking the game down a bad path. I'm talking about the absurd power creep we're seeing in gear right now.

Gear was already way too powerful in SOTA before, but with the latest crafting changes and artifact fusion it's gotten absurd. You now have characters pushing 600 statpoints when buffed up, and getting individual stats over 400 is possible if you can afford the equipment to do it.

That's while we're hearing that Season 2 equipment will be even more powerful and more artifact tiers are planned. What ever happened to diminishing returns? It seems like those only exist in the skill system anymore, and the cost of raising a stat by a mere 10 points through training gets astronomical quick, but apparently raising a stat 200 points through gear is ok.

This is honestly just a bad path for the game to go down. Sure, everyone who can afford all these amazing new items is going to say they are awesome, but this is poisoning the game. The ratio of how much of your character's power comes from skills vs. gear is getting more and more skewed toward gear like we've just done away with the notion of a healthy balance between the two. The achievement horizon for the game is also heading away from more casual players at an ever increasing speed. The amount of power that comes from upkeep tasks like maintaining high end gear in the game seems to be getting bigger and bigger, in complete reckless disregard of the fact that the vast majority of the possible audience for a game like this hates upkeep and basically every highly successful game is designed with as little upkeep as possible.

There are players who are committed to filling their free time with SOTA and those players want the game to keep them busy and give them ways to be productive. That's fine, some amount of content to cater to those players should exist. But the vast majority of players have different forms of entertainment compete for their time and to them systems that exist to keep people who won't just play something else busy aren't quality content. If those systems stand squarely in the way of them and building a strong character that's a dealbreaker on the whole game. So aside from the fact that power creep isn't a positive in general the current shift toward more and more upkeep is just not going to make this game more popular.

 

Hi Aetrion while I understand your view I barely spend per item more than 30-40k each which is a fully reasonable price.
There are many top crafters out there to check frequently and usually you can find a medium/high quality gear for a balanced price
Mid / High quality (3 ench 3 mw), if choosed precisely, are enough for many of players (like me, totally happy about this)
3 ench 3 mw are perfectly balanced for a sane high end level.
Min Maxers have fun with 4 x 4, 5x4 etc (and price goes up explonentially)

While triing to achieve Min/Max, they produce a good amount of medium / high stuff (to make us happy and reduce their costs)

 

Buying items is a major pain the ass in this game because there are hundreds of vendors scattered over dozens of towns, with thousands of random rolled items. Finding an item with the stats you want at a good price without feeling like you might discover something better for less the next day is hours of work in this game. That's exactly the kind of awful upkeep task I'm talking about. 30-40k is also not a trivial sum of gold in this game, it just gets treated that way because there is such an extreme bias in the community to only ever look at anything in the game from the perspective of a hardcore player.

I also think that settling for second rate equipment is a complete motivation killer for most people. Trying to reach a long term goal at your own pace is one thing, people are OK with it if their pace is slow and others get there quicker. Being expected to just settle for whatever their grind tolerance allows on the other hand is a dealbreaker and they will just find a game that doesn't disrespect their time like that.

 

that power creep is because us crafters spent 4+ years leveling up our crafting skills over 120+ with millions of Gold and Silver ingots and the same for crafting xp. So those changes were long over do to help us crafters keep up with Artifacts and to give us another tier of crafting. As to getting buffed up its not just gear. some of us have over 130+ in the buff skills to get the larger numbers. We are also around adv level 126 so I would hope that over time our gear and skills keep increasing that number. the epic and beyond artifacts will once again over power the crafting, but they will add yet another tier to help balance some of that down the road. You can't just ask them to halt things so that crafters have nothing to look forward too. We put in more time then most do adventuring to even get to this level of gear.

If our crafting did not increase and skills didnt allow us to keep going up why would I play lol. Sounds more like you are not happy that people are many levels a head of you as well wearing gears for those levels. Also why can't people afford the gear? I do a lot of sales on gear, and my prices are more then fair, if you don't have the coin then what do you have to trade is how I roll. That is the point to a player economy barter and trade when you have no coin.

 

there is nothing 2nd rate about it. there will always be better gear as us crafters every week continue to level our skills. We don't stop, just like you dont stop adventuring and leveling. As to markets that is the point to have it like this so that people have to explorer to find better traders to do business with. I shop at the same places most the time because I found someone that carries the stuff I want around the prices I am willing to pay. Then you have people like @CICI who is much smarter; who checks out many places all the time. She is not lazy at all compared to me

 

Why do you think that crafters deserve a continuous escalation in the rewards they can obtain but adventurers get just get walloped with a giant grindwall of doom if they dare to want to raise a stat more than 50 points through training?

The increase in gear power isn't due to you raising your skills, it's due to the devs constantly cranking up the power of equipment without any regard for the power ratio between training and gear remaining constant. Even if they upped the XP you gain 5x, people would only be able to add about 20 more points to their skill before the exponential XP costs would stall them again, which translates to +10 in their stats.

Reality is that when this game started out gear was maybe 10-30% of your overall stats, now it's 60-80%, flirting with 90. This is not a good development for the game, no matter how loudly the few people who think crafters are the only players who matter cheer.

The constant stupid power spiral between artifacts and crafters doesn't help the issue any, but this needs to stop in general.

 

@Aetrion ; Don’t sweat the gear issue and price. Get some mid-gear (3x3) that compliments your build and raise your main dmg skill to 150 plus in order to kill mobs quickly. The faster you kill, the more xp and items you can sell. When melee like me your stuff will wear out quick anyway.

R/Boris/El Pirata/Black Sails Forever

 

Stuff wearing out and needing more immediately is exactly what I'm talking about when I say this game is poisoned by an overreliance on upkeep because the devs don't seem to understand just how absolutely unpopular that makes a game the second you're dealing with someone who's not looking for SOTA to fill their free time, but is looking at SOTA as one of many options for filling their free time.

 

What I'm mainly taking away from the posts here is
- too much power comes from gear as opposed to skill/character development
- the vendor/merchant/shopping system is awkward, clunky, and painful

I agree on both issues, to a point, though I think gear is in a much better place now in terms of investment in crafting. It needed love, desperately. As 'gaining exp' has been pretty much trivialized at this point where people are getting millions of experience in a very short session, the average player is starting to hit the diminishing returns brickwall where there's little point in grinding anymore because it just doesn't do enough for you beyond a certain point. Instead of messing with the power curve, I'd like to see things 'unlock' at gm, 120, 140 and so on, to make achieving those levels more meaningful in skills. Whether its a new skill, or an additional glyph functionality, or something. Currently you look at investing like 50 million experience for +1 to your damage tooltip its pretty underwhelming.

The "junk gear" vendor glut problem will not go away unless we either rethink the creation of junk gear (remove RNG from crafting so it doesn't get made), come up with some other way to consume these items so they aren't listed on vendors in desperation to recoup losses, or somehow add vendor searchability to filter what you want. I don't see any of those things really happening and certainly not short term. The best mitigation is as Xee has said, learn who makes the stuff you want, get familiar with their vendor network or gather materials and commission a crafter.

I personally can't stand doing the vendor thing, its a tedious mess, rarely can I price for what it costs so it doesn't make me any money - I'd be better off selling resources. All my crafting work is done on demand for regular customers - when they want something, we talk about it and make it happen instead of them going shop to shop trying to see if someone might maybe have something they kind of want. Its a system whose shortcomings have actually encouraged dialogue and interaction, i.e. "people come to my workshop" rather than me 'sticking stuff on a vendor and hoping for the best'. I'm totally with you on the shopping side too, I don't want to check 800 vendors trying to find what I want - but if I'm looking for something in particular, chances are I know (or someone knows) someone who has a good supply and a conversation happens and then I go there.

 

Gear does help boost it that is for sure . I have 96int from my enlighten, 60int from my base int skill, 5 int from the shrine, 5 int from a 3 day buff, 15 int from a potion, then there is food etc... So its not all gear.

As to why crafters deserve continuous escalation... thats a silly response. for one the costs to make that gear is more then the costs of adventure on all scales. There is the time to gather, there is the time to make the materials, there is the time to craft it, the time to get the stats on it. The loss of millions of gold and silver on good ones and failed ones. For every 100 items made, only a hand full are good, the rest are vendor or scrap. Look at chest armor. takes 10 bolts plus other mats, 10 bolts is 20 beetles... if 1 in 10 crafted items are great that is 200 beetles to get that one high stat item... with beetles costing hours or time or lets say current market value of 2000g per beeter that 200,000k of my money to make that 1 good item. I work harder to get people gear so they can do what they do for fun... thats me having to slave a week to get all that nice stuff... Compared to what adventures get and do which is a lot more fun dont you agree? give me a break lol.

As to stats why are you so concerned? Everyone has the same opportunity to buy gear with stats on it. Its not like there is only 1 great item out there. You can always take up crafting if you dont like guying then tell me how you feel about all your time at the tables and the likes... I'm just saying there is really no fun in crafting and the costs to do so to get you your gear are astronomical. If there was no value in all that time spent then you would be out there making your own gear cause none of us crafters would do it if there was no reward for all that work...

Ps. there is nothing stopping you from making your own gear. that is why I started crafting was to sustain myself in the start, now I like many others make these nice things so people like you can have fun....

 

Depending on the drop rate (and presuming it comes from salvaging MW/enchanted items) I would expect gold and silver scrap to reduce the amount of junk items considerably. Honestly, if scrapping was reworked to be halfway decent (that is, you always get base material scrap, always get some gold/silver scraps if the item had MWs or enchants, get a chance at a pattern, and a chance at refined materials) i think vendor garbage would be a thing of the past. I've been playing ESO, and I'm really enjoying crafting there. I'm not a fan of scrapping items every few levels (I've always been partial to systems where you continually refine/improve the same gear as you get better) but it doesn't hurt so much when you get a decent amount of stuff back. Plus, no RNG, so you're never making junk you don't want in the first place. Plus, alchemy is much more rewarding.

 

well said, I forgot in my rant to mention the XP..... that is a big one there. An adventurer can millions of xp in less then an hour... a crafter its not at all like that lol... its so painful over 100 that some days you stare at that line wondering did it move all day?

 

It is always less work to force others down to your level than to raise yourself.

 

This is exactly what I was thinking which also present a new problem as you stated we would not vendor trash the low durability stuff but rather salvage... the down side to this is I vendor a lot of 3/3+ gear with 15-25 durability which ends up in the loot tables. even though its low the stats are still top which is a nice reward to those that have no money. That would all vanish forcing players to buy more often.

 

True, but I think there will always be good samaritans that will throw items into the loot table if they're not complete garbage. I did that as well, and would likely still do so. Usually after a big craft session, I'll have way more than I could put on a vendor anyway.

 

true that I do that all the time just for fun to get some nice items out there. i will probably continue that. I also put some in public chests that are crazy just so that person who gets it will be like OMG look what I found! makes me happy to hear from people that use my gear or that they got one from a drop.

 

Being able to acquire gear under the current system doesn't magically add any fun to a game that doesn't give adventurers any way to achieve. Gear is where most of your power comes from, and gear doesn't come from completing content, so there is no progression through the content. Overcoming one challenge never rewards you with the power you need to overcome the next in SOTA, so there is no achievement, no milestones, no long term goals, just grind all the way. Sure, you can convince yourself that getting that perfect piece of gear or artifact is your goal, but the game is set up from the start to take it away from you just so you have to do it over again. Even if the journey is supposed to be more important than the destination, you can't just put people on a treadmill and expect them to enjoy the "journey" without any destination at all. You have to actually go somewhere to have a journey.

While it's true that getting crafting XP is much harder, the adventure XP is totally hollow. The amount of power you get for raising active skills past 100 is usually negligible, and only a small number of passive skills are really powerful, and those are usually the ones that provide some kind of percentage boost that multiplies the effectiveness of your other stats, which come mostly from gear.

 

See I do agree sometimes with you lol. This is all true.... its pretty much grind to get the coin to get the gear or to grind the artifacts to get your legend.

it is the same for crafting for all the months work to get .5 to 1.0 boost. The core reason I see that they raised the tier up a level is because all us crafter's stalled out and all the top gear was all the same for a long time. This new addition started another crafting race to level up again to get to the 110, 120 etc to unlock more stats. This is always what boosted the economy for those that gather as all the crafters started spending millions of gold to get the painful mats which in turn the gathering folk then get money to buy the new gear... round and round it goes.

This is why today we have even more artifacts coming into play and many loot changes are happening so that adventures can get more value. The downside as you said though is that it still does not change the grinding side of things....

But there is light coming... as you know there is Player quest system coming soon and I can tell you that myself will be putting some of my best gear in my dungeons as rewards once we have the needed systems in place (player npc's) , doors and chest key, as well loot controls (1 item per person etc.) I already have away to fund the rewards and with all the other stuff coming I hope one day to provide that missing gap you are looking for which is reward for adventuring though questing vs the grind.

 

I found an item of yours once and I like how your vendor prices are low. I go to you to buy all my upgrades!!

 

Id love to always have them low, but there has been a lot of inflation because of the new crafting stuff... as I try to explain is a beetle is 2000g, and 20 are needed min for 1 item that is 20k of the cost right there not including the other sinks. in the end that 40k item is at a loss if you think about the time metric required to get it. on the bright side with the scrap for gold and silver coming some of the costs will be recouped which is awesome news for crafter's especially the ones that buy their mats to support other players like myself. best way to keep the economy moving is to support others.

Also thanks for the support and complement.