Rock of Time, Timeless EQs, pendants & the demand for them

Crafting is too expensive and will become even more expensive if this change is implemented. Though end-game, I find the timeless weapons too(though justified) expensive because of the levelling part and the WSing of 7 slots.
If timeless weapons, don't drop from PB anymore, I personally will give up trying to obtain a timeless weapon and be happy with a dragon weapon/NT/whatever. If many others feel the same way I do, it might end up lowering the demand for RoT? And ultimately kill PB runs?

 

Just lower pb timer to 1 hour and make it a difficult boss to run like it was intended to be.

 

After that, lower to 45mins.

 

Or fix DR so it's not broken for 5+ minutes at a time

 

But aren't those solutions ^ applicable to reducing supply? Cubes is talking about doing something for the demand of RoTs. Making PB harder might not have any effect on that.

 

Unedited soapbox warning:

Any kind of crafting system promotes only crafting the most valuable option. This has happened in the last 2 anniv events where supply of crafted level 64 maple weapons that werent claw or a couple others "in demand" options were practically nonexistent, and that was a "free" upgrade as far as meso was concerned. The value of rock of time is most definitely tied to the value of only a subset of the timeless items (claw, spear, some archer stuff are probably the big winners). If equips stop dropping outright, it attempts to equate the value of all timeless weapons and armors, which is certainly far from true. A pirate glove is worth less than even a warrior glove let alone an archer overall. And that's without bringing weapon options into the picture. If crafting was the only way to obtain items, it wont bring the value of say timeless mage items up, it will just kill the market for them entirely.

The undercutting value of the rocks in my opinion is a mixed indicator of the status of timeless demand overall and the health of pink bean. Timeless items are being advertised as *the* endgame items, and for good reason: just about any class can make some use of them (some more than others). That power comes at a pretty steep price, however, as the items are not only locked behind level rng, but literally locked from trade. Level rng already is effectively non ws-able scrolling, and if it doesnt meet your goals you have a virtual paperweight with 0 return value. And even if it does, you have to still actually scroll the untradeable item. With many people switching between characters (a must if you run bean multiple times), or quitting or remaking characters, untradeable is a huge dealbreaker. After all, our characters are already strong enough to *beat* all content including the bean, so the next step becomes making more characters/mules to beat things more and faster.

Related to demand of timeless items is, of course, the supply of timeless items. Almost everyone says the bean fight as a whole is too easy. Few runs can even fail, and those are usually due to excessive death on dr. Statues and bean (and other fights) are still buggy where multiple people attacking/taking aggro seems to stop bosses from attacking/casting outright, sending dpms to the moon. There are even 19 man runs now where practically everyone is either an NL or supporting the NL clearing (personally the dmg/cost gap between NL and everyone else is simply too large, but that's another topic). The 1/week limit was imposed to limit bean farming, but many runners simply use 2-3 characters to circumvent even that restriction and continue running in more runs. And bean will most certainly continue to be farmed.

Timeless gear is meant to be the endgame, but the endgame boss is already extremely farmable even without timeless gear. The biggest barrier to entry is number of characters (read: night lords) you have to run with, which directly goes against the untradeable nature of timeless items.

Uh... /rant

 

Another way to incentivize crafting could be to lower the risk of crafting by allowing all Timeless crafts to yield only average or above average stats. It wouldn't entirely fix the problem, but it'd help bring the risk-reward aspect of timeless crafting to a more sensible rate.

 

Timeless crafting is already so expensive that it doesn't even seem worth it in most cases.

 

If there’s a large amount of RoT in the fm that aren’t selling and haven’t been selling for a while then why wouldn’t sellers decrease the price?

If supply is much higher than demand at this price point (which it is), then really it’s only a matter of time for the price of the RoT to decrease. Personally that’s why I haven’t bought any yet.

 

Release of Prestige Coins looming around the corner.

 

Imagine a world where you could only bring 6 NLs epetroll: or just ban NLs from PB

 

100% agreed on doing something about the desirability of timeless gear.

 

I can't speak for other jobs but I've been buying Timeless mage equips and the prices are fairly high but also all over the place and yet they are way, way cheaper than the RoT. RoT prices are presumably pegged to the more desirable equips. I personally hope that the coin system basically "subsidizes" PB runs because as it is, buying Timeless [mage] items is really difficult and the prices are wack for both buyers and sellers (too low to pay for the run but too high to be worth it for buyers) and crafting Timeless [mage] stuff is prohibitively expensive. Just my 2c solely from the perspective of a buyer.

edit for more context/details:

Spoiler

IMO in terms of Timeless mage stuff, the shield and gloves are in a pretty good spot but the others equips aren't. The shield is like a Maple Mage Shield but untradable with extra slots and while I haven't see one of these on the market yet, I'd definitely be happy to pay much more than the value of a Maple Mage Shield for one of these.

Similarly, the gloves are like a BWG with extra stats and I've bought some of these with BWG price as a rough guide for the value of them.

Shoes are kinda borderline. I'm happy with paying a premium for these since that's something you can buy and then never touch again. But in reality getting one that's an upgrade over the much more common Dark Neli (a drop from Gallopera) is very difficult.

OA, staff, and wand are also kinda in a weird spot. Wand is IMO Not worth getting because wand scrolls are so expensive, but staff is a very nice alternative for Bishops. the issue is that it has a huge variance based on timeless leveling, so not only do you run the risk of scrolling this thing and ending up with a bunk weapon that you can't sell, you also run the risk of getting screwed by bad level ups. The prices I've seen on these have been too high for me to justify. Maybe a more endgame type Bishop would like these, but from what I've heard from sellers, the demand is very low.

Overalls have a similar issue as staves. Without counting levelups, they're about 2 AP better than Green Bazuras (a Petrifighter drop) but obviously much more expensive. A lot of these stats are in LUK which is useless for those who are going for a low LUK build with an elemental wand, which is currently the best LUK build for mage. Gambling on getting potentially 3 extra INT from levelups may be worth it for some very endgame LUK mages, but again, from what I've heard from sellers the demand is very low.

None of these are worth crafting, the PoTs are prohibitively expensive.

 

Rocks of time do play a real purpose in pink bean progression, which is speeding up the rate at which you can actually get your timeless items.

Based on various drop data from myself and jesscapades Pink bean equip drops seem to be uniform (that is every equip has roughly the same chance to drop).

Pink bean drops a ridiculous amount of equips, so much so that if the rates are uniform the chance you will see a specific perfect timeless weapon in a given run is about 3%. So lets say you are in the market for a perfect clean weapon, on average there needs to be about 30 runs before that specific clean weapon will drop.

Since we are locked to 1 pink bean run per week, it could take months for the perfect clean weapon you are looking for to come on the market.

Furthermore it takes on average 5 perfect clean weapons to get +7 attack or better on levels. (+7 attack from levels is generally where the line is drawn on what is considered perfecting with white scroll 10%).

Instead of waiting half a year for your weapons, you could just buy rocks of time and actually get your weapons in a reasonable timeframe, albeit at a much higher cost.

 

The thing is though, I genuinely think that Timeless mage stuff doesn't need a numbers buff. After the last buff, it clearly has huge advantages and provides a lot of TMA compared to LUKless build. I don't think that adding more TMA on to them is somehow gonna make them more desirable unless the balance team really wants to push this as a mandatory upgrade. The main issue, IMO, is that actually scrolling them or doing anything with them sucks ass. As a buyer, it some times takes months before a decent glove (for example) appears on the market, and then the level up mechanic means it can't ever be resold. Sure, my other LUK mage equips don't exactly hold value well, but I am at least able to resell them for something. I've been buying Timeless Hermosas (gloves) in preparation to scroll them. If these were BWG,s I could sell some of my failed attempts to recuperate losses. If they were other mage gloves, I could at least sell the crappy ones for a few mill. But here I am buying these Hermosas, usually for around 30m each, knowing full well that I'm likely going to end up NPCing some of them. But the issue is that already, these genuinely are good gloves, strictly from a stat perspective. So I'm not sure if increasing the INT on them or lowering the LUK requirement would make them more desirable. You can already reach 100 LUK with 4 base (or very close) and potentially getting 9 INT on a clean 7 slot glove is pretty significant. But because acquiring these things are such a huge undertaking, for both the buyer and the seller, it leads to a situation where nobody really wins. I've been told that a lot of these get either given away or NPC'd, and though there are a handful of buyers for them, the vast majority of players skip them for "washing gear."

Hopefully the boss coin system gives an incentive to run PB outside of the profit from selling equips, causing a surplus of these things to be created and interest in them to improve as a result. If that doesn't happen, I feel that the only thing that would make them worthwhile for most people is if they were tradable.

 

Actually on the topic of timeless mage specifically, I can attest that they are technically good on any mage. The issues come about because of the combo of stat req, level rng+scroll rng, and untradeable nature.

The LUK requirement on it's own is manageable if you wear multiple pieces or the entire set (minus hat and weapon on a/m). The LUK on the gears can be used to meet the requirements for other pieces (just not it's own requirement). If using just one piece though, timeless items can be a chore to equip especially as a lukless, so timeless is a pretty committal upgrade.

So now we have 4 (glove, oa, shoe, shield) pieces of gear which have to be dropped in a run with good stats, bought from sellers likely to just npc them, hope they level decently (although you can still see some benefit with even average leveling), and THEN scrolled. The upgrade potential is there, but the supply simply isnt. When the scrolling fails and we're back to square one, compare going through that entire process with just buying a bathrobe from an npc and getting an anakamoon/rune or star/moonlight and scrolling that an extra time or two. And even if you manage to scroll one item well, the benefit isnt all that noticeable until you get most of a set complete.

...And I hope that set is perfect, because theres no longer any chance of upgrading it further without starting over with an entirely new item. Other than cssing old timeless items and hoping for another slot, timeless items become a waste of space when it is time for upgrading. If I have a 26 int br and want a 30 int br, I can sell off the 26 and effectively pay the difference between the items. If I want to do the same with timeless I have to start from the ground up. Even if somebody pre-scrolled an item and never wore it, I'd still have to pay the value of the entire piece, unable to offset some cost with an old equip. And there just simply arent enough armors in production to warrant putting up with that. Non-existant supply keeps my mage from looking into them, and I cant be the only one.

 

From data on 77 runs, equips constitute about a third of the value of PB so deleting those without replacing would make PB into a worse HT, where either you get stompers or mw30 or you get some pennies that don't even pay for the apples.