Monk Prime Arm, thought experiment

[*juggleblood*]

That brings a question, what is a main purpose of drachma shops and drachma equipment?

Yup. I can't think of any principle to apply that would make sense. One thought I had is that perhaps elite damage gear that helps in splorking mobs (1 round kill) could be more heavily represented in the drachma eq, i.e. dam, spell dam, and hand dam. That's kind of how it already is for monk I think, yah?

[alris]

A bit off track from the topic again, but I tried to view drachma shop eq from player point of view.

I would consider buying item similar to one existing in the game if its within cost of 300 drachma. I think there was a ring of flaming serpents alike for 150 or so drachma? If the cost goes higher than that, it looks a bit overpriced. At higher levels I did regret slightly spending 600 drachma on sky king helm. While being best ac in the game, it frankly is not much difference from the roberts hat.

On other hand items which are one of a kind and heavily overpower ingame eq, could and should cost 500 or 1000+ drachma. Wasn't there some +3 hand damage shield in the shop? And I mean things like extra damage or 1-2 handdamage, not measly .1 ac difference from in the game item (some thief or monk might bring numbers saying that in the end 1dam or hand dam is not very huge difference, but trust me, -13.1 is very small difference from -13.0 on ac).

One thought I had is that perhaps elite damage gear that helps in splorking mobs (1 round kill) could be more heavily represented in the drachma eq, i.e. dam, spell dam, and hand dam. That's kind of how it already is for monk I think, yah?

Seems damage reduction and mvreg are not much worth much as indepentant stats, but could be good sidekick addtions too.

[*juggleblood*]

I'm sure there's plenty of inconsistencies like that because it's such a big job to tackle in an organized fashion. One immortal tries to deal with drachma gear and then other immortals come behind and design new ingame equipment that affects the relative values of the drachma gear. There's not much to be done about it, unless there is someone who wants to take it on as a project. It's not the kind of thing that is done well piecemeal.

[Teron]

I guess a common system of value points per stat would solve that problem, because absolutely awesome items will be put in the drachma shop, while the weaker items will be ingame.
Then any imm can create new eq to be put ingame or to the shop, and it won't interfere with the other items, because they are based on the same value assessments.

To think about it, with the eq point system, we could add an upgrade system, when players can upgrade their eq with separate individual buffs, which they could buy for a certain amount or forge, the difficulty of which depending on the value of the upgrade. e.g., if you want to add +dam to your eq, feel free to go and pop cps from a few 100m+ mobs or buy the dam token for drachma or for 20b+ exp, defined by the scaling system.

Imms would have to craft base or standard items, and players would customize the items themselves.

In fact, when I first heard of forging stuff, this is what I thought about.

And the beauty of it, is that it's not that hard to come up with the point system, based on internal knowledge and player feedback on what they value more. Then again, you could compare the number of group mobs dead vs the number of splorks vs number of mobs that lived 1, 2 or 3 rounds.

[alris]

You do realize that stat increments are not equal in value? Compare -.5 gauntlets to -.4 ones and then to -.3 and -.2 ones. How to assign cost to -.1 ac point?

Also, when you allow things like upgrade or constructing equipment with something point based, it turns in more or less what is avatar shop, but based on drachma, not experience.

[Teron]

You can calculate how much hps you lose for every -0.1ac, there's a formula for that.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, there's ingame eq that allows us to get better stats and we are already discussing linear progression of eq 3x40-9x40 that can be forged, not just for drachma.
Upgrades can be forged/bought for drachma too, I don't see any difference between forging/buying better item in a shop and buying/forging an upgrade that *you* need.

Of course, there need to be a few limits, but it works out nicely. Maybe I'll write it up later.

We can go back to discussing the proposed 9x40 gear, and how drachma eq fits here.

You do have a point that after 9x40 the game is over after a year or two, when you buy the stuff. I don't see any challenge for 9x40s, there needs to be more 9x40 content, maybe JB's Mystica fix did the trick.

[*juggleblood*]

The 9x40 thing was just a hypothetical for discussion. I don't have plans for such.

The takeaway for me from these discussions is that we could use more prime gear in the 2x40 range and then comparable or even better non-prime starting around 5x40.

So in this case for example I'm thinking a 2x40 monk prime sleeve that is about as good as sleeves of enlightenment. But maybe with damage reduction instead of hitroll.

Regarding your formulas, I don't see any algorithm that would work. For one thing .1ac doesn't have an objective value because its relative to whats available on that slot. I.e. a .6 ring is awesome cuz .5 is otherwise the max. But adding .1 ac to a .1 ring would be unimpressive in most cases.