Armor Issues

If you're keeping up on things (and it shouldn't be too hard, it's not like we've got 50 new threads a day or anything) you'll know that Spooky's finished his little armor data-mining project. He's collected the values and costs of each and every craftable piece of armor currently in game. And the results point out some things I've long suspected.

At the moment Spooky's results are private (I'm trying to get him to post them but we're understandably worried about such content being swiped before we can publish it and, I think, still figuring out just how to put the data up as something other than a block of text.) but you can get a rough idea of things by looking at KT's just updated listing of all the lv20 armor here. There are other armor guides but none of them are as up-to-date.

Anyhow, the problem is basically this : cost versus benefit.

You can easily figure out the actual cost of a piece of armor because all you need are crafting materials, gold, and the required level to make one. Gold is a set price, of course, the level is a set amount of xp, and the crafting materials can all be traded - bought or sold, in so many words - so you can fix a price to them as well. If it costs you 2 Iron and 2 gold to make a lv5 helmet and it takes 2 gold to buy an ingot of Iron, then anyone who's leveled to 5 just needs 6 gold to make a helmet. Enough to buy, sell, or trade to get exactly what they need, in so many words. Dedicated traders are concerned with profit, but the casual trader only wants fair value, and given the ceiling and floor provided by automated resource traders there's a clear one for most crafting items and a passable guess at that which can't be bought at an NPC. If you can walk into a deal with a set resource and walk away with the apparent value, that's good enough for our purposes here. If you can buy that Iron for 2 gold a piece then you can trade it for at least an item or amount worth 2 gold, basically, and you've neither gained or lost on the deal just transfered your assets.

So, with that as a given, that equivalent exchanges are possible, knowing the crafting cost of an item can let you figure out the relative values. Those values obviously shift, responding to the market, if a lot of people buy up Iron the price will rise and gear crafted from iron becomes more valuable. So armor costs aren't "fixed", not in the absolute sense even though the merchant's asking price is static because two people starting with an infinite pile of gold and an empty inventory will have different results if they try to craft the same piece at different times. And it's arguable that we haven't seen a stable and functioning ecconomy and the realistic pricing of crafting materials has yet to be seen. However, the general idea of just how much things will cost shouldn't fluxtuate too much, just the specifics. You can't push the price of things like Iron much lower than what they're at now, for example. It's cheap and abundant. And it's the price of iron that determines things like the price of steel and the price of most Warrior armor.

I need to check my figures exactly and this is treading close to NDA waters so I'm a bit wary of posting *exactly* what everything csts at a given point. However, I think it's alright to work up some generalities. For example, you could get a full set of Knight armor (4 pieces and the headgear of your choice) - 128 Iron, 32 Steel, 400 Gold - for around 3k Gold. If, say, Iron costs 2 Gold then Steel, which takes 10 Wood and 20 Gold in the form of Coal and 10 Iron and another 20 Gold or 10 Wood, 10 Iron, and 40 Gold, will cost around 80+ gold depending on the price of Wood. All told, walking around with Knight's armor means you've got about 3000 gold on your back in the worst circumstances (You'll never recover that cost, but that's certainly what you've paid for it, even if you don't realize it).

given the statistics of various armors you can figure out that sort of cost for each and every set, if you know the cost of the crafting materials. While I haven't run the numbers on everything, and I'll leave it to someone else, the numbers I have show that various sets are widely priced, within professions and between professions.

But, beyond that they show that the real suckers are those that craft that lv19 armor. That's because while you can get it sooner and for a little bit less than your lv20 armor, you pay nearly as much. If the lv20 Captain's set is 128 Iron, and 32 Steel, and 400 Gold and the lv19 Soldier's set is 88Iron, 24 Steel, and 300 Gold then it's nearly 2/3rd of what it takes to get your lv20 armor. And you get ot use it for all of one level. Why not make do with what you have and save your resources? Because, it's not very likely that you're going to get 3k worth of resources in the time it takes you to hit that level, is it?

Simply put, the mid-level gear is overpriced or the lv20 gear underpriced. Perhaps it doesn't make ecconomic sense, but there's no incentive to get those middle level gears, there's every incentive to save up for that end-level gear. Crafting all the steps in between is something only the extremely wealthy or connected can manage. The middle armors, then, become superfluous. Overlooked and underused. Whereas, I'm of the belief that armor is not simply a bonus, it's a requirement. Blame it on playing a War for so long, but armor is something necessary for you character to function, there shouldn't be such an incentive to skip a few steps here and there, armor should either be enough of an advantage that you want to upgrade, want to seek out those places where you can upgrade, eacha dn every level, or it needs to be cheap enough that you can.

A character should have gotten the raw resources necessary to trade or buy what it would take to craft the armor of a given leve by the time they reach that level. Even if they've crafted the previous level's gear. So, if, say, lv17 gear is 72 Iron, 24 Steel, and 200 Gold, then not only should you have that amount or what it would take to get that amount of crafting materials by the time you hit lv17 just by going through the progression of level that would get you to lv17 but also, by the time you hit lv19 you'd have gained enough for another 88Iron, 24Steel, and 300 Gold.

At the same time, that shouldn't hold true for the lv20 gear. The lv19 gear should be *just* this side of good enough for serious play that you wouldn't be out of place on a PvP team wearing it. It should only be a few AL points off of the lvv20 armor, which is generally is. But the lv20 armor should be priced a lot higher than the lv19 gear for those few more points. The lv20 armor is the last set of armor you need. The last set you'll "earn", it needs to be worth it. A sign that you've spent the time and dedication towards getting to it at the same time that it's really not all that important if you don't have it because you can have something almost at good. People who like to PvE will work to get that lv20 armor just to have it, people who like to PvP will work to get that lv20 armor for that slight advantage it might give them. Someone who's worked to lv20 will be able to have their nearly as good lv19 armor but will have something more to work for, if they want to. So, the lv20 armor needs to cost a lot more, relatively, than everything else. It should be possible to go from lv19 armor to lv20 armor the way it should be possible to go from lv17 to lv20.

Anyhow, that's what I think. Anyone else have any ideas (Or want to figure out the exact prices of each and every set of armor)?

The way it is right now, it seems like a lot of the armor that they have in game is just wasting space. How many different levels of armor do they have in increasing usefulness by now, at least 4 or 5? This means that the average character is never going to even touch some levels of armor unless they really feel that they want to be spending tons of gold on something that's going to be useless to them a few hours later. You want to make armor fairly expensive so it feels like an accomplishment to buy, but if it takes you 20 levels worth of leveling up to build enough wealth for 1 full set of armor, people aren't going to want to stall at each step just to try everything on.

The problem I see here is the clash between the ease of leveling up and the fact that there are tons of levels of armor to buy that all cost more than you're going to make leveling up a couple times. I would make the level 20 armor cost a ton and make the level 19 armor almost as good, then either get rid of a bit of that lower level junk or just make sure not to add more and make it even worse.

There are armor steps at lv1, (obviously, which you start with and get for free), lv5, lv10, lv13, lv15, lv17, lv19, and lv20 currently. There are various crafters, some obvious, some hidden in out of the way places, like the lv20 crafter was last BWE, and not every crafter crafts the appropriate level of each and every set. To say nothing of the various bugs and misrepresentations that are present currently. So the picture is a bit smokey, but I'd say that's about what you could expect.

The first 10 levels fly by too fast to worry about it. An armor at every level from 10 to 20 is superfluous in the extreme. An armor you get as you get out of the first couple missions, an armor you get as you get out of the beginner's area, and an armor every few levels from then on out sounds about right as far as what's avaliable. It's the practicality of getting them that I wonder about.

Even as a Warrior, someone who's dependant on armor much more than any other profession, someone who lives and dies on the strength of your gear much more than anyone else, I can't see getting all those armors (I mean, I have, but that's because I'm a collector and I wanted to see the differences in the level variations. My war-mon had a set of every armor from lv10 on up except the Ascalon, because of pelts, and the Platemail, because I ran out of room. Color coded. I was always stylin'. Good for testing armor values and damage, too.). lv5, lv10, lv15, and lv20, yes. But each and everyone? No way. Not if the ecconomy is sound and the prices are what they are now. There's just no point because those slivers of extra armor mean I have to spend that much more the next time around. Now, sure, I could blow a few hundred steel without batting an eye, but as someone starting from scratch? As a caster, I care even less. I'd get maybe lv5 because it's cheap, unless I thought I'd have a problem getting enough for the lv10 set, as some caster sets seem to be, in which case I'd just make do with the starter gear until I got out of Ascalon and into the mountains and could pick up a better lv10 set. Then, as I got to lv20, I'd just grab the set that was closest to my level whenever I had the crafting goods. Then, I'd sit and wait until lv20. Just no point to the lv19 armor if I'd already gotten lv13 or lv15 or lv17.

I'd really be surprised who's going to use the 13 and 17, unless it's those few who will be stepping forward in tankmode.

Isn't it not as much the cost/reward difference on the armours as to the speed at which we're levelling these characters? I'll be slamming my characters through the missions without crafting a damn thing as long as possible [and probably benefiting from those that 'do' craft all the armours], and saving up for my 10 (and then 20) armour.

I think that, depending on need/rate of progression, people with either craft the level 15, or level 13 and level 17 armors. Some classes and players are going to need to craft in between and the levels at that point are slow enough that just neglecting to craft between 10 and 20 often won't cut it.

Yeah, the cost/reward isn't there, but the 'reward' is being able to beat a mission and progress to more missions and areas and, with that, a better reward/time, so it's a step that someone who's struggling will have to take.

The costs on those suits might be a big high - that's something to re-evaluate, but by using Saus' metric of 'getting enough crafting materials by the time you get to the next threshold', I'd not use the 10/13/15/17 progression, but the 10/13/17 progression *or* the 10/15 progression. That's perhaps more realistic.

Peace,
-CxE

With the "lock down" and Spooky's permission I'm going to be posting the armor data he put a lot of effort into collecting (and I mean a lot, thanks Spooks). Here are the links to the individual posts containing the info :

Warrior
Ranger
Necromancer
Monk
Mesmer
Elementalist

Edited to add :

Now that we've got the armor in the CMS the links point there.