(edited by Nilkemia.8507)
The Halloween weapons/items.
Okay, this part is separate because I worried it’d be too big. But just to show how bad it is, I’ll use the Crossing as an example.
The Crossing requires:
-1 Gift of Souls (its unique gift)
-Eldritch Scroll (just 50 skill points, not bad)
-100 Mystic Coins (save up from dailies/monthlies, or buy them)
-20 Superior Sigils of the Night (why 20? It can only use 1. Sigh, whatever)
A Superior Sigil of the Night requires:
-1 Orichalcum Ingot
-1 Glob of Ectoplasm
-1 Onyx/Charged/Glacial Lodestone (depending on craft profession)
-100 Pieces of Candy Corn
Gift of Souls requires:
-1 Gift of Knowledge (500 Knowledge Crystals)
-250 Orichalcum Ingots (annoying, but doable with some effort)
-20 Globs of Ectoplasm (surprisingly few compared to other crafted exotics, though the Sigils of Night will need some Ectoplasm to make, so maybe that makes up for it)
-100 Crystal Lodestones (buy Crystal Cores and Elonian Wine, cheaper than getting the Lodestones themselves)
Is that grindy? Yes. But it is mostly stuff I can get on my own in a variety of ways, and I could manage this before I can’t craft them anymore. Except for one more thing.
In order to make the Gift of Souls, you have to make the recipe to allow you to learn how to make a Gift of Souls, instead of just discovering it. This is a cheap and blatant way to make craftable upgrades harder to make, and it’s done with quite a few other items as well (mostly food trays, but there are others).
Recipe: Gift of Souls requires:
-40 Bottles of Elonian Wine (why so much wine?)
-10 Candy Corn Cobs (each Cob requiring 1,000 Pieces of Candy Corn to make, so 10,000 pieces altogether. Very grindy and annoying, but doable…if you farm the Candy Corn Nodes in the Labyrinth for the rest of the Halloween events.
10 Piles of Crystalline Dust (easy, but wait for it..)
10 Tyria’s Best Nougat Centers (made from 1,000 Nougat Centers per Best Nougat Center respectively, also requiring 10,000 in total. Unlike the Candy Corn however, there are no resource nodes for these, you either get them as rare drops off enemies or semi-rarely out of Trick or Treat Bags, meaning there is no consistent means to gather enough soon enough.)
Seriously, for all the stuff this takes, the weapon might as well be an Ascended weapon. It really should be, if it’s going to require this much!
It’s the same for the other returning Halloween weapons. (They use different Gifts/ Lodestones/Halloween items, but the quantity requirements are the same from what I recall, it’s on the wiki.)
Who decided on these requirements for the Halloween weapons? I really want to know what their rationale was behind this, because from what I’ve read, it didn’t take this much to make them when they first came out. Why up the amounts needed? At this rate, I pretty much have to rely on the Trading Post to get enough Nougats and probably the Candy Corn too, since farming it in the Labyrinth is a pain. When just making a recipe you need is the hardest thing of all to do in the entire process, something is utterly wrong!!!
So…yeah. I wanted the Crossing, only to discover that since I wasn’t here for the first time, I might not be able to make it at all. And even if I can, it’s not something I can say I had fun doing.
After-note: Superior Sigil of the Night also requires you to make a recipe, but since it is easily buy-able from the Trading Post, I didn’t include that. Also, the actual quantity of materials necessary to make it is unknown at this time, as that was messed with too.
(edited by Nilkemia.8507)
In addition to these “updated” requirements for old weapons, we got two new items as well to get: A Bloody Prince mini, and a 20 Slot Halloween Pail. The mini costs 20 Candy Corn Cobs and the 20 Slot Pail requires 15 Candy Corn Cobs.
As of right now, 250 Pieces of Candy Corn cost 1.75 gold (at 70 copper per piece), meaning enough for a single cob costs roughly 7 gold (actually a little more, since I’m not factoring in the price going up bit by bit as you buy more).
So by that, the mini would cost around 150 gold’s worth of candy corn pieces. No thanks.
The 20 Slot Pail would cost around 110 gold’s worth of pieces. When you consider that other 20 slot containers are far easier and cheaper to buy (Fractals, Glory if your PvP rank is high enough, can be bought from the Trading Post ranging from 12-15 gold, can be crafted for 10 gold per Superior Rune of Holding), this item becomes utterly nonsensical, especially since the only difference is it’s own icon/name. Seriously, what’s even the point of this item then? Do Halloween materials fill up this pail before other containers? Even then, it’d still be pointless to get.
(edited by Nilkemia.8507)
I wonder if the economist/s that work for ANet (do they have any?) thought the price of Candy Corn would drop drastically. Well it would have if they made sure it was everywhere again and now not smarter to hoard like crazy. I mean seriously if you have the bank space KEEP ALL OF IT. It’s the smartest thing you can do. They’d need the Candy Corn node to put out 25 pieces a day with a higher chance of a Cob for the price to come down.
i totally agree with you mate. a lot of grinding is required now for almost everything you wanna get, compared to last year. but a reason for this could be to stop EVERYONE from having the same ‘unique’ and ‘limited’ skins.
Embrace the darkness..
Which is dumb J Night because with time all the limited skins fall out of favor anyways and you almost see none of them at all. I hate this years Halloween even it is just a grind fest. I’d kill for the bloody prince mini but candy corn is so stinking rare this year you need like 200g+ to get it. The drop rates are so bad on it inside the event that nobody does the event at all. They go grind dungeons or champions to get gold so they can get it and the price of candy corn gets even worse as a result. Since NOBODY AT ALL is farming it.
This years Halloween event was a complete letdown when compared to last years. Ya, it sounds really mean to say that when a developer put work into it and you do not want it to be. The truth is the truth though and that is that last years was actually fun.
The drop rates are so bad on it inside the event that nobody does the event at all. They go grind dungeons or champions to get gold so they can get it and the price of candy corn gets even worse as a result. Since NOBODY AT ALL is farming it.
But this is pretty much what ANET has been doing for months.
Every game needs money sinks in order to avoid massive inflation, and since taxes are probably one of the most powerful tools in this regard, the game encourages using the TP through RNG drops and/or unrealistic farms.
This is not something bad on its own (while I feel much more inmersive to play different content for different rewards, a TP centered game allows you to stick to the content you really like, being fairly consistent with the manifesto).
The game just fails allowing this to happen where it really matters, where there’s power creep involved (an obvious reason to prefer some item over what you already had) like with current ascended weapons or ascended rings some time ago.
For cosmetics and other vanity items, something I would understand to have to go out of my way in order to get, the TP emphasis and “play what you want” maxim are, however, almost universal. There’s just a “little” issue with this … rewards on different activities are FAR from normalized.
There are always some activities available with extremely high income/time ratios. It was CoF1 spamming for a long time, folllowed by some LS “design failures”, like gauntlet and aetherblade farms, and currently is probably about champion trains and alt t6 node gathering. Even dungeon rewards, balanced in this regard no long ago, are in obvious mismatch with the challenge and the amount of time required to beat them.
Most of the time it doesn’t really matter what kind of item you are looking for, be it a precursor, a Bloody Prince / Tequatl mini, some seasonal weapon skin … those activities are the best bet to get it and cut the replay value of most other content by A LOT.
@Varga ~ Actually Anet’s current track record has been getting far better in working within the events to get the miniatures or even farming gold. The Queen’s Pavilion farming, Scarlet invasion farming, backpacks dropping from the mini-games as well as from things such as fortunes, not having to do every meta-achievement to complete an event.
Anet has actually taken quite a few steps forward in letting you work within an event to get what you want. Unlike before where all you did was spam CoF path 1 over and over and over to get what you wanted. Which I really have begun to like as it breaks up the dungeon farming. It isn’t perfect by any means but perfection doesn’t exist to start with.
I also feel if you are going to limit a mini during a holiday to a holiday only item. You should provide a way for me to farm it it within that holiday without breaking my back. I mean it is a holiday not another random living story event with bloody Scarlet. It is something that comes back every year and something a majority of the player base looks forward to the most each year. That or they need to remove the account bound so you can get it later like I dunno… mini’s in GW1?
Weapons skins to me are a little different as this game is more about cosmetics like them as a stand apart thing that everyone notices. Even in WvW with things turned down weapons themselves still appear while the character model is just a generic color. Mini’s though? Lets be honest almost nobody at all notices it but you. It’s something you appreciate not others.