Idea for New Trade Items

[Tellis Stormchaser]

I have been playing for 6 years now. Over that time, I accumulated a ton of armor, weapons, gear and trophies. I would like to see a way to be able to recycle that old armor into augments for new armor.

My idea goes like this, the progression of no drop armor (not including Luclin armor because it is so bad) is Hate/Fear no drop, Kael/Thurg/SS Quest armor, Ornate PoP, Elemental PoP(Time etal), Qvic, Anguish.

What I'd like to see is you take a piece of ornate, instead of hitting the delete button to make room in bank, you put it in a forge and combine with chissel, solvent etc and get an augment piece.

Take Kizrak's Bracer it has various stats on it
Kizrak's Bracer Of Battle
MAGIC ITEM NO TRADE
Slot: WRIST
AC: 28
STR: +4 DEX: +5 STA: +6 HP: +45 Endurance: +35
SV DISEASE: +3 SV COLD: +3 SV POISON: +4
Attack: +10

After hitting combine you can remove part of the stats or all of one primary stat, (i.e. ac, hp, mana, effect). If your skill is high enough (305 +augment) you can remove 2. So maybe you gain an augment that has 45 hp or 28 ac or even both.

I could see this working for rings and things with jewelry.

Now to make another condition is that 'new augment' can only upgrade the next level of no drop armor.

So, Hate fit Velious Quest Armors, Velious -> Ornate, Ornate -> Elemental, Elemental -> Qvic etc.

And a final part of this, the augment only fits if the higher level piece of the same slot (head, feet etc.)

Ok I've rambled. What do you all think?

[Prelgor]

I don't see this working out very well, at least not in the way you describe. Gear progression was already balanced on the first pass through with the assumption that this would not happen.

For example, suppose your first few tiers of gear for a given slot (doesn't really matter which - these are made up numbers) have AC 20, AC 30, AC 40, etc. Going from AC 20 to AC 30 is a significant upgrade. If you were able to magically remove the AC 20 from the first piece of gear and give it to the second, you would get AC 50 on a second tier piece of gear, which is even better than the third tier! I imagine that this logic would hold up, if you fill in the actual stats of the various gear sets.

I understand what you're saying. It would be nice to get *something* back from obsolete gear that you worked for. The simplest mechanism might be to allow some modest tribute value for No Drop gear, so you feel you get something. Pricing this gear would be problematic... However, tribute has existed in the game long enough that, if SOE really wanted No Drop items to be tributable, it would already have happened. If this were a big issue for me, this is probably what I would lobby for.

Another possibility is to allow removal of a fragment of the item's power as an augment. Suppose an AC 30 item turns into an AC 3 augment. Remember, the amount has to be small enough that second tier gear doesn't become better than third tier. This is interesting, in principle, but there's a LOT of work that would have to go into just creating all the possible augments, to say nothing of balancing. A whole system of disenchanting like this would represent a major change in the game. That's not to say it can't happen, but it would represent a major effort. And the return would be what, very high-end gear can be recycled to improve other even-higher-end gear? So, you can immediately cash in your old gear, and in 10 minutes, you've "finished" content that took loads of time to develop. Contrast that with the same developer time being used instead to create new zones for you to spend months playing in and ultimately winning the Sword of Uberness from the Dragon of Nastiness. I think it's unlikely that something like this would be introduced.

In the end, it will all come back to a basic design philosophy. Can you get better gear by sitting at home beating on your old sword at an anvil and sharpening it for a few more days? I think the developers would reply with a resounding NO. You get better gear by killing bigger and badder monsters.

[Maevenniia]

Interesting, maybe a variation on the Salvage ability?

Salvage = chance to salvage useable components from a failed combine.

Recycle = % chance to recover useable components from existing gear

ex:

-recover 1-3 sheets of "____" metal when recycling plate armor (velious quest armor = folded sheets of velium, PoP ornate armors would perhaps yield a random PoP era metal, etc)

-recover a chipped gem or some ingots of precious metal from jewellery
(chipped cgem could be re-polished for reuse, 2-3 ingots could be melted down to make a new "bar" useable in JC)

-recover 1-3 swatches of silk or 1-3 skins/pelts

[tnexus]

I don't ever see this happening. If you could successfully make an augment from say a piece of ornate, what's to stop people from just pharming high hp items that rot and turning them into augs. It would kill virtually every market out there. The only way I could see this happening is if it gave you a component for perhaps a new augment, but with it you'd still need new items for the final combine.

[Tellis Stormchaser]

easy fix

I don't ever see this happening. If you could successfully make an augment from say a piece of ornate, what's to stop people from just pharming high hp items that rot and turning them into augs. It would kill virtually every market out there. The only way I could see this happening is if it gave you a component for perhaps a new augment, but with it you'd still need new items for the final combine.

First, The augment only fits the slot the item was from. bp turned into augment can only be used for your bp. (I forgot the OOW level 1 quest armor so I'd suggest you put that ornate augment into either elemental/time/OOW ph1 quest armors)

Second, it becomes lore, no trade, so you make it for yourself only. You don't have but 1 of them and there's no reason to farm. If anything they will bring more tradeable molds and patterns so more players who are less affluent can afford to get ornate.

As mentioned by another post, I can see the power problem, 28 ac is a great upgrade for a bracer, better then drops. Maybe get half like 14 ac. But I'd have to say 3 ac is worthless. You can get 10 (15?) ac from LDON regualr adventures. I'm throwing this out a starting point. This would be something else none raiding people could do for them selves. Especially if you are a tank in full ornate trying to tank mpg at level 70 or getting a group for RS. A little more ac or hps makes it a lot easier(still difficult).

[Prelgor]

Personally, I like Maevenniia's idea. Combine the obsolete armor with some special reagent (using smithing for plate, tailoring for leather, etc.) and get back the tradeable raw materials (PoP metal, rare silks, etc.). It makes sense, intuitively, that a skilled craftsman would be able to melt down an old piece of armor and at least get good ore out of it. This is along the same lines as getting pieces of velium from velium weapons, for example. It also has a neat solution for which tradeskill should be used for the combine (instead of some hypothetical new enchanting/disenchanting skill, which seems to naturally fit none of them specifically). Of course, this also avoids adding power-ups to existing gear.

Tellis, I'm not sure you're with me yet. I'm not familiar with high-end gear (my 60 BST main has just one piece of ornate), so I'll need you to fill in the specifics. Take your ornate-geared tank. So, elemental is the next step up, then what, Qvic beyond that? What is the AC of the breastplate from each tier? I think it's fair to assume that the AC on a tank BP is the most important stat (we can substitute HP if you prefer). If you take the elemental BP and augment it with some fraction of the ornate BP, it still CANNOT be as good as a Qvic BP! You haven't yet earned Qvic gear!

I can take this a step further. If you've earned elemental gear, then getting ornate should be trivial for you. Elemental gear is statted in such a way (or should be) as to be Ornate+(a bit). That +(a bit) is the inherent augment, if you will, for earning the higher class of gear.

Let me give one more extreme example. Suppose you're running around in full ornate. You want better gear. How about you go back to your home town and run the newbie quests. You'll get an AC 12 chest piece, which your system will break down to add a few points of AC to your ornate. Should the game really offer any meaningful rewards to a 55+ for completing a level 10 quest? By the same token, if you can get get gear from Tier N, then getting Tier N-1 (or less) gear isn't a challenge.

Now, I wouldn't opposed to the idea of a progressive quest. Take your ornate armor, get an elemental drop, and use it to fashion an upgraded, elemental-quality piece of gear. However, this still involves you beating elemental-level content for elemental-level gear. Perhaps the drop needed for the upgrade quest/combine is slightly easier to get than the drop needed for the "normal" piece of gear. That would seem OK to me. You already got the rare drop from Tier N-1, so I'll let you off with the semi-rare drop to upgrade it, instead of the rare drop for a brand-spanking new one. This also provides incentive to actually progress through the content instead of trying to jump headlong into places 3 steps beyond what you're ready for.