Is It Worth It?
Here is the one item that bothers me the most in-game right now. Let me tell you why.
The life of the average crafter can be tough, you know. Once upon a time it used to be all about the grinding. I have often regailed you with tales of the Burning Steppes, of long hours farming Black Dragonscale to craft that set which was pretty much required wearing for any Hunter taking their first tentative steps into Molten Core. It was hard, yes, but it was fun, and the only restriction was you. You farmed until you had the mats you needed, you sold everything you didn't need, you crafted (and never asked for a fee) and as a result the tips were normally pretty good. You earnt enough for half an epic mount [*] and then you earnt enough to buy the mats to allow your Warlock to do the Dire Maul Epic run. Then TBC came along, and all the crafting changed.
Blizzard introduced the wildcard, the additional material. The Primal Nether completely transformed the way crafting works in game, by adding a vital final factor to the mix. Now crafters were in a position where, to make the best items, you needed to (assuming you first had the reputation to buy the patterns you required) either a) get lucky and have a Nether drop after a L70/Heroic run or b) afford to buy a Nether on the AH. Of course the Nether was added as a way to extend the life of content, I completely understand that. It meant that you couldn't have the best items three days after launch or just farm until your eyes bled any more, you were required to provide an item that was only available via instances. You had to go work with four other people. Ultimately this caused problems, and when Blizzard offered a solution to those people who thought the Nether drop was restrictive, it created a whole new slew of issues. Once you could buy Nethers with Badges of Justice, things got really interesting.
As crafting has progressed into TBC, prices have closely mirrored content for these additional materials. Runed Orbs, the key to Ulduar patterns, now sell for under 100g on my server where once you could have happily added an extra 0 to that number. Crusader Orbs, the ToTC added extra, just dropped below 200g, and as they are used in all the iLevel 245 gears, now is a great time to be going out and grabbing them and crafting bracers especially, which are more than likely going to last the majority of players all the way to Cataclysm. Primordial Saronite right now is worth 2000g a piece. I cannot see it dipping much below that price until ICC is fully open and Hard Modes have been engaged.
Sorry, but that just seems like too much to ask.
Money like that makes people look to gold farmers, I know it does. 1000g for Crusader Orbs made at least one person I am aware of just that, and despite me reporting them to Blizzard they are still playing. I think it's a dangerous game when inflation in-game doesn't just affect the stats of your gear, it makes people expect to pay frankly unrealistic sums for items that, if we are honest, are only there to help you compete the current portion of content and which will be disgarded come Cataclysm. At the price of 23 Emblems of Frost, I cannot imagine there will EVER be a point where I can afford to purchase them this way either, unless Blizzard upgrade the Heroic content to Frost for the last few months of the game. This is where we see a major difference in the additional material market. Frosts ONLY come from Weekly quests, ICC or the Daily Heroic, making the Primordial Saronite the most sought after. You can downgrade all higher Emblems for purchase EXCEPT Frost, so if I wanted to I could use Frost to buy Crusader Orbs or Runed Orbs, but only if I was certifiably insane. These ilevel 264 items are unique not simply because of the ingredients, but also because it costs a Primordial Saronite to purchase the recipes.
I have a real quandry to consider as a LW once I hit honored with the Ashen Verdict: the completist in me wants four recipes, the GM in me wants to be able to offer the choice to Guildies. This will mean an outlay of either 92 Frosties or 8000g. I was saving that for my Chopper :( To make matters worse that's the same again at Revered for the leg recipes. I would have to seriously up my game time to even consider this at present, and I know that there are people out there who will be dialing 1-800-GOLD-FARM without a second thought, and that makes me sad. Yes I'm sure that's always been the case, but this is a frankly mind-boggling amount of cash or emblems to spend.
I know Blizzard have said that things seem hard currently with so little content to run for Frost Emblems, but still, the fact remains I can only run ICC 10 once a week, and Primordial Saronite hasn't dropped from ANY of the bosses there. With Daily Random plus weekly Raid Quest I can afford a new Saronite roughly every 10 days assuming I don't upgrade my Tier Gear or anything else. All the other creation crafts have a three day cooldown :p I find myself wondering if this is a deliberately steep mountain I've been given to climb, or whether my old age and cynicism has finally broken through: what is the point to buying these items when I have so many hoops to jump through to even be able to craft them.
I have to ask, is it worth it? Sadly, right now at least for me, the answer is no :(
[*] ... and then your Husband generously gave you the rest. What a top guy :D
Labels: 3.3, crafting, discussion
posted by The Godmother at
10:51:00 AM
: L80 : P
20 Comments:
To be honest, the 'ZOMG I must have everything NOW!!!!11!!' crowd are no more or less likely to buy gold for this than they are any other expensive item in game, whether it be crafting mats or Traveller's Tundra Mammoths or Choppers or whatever. It was, alas, ever thus.
For the rest of us, you can be sure that Blizzard will up the drop rate or drop the Frost emblem cost if they see that the economy is showing fewer Primordial Saronite than they would expect...
I run 10 alts through the raid weekly every week, and I very rarely miss a daily with them either. that's 50 frost badges from the raid weekly and 140 from the daily, for 190 every week, which doesn't include the ICC 25's and 10's I do, which are much more varied in consistency. In my opinion, with the number of alts people are sporting these days and the incredible ease of heroics and raid weeklies, it is very easy to come by frost badges, and thus primordial saronite.
I think you're right.
In fact I'd go much further and say that the rate of Frost emblem availability to a raider is a steep mountain to climb, but the rate of availability to a casual is a dead end.
No way a casual player will ever spend Frost emblems at the current rate on Primordial Saronite. They might be getting 4-6 frost per week, and that means they'll be lucky to have two items of that gear level by the close of Wrath.
eg. cloak 60 + belt 60 = 120 frost needed, with 6 per week is 20 weeks. Nope, not going to happen.
Even if the ICC content is nurfed and the Triumph are replaced with Frost, you'll still not see most non-raiders in Frost-ish gear.
And this all end in the fact that casuals can buy gear rather than earn it, and the fast way to do that is gold.
A highly paid, time poor gamer is going to do this without much consideration at all.
I'm a self confessed altaholic... and after a blow up with an idiot GM I decided to quit raiding in May and work on my alts. Up until 3.3 I was content to gear them all up as quickly as possible, but after seeing the ridiculous prices for Primordial Saronite, they've all stopped and concentrated on giving up their emblems. I'm now averaging 10k a week putting up PS on the AH on my realm... and I'm hoping for more than 50k before Catacylsm hits. Its a little ridiculous... but might as well make a quick buck when I can!
The price of Primordial Sarnoite is high for a reason, you use the same currency for the Tier 10. And you don't have much choice than to buy it for some classes that want to be the best there ever was.
Counting 2000 gold for Primordial Saronite, 23 emblems. Makes an Emblem of Frost worth about 87 gold.
For the Tier 10 you have to spend up to 95 emblems for a single piece, which you need to have for getting the higher tier. You are in a way spending 8,2k gold on it. (87g*95) Which is "reasonable" for what market prices are now.
But if you count the amount of primordial sarnoite needed for the recipes you have 8 primordial saronite for legs. That's 184 emblems or 16k gold for the sarnoite alone.
So in theory the crafted pieces requires almost twice the emblems. And that's way too much in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, they are great items, but I'd rather have 2 pieces Tier 10 then one pair of pants. Not to mention you will need the tier 10 pieces for upgrading to the higher tier.
Of course this is not how it really works in "real life", you don't get all the Primordial Saronite from one characters Emblem of Frost. And it's really meant for those who have huge stockpiles of gold, and willing to use it. Or the guy with 8 level 80 alts and can do daily heroics with all of them, every day.
But if you're on a main, and wonder if you should use Emblems of Frost on the Primordial Saronite, do you need 8000 gold or a brand new shiny tier 10 piece?
Oh, and I believe the Shadowmourne questline requires 25 primordial saronite. So the prices may increase when people realize that they want to try to get it "solo"...
And I remembered that I went awfully off-topic, as this was from a crafting stand point. But I really think that in WoW atm, it's real hard to balance the crafting system. As there will always be someone with stupid amounts of money, and be able to buy this kind of gear without ever stepping into an instance. It does encourage players to buy gold, because they want a shortcut to get top in raids.
But I don't think it matters, my gaming experience doesn't get any worse by someone spending 30k gold on two items.
And wanting the crafter to buy recipes, with currency she needs for gear to improve her own raid performance, isn't really a good way to go.
Sorry for making a long post...
(As a side note, in the upcoming expansion, I am massively psyched about the guild crafting they have talked about. And I really hope that they nail it, making crafting something fun again. (The Winterspring crafting quest was awesome, Pristine Hide of the Beast. ^^))
The one nice thing about Primordial Saronite is it's a great way for a casual 80 to make money. With all the time I spend on my main, my Mage alt is never going to run ICC while it's current content. At the rate of 2 Frost per day, when I can find the time to run her daily Heroic (and that's not all days, with my normal raid schedule), and an extra 5 per week if I'm lucky, the raid is easy, and I can find a group who wants yet another DPS, she's never going to pull in enough badges to make it worth her while to upgrade her gear--by the time she got a full T10, it would already be obsolete.
But what I CAN do is use those Frost badges to buy Primordial Saronite, and pick up cash instead, which I can then use to upgrade more pieces of gear than I could with the badges themselves.
Generally-speaking, I agree. It's daunting. Even if daily quests make it fairly easy to earn 100-200g a day, that's still 10+ days to buy one. If raiding both 10-man and 25-man ICC isn't practical for you (and it isn't for me), getting and making those recipes looks a looong way off.
And yet I've recently seen a hacked account where a hacker had something like 990 primordial saronite (along with many choppers and battered hilts). I can't even comprehend how they acquired that much of those things, even with the potentially huge backing of gold from farming/selling. They only held the account for about three hours, which makes me wonder how our server possibly had that much surplus for them to buy - or whatever they do.
I find the fact that you buy a recipe with a mat u need to create the stuff absolute bullshit...
especially when the item is so rare to get - way to promote all the ppl with tons of alts who dont want a T10 upgrade...
I marvel that this is an issue to anyone. Gold is extremely easy to come by these days even if means just doing the prescribed number of dailies. Factor in that anyone that would bother to look up greedygoblin or "just my two copper" could have a decent side income from the wow economy while sleeping.
I would consider myself a dedicated raider, not hardcore as my schedule with school, job, and a wife doesn't allow it, but I make 10-15k a week from my AH business that usually takes me anywhere from 10-15 minutes a day. Not to say that starting this business did not take some time and investment, because it did, but now everything is to the point of automation that I read a book while I hit the reload ui macro to collect all the sales every two days, then hit batch post and go do something else for an hour while some 4000 auctions get posted. Total time on AH stuff a week? 2 hours out of a total of 16 that I allot myself.
I have never bought gold from a gold seller, and yet I have purchased every available upgrade from ulduar's runed orbs to icc's primordial saronite (25 for shadow's edge, 9 for the leggings and the patterns, 6 for the boots and patterns) and I still have cash in the bank.
I don't want to rail on the OP, or anyone else for that matter, but the point I'm trying to make is that you can have your cake and eat it too without buying it from some Chinese guy that will try and hack your account. There is a wealth of information out there (for free) that can help you get the optimal performance for whatever your doing: elitist jerks for raiding, greedygoblin for making money, etc... Use them!
I think that as it stands there is a huge market for it as every man and their dogs aims to get 264 items as these are END GAME WOTLK items, the cream of the crop for non-25man-raiders.
Over time the demand for these items will most likely diminish as people end up with the 2-3 crafted items needed.
As long as there is demand, and people are willing to pay gold, its doable.
I am a raider, but i also have a bit of downtime to the side to farm mining nodes in icecrown, and do enchants in dalaran - i can do 400-500g a day easy from doing those two things. In 4-5 days thats 2000g.
If people think its hard to earn gold, they just havent worked out a way to use their professions/abilities to their best yet.
2000g does sound like a lot, but if you want those end-game items, you have to be willing to work hard to afford them.
Plus btw - if u have say 1-2 chrs, that do the dailys each day, and the weekly (as in staying out of all raids), thats still 19-28 emblems a week, which means in 3 weeks u can have 2-4 saronite easy. If that isnt catering to the casual players....... i dont know what is.
And thats all without raiding. Not too difficult.
I think blizzard have it pretty sorted at the moment.
Well stated article. I was pondering over Saronite earlier today, and looking at the crafted gear. (Luckily, for a retadin, the crafted gear is mediocre in comparison to drops.)
Crafting reagents in BC and Wrath have been expensive and I accepted that. Running heroics for Nethers/Orbs didn't seem unreasonable for high quality crafting, and Crusader Orbs, while pricey, were cheaper than Saronite. I suppose my quandary with Saronite is in relation to the quantity demanded.
Sure, Crusader Orbs were expensive, fairly rare, and the crafted armor was somewhat mandatory for some classes/specs. But ALL you used it for was those items...at about 6 orbs per, 12 was roughly the maximum your average high end raider could use.
Crafting still uses 6 or 8 Saronite, which is...OK. Toss in the fact that recipes also cost Saronite. Toss in the fact that gated content means that their is a somewhat limited supply of frost orbs. Throw in the fact that since the quest is available to anyone, every plate melee on the planet is trying to collect 25(!) of 'em for Shadow's Edge/Frostmourne (despite the fact that very few will be able to acquire the shards in the end), driving up the price.
Finally, add the new tier system. Buy your 251 tier with Frost badges, then upgrade with a token, then again. It's a good system; it's logical, lets you build up your set rather than the hodgepodge game of ilevels in ToC. BUT, since one now has to shell out a couple hundred badges for T10, there is a very difficult triage to be applied in what to do and when to do it. By the time that Saronite is common enough to make decisions easier, most people will have conquered the majority of ICC, and will no longer have much need, since we'll be tapping our feet for Cataclysm by that point.
I think too many important items/facets of character development were tied into Emblems of Frost/Primordial Saronite, and the gated nature of the patch only exacerbated that unfortunate concurrence of otherwise good ideas into a stew of greed.
I shan't buy gold, but it's a tempting thought when I could look at a potential price tag of around 40-50 P. Saronites to minmax, to the tune of about 100,000 gold at the moment.
In our guild we have a few raiders who have level 80 alts. Emblems of Frost won by these alts are being used to buy Primordial Saronite for the mains.
It seems to work okay.
Part of the inflated economy also allows people to make that much gold, however, and as another said, the people who weren't buying gold before and are part of the ZOMG MUST HAVE NOW crowd aren't going to be influenced by high prices now. High gold prices for new stuff isn't a new phenomenon.
For example, when ICC came out, I knew I HAD to have the 264 boots for my hunter, because I would almost certainly be wearing them until Cataclysm came out and wouldn't have to concern myself with spending points on upgrades in raiding.
So what I did is, I went on a profession blitz with jewelcrafting, chaining heroics and building up honor and amassing a hoard of epic gems so I could easily cover the 12k gold cost of materials... and it took just a few days of grinding in the evenings. Really, there's no reason to go and buy gold, other than to take the 'easy way out.'
I love your blog :)
Unfortunately, the primordial saronite cost of Icecrown recipes really favours hardcore gamers, who are likely to have several level 80 alts and they'll run the random dungeon and weekly raid quest on many of them.
I'm weighing up at the moment whether it's worth buying a blacksmithing recipe because I want the legs myself. Or just asking around to see if any of the hardcore guilds have a crafter who can make it. Even if they charge a fee, it won't be as much as the primordial saronite would have been.
Factor in that anyone that would bother to look up greedygoblin or "just my two copper" could have a decent side income from the wow economy while sleeping.
Amusing that you mention that, since such economy-exploiting LOLINTERNETCAPITALISM jerk-offs are the reason WHY things like Primordial Saronite are bloody expensive.
But regardless, I don't feel that it's really that big an issue. I have a single level 80 alt that got me three of the five Primordial Saronite for my crafted boots (my guild provided the other two), and now I'm heavily considering investing in another alt (with Heirlooms) just to build a monetary nest egg for Cataclysm while Saronite is still high.
I suppose the PS cost on the recipes sucks from a completionist point of view, but that point of view has always been hilariously foreign and unapproachable to me. Buy and learn what is useful to you and your guild, then get the others later when it's not as big of a burden to the wallet.
I agree that the way they handled Primordial Saronite is flawed. I am not an altaholic. I have one main. That's it. And now I'm being penalized because I don't have other 80's that I can run through the randoms to get Primordial Saronite for my main. Similarly, I've been saving up gold for a long time now, but have just 10.5k. That'll buy me about 4 saronite (they're going for about 2,500 on my server). But I need 8 saronite for the legs.
So what am I to do? I can borrow a few gold from guildies and be in debt to them, I can try and finish leveling my 74 rogue I abandoned a while ago, or I can go online and spend $6 or $7 per 1,000g and buy my Primordial Saronite that way. Now, I'm not going to buy gold, but it really does seem that there are going to be a lot - and I mean A LOT - of people tempted to buy gold for the first time if they want to stay competitive in raids. I am already behind because of guildies who have alts who are farming saronite for mains and I really want to stay competitive, but just can't without resorting to buying gold right now.
Please don't be so quick to assume that people who can afford very expensive in-game items have purchased their gold from farmers.
Plenty of players know how to make gold legitimately in this game. It isn't that hard or time consuming.
I got my lvl 264 boots last night, and I bought the Primordial Saronites I needed from the AH. No gold seller was necessary. Just my various alts and their daily crafting cooldowns.
If you have time to farm for hours, as you said you did in Burning Steppes then take 2 hours a day and you make upwards of 1000g. Its easy. Less QQ and more grind.
Everyone seems to be missing the distinction between the three groups involved here, and only one has a problem. Group 1, whom are saying there is no problem, are either: ICC Raiders, or players with many lvl 80 alts, or players whom have got their AH-Fu up to sufficient profit levels. They can all afford these items.
Group 2 are those people whom are completely casual and are looking to make a quick buck with their low, but still highly profitable, rate of acquiring P.S. by occasionally puging the easier weekly's, and running daily hc's, and trading frost's.
Group 3, the problem group, are those players that are hardcore right now (in terms of effort), but have not been so for long enough to amount the wealth, or number of alts, or a priority position in a guild that runs ICC weekly, which is possibly where the OP is placed. And group 3's real complaint is:
"You cannot become a member of group 1 in a short space of time!"
for example:
I make good money on the AH, but i had to learn a lot about how the markets work and what sells, how and when. What add-ons to use and how to make best use of them. I had to work on my spreadsheets, and level professions. That took a long time, and no small sum of gold (and I'm still learning). It might not take me long now to keep the business ticking over, but to get here took mucho effort.
I have only one 80 alt.. i know it would take me a long time to get another couple up to 80, whilst still raiding on my main and conducting my AH business, and then get them geared to start farming hc's, let alone the time it takes to farm 5 hc's a day in a schedule that see's my main raiding 16 hours a week.
If I was a non-raider, just running hc's, it would take me a long time to find a good guild whom would take me in, get geared up with 245 craftables and totc runs etc, then prove my worth and get lucky enough to get a regular spot on a weekly ICC team. Or at least, I remember it taking me a fairly long time on my main.
To be honest...
Use ur professions to get bonuses.
Dont craft (unless ure a thousand-hours-player to farm thousands of gold)
Wow have one of the worst´s crafting systems a game could have...
It´s the true =/
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