Artifacts should be account bound

Actually, the cost of leveling artifacts depends upon how much time you are willing to spend farming Nth metal. I spend more time farming Nth metal than I do spending money leveling up artifacts, so I have never spent more than $30 on any single artifact. If you don't want to spend time farming and want to level up your artifacts fast, then yes, you will have to "pay" for that privilege.

This game was actually meant for the PC; DCUO was able to branch out into the console market for this game at the same time and was able to make a profit off of that. The controls for this game are tooled for a mouse movement playstyle, something that I have never been able to do being a keyboard warrior myself.

When DCUO was first announced, it was supposed to be on PC only; Sony decided to put it to the PS3 as well since at that time Sony Online Entertainment owned it.

It is not an easy transition to go from one game engine to the next, even within the same game engine company. This is why some game companies create entirely new games for new engines and leave the old ones behind. MMO's in general cannot do this easily or quickly, especially if their servers cannot handle that new engine and if there are no resources to dedicate to such an endeavor. Since Unreal 3 works across the board for all ports for this game, then it makes sense to keep it it there until upgrades to the servers/ports and resource availability are realized.

Edit: Game engines are "EXPENSIVE"!

The game came out for PS3 and PC on the same day. The game was primarily developed for PS3, I could dig up the interview if you want.

Understood. I still do not support account bound artifacts, as I can see how it would be abused, intentional or not. I only play support roles, since the DPS market is Super Soaker Saturated. That is why I questioned the OP about how many artifacts he/she is using on their main character. I don't use more than 3 artifacts for my healers and I never have to switch out artifacts once I have the ones I want on them.

It seems to me that using both roles is not artifact or alt friendly. There must be another way we can think of to make it easier for dual role players to level up their artifacts.

Uh, I think I'm going to have to throw a "know your facts, bud" right back at you. It looks like the Unreal 3 engine was not designed specifically for the PS3. it was designed to take advantage of the new shader hardware that had been developed. And that is tech which WIndows computers and the Xbox 360 also used. In fact, the first games released using Unreal 3 were on the 360 and Windows.

The engine being called Unreal 3 is in no way indicative of it being for the PS3. It just means it's the 3rd Unreal engine that had been developed. Or do you think Unreal 4 was developed primarily for use on a PS4 and Unreal 5 is intended primarily for PS5 due to the naming convention too?

I have two healer/dps characters. My sorcery main I use source shard, grim, and la mort for dps and orb, ray, page for healing. My celestial alt had the same healing artifacts and the card combo with SA for dps. I recently switched the celestial toon to HL while I level up a water toon. Now, my healing artifacts from that toon are sitting in a bank that I could be using for my water toon to heal and just focus on lving dps arts. I don’t understand how account bound artifacts can be abused. I think it would only encourage having Alts for powers we find fun.

I just want to clarify that I’m not spending money of upgrading my artifacts I’m just saying it’s very expensive or it wou,d take forever for multiple characters. I enjoy many powers in the game and I really liking dpsing and healing so that’s approximately 6 artifacts per character. It would be more alt-friendly to have artifacts account bound. Especially if I change power for one character and I can no longer use my healing artifacts. It’s just a suggestion.

A variation of an idea I made before...

You get a new base amenity just for Artifacts. This is shared for all of your characters (even if they aren't in the same league or faction.)

It shows all the artifacts and here you can add all your Nth Metal to it. You can then put the nth metal in any artifacts you want and max them out.

The trick is with the alts. While they'll have access the maxed out Artifacts they'll have to pay a certain price every month to use them. This way your alt doesn't just get a free ride.

Much like resetting powers, you can pay to reset the Artifact and put the nth metal elsewhere. This is where the Devs could make some real world money. Rather than the way they're doing it now.

Baffles me as to how many people are being white knights for Daybreak and defending the current artifact system. Having some form of system that makes playing on alt's easier (like pre-artifact days) would benefit every player.

Imagine playing DCUO in 2013 and someone told you there would be artifacts 3 each and plus you need different ones if you playing a role...that would cost 200-300 each.

Alot of people back then would of declined.
Our loyalty keeps us in the game, not our logic.

It's been abused for years and the energy we get us "we have more important things our developers are working on".

People who have memeberships should be able to allow alt to use account bound artifacts.

The only reason why I dont go on my alt is because of artifacts. I'm maxed on my main but absolutely do not want to relive that grind. But theres no point, even with the XP boost.

The game gets bland overtime because of the limitations they put on us and the community who OKs it and say it's a non issue. Artifacts for what they're worth should be usable between alts. It isn't cheap at all and it would push others to use an alt.

You always call people white knights if they dismiss certain ideas. It has nothing to do with the devs. It has to do with claims being made.

People keep saying it cost $200+ to get artifacts. That is false. It doesn’t cost a penny. People’s inpatients makes artifacts cost money. The devs and the game aren’t responsible for you spending that money. You can easily save up nth metal and use it during double exp week. You can easily buy catalyst of Constantine over time. You can easily wait for the free unstable catalyst to do higher level breakthroughs. Or you can spend money. It’s optional.

Raids do not have restrictions that don’t let you in if you don’t have artifacts at certain levels. The devs don’t tell you that you have to have them at a certain level. The only ones tell you this are yourself and likeminded players.

Other items should be account bound and contribute from group effort called alts. Like if your main buys an artifact, then others can use it and also level it up. Same with adaptive augments, any of your toons can contribute to it and use it.

It is really really obnoxious that we have to acquire them again and again for each toon. It would make the game a whole lot better if we had things like these that are usable by our alts. These are additions to our toons and would be like talking off a watch/hat/sunglasses to give to our alt, its not like are giving our alt our underwear as that would be gear/origin mods and not sharable.


I also see people talking about nth metal and $ stuff...if this was sharable, then those issues will not be as pronounced as you will need only to level up that specific artifact once.

I doubt this would ever happen, as many people use things like Trans/Strat/EOG on multiple toons. That means where today they are spending money on XP/Seals to level up 2x, 3x or more (maybe many more) copies of the same artis, they'd only have to pay for the 1 set to service up to 32 toons on the account. Yes, it would majorly benefit US the players, but I see 0 benefit for DBG...only a loss.

The only way I can see this happening, is if once the arti is 'shared' it remains shared in that slot. Meaning you'd put Trans into slot 1 and ALL the toons have trans in slot one. Also meaning the only way to ever swap that out is to consume it...not change on the fly. This would make the decision to share an arti much more of a permanent decision and might force more arti consumption later on...which would potentially generate more XP/Seal sales as people 'swap' those artis out for the new thing that comes along.

Good luck though. I'd sure like to have all my 200's across all my low level alts.

I'd say this is fair and would still allow for a lot of XP sales for DBG.

VWD was actually bumped up at 140+. I got several of them up to 141 the week before the upgrade just to pick up the 1 million free XP the 200 brought over a 140. Consumed most of them next double XP, but that was a LOT of free XP to pass up on...yet many did. Even if you got the 1/2 XP consumption price, 1/2 of 1.67 mil was still about 200K free XP. Easy money.

Right. I was just recounting how I personally got to as many 200 arts as I have without spending much money other than seals. My VWD was at 160 when it was bumped to 200. I was still using it until the 2XP just before Wonderverse when I turned it in to the Grim and then later the HUD. Now that I think about it, I dumped my Grim in to the HUD without the 2XP benefit so I actually lost the free XP from the VWD bump.

Account bound artifacts could be abused by players leveling up their artifacts with their main character and then giving them to their lower level characters. Imagine a level 25 character with 3 level 200 artifacts; why would a character need those at that level? I think the devs would put a hard CR/SP wall on artifacts so that players can't just give any level artifacts to any of their alts at any level. Imagine not being able to find a group for lower-tiered content because your lower level character doesn't have high level artifacts; this is guaranteed to happen if artifacts become account bound.

Another point that someone made earlier about this is the fact that the devs would not want to give up a viable revenue stream. Artifacts support the game by having the option to "purchase" upgrades; again, a player could just use only one character to level up artifacts and then pass them along to their other characters. Very nice for players; not very nice for maintaining profits for the game.

I think account bound arts wouldn't be a bad thing, but wouldn't really do as much to allow alt flexibility as people seem to think. For your usual DPS you'll still want Trans., Strat., Solar Amp., Grim. OK so you make an alt, an Atomic Tank... and none of them are useful to your new power and role. So, you level up your Manacles of Force, Mystic Symbol... and you make another alt this time Sorcery DPS, you keep your grim, but decide to level Source Shard...

Or you make troll, then you want to even use that same toon as a buff troll, you'll need more arts. Being able to share arts just doesn't change that much of the game except if you only want to play cookie-cutter DPS of different powers. And sure, you can use Manacles and Mystic on any tank, but how different toons of one role are you really playing?

I am not defending the current system, I just don't think this is the way to improve it.

Went back and did the math just now since my game is bugged and I can’t actually play much without getting motion sickness lol. I used a couple parameters since the subject of nth drops is very rng dependent. These are as followed:

2 months time since that is what I used in my claims (technically 2 sets of 28 days)
Membership was taken into account for the perfected nth metal
Vault run for the 3k nth
1 hour of play time to have some sort of standardized timeframe
Minimum nth drop of 70 provided by yourself
1 Nth metal detector per day since it was what I would use. (However only the 500 nth is guaranteed so the rest of the caches won’t be included in the calculation)
And finally being smart and only using that stored nth during bonus exp week

So let’s start.
2 months of membership gives enough DBC to get one perfected nth with 75,000 exp
2 months of the 3k nth from vault is 24,000 exp
Nth metal detector gives 5-6 nth metal but we will assume bad luck and only 5. 5 caches will gives 140,000 exp (again only the 500 nth)
Using 8 minute length between nth drops mean 7.5 drop in an hour so we will say 7 nth drops of 70. That would be a total of 27,440

Adding it all up is a total of 266,440. During the bonus it would turn to 532,880.

This to consider is that this did not take into account the other nth that you receive from vault/stabilizer, and it also did not take into account the other nth that would come from the detector.

Also, yes I am very aware that the guide I wrote for artifact is not perfect. I actually had/have full intention to actually edit it. I’m waiting to get more information on the membership update first before I do so. Even in my early quotes of promoting that thread it I kept hesitating to call it an actual guide. But I do still stand by the 2 month range as a solid baseline. And as I’ve stated when quoting timeframes, that’s the baseline for having the nth needed, not everything needed. I am definitely aware of other factors that play a role into it. Mainly the breakthrough catalyst and seals coming into play.


Also, no offense taken at all. I’m happy to have these kinds of discussions. People’s work should be questioned to make them better. That was my first written guide. And if I’m being honest I was mainly writing that as I went along so a lot of it is badly structured with little flow. I actually wanted to get it out ASAP since I thought bonus nth exp was coming sooner. Actually thought it would’ve been here this week so I was wrong lol.

Incorrect, just ask Mepps. It was made for both PC & PS3 concurrently. You can easily tell just from looking at Pre-Alpha footage, where the loadout tray was tailored towards a PS3 controller. PC MMOs have a larger loadout tray because a keyboard can easily accommodate it. But if you don't believe me, just ask Mepps (he has answered this in the past btw).

There are two types of Nth Metal: Account Bound and Character Bound. Character Bound Nth Metal is what you currently get from the vault and partially in the Stabilizer Duo. Account Bound Nth Metal is what you get running regular content, a few pieces in the Stabilizer Duo and from Time Capsules and Nth Metal Caches. Account Bound Nth can be placed in your shared folder...same goes for Catalysts and Seals. If your main toon already has fully maxed (or whatever level you want) Artifacts, you can just funnel all of your Nth to your alts and save it until Double XP weeks, which usually occur a week or two before a new episode releases.

When you combine that with the upcoming New Membership upgrades (more Nth for members) plus the daily log-in currency that you can use to buy seals from a new vendor as well as loyalty points, you'll have a much easier time to level up artifacts for alts.

While it would be great if we had account bound Artifacts, the reality is that this does not benefit the company. And before you say it, this is not "white knighting", this is just pointing out the reality of things. They're making the whole game truly free to play....no more need to buy episodes and looser cash restrictions for FTP, with no cash cap for Premiums. That means they are not giving up their few remaining sources of income. That's a fact, not an opinion.

Don't forget the Nth Metal Detectors and Nth Metal Caches which players can trade (just not across platforms).