Adorning: Converting Powders to Fragments

This is a topic Domino brought up back before SF launched and kind of shelved until she could see how the market for adorning materials would play out.

It's now ~2 months after SF, and I'm noticing that fragments still seem to be consumed much more than powders -- there always seems to be a glut of powder and a dearth of fragments. And when you look at the numbers required for items, we can see why. Consider that powders only come from treasured-type transmuting, and say you get about 3 fragments to every 1 powder.
That's not so bad; after all, treasured adornments have a net requirement of 1 powder and 3 fragments. The issue arises in all the other recipes, where 6 fragments are consumed. For legendary adornments, it only takes a net of 1 powder -- now you're going through fragments at a rate of 6 fragments : 1 powder. Fabled adornments are a little nicer to that ratio, in that they take only 2 fragments for every powder (a net "gain" in fragment ratio).
So treasured adorns take roughly what you expect from a treasured item transmutation. Because of that, the market size for treasured adorns isn't too relevent to my point. Now consider the reletive market sizes for Legendary and Fabled adornments; the high price of manas makes legendary a much more common choice for everyday adorning. So, for each legendary adornment made, you're 3 fragments "behind" the ratio you get from treasured items. For each fabled item, you gain 3 fragments back, but the market is much smaller so there's still a net glut of powder. Add on all the powder from legendary items and you've got a lot more powder now.
We can turn it into infusions (and make legendary adorns that eat up more fragments) or even manas, but what I'd like to suggest is the thing Domino originally considered: a way to downconvert powder into fragments. Each other adorning resource can be acquired from conversion, except the lowly (but oh-so important) fragment. To that end, what I'd love to see is a recipe to convert a powder into say 2 or 3 fragments. That seems to be a pretty fair ratio to me, considering it takes 10 fragments to convert to a powder (of course, running that in reverse, ie 10 powder to 1 fragment, just seems ludicrous).

What are folks thoughts on this? I've seen this overabundance of powders both while skilling up in adorning and at the high end in making T8/T9 adorns.

I love this idea and came to this forum today to start a thread on this very topic. Thank you for beating me to the punch, and also for presenting the idea much more articulately than I would have.
I was just complaining to a friend in voice chat last night that I am forever running out of fragments, but always have an overabundance of powders. We talked about how if 9 fragments could be combined into one powder, why couldn't the process be reverse engineered and have powders be broken down into fragments? Now, neither of us expected to be able to break a powder and get all 9 fragments back - something should be lost in the process so the components don't become entirely interchangeable. I was leaning towards 1 powder = 4 fragments. It's a good number that represents roughly half of the batch (rounded down) and wouldn't significantly skew the market value - but simply make things less frustrating when you feel that RNG is working against you.
I don't know about you, but when I'm melting Treasured material, I seem to get the "rare" result (powders) a disproportionally high amount of the time. Conversely, when melting Legendary material, I tend to get the "common" result (again, powders) more frequently than the percentage should play out to.
This, of course, could simply be my personal bias - being that I really want Infusions and Fragments.

Agreed. We need a recipe to break powders into fragments. Doesn't have to be a lot, maybe just 1 powder = 2-4 fragments. But that would help a lot. I have about 100 powders, 25 infusions, 5 manas, and 0 lvl 90 adornments. Need Fragments to make anything, and they are the quickly used once got.

I am always running out of powers not frags.
You guys taking it to 4th bar or just powerskilling and canceling after the first bar?

Kizee wrote:

Always to the 4th bar. Are you making mainly treasured adornments, or mainly others? The most common adorn type I craft is Legendary (it's a good mix between price and power), where you really go through the fragments. Treasured adorns you should see an ok number of fragments if that's the primary thing you craft. (But again, I think most folks look for Legendary rather than just treasured).

Though I will say the first few tiers (like T1/2) seemed to have want of powders more than frags, but it quickly changed to having fragments as the limiting reagent.

I'd have to agree. Over the weekend, I power leveled myself from 160 Adorning to 325 Adorning. (Thank you spare materials left over from leveling Transmuting. And thank you broker.) Based on my observations on LDL, fragments are selling for the same value as powder in most of the tiers. Or in certain lower tiers, fragments are 2-3 times more expensive then powders.
At the upper tiers, it's just painful to run around gathering fragments. It's really sad when I buy some Treasured items off of the broker and start to curse when I get powders instead of fragments. But like it or not, that's the reality of the situation.
Also like others have said, the Legendary and Fabled adornments don't have any fragment returns. So each adornment is flushing 6 fragments down the drain. It's really starting to add up for me. To be honest, I'm finding it easier to farm powders and infussions for T9. An hourly run through Sebellis at 90th can really start to rack up the transmutables. But like it or not, there isn't a cost efficient way to get T9 Treasured items to break down. People sell these for 1p+ each on the broker, then I often get jacked with a stupid powder result.
Right now it takes x10 pieces of a lower tier to make x1 piece of the next material grade. I'd be personally satisfied if you could crush a grade and get x4 - x6 pieces of the next grade down.

I say leave it. It isnt like it is hard to get treasured items to mute.

I think a better idea would be to add critical event to transmuting that returns 5x the lower material.
So maybe the results table looks like this(numbers pulled out out air and not based on anything)
75% fragment
20% powder
3% powder + fragment
2% 5 fragments.

Kizee wrote:

Always 4th bar, always never enough fragments.

Not a bad thought at all. I'm perpetually out of frags and swimming in powder.

I don't think this is likely to happen. Since you can upconvert you'll always have a use for all that spare powder. Pre-SF we had a glut of fragments because legendary and fabled recipes took 5 powder. That was also when we consumed 8 fragments per legendary/fabled combine too.
If there was a down-conversion available it would probably be 1 powder = 1 fragments. After you run the same instances 10-15 times you start muting just about everything that drops. At that point powders become a larger segment of the transmuted loot that you pull in. If you could down convert to even 2 to 1 you wouldn't need to transmute treasured gear and dev looses one of its best money sinks in the game. Any down convert recipe would have a negative effect in that reguard.

I also came to this forum to make this topic.

Either change the transmute numbers so we get more fragments at the T8/t9 level (only tiers with this issue), or add a convert powder to fragment.... or even both.

Meirril wrote:

I disagree on it having a negative effect. A T10 adept books costs what, under 15g. If what you are saying were to happen, where people would transmute instead of sell even MORE legendary things, it'd be more of a money sink -- legendary items sell for several times the price of an adept book. Any downconvert recipe is a greater money sink: you're taking an item that comes primarily from more costly items, adding fuel (that is money out of the game right there) to produce an item that comes from lower price materials.

And even a rate of 1 powder --> 1 fragment would be fine with me. It'd be horridly inefficient, but when fragments are selling for 2-3 times the powder (for the lower teir fragments) it'd certainly help to put things back into their proper order.

So I posted something about this like a week ago and only got ONE response.... I really think we should rally and try to get a response from Domino on this:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=475802

I think they should scale down adornments by tiers so it takes less powders AND fragments to make T1 adornments than it does at t9. Seriously, whats up with that? I'm trying to make it through T1 and I'm burning through 50 fragments and powders just to make 7 adornments. 50 fragments and powders should be makin 25 adornments at best at that tier.

Cusashorn wrote:

I'm fine with the ratios on them now. 1 powder and 3 fragments to make a treasured adornment is reasonable to me, given it's roughly what you get when breaking down 4 treasured items (on average). The whole 'skilling up' taking loads of mats is something Domino is looking at, with her possibly adding a daily quest to give you a few free or fuel-only adorning combines a day. With those plans said, I don't think the ratio needs tweaking, and I actually like that it's one thing that's consistent now

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Yep, I just ran into not having enough frags around t3.
I was assuming that it was pretty typical fron t1&2 across all tiers.

Cusashorn wrote:

I am assuming you are exagerating, but, just in case you are not:
If you have 50 fragments and powders you should be able to make 15 adornments. It takes 6 fragments to make a treasured adornment, but 3 of those are returned at the 4th level of creation. By your calculations, it seems you did not take it past the first level of completion, which will easily lead you to an excess of powders over fragments. To get the most from your money, take adorns all the way to the end completion level.

I've made hundreds of adornments since SF came out so these are my suggestions:
Make each component able to be converted upwards to the next component or broken down into the lower tier in a ratio of:
1 Mana -> 10 Infusions -> 100 Powders -> 400 Fragments
This maintaines the current up-convert ratio but allows down-converting at the same ratio. It adds on conversion between powders and fragments at roughly the current transmute rate and the rate at which they are used (averaging the number of lesser, greater and superior adornments made and the rate at which fragments are consumed per powder consumed).
The prices on my server are actually fairly consistent with this up to the point of going from powders to fragments. One mana is roughly worth 10 infusions. 1 infusion is roughly worth 10 powders. The only inconsistency is the price of fragments which, right now, are actually worth more than powders due to the reasons mentioned above. Allowing a down-convert from powders to fragments would cause the price of fragments to drop considerably and availability to increase, but the ratios would eventually even out. People playing the conversion route will make it so.

1 Mana -> 5 Infusions -> 25 Powders -> 125 Fragments . . . seems more reasonable to me.

Have to agree with Hecula. It would make sense to be able to upgrade or downgrade materials in the same ratio at only the cost of fuel. When you run out of quests, finding treasured junk to crunch is a pain. And people get mad when you are consistently pulling mass quantities of mobs for transmuteable stuff because most of the mobs are quest related.