Another "Don't remove rare loam" thread

Domino,
It seems to me that the solution would be to change either scout or warrior spell rares from loams to rare roots. I don't have the metrics in front of me, but it feels like reducing the demand for loams by half would relieve the pricing pressure on the remaining loam products. (It would also reduce the number of unharvested bushes I run past every day).
Of course, you would have to make sure all spell recipies still produce the same by-products or else this change will propagate into the potions and poisons markets.
Now, about that pesky back-end programming. This solution would be odious. Absolutely. But so was renaming all those spells. Since the spells did get renamed, I must conclude that the personnel resources needed to make odious changes do exist. How can we help you convince the managment team to give you the resources you need to do it right?
Who do I need to PM?
Jarnhand
SONY subscriber for 9 years.

DominoDev wrote:

Incarnadine Cluster sell for less then 5 gold. If Fighter spells used this rare to make the spell instead of the loam, things would be balanced. As of right now, if this rare were to be changed to make fighter spells it would go up in price becuase there would be a demand for it. Right now there is none.

Eclavdra@Nagafen wrote:

Yea, I'm kinda scratching my head over this one, too.

Flaye@Mistmoore wrote:

From what I can see, expert's are still supposed to be semi-rare. Opening them up to all rares would require mass rare rate calibration and impact every single tradeskill be it positive or negative. There is no fine tuning and with the massively increased spell rare potential, experts would either be insanely common or all rares would be really rare. It would also be complicated by other externals like how much people desire say, root made goods over hardmetals or pelts etc.

Don't just remove rare loams. remove ALL loams. kthx.

Riliszkas@Splitpaw wrote:

Looks like that's the plan.

Olgie@Butcherblock wrote:

I really cannot understand how removing loams from the game will solve the problem of loams being so rare because they are used for so much. Once the loams are removed, the gems will just become as rare as the loams are now. That doesn't solve anything.

Elessara wrote:

According to ZAM, there are a handful of misc furniture or jewelry recipes that use these, but the overwhelming majority of the uses of both of these two rares are for tailoring.
I hate to bring up lore in a game design discussion, but it seems backwards to me that we're considering moving jewelry away from the use of actual jewels because we've decided that jewels are going to be responsible for half of the spell upgrades in the game, and this would price jewelry out of the market.
Why not consolidate all tailoring recipes onto pelts and use rare roots for ALL FOUR classes' spells? This would avoid the current situation with overabundant hard metal rares from people searching for loams, and wipe out any concerns about differing Adept III prices between classes. Provisioners don't use rares, so the effect on them from having people selectively harvest food bushes should be minimal or even beneficial (cheaper raw ingredient costs -> more profit from the same sale price). The only thing that would need balancing is the relative ratio of bush/root nodes compared to other nodes.

Silken@Butcherblock wrote:

The issue is relative rarity, not absolute rarity. Because two classes shared 1 item while the other two were only one class each, loams were essentially twice as needed (and by extension twice as 'rare'). What they are doing is making it so that a single node will be your "expert spells upgrade" rare source. The relative rarity will then be equal.
The only issue I see that has not been 100% addressed yet is how jewelry will be affected, and even carpentry since classically we have used some of the gem / soft ore rares for furniture. The furniture part is pretty easy to fix, but the jewelry is going to be a sticky part, since now you have twice the dependence on gem/soft ore as you did before and yet jewelry is likely to still be made out of it. Perhaps a solution would be for jewelry recipes to either make two pieces from one rare (thus halving the cost of jewelry pieces) or producing a byproduct that could then be gathered up for eventual reuse (ie each piece produces a leftovers, two or three leftovers can be turned back into the rare via some recipe).

I skimmed over the thread so far, and wonder if maybe a different approach is needed. IMO, why not give Transmuters a recipe per tier that they can transmute rares into loams and have the loams be the universal spell component of all classes? Leave loams in the same nodes so the harvester has a chance to harvest the loam that way and have the transmuter recipe require extra work, maybe 2-3 of that tier's rares plus some new material like 'Steel's Ye Olde Magic Dust', sold from the merchants that allows the finished product to be the loam. I know that when the new expac starts it was stated we can be both transmuter and tinkerer and more recipes to transmuters, but as of now, there is way more tinkerers out there than transmuters and this might improve the worth of tranmuters. It would be similar to all rares yielding a expert scroll, but you can adjust the amount needed in the recipe to reflect the abundance of rares that can pop per tier( so maybe the recipe will require 4 incarnadine or 2 hidebound pelts or such if such is needed).
After all, with a profession titled "Transmuter" shouldnt we be able to convert a rare from type to another besides breaking down loot and hoping for better than 1 in 8 chance of a mana vial on fabled on bad RNG nights...;-)

I think I would just like the hard metal be changed to fighter spells. Since there are typically less fighters then scouts due to more dps then tank spots in a raid or group, they would not overburden the use of them to the point where MC was unable to be sold but would not remove loams altogether. Then it would be "rare sound " Oh yea, please let it be a loam. No, curse word, just another worthless hard metal to use for an alts armor and weapons while lvling them.
Of course if one of the main reasons they are doing it is to simplify the data base or code for the game then they will do it anyway and probably should. lol.

Eclavdra@Nagafen wrote:

That is an easy argument. While it would balance prices for spells, it would unballance the pricing points for other crafts. By turning spell components into the most available rare in the game your shifting spells to being the de facto "cheapest" rare and bumping the less used rares to being the most expensive.
It isn't fair to crafting classes that don't produce spells to have their rare materials suddenly poached to make spells. Incardine armor and weapons benifit greatly in pricing due to their relationship with loam. Similarly t8 roots are cheaper than t8 pelts due to the roots relationship to two different harvesting nodes which their common harvests are used in far more recipes than t8 common leather.
If you could harvest a spell component from any node, then you'd be helping up the supply vs demand for all crafting classes by the mutual relationships. Spells would be more common because there are more nodes that potentially give spell rares. Other rares are more common because people looking for spell material harvest everything and sell stuff they dont' need.
Making spells out of any existing rare hurts all the non-spell producing crafters. Taking already questionable upgrade adventuring gear and making it more expensive than spells seems like a horrid idea.

One argument raised in here is that of using the hard ore rares for fighter expert CA making - this might appear to have some sense for the T8 rare ore/rare loam balance, but remember that the game does not revolve entirely around T8 - in the earlier tiers the hard ore rares are the most valuable of the rares already, with the loams coming second cheapest to the wood at cheapest. (on Runnyeye)
Also the rare roots are also used for hex dolls - which have been revamped last GU.

If we need to post in the title that it's yet another thread... Methinks it behooves us to utilize the existing threads.