Thursday, April 4, 2013

Blacksmithing


Blacksmiths gained six new craftable i502 weapons, which each cost a total of 30 Lightning Steel, 18 Harmony, and 12-18 Living Steel to craft. Fantastic. Love it. Where is the fucking caster sword? Or dagger? A staff I admit wouldn't make a lot of sense for a Blacksmith to make...

Coreus is the one toon I desperately want a decent weapon for, but he can't use a single one of the new patterns. There is a 2H strength sword and a 2H strength axe [completely redundant if you ask me] but the only caster weapon is a fucking mace. Sigh.

I've been pondering these new weapons all afternoon... Lightning Steel is BoP and has a daily CD to produce, so one of these weapons will take literally a month's worth of materials to create. But the item level is only 502, which to me places them squarely in the realm of alt-fodder-- shortcuts to power and item level which are not necessary for any toon who has been at endgame for any significant time. But at the same time, every blacksmith in the game will now be creating this material every day whether they need it or not in order to proc new discoveries, and once created, since the material can't be traded and can only be used for the above weapons, every blacksmith will end up creating these weapons.

I hate BoP crafting materials, I really do. You "buy" them with time instead of gold, which makes them infinitely more "expensive" to acquire as an AH mogul than the average player, because our value ratio of time to gold is so much higher. Yes, I get that that's the whole point, and that this is probably viewed as a noble goal by the developers, so I'm not going to waste too much time complaining, but as an AH player their existence has shut me out of mass producing items which would otherwise be great moneymakers, like epic leg armour, engineering mounts, and every single blacksmithing epic.

My only hope is that there will eventually be enough lazy or dumb people with stockpiles of Lightning Steel and Harmony who are willing to craft weapons for someone who provides the Living Steel and some arbitrary fee. This was extremely profitable [though obviously time intensive] back in Cata while Chaos Orbs were still BoP, because these guys have no concept of opportunity cost ["I got them for free!"] and as I mentioned, usually place a much higher value on gold than I do.

2 comments:

  1. Opportunity cost is only valid as an indicator of, in your words, laziness or stupidity if the action that acquires the materiel is not something that would otherwise be undertaken. Yes, it's not free but it was an incidental byproduct and not the intent or goal of the activity. To state that people are 'losing' by doing what they enjoy is a rather difficult position to defend in a game without set victory conditions.

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    1. When did I state that people are "losing"? Quotation marks are for when you are quoting someone.

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