I can agree with this. I mean, it does take both more Oortstone up front to make, plus other materials thus increasing it’s base cost. Having it also make the shards/anagram less efficient doesn’t feel justified to me. Although less than a 10% loss is not a great loss, I know when the balance pass on the forging system caused 10% or greater loss of effectiveness on the centraforge people lost their minds.
To me it costs more to make, so should be more efficient, but if it were just more potent and the same efficiency seems like a fair middle ground. Just my opinion though.
Okay so I have a question for portal hub owners, if I was able to gather amalgam and sell it to you for only 2x the price of regular oort, but you are getting 3x the fuel per shard bought, would you? It would save you 33% coin.
They should have done that from the very beginning anyways. EXOs are suppose to be very hostile places to go. Even more so once we have the Warp Wraith. It’ll make miners a lot more paranoid outside of drowning in water or burning to death by lava.
If they’re tired of doing meteors, then we as the community need to start suggesting better delivery vehicles for these kinds of items, particularly Ichor. That way there’s a lot better dynamics to how you go out and gather stuff up you need to craft for whatever you want to do.
Maybe there needs to be a larger variety of meteors… some that just spawn creatures, some that spawn Oort Shard mobs, another that spawns a large wildstock that destroys meteor towers made by players, and is larger than a level 5 elite wildstock. Heck it could be a completely unique creature to this type of meteor. Kill this “boss” and it drops 100 Ichor.
Just some random ideas that come to mind. They’re kind of like loot goblins in Diablo 3 and other games similar to it. Children of Morta does it (just started playing it and will make YT content of it but that’s off topic) although I haven’t actually been able to see how it all works yet.
I think that would breathe some life into meteor hunting if you know that each meteor is going to be relatively different enough from the last and next one that it makes it worth going on them. The idea could also simply just be introduced as a completely different event that goes on and is more or less dynamic events that you can see from the MMO called Rift. Another great way to implement something that isn’t completely pointless to do since you get a pretty decent assortment of rewards.
But even if meteor hunting changes up dramatically, we’re going to need a way to increase our inventory space by a lot. Either by some sort of bag system (modded MC servers with bags comes to mind) or some sort of traveling companion that’s a pack mule role that you interact with to open its inventory.
Anyways, I think I am starting to get off topic with this post.
Taking Jacey’s current offer of 200c per amalgam as a baseline (there aren’t many offers to consider for an average) there is an additional 14,400 coin cost for a mass craft of amalgam.
Using mass craft numbers and rounding a bit, you’re talking about 13.9 shards per rough oort, 23.49 rough oort to acquire 324 shards. Counting rough oort at 200c (more than what most baskets will pay) per unit this is an oort cost of 4695.65c
So, to recap:
4695.65c for 324 oort shards
19095.65c for 300 oort shards (equivalent) as amalgam.
Jacey must REALLY want those portals open. That’s actually slightly over a 300% increase in cost (406% of original cost). Still with a 10% loss in duration, which since portals differ in consumption, I didn’t try to roll into the price.
So, I have to pay 10% of the oort in order to get more compact fuel that last 3 times longer. Which saves me the 5 minutes logging in each ~1 week 5 days to refuel my portals…
Now I have to pay a lot more in mats/coin/time to fight t7 meteors which have a puny increase for a reward to a t5 meteor so I can then save two times 5 minutes which is 10 minutes of my time. But have to invest 30 minutes+, coins/mats/forges etc in the same period to even collect the stuff…
Yea, sorry to say, but no this is not good balancing!
I think their justification was that it’s meant as a backup fuel if you’re not going to be online for a long time and want to keep a portal up Not meant to be used when you’re able to log in.
But Mayumichi-san then I do not need an open portal since without friends or trust to anyone, I can just look for the next portal Hub on my return instead of paying to keep a connection going which yields me nothing and only costs me time and grief…
I agree the use case is very limited, and because of it the amalgam is just a curiosity for 99% of the playerbase. Rarely you actually need it, so the demand is really low, it doesn’t really offer enough benefit in a normal use case to justify spending all those resources and losing efficiency at the same time.
In my perception or the reason I don’t use it, is because its loss in efficiency AND rare extra ingredient.
(Plus oort is already hard to get if you don’t hunt. (because of time/priority issues))
To me it would be an ok deal if it would be split into 2 recipes:
Just from oort shards: ~10% efficiency loss. (Quick and dirty / have plenty of oort / Don’t care about exos / omg holiday already starts tomorrow)
Shards + Ichor (as catalyst?): no efficiency loss. (“Buying” more precision by using additional rare ingredients / more sophisticated recipe / more expensive, but not in terms of oort)
(Of course, since you can buy and sell everything every coin spend on buying Ichor or not selling Ichor could always be converted into oort, so it’s only a perception thing rather then a mathematical or economical change)
Well, I’m not so sure. If I only have a 10% loss in efficiency, and I sell it for 2x. Then I believe I still earn 80% more per shard.
But my math is a bit rusty.
Since I dont have portals, and I’m just a hunter/miner/gatherer everything I do is profit over the cost of forged tools, brews, and food. So I think this would cover my costs and allow me enough coin to continue buying items for my build, but also saving portal users money. It’s really a win win in my eyes.
Not meant to be used when you’re able to log in.