133520-serious-concern-gearing-cost

== Content ==
			
Just noticed that the thread in the PTR forums got locked up. Since this is still an issue, I figured I'd open a new one for feedback. Mods, if this is not the "appropriate" place feel free to move it wherever it should go!
 
For the people who don't know, this thread is a place to discuss the cost associated with rerolling rune slots and reopening rune slots that were locked with the F2P transition. Total for a full set of gear seems to range from 12p if you are the luckiest boy alive, to much much higher than that.
 
You can of course spend cash to use service tokens to reduce the price of rerolling.	
----
			
Though I feel like a broken record at this point and have very little hope that Carbine is actually 1) paying attention and 2) caring enough to be willing to change things... I suppose I'll reiterate my feelings.
 
It's too much. Too much to ask of your current players. We do not deserve being told to go broke in plat fixing gear that Carbine screwed up, or spend real money. I've given up on fixing my gear because I simply can't afford it - especially not when I have to do it for PvE and PvP sets. No more WS content for me. :|
 
... and then I find out that Carbine's gone and screwed with dye pricing, too. It's like they don't want me to actually be able to afford anything I enjoy in this game. @_@ *eyes housing warily*	
----
			
I feel the same way. After finally logging in and getting all my 90 plus mails, sorting through all my stuff, and trying to figure out what my toon was even wearing (have 3 sets of gear) I looked at the rune slots on my gear and saw it was riddled with elements I do not want. So that means, lots of rerolls. It wasn't so bad doing that 18 times on the ptr for an Air slot. (wish I was exaggerating) But on live, I don't even have the plat to do that.
 
It makes me really annoyed that I had a toon that was raiding and had her gear sorted. Now, she isn't even fit to do a dungeon! Not that I could with the lag the way it was anyways. Fantastic relaunch.	
----
			Well, I got all the way to fusion runes, and now I'll need to either grind or buy credd to get plat to buy the materials to make the runes.	
----
			
I'm not even sure how we are supposed to be getting pure rune fragments for making GA quality exceptional runes. As near as I can tell, it will take forever to create even one rune because the drop rate is so low on these fragments.
 
This isn't just going to be a problem with the transition, but going forward as well. This system is awful, completely not fun, and really dampens my desire to keep playing WS.
 
The fact that I had NO IDEA you could put a 120 rune into a 116 piece of gear and so mis-runed a bunch of my pieces also contributes. Because now I have to either pay cash to extract runes out of my gear- runes that are worth several plat at the moment, or wait until I can grind out the omni-bits for service tokens and play with less optimal power for a while. Awesome.
 
I pay my $30 per month for my wife and I to play, but it's getting very close to feeling like if I want to raid, I have to pay more money per month for service tokens. I've been faithful from day one and given Carbine plenty of money. Now it feels like you are just manipulating me to get more. I'm very close to done now. Don't let this be this way, Carbine. The game play is too good for you to destroy it by making runing so painful.
 
This is easily the worst experience I've ever had in a video game. Make it stop, please.	
----
			
Hey y'all ;)
 
I hope this thread will get bigger and noticed/pinned or whatever.
For me this i not just about the costs of gearing in the meaning i have to pay a lot of platin to get my gear runed again.
 
I want to give it a slightly different angle - and i know that a lot of (DS-) raiding folk will be with me...
 
I had two sets of fully runed DS gear (and an alt with complete GA set gear).
So i already spend a lot of time and money to reroll slots... to buy and craft more or less expensive runes.
(Just one example here for u to remember... specter runes.)
I spent hours... month... farming mats/signs to make my gear as good as i could.
To sum up - before the patch i had it all, runed-gear and mats wise.
 
And now ... ?
I got almost nothing.
I can't even rune my main char gear properly.
This is not only a money question - i simply don't have the mats for it.
(In the last months i even spend extra time farming again to be ready for this.)
 
At the moment there are 2 possebilities to get the gear back to a similar status.
1.) Spend RL money. (which i won't do cause i play with ingame credd)
2.) Start endless farming of money, mats and bitcoins/service tokens ect.
To get to a point ... maybe in a month ... were i already was before the patch.
 
Sorry, but this can't be it. This is a slap in my face.
I'm here in W* since first beta crash test ... i spend a lot of time and patience to be where i am now.
 
Don't get me wrong i am not bitchin' about the new runing system ect.
It just simply can't be like that.
This will be a huge set back in mosts guilds raiding progession - for who knows how long?!
Cause we're not able to rune our gear they way we could before or rather we already were endgame-gear-runed.
 
Pls - Dear Carbine - take this seriously!
Thank you.
			
				
	Edited September 30, 2015 by Y3lla	
----
			The amount of mats required and the cost is absolutely astronomical. Just like TERA's pay to win gemming system, from what I remember. It's not even negotiable either, the amount of stats you get on a fully runed piece is like triple the unruned version. It's not like they're small upgrades, of course it wouldn't be in the interest of the company for them to be small upgrades. How it is is exactly how they would want it. I won't be supporting it though, I'll just keep playing FF14 and paying 15$ a month in that and casually mucking about in Wildstar. At least I don't get *cupcake*ed by nickle and dime, grindy pay to win nonsense over there.	
----
			
Yeah our guild folks were either extremely upset or sadly resigned. Not a one was happy, and why would they be?
 
Crazy thing is, service tokens will only get you the slots. They won't get you the mats to make the fusion runes, which for some completely incomprehensible reason are not present on the rune exchanger. (Unless you want to get the crappy fusion specials.)
 
So you need to get a combination of service tokens AND CREDD to rune properly.
 
As I said before this went live, we've just been booted down the progression ladder, plain and simple. And for no reason whatsoever.	
----
			
Runes are a HUGE deal.
 
We went into GA last night, despite all the lag. I had my gear fully runed and near optimized (I didn't realize I could put divine runes in my DS gear, but other than that, I was pretty dead on). Now granted, I probably have one of the best gear sets in the guild, but there are plenty of others who did similar DPS pre-patch. My wife has similar gear (we both have almost all token gear, DS pistols and one other slot of DS gear), but did not have enough exceptional runes to fully gear herself out, so we used a lot of one point runes, which means she lost a lot of set bonuses. 
 
Almost no one else had had a chance to rune. So why did we do GA? Juts to practice and see how raiding was going to be in the patch. A lot of our healers and tanks especially wanted to get a feel for how they should be runing to compensate for tanking/healing changes.
 
Here is the result of that (don't judge that we took so long to get x-89 down- the lag last night was crazy, and yes, we wiped on GM- LOL)
 
As far as I know, my wife (Crisseyda) and I were the only ones runed, and I was far more optimized than she was. You can see the HUGE difference (though, we both are used to relying on the "Spellpower" add on, which we didn't have, and I had a little more practice working without it last night, so some of our difference was execution- in dungeons she was closer to me in DPS).
 
http://www.wildstarlogs.com/reports/NXYF4kaLMR36tH2K#type=damage-doneBy comparison, here is last week's kill:http://www.wildstarlogs.com/reports/CvpmwdkbqQ8BxzYK#fight=6&type=damage-doneOf course there are going to be variations on that fight, especially with bombs and such, but I was doing something like 180% more damage than the top 3rd (I presume unruned) dps. And if you look at the difference between my wife and I, you can see that near-optimal >>>> "pretty good".
 
 
I'm not complaining about the power of runes, but for a lot of people getting back up to a top dps spot is going to be a long grind, even though they already have the rewards (gear) from successfully completing some very challenging content in the game. That is disheartening and I'm certainly worried about a few people quitting the game now.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Crazy thing is, service tokens will only get you the slots. They won't get you the mats to make the fusion runes, which for some completely incomprehensible reason are not present on the rune exchanger. (Unless you want to get the crappy fusion specials.)
 
 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Best way to gain Divine fragments atm is by buying the glory gear for DS and salvage it.
----
			
For the record, I did get service tokens to unlock my rune slots and change them to the right rune colors, after fighting my way through a host of website errors when trying to actually make the purchase.
 
And then once I'd gotten past that I used all 7 exceptional rune tokens I had and filled in the rest with normal runes, leaving the fusion slots open.
 
Which brings me to the next problem, because fusion runes aren't on the exchange, which means that I'll need to buy a credd to get the mats to make the runes. So that's an additional cost on top of the cost I already ate to get the tokens. When I got to that point in the evening (2.5 hrs after I started runing, thanks to the lag) I was so frustrated that I just called it a night.
 
I'll probably log on tonight to check the price of the mats and see if I can bring myself to give Carbine money to get around this travesty they created and get back to where I was on Monday, but I doubt I'll be raiding again until at least next week	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Runes are a HUGE deal.
 
...
 
I'm not complaining about the power of runes, but for a lot of people getting back up to a top dps spot is going to be a long grind, even though they already have the rewards (gear) from successfully completing some very challenging content in the game. That is disheartening and I'm certainly worried about a few people quitting the game now.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Runes are overshadowing gear so much and are so bloody expensive to mess with that I'm beginning to question the value of replacing 98/116 pieces with token pieces. Shades of Launch! Are we going to get back into an era where token pieces are only going to be worth getting to be salvaged?
 
edit: Forum rejected a follow up post so I'll just stuff it here.
 
Oh and it looks like the plat cost of CREDD is cratering hard. If I'm paying for Signature Service and I still have to pay to make it stop hurting, what's the value of Signature Service? If I have to shell out to do content anyway I may as well just spend it on the crap I'm now required to buy.
 
Back me into a corner with obligatory purchases and I become very hostile to discretionary purchases.
----
			Phan...runes are purchased from the AH not CX now...nice change eh!!!!Also what you did (purchasing service tokens) is EXACTLY what I didn't want to happen and have CRB completely blur the lines of F2P and P2W...if someone can get exactly what they want using real money like that the game's *cupcaked* for me.If I find I'm running out of money or spending endless amount I'll pack it in.  We're paying a sub for *cupcakes* sake....what the hell for?
			
				
	Edited September 30, 2015 by Charge	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Which brings me to the next problem, because fusion runes aren't on the exchange, which means that I'll need to buy a credd to get the mats to make the runes. So that's an additional cost on top of the cost I already ate to get the tokens. When I got to that point in the evening (2.5 hrs after I started runing, thanks to the lag) I was so frustrated that I just called it a night.
 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Phan...runes are purchased from the AH not CX now...nice change eh!!!!
 
Also what you did (purchasing service tokens) is EXACTLY what I didn't want to happen and have CRB completely blur the lines of F2P and P2W...if someone can get exactly what they want using real money like that the game's *cupcaked* for me.
 
If I find I'm running out of money or spending endless amount I'll pack it in. We're paying a sub for *cupcakes* sake....what the hell for?
----
			Yep it's a pretty disturbing way for them to go about things ... clearly they were listening to us but don't give a *cupcake*  :rolleyes:	
----
			
I runed the tank set last night (mostly, still a few slots here and there that I"m sort of saving for getting some flavor of Fusion special).  I had 400+ regular rune tokens, and 40 exceptionals.  
 
I am now down to 10 exceptionals.  The exceptional thing which was sort of a "nice to have" is almost mandatory for runing now.  So the DPS set will be half-assed whereas it was fully capable prior.
 
I spent probably about 20 platinum solely on unlocking slots on gear I already had unlocked, and rerolls.  I suspect I got lucky too.  A few times I ended up with exactly what I wanted only one or two rolls.
 
Anyhow, that's my experience.  It's expensive.  It's not wholly pay to win, but it's squeaking so close to the line Carbine is leaving skid marks on the pavement from swerving.  And honestly they should have made all the fusions purchasable like the other runes.  And if I really get rolling, given their lag issues, they really should have made it such that selling a rune back to the exchanger refunded your token, NOT the cash price.  So many miserable people complaining about buying the wrong rune, or too many of the right one over mumble last night.  (See point about number of exceptional rune tokens and their importance).	
----
			
Every rune should have been purchasable with a generic token, I think. Why does it matter if some people got a small boost? That would actually be a nice thing to do for people, instead of invalidating the effort we put in over the last year.
 
Runes are a huge part of power now. I didn't even have enough exceptional runes for my main healing set, forget about dps entirely.
 
One of my guildies put it perfectly when explaining it to another guild members. Carbine took our gear, tore it into pieces, and didn't give us back enough of the pieces to put it back together again.	
----
			
My DPS set which is mainly DS (glory and drops with 1 set piece and 1 set GA piece) cost ~50 plat to unlock and reroll.  It would have been cheaper but the last slot I had to re-roll took ~12 tries.  The re-roll variation feels like it's pretty large (the same set on the ptr just before it when down was 70p).  I saved my previous gear + saved glory was enough to get varying levels of fusion runes.  I'll be able to create one or two ilevel 100 fusion runes for my tank set.
 
One thing's for sure.  On the pieces that I do upgrade I will be spending cash(maybe omnibits if i've gathered enough by then) to buy service tokens so I can remove the fusion and exceptional runes.  There's no real alternative as otherwise the upgrade wouldn't be worth it.
 
Remillard is right, the token exchange should have been like glory gear, etc.  Have a time limit and a refund of exactly what you spent while you're within it.	
----
			
i did a lot of content and a lot of contracts across three 50s pre-f2p so i had over 100 exceptional fragments, thank god
only one raids seriously, so runeing that dps set to near-bis cost around 30 exceptionals, and i used 30000 worth of glory on DS gear to salvage and got enough divine runes to craft fewer than 2 divine fusions (currently using 2 divine fusion 2 pure fusion)
 
i didn't even go Ultra-Max® BiS, which, for example on slingers, requires 2 earth runes in every piece since crit sev is the only stat that we can rune that doesn't go into diminishing returns super quickly and isn't total ass. my multi hit and vigor are higher than is optimal and my lifesteal is WAY higher than optimal because i just said screw it and didn't want to reroll that many slots. it still cost 20-30p to unlock all my slots and reroll the 8-10 slots that i actually did.
 
another thing i need to test more is the value of contracts now, as i doubt they give any rewards that are NEARLY as valuable as exceptional runes. i really worry about people trying to fully optimize their gear when they didn't have gobs of exceptional tokens to start. good luck with that. :\	
----
			Even Carbine's forums are crap now.  Since my previous post didn't save i will just say that Carbine seriously screwed over anyone who had runed their gear.  I will no longer be playing on my main now since i don't feel like grinding through their new shit systems and wasting plat to fix something that wasn't broken to begin with.  Thanks, Carbine, apparently in the move to F2P you decided it was a good thing to bend over your loyal player base in the name of "streamlining".	
----
			
This whole rune fiasco is absolutely despicable on Carbine's part.  There were multiple solutions they could, and should, have implemented, but instead they did the bare minimum and congratulated themselves for how generous they were.  It is, frankly, the first time I've been disgusted with Carbine, and I hate the feeling and that they were able to provoke that feeling in me.
 
That being said, I'm not sure what value there is at continuing to dig into this wound.  The damage is done, the chosen currency has been spent, and I feel like its time to move on.  Regardless of how painful the initial process was, this new rune system will absolutely be better for new drops.  Anyone that was at their AP ceiling in the old patch and had been through the pain of changing a dozen runes and runeslots to balance the stats from a new drop will appreciate how easy gear replacement will be, especially once we've had some time to bank some service tokens from their various in game sources.  And hopefully we'll be more aware of the shenanigans, so that when they completely revamp the gear again in drop 9 we will call them out earlier and put the pressure on harder.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
That being said, I'm not sure what value there is at continuing to dig into this wound.  The damage is done, the chosen currency has been spent, and I feel like its time to move on.
----
			I am really sad that they did not go for other compensation (a flat amount of service token or anything else), I love the game but what they have done here is completely *cupcake*. I had plat and enough exceptionnal rune for my DPS stuff because I decided to put time and effort to not be screwed while hoping that they would implement something else...but no. Now I am optimized (at the cost of 26 plat which should never have gone in my stuff as I was optimized before the transition) but my guildies aren't. Most of them are totally screwed and can't even rune properly (not enough money, no good runes,...) while they had perfect rune before f2p. It will completely hurt our raid team and we won't be able to go as far in the content as previously. We have kill avatus but we still had difficulties to kill it so now I am pretty sure it won't be possible to come back to where we were before weeks thanks to Carbine totally screwing his old playerbase.I still hope that Carbine will do something for us after fixing the servers problems, it is not too late to repair things and not lose a big part of your old playerbase (or simply lose the confiance of the players). 
			
				
	Edited October 1, 2015 by Miras101	
----
			Yeah at this point I'm not sure what they can do to make it right; they've burned a huge amount of goodwill across the veteran player base. Maybe sending a bunch of rune crafting fragments and signs out to the people who were affected. (And it would have to be A LOT considering how many it takes to craft anything right now.)	
----
			
I had a really hard time motivating myself to even attempt to log in last night. I eventually got in on Antimony but then just kinda sat there are stared at things. This whole situation has killed my enjoyment of the game more than I'd even expected. While I still may be able to do dailies and shiphands unruned (though it will be a lot more of a pain than before... another kick in the gut), I'm the kind of person who takes a lot of pride in doing right by their gear. It bothers me to leave my rune slots untouched, makes me feel like an inferior player.
 
Awesome, Carbine. Thanks a whole bunch.
			
				
	Edited October 1, 2015 by Naunet	
----
			Nothing like thinking you had plently of exceptionals for this drop, then you log on and bam....you only have 16 when you need 30 to even rune decently.  Don't even get me started on how much I spent to rune specter :P.  Good on regular tokens though, but they might as well be worth *cupcake* at this point.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Yeah at this point I'm not sure what they can do to make it right; they've burned a huge amount of goodwill across the veteran player base. Maybe sending a bunch of rune crafting fragments and signs out to the people who were affected. (And it would have to be A LOT considering how many it takes to craft anything right now.)
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Nothing like thinking you had plently of exceptionals for this drop, then you log on and bam....you only have 16 when you need 30 to even rune decently. Don't even get me started on how much I spent to rune specter :P. Good on regular tokens though, but they might as well be worth *cupcake* at this point.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Well, I'm not convinced the current system is going to work going forward. Having to RNG your slots for sveral plat every time a shiny new piece of gear drops? You are mixing pain with the rewards in this game. It isn't fun, and it could very well cause people to stop playing.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Its not worse than the old system, where you were having to rebalance a dozen rune slots across all your gear to fit in that new drop in without going over your ideal AP.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
IMO, it's *far* worse than the old system. Rebalancing before was a puzzle and you worked through it. The plat costs were reasonably known.
 
Here you just click the button and watch the plat go down the toilet until the pain mercifully stops.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I had a really hard time motivating myself to even attempt to log in last night. I eventually got in on Antimony but then just kinda sat there are stared at things. This whole situation has killed my enjoyment of the game more than I'd even expected. While I still may be able to do dailies and shiphands unruned (though it will be a lot more of a pain than before... another kick in the gut), I'm the kind of person who takes a lot of pride in doing right by their gear. It bothers me to leave my rune slots untouched, makes me feel like an inferior player.
 
Awesome, Carbine. Thanks a whole bunch.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I'm very close to done now.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Yeah at this point I'm not sure what they can do to make it right; they've burned a huge amount of goodwill across the veteran player base. Maybe sending a bunch of rune crafting fragments and signs out to the people who were affected. (And it would have to be A LOT considering how many it takes to craft anything right now.)
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
 
.  I was a huge Carbine supporter but there is only one way to describe how I feel about them now: utter and complete disappointment.
 
----
			
So I runed up both my dps and tank specs recently. I was lucky in that I had a ton of exceptional and regular rune tokens, as well as those runecrafting tokens. And here are the results:
 
Spent 55-56 plat due to terrible element rolls. Probably a third to a half of my plat was spent experimenting whether it was better to reroll the same slot over & over vs reroll another slot. I found rerolling the same slot over & over costs less plat overall.
I had over 800 runecrafting tokens. I got maybe 2-3 Pure fragments and 1-2 Divine. What I mostly received were elements, which I already had in ample supply. Most of my gear is GA so I bought more Pure runecrafting bags.
I had about 60 service tokens to start (login bonus + something else?) and I still spent this much plat.
Was able to use rune tokens for most of the runes I needed. Could only craft one Fusion rune I needed so I'm missing these on both my sets.
Haven't bothered with class sets as I have no money. Have quite a bit of glory saved up so might work on this later.
Worth noting I did my dps set a little incorrectly and I will get to work throwing plat down the drain when I make the money back. I posted this to give people an idea of how much it could cost to rerune. Please keep in mind that I was spending significantly less money than I should have been due to all the stuff likes runes I had stockpiled. I realize most people won't have to do this all at once, but the process is still very costly for newer players.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Honestly, there's no indication that they even care that this happened.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I hate it, but... yeah. They clearly don't give a rat's behind about this.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
The people that would address this are likely also people that can be pulled in to look at the performance issues.
----
			Here's hoping that a change is coming around the corner for rune management. Previous system was acceptable but now it's a greedy slot machine.	
----
			when our economy tanks from dinks buying plat from gold farmers because basic costs are too high they'll figure it out 	
----
			Havent been able to play for a while... is it still bad?	
----
			Yup.	
----
			Dang. Still no off spec for me then!	
----
			They announced some changes that should make this better.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They announced some changes that should make this better.
----