135079-issue-fixed-praise-be-to-carbine-divinepure-rune-fragments-are-stupid-difficult-to-come-by

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Update #3: THE DEED IS DONE. System's fine now Carbine, good job. Leaving post here for posterity.
 
All right, I realize that the Carbine server rooms probably look something like this right now and that you guys are justifiably busy as a result. But this little droprate discrepancy is going to end up being really important to maintaining your new playerbase, and needs to be addressed ASAP.
 
Divine and Pure Rune Fragment, which are needed for raid gear, are stupid difficult to get your hands on. If you're a new player who's just getting into raiding with the setup on live, then actually filling out raid gear with average-quality runes for their iLevel will be a so singularly long, grindy, and generally un-fun that I can honestly see it causing new players to quit once they hit Elder Game.
 
"So wait, what's the problem exactly?"
 
Divine and Pure Rune Fragments, a basic green-quality material that you need to craft raid-quality runes are exceedingly difficult to get relative to how many you need to fill out your gear.
 
"What are you talking about? I filled out my raid gear easy when F2P went live."
 
And so did I, since we both had Rune Tokens we could turn in for everything we needed. The issue here is that new raiders (and us later, when we run out of tokens) won't have those and will have to take part in an awful grind to actually craft gear and get their sets filled out.
 
"Hold up, how bad are we talking here?"
 
You'll need 10 Fragments for every rune that you craft (12 for Divine Sets), be it a class set, an exceptional set rune, normal set runes, and even just plain stats. The runes themselves only come from salvaging raid-quality gear or as drops within the instance (the latter is a laughably low number) at about 0-7 runes per salvage. I've personally been getting around 2.5 on average from salvaging stuff thus far.
 
With raid gear, you have 7 pieces of gear that have 5 available rune slots for a grand total of 35 runes, which takes 350 Pure Rune Fragments or 420 Divine Rune Fragments.
 
That's right, you need to salvage around 140 pieces of raid-quality gear to have enough fragments to fully rune out one spec on a single character.
 
The most efficient way to go about this is salvaging raid-quality Glory gear. Especially since people progressing though the instance will, y'know, kind of need the gear that's dropping in the instance to equip and stuff. The cheapest pieces you can buy from GA are 1000 Glory while the cheapest DS ones are 1900 Glory.
 
To rune out GA-quality raid gear, you'll need to grind dungeons for around 140,000 Glory. About 318,200 Glory for DS-quality gear (RIP off-specs).
 
And that's not even getting into finding Set Focuses (you need them to make set runes and can expect to get around 4 or 5 for salvaging around 100 pieces of gear).
 
"Can't they just use weaker runes?"
 
Runes make up the majority of your gear's stat budget now. You can get away with sub-par runes during the start of Genetic Archives, but you need to fill out your gear to actually finish the instance and progress through The Datascape (Where the grind will start all over again, yaaay!).
 
"Surely, you're being dramatic about this?"
 
Not really, no. You're fine for the most part if you're an old player who got Rune Tokens on the F2P transition since you'll only really have to grind to build Class Sets, but everyone else is kind of screwed.
 
"That sounds like it really sucks."
 
Yup.
 
Probably made it to live because we were all using the Bev-o-Loot to give ourselves Runecrafting materials and didn't really notice. We complained about the class focuses a lot, but not many people actually looked at the other, more basic components. You also couldn't even get raid-quality fragments from salvage until about a few weeks ago on the PTR, so drop rates might not have had balance passes at all.
 
The drop-rates from salvage need to be massively boosted. In addition, Pure and Divine Rune Fragments either need to start coming from places like Contracts (which used to be a fun, repeatable source of light endgame content for all progression levels but are now more or less completely worthless to players once they start raiding) or be purchase-able from a vendor for some kind of currency (like Glory) somewhere. Hell, you can't even slot these things into non-raid gear, so it's not like you'd have to worry about players in dungeon-quality gear using the things before they should.
 
Carbino plz.
 
Update #2:
"Hold up, hold up, didn't they add runecrafting bags that you can purchase for glory?"
 
Yup, and on the PTR their droprates are around where they need to be (green fragments are abundant, while the focuses are rarer). However, the bags they added on live are actually worse than salvaging raid gear and tend to give you lower amounts of runes per amount of Glory spent on average. On top of that, most people (reasonably) assumed that the bags must be better, and started buying those instead of buying gear to salvage, which reduces the number of runes being created.
 
That's right, folks. Carbine managed to make runes more scarce.
 
Update #3:
"WHY CAN'T I HOLD ALL THESE RUNE FRAGMENTS!?"
 
PRAISE BE
			
				
	Edited November 16, 2015 by S-Flo	
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			Yes . . . this was exactly what I was afraid of. I used all my runecrafting bags on Divine and Pure bags, and got a bunch of elements & next to nothing in terms of the fragments themselves. And I've been dreading the reality of actually having to craft these runes.	
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Carbino plz.
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I am worried about this. Very worried.
 
However, what we don't know is what will happen to the market in the future once raiders have filled out all of their slots. At this point they'll start getting rune fragments they don't need and selling them on the CX. Since you can extract runes, it's conceivable that the market will start having a lot more once established raiders get their gear up to snuff and start farming drops.
			
				
	Edited October 1, 2015 by SlyJeff	
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However, what we don't know is what will happen to the market in the future once raiders have filled out all of their slots. At this point they'll start getting rune fragments they don't need and selling them on the CX. Since you can extract runes, it's conceivable that the market will start having a lot more once established raiders get their gear up to snuff and start farming drops.
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Carbino plz.
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Unlikely. Pure runes become irrelevant only once you start progressing into DS. However, at that point, you'll most likely abandon GA, therefore pure rune fragment supply stops more or less. For divine fragments, you'll stop needing them when you're full in the good 120 gear, so pretty close to the end of the raid. But while you don't stop raiding DS, I dare predict that the demand from DS starters (and twinks) will by far outweigh supply from guilds which have finished DS.
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			What they've done, in addition to making people broke and angry, is take the game one step further from its current alt unfriendliness. It is now alt-SPEC unfriendly. Good luck creating a viable gear set for your off spec now. You shall pick one character and one spec, forever and ever, amen.	
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What they've done, in addition to making people broke and angry, is take the game one step further from its current alt unfriendliness. It is now alt-SPEC unfriendly. Good luck creating a viable gear set for your off spec now. You shall pick one character and one spec, forever and ever, amen.
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Alt GA raids are probably going to be even more frequent, at least off the bat, due to the need for Class Focuses and gear to salvage for Pure Fragments.
 
What are going to be completely destroyed are guild-managed PuG GA runs. The new system basically means that there's no loot can really go to rot anymore due to the need to be able to salvage it to get fragments. Class Runes still need to be crafted and you need 50 Pure Fragments per person per spec to actually make the things.
 
Hell, in World Last we started distributing Class Focuses and everyone who has been given any so far are strapped for these basic fragments.
 
It's also kind of frustrating because getting a hold of those Class Focuses is kind of supposed to be a big moment for you as a player. The drop rates for those things are currently pretty well balanced, there's a limited supply of them and lot of the bonuses they provide are game-changers for your class. With the way that getting fragments is though, it just means you have to grind shit for days (or weeks if salvage RNG is being unkind) if you get them.
			
				
	Edited October 2, 2015 by S-Flo	
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It's also kind of frustrating because getting a hold of those Class Focuses is kind of supposed to be a big moment for you as a player. The drop rates for those things are currently pretty well balanced, there's a limited supply of them and lot of the bonuses they provide are game-changers for your class. With the way that getting fragments is though, it just means you have to grind shit for days (or weeks if salvage RNG is being unkind) if you get them.
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Like I noted up above salvaging the ilvl100 stuff had an extremely poor yield, 3 Pure fragments out of 7-8 pieces.  Salvaging the ilvl96(?) GA glory gear worked like a charm and yielded 3-5 Pure fragments per piece on average.  Just means I need to get a lot better about farming glory. 
 
My chief worry right now is how to acquire the non-class major set focuses.
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Like I noted up above salvaging the ilvl100 stuff had an extremely poor yield, 3 Pure fragments out of 7-8 pieces.  Salvaging the ilvl96(?) GA glory gear worked like a charm and yielded 3-5 Pure fragments per piece on average.  Just means I need to get a lot better about farming glory. 
 
My chief worry right now is how to acquire the non-class major set focuses.
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			As someone who flexes in nearly every raid I participate in, this particularly sucks. Double the grind because healer requirements differ for different fights in a raid. Before F2P, I had two fully runed out sets of gear, now I barely even have 1. 	
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			very sour about this, but it seems very few are, idk how im supposed to get runes at this point. 	
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Yeah getting these fragments is just nuts.
If I wanted a grind like this I'd be playing a Korean MMO
 
EDIT:
 
Thing that annoys me the most is that we invested huge amounts of plat to get our gear runed for DS, and now we need to do it all again.
Cause the amount of tokens that were handed out:
 
Are insufficient
Are not unlocking everything we need
The rerolling of runes for elements.
So as we mentioned in the beta: This is a big FU towards all existing players.
			
				
	Edited October 2, 2015 by Olivar	
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a big FU towards all existing players.
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			Most of you knew this patch was coming for awhile now. It's your own fault if you arent ready. I heard about the patch checked the PTR and started saving exceptional runes. I got on to F2P with 104 exceptional runes.  All my stuff is runes with BiS for one tank spec and 2 dps specs. Blame yourself. As for new players they dont have to start with the BiS gear and BiS runes it's a new system they will have to start from the bottom as it should be.	
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I am 100% in agreement with the original post. Especially now that gear pieces are useless without runes. Right now, new gear requires a ridiculous amount of work to make it an upgrade. That's ridiculous. Getting new gear should be exciting, not 'Dammit, now I have to grind 40000 glory since now I need divine and pure instead of pure and superb so I can't just remove them with service tokens purchased with omnibits.'
 
@Campbell, two months of saving up got me enough to rerune the dps set of ONE of my two raiding characters. That's one set of four that I have to rerune. That is just stupid. Now you can say 'Oh, Durinn should have made more money,' or 'Oh, Durinn planned badly,' or 'Why didn't you do 80000 level I contracts like I did?' Guess what. If I have really good runes (BiS in my main's main spec), I shouldn't HAVE to 'plan well' to accommodate a drop that doesn't do anything but modify how runes work. Besides, that does not even remotely help new players who are going to suffer from this system. And the problems for new players are what the OP was talking about!
 
Oh, and Campbell, when you say that you have 'BiS runes in three specs,' you mean 'not even close to BiS.' Because 'BiS' means class rune sets. And class rune sets can't be purchased with those tokens; they have to be manufactured, and can only be manufactured with a ton of divine rune fragments (which sadly are actually more of a block to getting class sets than the set focuses themselves!). So actually what you have is 'fairly mediocre' thanks to all your careful preparation, and the sad thing is, fairly mediocre is the best we old players could manage, even if we had BiS prior to this drop, without grinding out several hundred divine fragments, or, in terms of glory, around 300k (oh, and convincing your raid group to give you class set focuses, of which you get like 2-4 per boss).
 
Now, I have the perfect solution for this as well: Give us back the 3 exceptional rune tokens from the top tier of contract rewards, and make it possible to combine a class set focus with one of those tokens to buy a class set rune. That would make it feasible for people to rune their equipment without inordinate difficulty, both old players and new, while still gating getting BiS runes by gating the class focuses.
 
Frankly this rune system is the only thing that upsets me about this update. I can laugh off server problems. Those will be fixed by the devs in a few days. But this rune stuff is, I am very sorry to say, a design decision that I think lowers the enjoyment of the game. I play this game for the challenge which content offers and commit a lot of time each week to raiding. Not to grind 300k glory so that I can keep on raiding with maximum efficiency.	
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The best thing I feel that could be done to make the system fixed in the simplest manner possible while keeping everything the same is to screw with the drop rates.
 
Make mobs that drop gear that is divine also drop divine fragments. Do this all the way down.
 
Make the amount of rune fragments from salvage also drastically higher. A BiS piece for the rune level should drop enough for 4 runes at that level. A ilvl 120 should salvage into the material for four divine runes. Glory gear can salvage into 1 piece. Drops that are not BiS should salvage into 2-3 runes worth of material.
 
Keep the class tokens rare. They are not as needed and can be the glory pieces of a gear. Putting runes themselves into a piece though? That should not be something glorious.
 
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Most of you knew this patch was coming for awhile now. It's your own fault if you arent ready. I heard about the patch checked the PTR and started saving exceptional runes. I got on to F2P with 104 exceptional runes.  All my stuff is runes with BiS for one tank spec and 2 dps specs. Blame yourself. As for new players they dont have to start with the BiS gear and BiS runes it's a new system they will have to start from the bottom as it should be.
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This.
When i logged into f2p for the first time i was pretty excited, until i looked at my gear and then this thread and the other about gearing cost.
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Should the basic runes be cheaper in material cost than set runes ?
Yes, they should be lot cheaper. So the new players could rune their gear faster with decent runes.
 
Should you always use highest itemlevel runes what you can put on your gear  ?
No. For the new players getting best runes isn't feasible until economy stabilizes. If you are new player and get for example GA lvl gear you shouldn't use all your money for runing it with pure runes. if you don't have any rune tokens just do few dungeons and get superb runes for it and swap them with pure ones when you get enough rune fragments from salvaging or the rune fragment prices go down enough. 	
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Ah so they thought to hide the hyper grind behind raiding....the games ONLY good end game? 
 
Figures.....
 
I feel like they just want to keep pissing off their player base and drive players away.	
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			Can we get any response to this thread? The amount of time you'd have to spend to rune yourself is just ridiculous. It cannot stay like this.	
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			I agree, but they are probably to busy right now, but devs when you guys get a chance would you please be so kind to atleast hint at changes to this system atleast for paying players?	
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Should the basic runes be cheaper in material cost than set runes ?
Yes, they should be lot cheaper. So the new players could rune their gear faster with decent runes.
 
Should you always use highest itemlevel runes what you can put on your gear ?
No. For the new players getting best runes isn't feasible until economy stabilizes. If you are new player and get for example GA lvl gear you shouldn't use all your money for runing it with pure runes. if you don't have any rune tokens just do few dungeons and get superb runes for it and swap them with pure ones when you get enough rune fragments from salvaging or the rune fragment prices go down enough.
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Except "swapping out runes" costs gobs of gold. You are punished for working your way up because of the high costs to destroy runes.
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True. But it is better to pay 60g rune removing tax than paying now 20-40 plat for perfect rune. Rune prices will go drastically down in month or two when you will get same rune with 2-5 plat.
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True. But it is better to pay 60g rune removing tax than paying now 20-40 plat for perfect rune. Rune prices will go drastically down in month or two when you will get same rune with 2-5 plat.
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Does it cost 60g to remove one rune? I'm sorry, I don't know the price as I haven't put in even a single rune yet. But replacing each rune to upgrade it, you would have to pay the removing fee each time, so... that would add up.
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			Hopefully that was posted sarcastically, ebp.	
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That's for DS level gear. GA is 50 and dungeon is 40.
 
Still a lot, and definitely a problem if you want to work your way up from cheaper runes.
 
We went into GA Tuesday and one of our healers wanted to at least put in some basic runes before she had a chance to study and get it "optimized", but then to replace them after would have cost 15 plat. Ouch. That's a heafry price to put on someone who just wants to do "quick and dirty" now and then "right" later on. But runes are so powerful, you can't really gone unruned till you figure things out.
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Hopefully that was posted sarcastically, ebp.
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I agree, but they are probably to busy right now, but devs when you guys get a chance would you please be so kind to atleast hint at changes to this system atleast for paying players?
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Most people are raging over the cost because of the fact that all the gear or most of the gear they had got salvaged into tokens which was redeemable, also all the old runes turned into tokens. But the biggest thing that I think is making people rage over the cost is that Carbine FORGOT to make all the token gear and rune slots on them FREE of Charge at least for the reworked pieces. This would of eliminated a lot of those QQ'ing over the costs to redo runes on GEAR CHANGES that Carbine made in the first place. If they eliminated the costs on gear that came from the tokens they would of saved a ton of customer service tickets for mistakes made also. Its like punishing someone for what they didn't do. As for those new and with no tokens gotta start grinding it out like every other F2P MMO. Especially since none of the Token gear is even close to BiS. Also maybe giving everyone a few free attempts on gear runing would help since I see many people QQ'ing over removing runes and rerolling.
 
Also Question? Is it possible to roll a Fusion rune on a piece of gear that doesnt have one? Been trying to roll a Fusion on a weapon and gave up after the 10th try lol.
EDIT: Nevermind saw another post " Fusion Runes can be placed in any element , but Fusion Rune Slots can take any element " was confused and thought you need a Fusion Rune slot for a Fusion Rune lol.
			
				
	Edited October 4, 2015 by Jorn	
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I'm having this problem too.
 
My main is a DS geared Engineer, about 6/9 in DS. I'm a dual spec raider in my guild, which means I need to maintain both of my DPS and TANK gear at maximum optimization (like BiS rune set / rune slot on every piece of gear) for my guild progression. I just finished to re-rune my DPS gear. spent around 30-35p just to reroll all those rune slots to match the BiS rune set on every piece of gear.
 
Now here comes the problem.
My other gear set; My tank set isn't fully optimized and I'm running out of exceptional rune token. I tried to use rune token instead of exceptional rune token for my tanking gear. If I can get 6/6 2/6 rune set using the exceptional rune token (which is unobtainable anymore from the contract reward, not even T3 or T5 contract board rewards you a rune token / exceptional rune token) I can only get 5/6 rune set using the rune token, 4/6 rune set if I'm using fusion rune on weapon / helm / chest / gloves / feet. AND It's affecting my tanking capabilities... the healers in my guild told me that I'm taking a shit load of damage that they couldn't keep up while I was tanking System Daemons (1st boss in Data Scape Raid)
 
They asked me to rune all my tanking gear with the exceptional runes (divine / pure major set which gives me 2 set bonuses per rune)
The price of 1 piece of divine runes is about 1p20g - 1p50g in AH; price could be higher / lower
The price of 1 piece of divine focus major is about 7p-9p; price could be higher / lower
To craft 1 piece of divine rune for your gear set requires 12x divine runes and 1 piece of divine focus major. that's around 18p + 9p = 26p when you bought it at the highest price in CX / Auction House.
Each piece of gear has 5 rune slots, now multiply that 26p x 5 rune slots = 130 platinum to get 1 piece of your DS gear runed.
There are 7 piece of gear you need to rune, weapon, helm, shoulders, chest, gloves, pants, legs. 7x 130p = 910 platinum total
wait... that doesn't include the cost of reruning your gear to match the runes you just crafted... let's say I need the same amount of gold to reroll all my tanking gear runes, 35p.
 
SO the final cost is around 945 platinum.
 
Now let's say I'm a new player that just started playing wildstar in F2P (aka drop 6) I dont have any rune token / exceptional rune token.
I finished lvled my 1st toon to lv 50, finished the attunement, A guild recruited me, and my guild gives me all these bind on equip gears they've got from Data Scape months ago. Cus they want me to raid with them.
How am I supposed to rune all these new gear?
 
It makes me feel that I kinda wanna just quit the game fr.	
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Get rid of rune slot types, just let them be rune slots... Only reason this exists is a plat sink and money generating machine. Re-rolling slots for the right ones isn't fun.  Cut cost by 50% to remove runes, full cost to retain the rune. Decrease rune fragment reqs to 1 or increase drop rate, or do nothing and shift 90% stats back to gear so runes become something to fine tune your build, not completely make your build.
 
Why is like 50% of our DPS coming from a broken rune system, I would much rather look forward to the next tier of gear after DS, not re-runeing for the 2nd time in the past 6 months to get back(less til you can actually get the sets you want) to do the same DPS i was at prior to the F2P drop.  
 
Do something Carbine... 	
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I'm a returning player who quit after their guild fell apart going from GA to DS. I thought about shopping around for a raid guild and started looking at runing out my replacement gear they gave me from the switchover (RIP all those ridic crafteds ;_; ). Checked to see the cost of the rune fragments to see what it would cost to get my gear up to snuff, immediately was discouraged and logged off. I had something like 10 plat? Basically dirt poor with inflation. The amount of grinding it would take to either a) get the money or b ) farm the rune pieces wasn't even worth my time. If this is what it takes to raid, screw this, I'm going back to FFXIV.
 
IDK how Carbine made the rune system even WORSE than it was on launch but they managed it. GG no re.
			
				
	Edited October 8, 2015 by cakesphere	
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I'm honestly a bit shocked that we haven't seen any sort of dev response on this at all. They've been beyond excellent about communicating well over the past few months.
 
We're not seeing that many complaints about the system in the short-term, but we're going to lose a lot of players in a month or so when the free-to-play wave starts raiding. Those of us that have been around a while have access to Rune Tokens, but the new players will have to participate in one of the most awful grindfests that's ever been in this game if they begin raiding. It's worse than the AMP/Ability Point unlock system at launch, which by all rights was godawful. Us vets are fine, but almost nobody from the free-to-play wave that plans on raiding is going to put up with this @#$% once they encounter it and figure out how awful it is.
 
Carbine, the new drop and the new rune system is excellent, but this seemingly minor high-end droprate issue you have is a ticking time-bomb.
 
You need to modify something within the next few weeks before the F2P wave begins raid progression, be it drop rates, required materials, or whatever before it blows up in your face.
			
				
	Edited October 8, 2015 by S-Flo	
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Well, I'm guessing that progression raiders are going to have to do GA with superb runes, even once they start getting GA gear.
 
But it's going to be strange, because you need a TON of salvaged gear for each piece of gear you want to keep. Progression guilds are going to be eating the gear up, and none is going to be salvaged for quite a while. They'll be reliant on farming guilds to get their runes. But right now, we are banking all of our salvaged gear and using it for runes for raiders until they are fully runed out. And once they are, we'll probably not be farming GA anymore. I'm not sure where the supply is supposed to come from.
 
I'm sure we'll have the same issue when we start getting gear in DS, but maybe not quite as bad as we are already starting to salvage gear from the probes.
 
It's going to be interesting for sure- I don't see the price of pure rune fragments coming down any time soon.
 
But I'm not shocked Carbine hasn't commented on this. They are still fighting fires to do with general game stability.
			
				
	Edited October 8, 2015 by SlyJeff	
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I truly believe this could be addressed, at least partially, by having contracts award pure and divine runes and frags. We used to get exceptional runes from contracts. Why not now? This would give raiders something to do outside of raiding in order to grind up stuff we need. In addition, greens in general need their rates increased. There's just no reason we are sitting around with class sets we can't make because we don't have the fragments. There is no way to get higher than superb frags outside of raids right now, and I really believe there needs to be.
 
Over time, this will work out. But, for those of us that were well geared prior to the F2P transition, getting back to where we were has cost us a lot....and it felt like paying twice as much since we'd already put so much time and plat into gearing up/runing up originally. I haven't even looked at my dps spec or my alt at all. I just runed up my tank set and have focused on that. I dread trying to get the rest of my gear up to snuff. Plus, I am not sure I have the plat to do so. *sighs*	
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There is no way to get higher than superb frags outside of raids right now, and I really believe there needs to be.
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Not a *fast* source. But salvaging raid level glory gear does it. That's my source of rune fragments at the moment.
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Mine too. I had 60k glory before F2P. I spent it all salvaging gear. It's helped. I run dungeons daily and spend all my glory on gear to salvage. Then, try to help guildies that we are passing sets to have enough green frags to go with the class set focuses. It's working, but it's frustrating.
 
I just think it would make sense for contracts to be rewarding for raid level players as well as non-raiders. I guess that's my point. Right now, there's no advantage to running contracts as a raider. There's some cosmetic/fun stuff to get, but nothing that helps us improve our gear. We used to be able to get fun stuff AND gear improvements with contracts. Now, none of my raiders even care to do them. And we can't currently run alt GAs and such because none of us have geared enough alts, any longer, to do so. We stole all the "good stuff" from our alts to make our mains viable again. C'est la vie.
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This applyies to PVP too
Those who got lucky with their fragments got set, those who not - suck big time.	
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Wow, 1½ week, and still no-one from Carbine daring to respond to this thread. (Well, to be fair, I wouldn't want to be that guy either.)
I don't really have much to add to what's been said already, but I'll add my view of things anyways.
 
I'm an engineer in pretty much full DS gear for tanking (though the old DS shield is now pretty bad and was replaced by a GA one that dropped last week, and the iLvL 120 gadget is currently replaced by an iLvL 70 one because the DS has become completely useless; getting a 45s window to gain 18k extra hp for a few seconds, but only once you've taken 4 crits - try to guess how often that has saved my life compared to an instant 9k absorb; you guessed it - it's seldom up when you need it, and you can't count on it). I'm pretty much full DS gear for DPS off-spec as well, though not quite the same level there. I was fully runed in both, obviously, though I didn't have many exceptional runes before (because it was nearly impossible getting Logic Bomb of Armor, or whatever they were called - nothing on AH for weeks and weeks).
 
So I started with 10 Exceptional Rune Tokens. Since information on how to rune the new gear was scarce, I started runing on what I thought was good, and from what people recommended initially. I got some glance and deflect exceptionals among other things. Later I've been told that I should drop my crit mitigation, and more or less avoid runing glance and deflect and go for armor instead.
 
I spent well over 20p och runing gear initially (some 7p rerolling a single runeslot that STILL didn't get me any of the two I wanted) was more or less broke since I haven't had much time to farm gold the last few months. That's not much compared to what others have spent, but that only got me half way to runing my tanking gear (leaving dps gear in poor shape) and still not with that many exceptional runes. Considering how much has been spent on these items to get them runed once before, it's just stupid that you have to spend a fortune on runing them once again! What the hell's up with that?!
 
Now I've bought thousands of NCoins just to get the service tokens needed to re-rune my gear. I guess that was the point of all this, right? To get us to spend (more) real money to get back to raiding, even though we're already subscribing? But even WITH those NCoinc/Service Tokens, I won't be able to rune properly, since I need more exceptionals. They're more important now than ever before, in my opinion.
 
 
I'm... well decently runed now, I guess, with mostly blue ones, but at least it's more or less the sets that I should be going for. But the damage! Holy hell! Healers even had trouble healing me on Ohmna in GA, even though I'm in DS gear, so a warrior (who had better runes and mitigation, even though he was in much lesser gear) had to take over so we could make it. 22k hits on System Daemons wasn't great either. I had to start using different ability set-ups for survivability, losing some utility and stuff, which may be fine for some fights, but not for others. Is this the way things are supposed to be? How are new raiders going to get ANYWHERE unless they get carried, when a DS geared tank can hardly tank GA? (Yes, Ohmna is supposed to be fairly nasty, as it's the last boss in the raid, but if you need Ohmna to get to DS, and you need DS gear to kill Ohmna, I see a problem here.)
 
 
 
Despite all this, I actually like the new rune system. It's great to have full rune-sets for each piece of gear, making future upgrades easier to rune. The idea is brilliant!
 
What I don't like is that I have to spend a fortune on getting back to where I was before Reloaded. We already SPENT loads to get where we were, and we have to do it all over again! For the same pieces of gear! We have to buy new rune slots, for pieces we've already spent lots on to GET those extra runeslots. And once the rune tokens are out, it's going to be a real pain to craft new runes as well - earlier you just needed some renown to buy rune fragments and then some signs of this and that.
 
 
 
So the TL;DR:
* I like the new rune system. Full rune sets in each piece of gear. Well done, Carbine.
 
* I HATE to spend already spent platina on gear just to get it back to the raiding standard it was!
* I think it's ridiculously hard to get the crafting materials needed to get new runes, and that needs to change two weeks ago!
* I feel squishier than ever, and it's starting to take it's fun out of raiding when healers complain and want another class to take over, even though he has lower level gear.
* I don't really like that runes are now more important than the gear piece itself.
* I really dislike the fact that some items that were really great, now got their stats utterly reworked and became worthless! (Looking at you, gadget-of-which-name-I-can't-remember.)
 
 
Oh, and is there any reason for me to actually subscribe anymore? It's not like we get a discount for runing or anything. I'm not saying it should be pay-to-win, I'm just saying it should give me something that makes it worth my money.
 
Anyways, here endeth the wall of text.	
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Wow, 1½ week, and still no-one from Carbine daring to respond to this thread. (Well, to be fair, I wouldn't want to be that guy either.)
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Isn't the stickied thread a solution to this thread problems? https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/140151-f2p-update-economy-and-tradeskills-100915/
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There is no solution to slack/laziness.
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if everything just costs 1g again your point is invalid.
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if everything just costs 1g again your point is invalid.
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Oh hey, Carbine responded to the issue. Time to retire my pitchfork.
 
From this thread: https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/140151-f2p-update-economy-and-tradeskills-100915/
 
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Hey all,
 
I just wanted to pop in and give a quick update. We have heard your feedback and we plan to make the following adjustments soon.
 
·         Removing Runes through the “Destroy” button will no longer cost gold.
·         Gold cost for re-rolling runes will be reduced at all levels and rarities.
·         We are adding a method to extract runes from an item with gold. (This will go to PTR before going to Live)
·         Adjustments to repair costs to smooth it out and lessen the burden throughout the gear progression, particularly at the Vet Dungeon to Genetic Archive range.
·         Lowering the cost to use common, uncommon, and rare dyes.
·         Adjustments to Rune Fragment drop rates to increase the acquisition rates.
·         Addition of a vendor that allows the trade-in of lower tier Rune Fragments to gain higher tier Rune Fragments. (This will go to PTR before going to Live)
 
 
Thanks again everyone for your feedback!
 
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I'm bringing salty back.
 
Last week's change actually made things worse. The Pure and Divine Runecrafting bags on the PTR give fragments in abundance (the way things should be), however, the runecrafting bags they gave us on live actually seem to give less than you get on average for the Glory you spend than just continuing to buy and salvage things.
 
On top of all of that, a ton of players are (not unreasonably) buying the Pure and Divine Runecrafting bags instead of salvaging Glory gear, which is more consistent, but is giving them worse returns overall. Pricing for the things are already starting to rise again.
 
That's right, folks. Carbine actually made runes more scarce.
 
Now, for all I know they might implement the numbers on the PTR later, but since they've given no indication of that yet I'm going to take my pitchfork back out.	
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https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/144763-rune-crafting-problem-still-not-addressed/?p=1439693
 
 
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As posted in other threads and Reddit, what went live is our f2p Alpha patch. PTR is the f2p.1 patch, which has not gone live. 
 
 
The updated rune fragment acquisition rates are still on PTR. There is one known issue that will be addressed on PTR and that is salvaging is currently granting too many rune fragments.
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i wonder why they pushed those "faulty" 500 glory bags out then if they want to test a better version on the PTR before releasing it. 
Its in their interest to make people "grind" glory for perfect rune sets to keep them playing the game. its also more rewarding if you work for the perfectly runed character instead of buying everything for it for <10p (random number... it could be <100p and would be super cheap in relation to what it is now to rune it PERFECT) in the ah. there has to be a difference between twinks and mains imo	
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i wonder why they pushed those "faulty" 500 glory bags out then if they want to test a better version on the PTR before releasing it. 
Its in their interest to make people "grind" glory for perfect rune sets to keep them playing the game. 
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So, going off of Dinwitt's post (thanks for digging that up, by the way), the high drop-rates on PTR are incorrect, and the actual future drop-rates are still up in the air?
 
While my gut feeling is that the updated rates are going to be fine and you could certainly argue that the current PTR drop numbers are too high, I worry that they're still going to miss the mark and make the droprates still too low (my confidence in the team has been somewhat shaken by last week's crash-tastic patch of awfulness).
 
Rune fragments should drop like candy. Set and Class Focuses should be the gating mechanism behind getting higher-powered sets, not this awful grind. The current state of things remains completely ridiculous.
			
				
	Edited October 28, 2015 by S-Flo	
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The current system works, IMO.
 
Guild efforts on gearing up players with the appropriate runes.  Guild banks have a multitude of items to sell on the market place for good money.
Casual players can make plat much easier with glory in order to buy said items that guilds are putting on the AH.
The prices went down.  They used to be 2-2.5p a piece.  They are now half that; which will also fluctuate depending as more people get into GA and DS.
 
Pure fragments are cheaper to buy with glory and will ultimately be the bigger cash cow, since more people will be doing GA and the demand for them should always be relatively high in comparison to the divine counterparts.  Pure fragments are worth anywhere from 1.5-2.0x more value than divine fragments currently when you finish conversions and stuff.  However, the down-side to this is maybe more people will catch on and only buy pure fragment bags and not divine.  At least there is plenty more crap gear to salvage in DS :P
			
				
	Edited October 28, 2015 by MoePork	
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The current system works, IMO.
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So, going off of Dinwitt's post (thanks for digging that up, by the way), the high drop-rates on PTR are incorrect, and the actual future drop-rates are still up in the air?
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The current system is incredibly broken, especially for a guild just starting one of the raids.  Until a reasonable effort is all it takes to obtain enough fragments to rune out a piece of gear it will remain broken.  A raid leader shouldn't even think about not giving out an upgrade because the fragments from salvaging, so that other upgrades given out could be fully runed, might be more beneficial.
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			If I could like this post a trillion times I would!  Been weeks since I got my first class set, but it's rotting in my bag do to lack of pure rune fragments.  Not to mention the loss of 20k+ glory for minimul returns.  The bags they added suck too, and if you were a new raider with supurb level, you'd still need a billion fragments just to be able to raid properly.  Feel horrible for the new peops, and this was supposed to be a fresh start, but if they hit this bottleneck, they're going to quit again.	
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			How many pages does this post have too go before carbine gets in and says, hey we see what your saying it and this current state is garbage.
			
				
	Edited October 29, 2015 by Bwack Jack	
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And perhaps too add some more construction lets look at this from a  raiding "guilds" perspective lets say a boss drops you 3 bits of loot +1 focus roughly 2 off those loot pieces are useful too some one so that's 10 runes required + 2 foci yea with a cos of 10 frags (pure) 12 frags divine. Lets look at divine so that 120 frags required too run out thoose 2 drops with an average frag rate of 2.5 You're going too need 48 addtional gear drops that are not usable by any one else too rune 2 pieces of gear. so if your expecting the guild as a whole too help you out with frags bear in mind people are still upgrading too tier so they're gonna need frags ........................ FRAGS FRAGS FRAGS FRAGS FRAGS. ....... frags.
 
this may of gotten a bit distracted there but you can do break downs for 5 paragraphs point is there's no way too catch up too the demands atm in the game you up grade 1 piece and you suddenly need 60 frags that again is 60 ish bags at 500 glory a piece a comes in at a lean 30000. or like 70 speed runs if your lucky PER PIECE THAT YOU UPGRADE. 	
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			Not too mention that now is the perfect time too buy out the market and relist higher. perfect time to make plat on cx. TY for an extremely poorly laid out system a toddler with a nose for money and a crayon would lay out. terrible ideas. just terrible ideas	
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For those that were quoting me and responding,
 
What I meant to say, as a whole, the system works.  Do ratios need tweaking?  Sure, but the big picture makes sense.  I've already expressed my distaste for how the ratio of majors to minors are currently and fragments, etc.	
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For those that were quoting me and responding,
 
What I meant to say, as a whole, the system works.  Do ratios need tweaking?  Sure, but the big picture makes sense.  I've already expressed my distaste for how the ratio of majors to minors are currently and fragments, etc.
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			*SCREAMS RIPPING HAIR OUT*  Please sir, fix this already....	
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If I could like this post a trillion times I would!  Been weeks since I got my first class set, but it's rotting in my bag do to lack of pure rune fragments.  Not to mention the loss of 20k+ glory for minimul returns.  The bags they added suck too, and if you were a new raider with supurb level, you'd still need a billion fragments just to be able to raid properly.  Feel horrible for the new peops, and this was supposed to be a fresh start, but if they hit this bottleneck, they're going to quit again.
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Yea let people only log for raid, that not gonna make the game look/be total dead in no time..
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			Been some speculation in my guild that there might be some people attempting to control the market as well. Buying up rune fragments once they reach a certain price, then selling them back off once they inflate again. Since there's such a limited commodity, it probably wouldn't be that hard to do if they already had a sizeable chunk of money.	
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So you prefer the current system where you have to kill 5+ world bosses or run 5+ random dungeons (both of which take hours and hours) to buy a rune bag that MAYBE gives you 3-4 fragments?  Not everyone who likes raiding has time to play for the hours it takes to rune just ONE piece of gear.  There should never be a problem where someone passes on a raid upgrade because they don't have the time or don't want to spend the time farming fragments to make it worth putting on.
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If some 1 passes on a item, i assume it be giving to some one who actually log in daily and support the game by playing it..
Our guild(2d/w semi progress) had returning players at F2P, funny how all those people managed to get a full sets of exceptional divine
for the 2-4 pieces of gear they get each raid, without whining about it..
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I agree with the gist of what OP posted, however there's one small difference with bags.  Bags currently have a higher chance to give set runes (not class focus's) than salvaging, so they are worth it.  However, Carbine really need to push out the econ patch giving us 10-13 green fragments per bag along with the removal for gold etc, as it's making re-runing a complete pain. 
 
I've got two need DS 120 items that I can't use at the moment because I can't afford to rune them optimally and I refuse to pillage our Gbank for something that should be easily obtainable through farming (I've done the 'hard' part in being part of the boss kill), but I don't have time to do more than 5-6 dungeon runs per night around raids as I work full time and still need to eat :P. 	
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it's getting a little bit boring.
 
how in the world can a problem like that exist for 4 weeks (after probably being on beta for months)? i REALLY don't want to spend ~90p on fragments alone to rune a single piece of gear. and yeah, i know, we can clear everything with suberp runes or the 1setbonus runes from rune tokens.. but i'd really like to get (BACK) to nearly BiS after already farming for months to get to it.	
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Making people grind out a few dungeons for glory is fine, and even good. But the current grind rate will burn people out and drive them from the game.
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It certainly is getting tedious, though there are good moments.  Had a guild group going Saturday where we gave up all pretenses about doing the dungeon legitimately and went 4 or 5 dps on every fight.  Six minute STL runs are glorious, though the final boss in SSM is tricky to kill without a healer.  One of these days I want to get a group of four DS geared Engineer DPS with their GA class set and see what bosses we can kill in the first five seconds.
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			I expect the current build on the PTR to go live soon so the glory bags should reward 10+ pure/divine rune fragments. salvaging ilvl100/ilvl120 gear currently has a chance to give GA/DS class runes which is probably a bug not yet declared one by carbine. If this goes live gearing everyone in class sets will be very easily done in future.
			
				
	Edited November 4, 2015 by furoflo	
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			aaaaaaand another patch without any changes about this. i guess having actual useful fusion runes was a much bigger problem and nerfing them into oblivion was a much higher priority than this.	
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			The longer they don't fix it, the less I'll play.  They have probably a month tops before I stop playing altogether, even though I'm really enjoying raiding with my guild.	
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https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/146257-please-push-the-runecrafting-bag-fixes/?p=1451567
 
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Next week, pending the usual qualifications.
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Don't know if any of the devs will see this and I realize it's a smidge belated, but I just wanted to say thanks for fixing the rune thing.
 
Keep up the good work, guys.
			
				
	Edited November 16, 2015 by S-Flo	
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Don't know if any of the devs will see this and I realize it's a smidge belated, but I just wanted to say thanks for fixing the rune thing.
 
Keep up the good work, guys.
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Don't know if any of the devs will see this and I realize it's a smidge belated, but I just wanted to say thanks for fixing the rune thing.
 
Keep up the good work, guys.
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