Ok first off Sano and rest of the team, thank you for releasing the new balance patch. I do not want the rest of this post to feel like a shit post as it is obvious you are working on things, but I want to get some thoughts out there regarding current A-Grade status.
Overview:
1. A-Grade weapon crafts / availability are unbalanced.
2. Unsealed A-grade armor is too expensive for players to progress into.
Point 1:
Some A grade weapon key mats are unavailable in the game at all, and some have such a ludicrous drop table it is impossible to get the weapon.
Unattainable keys:
Branch of the mother tree
Doom Crusher
Keys only drop from Hekaton Chires:
Infernal Master
Destroyer Hammer
Flaming Dragon Skull
Blood Tornado (recipe only from chires too)
Meteor Shower
Bloody Orchid (recipe only from chires too)
Dragon Grinder
Tallum Glaive (recipe only from chires too)
To be fair some of the low A grade weapons full drop from all 75 bosses and epics so there is the method to obtain those weapons through other means. I am not sure if it is intended as well that Branch, Doom Crusher, and Dragon Grinder are only attainable from epics either similar to Ice Storm Hammer, Guardian Sword, Wizard’s Tear, etc; however, it was balanced a while ago that the recipes for many of these weapons were added to the drop table either through FI or through gamlins, so it doesn’t quite make sense that they keys are still only attainable from 1 mob that has a 3.5 minute respawn time.
I think there is potential for a separate discussion on the overall craftability of Mid-A needinging 70+ gem A, but the bigger gap is that some keys are essentially off the loot table.
Point 2:
A-Grade sets require 7 cloth pieces to unseal a whole set. 4 or 2+2 for body/legs, 1 helm, 1 boot, 1 glove. At the going market rate (this may not age well) that is ~550kk just to unseal pieces. Lets break down current cloth piece drops rates to put it in perspective:
1 A-Grade set requires maxed cloth pieces from an Antharas kill, requires 2 max+1 Zaken kills, 2 near max baium kills (with cloth drops 52%), or 3 max+1 sailren kills (10% drop rate).
The other drops are from Hekaton Prime 4.7% (3 hour spawn), Midnight Nightmare 2.2% (10-20 min spawn ¼ of the day), and Pterosaur 0.3% (10 min spawn). So excluding the epics and assuming you have perfect party conditions that can kill all these mobs on spawn all day as they spawn (this is including all 4 pteros on FI not just 2 per spawn location) potentially simultaneously, an A-Grade set would take 66 hrs of playtime to unseal. If doing the more reasonable thing and only farming the best mobs (Ptero x2) it would take 204 playable hours to get enough cloth pieces. Each of these mobs are also some of the strongest single mobs in the game and require full farm party to kill (~5 members minimum – DD, DC, PP, BD, SwS/SE).
Overall cloth pieces have been challenging to farm and I expect them to remain challenging to farm, but I ask the GM’s if the purpose of A-Grade is to solely wait until there is a +6+ set made before unsealing because due to the scarcity of cloth pieces? There are plenty of non +6 A grade sets currently on the server, but in reality, for most players changing to A-grade is not worth it because +6 of any armor is pretty much better. Another intent would be to slow down the progression into +6/+8 A grade sets so the life of the server is longer, but couldn’t this also be achieved through making obtaining enchants harder while allowing non-over enchanted A-grade to be an upgrade?
If this is the intent and to keep unsealing the gating piece to enter A-grade then that is ok, but please address point #1 in detail.
TLDR: A-grade weapons are very limited and only top A has full loot table. A grade armor is fully limited by cloth pieces and making standard +0-+3 A-grade is much worse than just using +6 B grade.
