Perfected Armor Patterns

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Amurdora
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Perfected Armor Patterns

Let's talk about the disparity in Perfected Armor Patterns and high end loot and dragonsworn armor patterns.

Perfected Armor Pattern's are required for each crafting attempt of runed armor. This means that every-time one wishes to craft a piece of armor with at least 99% quality it will take an expected value of 4.455 crafting attempts to achieve this (16.33% 99 and 2% 100 qual) with a standard deviation of 4.929. This means that if one wishes to make an armor suit with 2 crafted pieces of armor they'll require an expected 9 perfected armor patterns and require as many as 18 25% of the time, for these two pieces. At a price of 100 BP per armor pattern this is the equivalent to increasing the price of the armor by 900-1800 bounty points, or in plat terms somewhere between 500g and 1 plat.

To summarize this point, let's look at only the cost of materials. Rune chain gloves, the cheapest chain, will cost you in 4.455 tries, 225g 49s 47c (assuming 0 mark-up). SCing of said piece, doing it yourself, will run you ~50g, a proc will run you ~254g bringing our straight out of pocket 0 mark-up expenses to roughly 530g. Now, the way perfected armor patterns are currently designed those 4 patterns will take you, at what my alliance mates describe as 20/hr as a solid drop farm rate, 12-15 minutes of farming, ~450-900 BPs, or ~ 200g-400g for. Meaning that perfected armor patterns have either taken 12-15 min of farming (remember our standard deviation, this will mean 24-30 min of farming for 25% of pieces), and a 50% to 100% price increase (at 50g per pattern) over what it already costs to make the item (and this is chain mind you, the proportion of costs for cloth, leather, and studded is even higher!).

Adding all of this up and doing it yourself at the cheapest possible rate will mean that 1 pair of crafted chain gloves will cost you an average of 530g and 15 minutes of farming to make. 1 in 4 of these gloves will cost you 650g and 30 min of farming. You will take into account the fact that these gloves aren't likely to pop in 2 tries, which will happen again, 25% of the time, so you'll likely spend a good 30 min farming PER PEICE you want to make. Or you will spend hundreds of gold on patterns, a cost you cannot recoup unlike the other crafting materials, or hundreds of bounty points.

This is all kind of confusing I know because there's lots of what-ifs, It's all based on probabilities with a great deal of relative uncertainty.

So let's make a different kind of argument. There is another piece you are required to obtain to craft armor, Dragonsworn Patterns. Now, a 1:1 comparison of these items shows that Dragonsworn blow Perfected Patterns out of the water. In a three hour period today my friend got 130 Dragonsworn Patterns of semi-try hard play. He could have pushed this over 200 in a 3 hour span if he had wanted to. Now, that's one data point but 60+/hr vs ~10-20/hr is a significant gap. Clearly dragonsworn pieces are far easier to obtain than perfected armor patterns, potentially 3x as easy, maybe even 4 or 5.

Let's just say it's twice as easy. What is the logic of having one crafted armor be twice as easy to obtain as another? What if it's 3x easier? 4x? 5x?

This isn't a precise argument but if you gave me drop numbers on mobs I could paint a precise picture for you. The bottom line I hope I showed here is this. Dragonsworn armor is at least twice as easy to obtain, probably 3-5x easier to obtain. Another solitary datapoint but one I found stunning, yesterday when farming patterns I obtained 18 scales and 11 patterns. How are dragon scales easier, or at least as easy, to get from trash mobs as perfected armor patterns are?

The final argument I'll make just to keep it relatively short. I'm a random player. I've raided my ass off, saved up my pennies, scrounged together a template. All that's left is crafting. I find out that I will need to farm 15-30 minutes, potentially for every crafted item I have, or increase the price I'm paying for armor by 50%-100%. Boom, I just hit another barrier that shouldn't really be there to me being templated and ready for RvR.

Now I appreciate that if armor patterns become too common the question becomes, why have them? A valid point and I'm not arguing to make them drop in stacks of 6 off every third mob you kill like on live. But surely the intention wasn't to increase the cost of one type of armor by 50%-100% (or more!) was it? It wasn't to have some random guy go up to a crafter and find out, hey this piece is going to cost you 2p for a 99% qual because I got a bad RNG and used up 20 armor patterns making it, something that will happen in 2% of cases for each piece of perfected armor.

How to fix this? Either increase the drop rate of patterns, increase the size of the stack that drops, increase the number of mobs that can drop it so that overall the server has more (trash mobs in the non-epic SI dungeons for example drop these on live) or dramatically reduce the cost in bounty points of these patterns.

At the bare minimum there is no reason whatsoever to have dragonsworn and perfected be functionally different in price.

Finally, if you're wondering to yourself, Amur, wtf are you doing writing out a 1,000 word essay on this at 1 in the morning my reply to you is, farming perfected armor patterns at a god awful slow pace because they're so fricken slow to obtain!
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Amurdora
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Re: Perfected Armor Patterns

I'll add to this that it's far more time efficient for me to sit and camp a quest mob in a dungeon, salvage that gear, and buy perfected armor patterns than it is to farm them myself. I'm not going to pretend like farming will stop by addressing this issue, but it is one of the subtle ways you can help with it.
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xMajix
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Re: Perfected Armor Patterns

I take your 1000 word essay and respond with......yes please.
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Lynee
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Re: Perfected Armor Patterns

I had a nice dream two days ago where I dreamt that perfected armor patterns dropped in stacks of 3. I am sure this was born from the painful farming of getting more after sinking 12 tries into a pair of 99% pants.

Yes please, I would like the drop rate to be raised.
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