Costly...

[Adley]

What is the most costly thing one has ever seen in the black market?

[Derakon]

Ring of Speed +2 back in the frog-knows days (when +1 was equivalent to modern +10). It cost several million AU.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Ring of Speed +2 back in the frog-knows days (when +1 was equivalent to modern +10). It cost several million AU.

I have seen high pval BoS couple of times in BM before stores were changed with couple of million AU. Now I bought BoS +8 at armory with less than 30k. Cheap. BM probably has same value decrease for BoS. Not sure if RoS also suffers same broken price. It might be that those high-price times are over.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

I have seen high pval BoS couple of times in BM before stores were changed with couple of million AU. Now I bought BoS +8 at armory with less than 30k. Cheap. BM probably has same value decrease for BoS. Not sure if RoS also suffers same broken price. It might be that those high-price times are over.

The most costly things now seem to be high AC dwarven armor for god knows what reason.

[Nomad]

When I was still playing 3.0.9 I once saw speed boots +9 for about 800k. The most expensive thing I've seen in 3.1.2 was an awl-pike of Gondolin with ESP for just under 200k. There doesn't seem to be much that gets over 100k now apart from Defender weapons.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by fizzix

The most costly things now seem to be high AC dwarven armor for god knows what reason.

I'd guess this is because AC is currently overvalued by the stores, and dwarven armor gets an extra +d15 AC in addition to the boosts it gets from being an ego-item -- plus several other useful boosts.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

I'd guess this is because AC is currently overvalued by the stores, and dwarven armor gets an extra +d15 AC in addition to the boosts it gets from being an ego-item -- plus several other useful boosts.

Is it? Leaving aside the continuing underpricing of speed, is dwarven armour priced correctly relative to, say, weapons of westernesse, or defenders?

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Is it? Leaving aside the continuing underpricing of speed, is dwarven armour priced correctly relative to, say, weapons of westernesse, or defenders?

Defenders are way overvalued. Westernesse is about right, Dwarven armors should be somewhere around same price as resistance armors. That's how I feel about them.

[Nomad]

Both Dwarven armour and Defender weapons strike me as items that are awesome game changers if you find them early on, but by the time you've assembled enough money to buy them, you've already got most of the bonuses they give covered and are much more interested in looking for higher resistances and ESP.

I think the trouble with trying to work out any consistent system of pricing is that value is kind of self-referential - price determines what stage in the game you can afford to buy, which affects how much you value the bonuses offered by a particular item, which affects how much that item should be priced. Dwarven armour and Defender weapons would both be exactly as valuable as they're priced to a naked newbie character with no base resistances or FrAct and weak stats, but naked newbs aren't the ones who have 100k AU to spend.

It would be interesting to collect some stats on average cashflow over the course of a game - maybe if you recorded how much money the player has every time they go down to a new max depth? That would help in figuring out what stage a 'typical' character has reached by the time they have x amount of money to spend.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Nomad

Both Dwarven armour and Defender weapons strike me as items that are awesome game changers if you find them early on, but by the time you've assembled enough money to buy them, you've already got most of the bonuses they give covered and are much more interested in looking for higher resistances and ESP.

Problem with defenders are that they are weapons without any combat benefits. That makes them weaker than weapon of slay orc, and way way way weaker than Westernesse. Dwarven armors I have actually used sometimes because of +2 CON and FA if I had resistances from other sources.

Defenders are basically just easy money. Like rods of curing. You need to get them _very_ early because as soon as you find your first westernesse / any weapon with more blows & FA and resistance armor nothing it gives is better than that other weapon.

To make Defender comparable to Westernesse you need to give it same slays, and even then Westernesse wins in most cases, because bonus to STR, DEX and CON. Especially CON.

Weapon needs to be good as weapon, otherwise it is junk.