I’m kinda sick of reading the same issues over and over again since people are too lazy to read.
THIS POST IS ABOUT THE LACK OF INCREASED UNBOUND SHARDS AND HOW THIS CHANGE HELPS MAKE IT EASIER FOR NEW PLAYERS AND PUSHING ALTS IN GENERAL
Chaos dungeon gets more, why not chaos gate? By introducing more shards per chaos gate the price overall goes down which is good for everyone since the problem only gets worse.
TLDR: at the end.
The biggest design flaw of lost ark imo are shardbags.
a new player at 1415 has to buy/use the same shardbags a 1580 whale has to buy in a quantity which is a pure joke.
Let’s compare brehlshaza +20 weapon with Valtan +20 weapon:
Brehlshaza +20
Valtan +20
250k Shards vs 44k just to fill up the weapon to start honing.
Lets look at the gains we get from chaos dungeon:
(Credit to u/ Nsbhyfr on reddit)
Those rewards are (according to Nsbhyfr with a sample size of N=50 (minimum)): Unrested, no portals, all accessories dismantled, including end dungeon rewards.
althought a bit confusing to look at this compares how many days it take to run chaos dungeons to be able to fill up the respective +20 weapon (since 1520 isnt the highest cd i took 1415 as well as a comparrison)
Now this isn’t an issue for people who play their class since release which let them hord a lot of shards by doing chaos dungeon while not having to hone for weeks/months.
Now lets look at a new class release, we are at a point where every new class will get an express pass so thats nice.
How long does it take to catch up? Thats a question which will take more time to answer than i have paciency to answer and most won’t read this far anyway but to keep it short, the biggest issue is shards.
Lets look at maxrolls +6 (1370) to +20 (1490)
It takes roughly 840k shardbags to be able (on average) to have enough shards to hone.
In EUC this costs roughly 293k gold in shardbags alone. CORRECTION: i noticed too late I took 1370-1490 instead of 1415. The difference in shards and gold is 71k shards and 24k gold.
Now lets take a look at the highest ilvl content with the next class (artist) into consideration (Brehlshaza g1-6)
We will take a look at brehl hm g1-2 and 3-6 seperately. and to keep it simple ill start from full brehl +12 (valtan +20).
G1-2:
G3-6:
Together you need the following materials:
Looking at this shows that to get enough shards with the current system costs you roughly 1.4 million gold just to get enough shards to catch up.
Now lets take a look at how long you need to grind the respective chaos dungeons (I ignore overhoning because it makes everything unnecessary more complicated.
(i noticed here a mistake - i didnt update the shard gain for dungeon 1445 and 1475 but i fixed it)
Now this looks like roughly the same which kinda shows that at least in the chaos dungeon department they did a good job in balancing cd shard gain vs shard cost but this is only interesting for people who play since day 1 since they gain their shards over time while being at the endgame content.
Lets take future classes releases into account which don’t want to grind 307 days while slowly going up the ilvl ladder.
Above we looked at the (current) price of shards.
To catch up in shards from 1415 to 1490 vs 1490 to 1560 costs 293k vs 1.4 mil gold but why is that? We gain more shards above 1490 so why the steep increase in costs? Simply because we do the same chaos gate since 1415. Even koreans who are 1650 still do the same chaos gate and get shard bags worth 500/1000/1500 shards per bag which to me is a huge joke.
My idea to combat this is let player above 1490 gain new set of shards from secret maps (together with some current shard bags)
Those are only useable on chars above 1490.
The shardbags we know are locked from 1302 to 1490/1500.
The reason why you drop both set of shardbags above 1490 is that you can still use them yourself on alts or sell them for new players/chars to buy.
The new set of shards will be way more to equalise (roughly 3x) to keep up with the high demand of shards needed (1500/3000/4500).
This way new characters can buy old shardbags for fast 1490 and even getting shards fast above 1490 is somewhat affordable.
In kr shardbags went close to 1k g for L which imo is absurd for anyone except whales to get.
TLDR: shardbag gain from chaos gates is the same after 1415 which is absurd, introduce new shardbags after 1490. (1500/3000/4500 shards per bag).
