Game Design Early LVL Repair Costs

I've recently come back to Wynn after a long break and saw the new repair system, with scrap removed and it only costing emeralds I quickly drained through my emeralds. Even a lvl. 8 repair costs 45E, with lvl 30-40 costing 2 whole blocks, regardless of the ammount repaired. This is a little too much I think. As someone who loves the self-crafted progression, I can't imagine having my entire armor, rings, etc. crafted right now since even a single repair run would cost me several hundred emeralds.

I understand the need for emerald sinks, but I really miss the scrap system.

Especially since dropped items dont need any repair whatsoever.

 

Adding my opinion on how to fix the issue:

Either:
1. Bring back scrap and let repairs cost scrap
2. Rebalance the emerald system and leave scrap history

 

I dont think the repair cost in emeralds is that much more than what the repair cost in scrap would be, in terms of items sold/scrapped

 

I've done a little experiment, now this is by no means foolproof or definitive but, I took my lvl 30 bonus loot ring and ran 3 caves in the almuj desert, after collecting all the chests I found along the way and as much loot as I could, I eneded up with a total of 254 Emeralds, I got a nice highroll for selling all the loot. My ring recieved about 10 durability dmg in the process. It's overall durability is 149, so let's say I can run this 4-5 times again, before the durability gets so low the effect of the ring starts to go down and I have to repair it. My ring costs 1EB and 41E to repair, or 105E. So if I got lucky and rolled as I did 4 more times after running the caves, I'd end up with about 8 item repairs worth of emeralds. So about a full set, If I roll high though. And even then, all the emeralds I got go straight into fixing me up, so buying stuff like heal pots, mana pots and so on would be harder.

Compare this to running the caves with gear I found in chests, aka with no durability. I pay nothing for repairs, I get about 1K emeralds to spend how I like and my gear is just as good as it was before I ran the caves.

Now the old scrap system wouldn't magically give me the same emeralds as I would running with looted gear, but I could take the cheapest items I found, usually white/common drops that are worth nothing and scrap them for an ok ammount of scrap. Mainly, my emeralds would't even go into the equation, meaning I dont have to worry if my playstyle is giving me enough emeralds to sustain itself.

Again these problems are most felt at the beginning, as you enter lvl 40+ the loot and rewards get better and money making opportunities too, however I think the early experience is key. It's the first thing people will interact with and if they find it drains their pockets and they cant buy anything, compared to how easy running with looted gear is, they'll just disregard crafting their gear alltogether in the early levels.

 

1: previously obtained scrap can be used (dunno know if you have any)
2: in the old system, you lost out on potential emeralds from selling stuff by scrapping it. now that you no longer need to scrap, you get to sell everything (and the rates you described sound better than the old scrapping (low-level items sometimes cost 10 scrap to repair with one durability missing and low-level items don't give a lot of scrap.))

 

1. until it runs out and there is no way to get more
2. it's hard making specualtions on the old system since I dont have any data on it, in the end the problem still is, it's way to comfy to just run with looted gear compared to crafted, making the whole early game pointless to craft

 

my point is if you had a lot you can still use it (it don't be scamming you)

you sounded like you wanted the old one back?

 

In the old system, I would prioritise retrieving Normal items from chests because the amount of scrap a high-level Normal produced was of considerable value on the Trade Market. To be fair, non-Normals were more valuable to sell than scrap, but Normals were worth a good deal and I wouldn't say scrapping items resulted in lost emeralds.