Spiral Knights - Rebalance Orb drop rates to reflect stated intent

Rebalance Orb drop rates to reflect stated intent

9 replies [Last post]

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 08:54

Warp-Master

Or, how to make orbs not a money grab.

The idea is simple; dropped Orbs are intended (I hope) to replace Mist Energy for crafting purposes to put a stop to people crafting items with alts en masse to sell on the Auction House. However, the current drop rates are utterly insufficient for this purpose; I haven't even seen an Orb of Alchemy outside of mission rewards. I know that the rates for 5* orbs were absurdly high, but the "fix" in the August 1 patch was a massive overcorrection. The end result is that buying Orbs from the Depot is mandatory, when all signs pointed to crafting being as free or more free than they were in the old order, where you could at least craft 1* and 2* items for free if you hadn't done any crawling that day.

What I have in mind is increasing drop rates for Orbs in earlier strata, with the end result being a mirrored logarithmic curve of drop rates from earlier strata to later strata. This is just a wild guess; any other curve would be fine as long as drop rates for strata-appropriate Orbs are significantly higher for earlier strata than they are for later strata. In addition, Orbs for one star level higher than appropriate should be dropping slightly less often than strata appropriate Orbs, to make it easier to actually advance while still requiring effort and experience to craft gear.

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 09:56

Thunder-The-Bright

yes, replacing mist. right now, I've found (in total) 3 advanced orbs, 1 elite orb and 6-7 eternal orbs. seems legit, since I've found most of those after the patch you mentioned.
even before buying ce was mandatory for every gear after 2*. now it's practically the same to me.

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 11:49

Warp-Master

@Thunder-The-Bright

Out of curiosity, over how many runs was that, and what was the strata and difficulty of those runs on average? I'm mainly doing T2 missions on Advanced on an occasional basis, and I haven't seen any. I guess "pre-patch" isn't really what I'm after here, either; the dev posts that I read implied that Orbs were intended to make gear easier to craft for newer without buying Energy and give Vanguards and whatnot more wiggle room to experiment, and that hasn't happened judging from my personal experience and reading these forums.

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 11:52

Thunder-The-Bright

please tell me where is written that orb drops have the function to replace the cost of crafting.
t3 elite, some t2 elite, and I don't know how many. I can tell you that today on the same wolver den I got 2 5* orbs.

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 15:00

Blitzsonic

I liked the original idea of

I liked the original idea of having multiple sets, but then someone got like 20 orbs on elite(main reason to play elite is for the drops) and OOO decided to "fix" it. I'm not sure if having the same reward for all difficulties would fix that.

Wed, 08/07/2013 - 15:18

Warp-Master

@Blitzsonic

Well said. However, I'm not suggesting that Orb drops should be the same for all difficulties. It makes perfect sense to have Orbs drop less often on Normal and more often on Elite. I'm just saying here that Orbs don't drop enough on lower strata for newer players to realistically use them to advance, when my impression from the dev posts was that dropped Orbs could be used to craft items and advance.

Thu, 08/08/2013 - 01:10

Blitzsonic

The orb drops were ok on

The orb drops were ok on advanced(i think) and rather high on elite. Elite had a difficulty, but that's no problem if you had 5* gear and did tier 1/2 arcade. In tier3, you just had to run and open the boxes, so surviving in elite was very easy.

I'd suggest to change Elite mode, so it's like a hardmode with the old enemy AI and everything that Waffle wants, while keeping the same orb drops on all difficulties. I'm sure that some players would probably never play the elite mode if it would be like this, but it's a good way to allow the original idea of having many orbs that you can use to craft multiple sets. And for everyone that thinks that this breaks the economy, I'm sure that OOO added the orbs to the supply depot for vanguard players who don't want to play all of the tier 2 arcade for the 2* and 3* orbs, or for players that just want to mass craft gear.

Thu, 08/08/2013 - 01:43

Gabrihel

oh come on..

The drop rate is perfect the orbs are a big gift even with this drop rate.. If you do more difficult runs they give you these valuables... It's a perfect system.. Before this update and patch you only had to gain crowns and buy energy, but now you can obtain the energy for the crafting process directly from the run without spend crowns.. This is awesome, isn't it? If not: Are you ever happy?

Thu, 08/08/2013 - 03:10

Blitzsonic

The problem was that OOO

The problem was that OOO said: "you'll get many orbs to craft different sets and everything". Some players returned, and i'm sure that they won't farm arcade on elite because of the orbs.

Thu, 08/08/2013 - 03:41

Thunder-The-Bright

nick said "in the end" at the beginning of that sentence. it means that by the time you reach endgame, you will have more orbs and crystals than you need. not "you will be able to craft your gear right away", but "in the end you'll feel encouraged to get other gear."

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Rebalance Orb drop rates to reflect stated intent