There is one thing in this game that I would not even remotely consider buying even if I were exorbitantly rich with CE coming out of my ears. And that thing is a Heat Amplifier. I will focus on the 7 days here since that's what's in the Explorer Pack.
Now, I play quite a bit. And I'm willing to pop one of my 7 day heat amps if I've got three or four things to heat over the course of the next week (as in, they are 3* and I want them at 5* with full heat). To me, that's worth 10k cr. It might even be worth 15k cr. 20k is pushing it.
Unlike many people, I usually (though not always) have more sense than money. I admit that some people have more money than sense. And yes, I understand that these people are an amazing source of income. But a 7 day heat amp costs 1600 CE, which at current CE market prices costs about 100k cr. Yes, that's FIVE TIMES as much money as an amount that I already feel is too high.
Nobody rational is willing to pay that. It's an item that can literally be waived by "eh I'll just do twice as many runs," and VERY frequently is by the average player. And it's a timed item that's targeted at people who don't have much time to play. If you've got enough time to play to take full advantage of a heat amp, then you either have 10-20 items to heat (which is absurd), or you have enough time to play that you don't NEED a heat amp.
Furthermore, this is being included in the value of the packs that are up for purchase. The Explorer Pack is $15 and is being marketed as a $25 value. Sounds like a great deal! But if I want to put $15 into the game, do I really want to get a 7 day heat amp for that and be told it's "a 1600 CE value"? Of course not. To me, it might be a 300 CE value. And that's true of a lot of people, so you can't exactly sell it for anywhere near it's "1600 CE value" on the Auction House.
So sell them for 400 CE, possibly 500, and people might start buying them like they do with weapon and trinket slots in hopes of making a "profit off their mist by getting a discount" by selling them on the AH (because people might actually buy them on AH). Whether or not this is sound logic on their part is irrelevant. Me? I wouldn't buy a 7 day for 400 CE. But somebody might.
Suggested prices:
2 day: 200 CE
7 day: 500 CE
30 day: 1500 CE
I'd kind of like to see a one-day (or maybe 8-hour) heat amplifier for 100 energy.
Can't play today? Log on for a minute and grab a heat amp with your mist; you still lose out on all the crowns you would have earned by playing an extra day, but you get to keep all of the heat by doubling your next day.
Free-to-play players are STILL probably never going to use one (the money for crafting takes substantially more grinding than the heat if you're not dropping real $$, so if you've got mist to burn you're better off converting it into crowns, not heat). But it has poetic symmetry, and if I really needed some heat RIGHT NOW for some reason, I would consider it a legitimate option (whereas the current heat amps are more of a "hahaha, never in a million years!" thing).
Not that I expect this to ever happen.
Anyway, I agree that the prices on heat amplifiers seem utterly insane, but the publisher presumably has statistics on how many of these things people actually buy, so for us to tell them what price point will make them more money is probably laughable. They recently improved heat amplifiers (they are now merely AS bad as I thought they were before the patch), and putting them in the explorer pack sounds like an attempt to get players addicted to them, so they seem to be aware of the issue, at least.