Question about Child's Tear (Shaman Epic)

[baakss]

Originally Posted by Carkle Jackson [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Changed the loot tables on the golems. Making them able to drop a lot of CT's loot.

Wait, so the same amount of tears are dropping, but the guilds killing them have changed because of improved loot, and so the price of the tears went up 3x as much?

[Danth]

Originally Posted by baakss [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Wait, so the same amount of tears are dropping, but the guilds killing them have changed because of improved loot, and so the price of the tears went up 3x as much?

No, the change also made the golems spawn far less often--days instead of hours.

Danth

[baakss]

Gotcha, that makes more sense, thanks!

[Kefit]

The golems used to spawn once every eight hours and killing them did nothing but generate tears for shaman epics. Shortly after Velious came out the golems were revamped to 72 hour spawns that drop multiple key epic pieces and highly desirable loot like Puppet Strings and AoNs.

So competition for golems went way up at the same time as the supply of golems went way down.

That being said, there are still plenty of tears dropping (~4 a week) compared to many other epic bottlenecks. Any shaman can get an epic by joining a guild that regularly kills golems and not being an asshat for a month.

[Kefit]

To add a bit more:

Originally Posted by baakss [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Wait, so the same amount of tears are dropping, but the guilds killing them have changed because of improved loot, and so the price of the tears went up 3x as much?

It's actually a bit of a misconception that the price of a child's tear increased by 3x after the Fear revamp. In reality, the price of a tear increased by far more than that. This is because there are two components that go into the price of a shaman epic - the variable price of the tear itself, and the static price of the guild effort required to turn that tear into an epic.

Guild Effort
The process of turning a tear into an epic requires a fair amount of time investment from the guild that loots the tear.

First, the toon holding the tear needs to max out their truespirit faction. Doing this efficiently is a tedious process that requires two people to work together for several hours without interruption (unlike the shaman buyer, the tear seller didn't casually max out truespirit faction while leveling up). Oh, and epic shaman don't get a free ride on this faction grind, cause the final turn-in for the shaman epic resets truespirit faction.

Second, the seller needs to bring a kill force to CoM for the Rak'Ashiir fight, which first requires farming black reavers until Rak'Ashiir spawns. This can be done with one group, but a selling guild is more likely to get a couple groups to show up just to ensure everything goes smoothly.

I'd estimate the value of the guild effort component of a shaman epic sale to be comparable to the value of demon fang loot rights. So about 20k plat. This component of the shaman epic price is a static value unaffected by any change in the supply of tears.

Child's Tear
I haven't been on a golem raid since 2016, but from what I remember a tear will be generated on about 50% of golem kills. Golems used to be eight hour trash mobs with no loot aside from child's tear generation. Now they're highly competitive 72 hour raid mobs with loot that remains highly desirable at all levels of play. So now there are far fewer tears being generated, and the competition for golems is much more fierce.

Before the Fear revamp, a shaman epic sold for around 30k. If we remove the static 20k guild effort cost, then we get a tear value of about 10k.

After the fear revamp, a shaman epic sells for around 100k. If we remove the static 20k guild effort cost, then we get a tear value of about 80k.

So yeah, the value of a child's tear has actually gone up by about 8x. And this is pretty much exactly the kind of value increase we'd expect when the mobs that supply tears change from eight hour respawn timers to 72 hour respawn timers.

[Erati]

^*72 w 16 hour variance ie has to be tracked compared to just a static 8 hrs.