Reinforced Stone needs to be balanced with Black Ice

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

This has been mentioned multiple times but I felt the need to give my take on it.

Reinforced stone is terribly balanced with it’s black ice counterpart. The main reason I say this is because of the time investment required for making the build pieces.

I’ll compare foundations for this exercise, using t3 thralls.

Black Ice needs:
5 Black Ice
4 Dry Wood
4 Resin
30 Ironstone

As base materials.

Reinforced Stone requires:
150 Stone
3 Ichor
9 Plant Fiber
40 wood
30 Ironstone

The ironstone turns into steel reinforcements in each case. Dry wood and resin turns into insulated wood, Ichor and plant fiber turn into stone consolidant, wood turns into shaped wood, stone turns into bricks and then hardened bricks.

The big difference is in the harvest times, and craft times at stations.

With black ice, every component can be crafted in parallel, no matter how you do it. Black ice is harvested hundreds at a time, in completed form. It’s only disadvantage is needing warm clothes and a trip up north, but you can return with hundreds to thousands of it, enough for hundreds of foundations. While this is happening, wood can be drying, while insulated wood is being made, while steel is being made, all in parallel.

With reinforced stone, I need the same station (furnace) for the iron and steel like black ice… but ALSO the bricks and hardened bricks. The firebowl needs to make steelfire… and ALSO stone consolidant. Meanwhile, the stone requirements for mining are 30 times higher than black ice.

This means it takes 30 times as many swings to get enough materials… and you can’t make the components in parallel, you must decide on iron or bricks, steel or hardened bricks, consolidant or steelfire, until you have enough. You also need ichor, which you need to gather fish for (broken right now) or actively kill spiders (only certain kinds) to get.

When we look at the process holistically, we can easily see that black ice can be made in mass quantities, much much faster than reinforced stone. Since they are otherwise equal, the best method for achieving T3 protection is always going to be black ice. It will happen fast every time, with less active harvesting required by the player, and less crafting time at the benches, by a HUGE margin.

I am not sure if you as the devs think about the balance, if either is too easy or too hard, but their crafting difficulty needs to be at least somewhat similar. Two choices when one is clearly highly inferior is not actually two choices. You could argue the materials for reinforced stone are easier to find, but at T3, going places is not an issue anymore.

My suggestion is to raise the black ice cost, and lower the reinforced stone costs to be more balanced. You could easily double the black ice requirements, and halve the hardened stone requirements, and you would begin to get into the realm of being comparable.

Edit: A different suggestion would also be to lower the craft times of bricks and hardened bricks.

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2

Stonebrick is also harder (or more time consuming I suppose) than insulated wood :slight_smile: both tier 2 and 3 should be balanced build material wise

Edit: And i do realise that stonebrick material wise still isnt downright insane, i’m just saying that compared to insulated wood, it’s actually quite high…

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Is one a hot weather building and the other for cold? If so, maybe this is why they’re not equal. Also, maybe one is harder so you can still do “something” T3 until you have access to black ice.

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You do realize that Reinforced stone doesn’t use “INSULATED WOOD” it uses “SLOPED WOOD”

Both are really easy once you develop a system in which you farm your materials.

For example no need to make any hardened brick unless you have 2,000 plus brick because its to much time to get a little at a time. Set up about 10 furnaces and do nothing but stone. Once you have alot of brick then make all your hardened brick because its no point of doing 100 to 500 brick at a time cause your going to use that on building pieces in a matter of seconds.

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5

Actually, stonebrick should be buffed. It should be T2.5 instead of T2.

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6

Stone brick is a bit ridiculous to craft. I’d like to build my Khotan structures but that’s way off at the moment.

The simple solution would be to give t3 and t4 smelters the same cost reduction as all other crafters.

T3 takes 7stone to make a brick.
T4 takes 5 stone to !make a brick.

Other than speed they are useless.

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7

I find that the cost reduction alone wouldn’t be enough. the time spent baking all the bricks is the major part of the time sink.

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8

Turn the furnaces on and go farm some steel from npcs or legendary chests for fun. If on pvp, go for adventure. By the time you come back you would be surprised of the results.

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Then go to frozen north, get black ice, get to your base at noob zone and tell how it’s not balanced. Stone brick can be done in all zones available in game, black ice can be obtained exclusively in frozen north or for ridiculous price with imir.

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It’s not balanced.

It’s trivially easy to set up a map room on each side and keep going back and forth with full hauls of black ice. You act like it’s some kind of insurmountable barrier - it’s not. Not even remotely. The costs are nowhere near balanced in light of the ease (yes, actual ease) of acquisition of mass amounts of black ice. In no reality is 150 stone even close to a comparable cost to 5 units of black ice, which you can get in quantities comparable to stone (lol). You see nothing but black ice on PvP servers for very good reason. Nobody who is actually playing the game is stupid enough to believe that this is actually balanced.

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11

Map room isn’t mandatory and base can be placed not around the teleport obelisk.

Stone is incredibly easy to get-it’s everywhere in tens of thousands numbers, incredibly easy to burn-just make more furnaces, incredibly easy to upgrade - couple of fish traps gives insane amount of ichor (not mentioning that you can actually get it from mobs as well), plant fiber - place into your hand sickle and get insane amounts of it instantly.
It’s balanced because stone does not require you to move anywhere, you can make it in any place easily using locally available resources.

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The issue I have with the idea that reinforced stone is balanced because it doesn’t require trips to the north, is two fold:

  1. If your base is in the north, the point is moot, black ice is better. Period. even though stone is also available in large quantities. This fact alone automatically shows that the balancing is skewed heavily towards black ice in terms of time commitment.

  2. As other have stated, going to the north is actually not hard. The thing to remember is that we are talking about end-game T3 building blocks. By the time you reach this stage map rooms and warm clothes are trivial to come by. Each time you make a trip you can also go kill the barrow king for some demon blood, bring some orbs to possibly gather star metal as well, and get a metric ton of thick hides and pelts. No trip to the north where black ice is located is ever wasted.

I can mine stone faster than I can reasonably bake it into bricks. Black ice requires no processing whatsoever. if we remove the steel reinforcements from the bill of materials, since they are identical to both black ice and reinforced stone, you get 5 black ice, 4 dry wood, 4 resin, against 150 stone, 40 wood, 3 ichor, 9 fiber.

Just chop some trees in the north forest, and chop some dead trees in the desert, then turn them into insulated wood and all you have left are the same steel reinforcements both T3 types need. And this can be done in mass quantities quickly with 1 carpenter. The 40 wood for reinforced stone is similar, but a bit easier to get.

150 stone. On a PvP server at 2x, with a fully upgraded obsidian pick, this is about 1.5 - 2 rocks worth. With the same pick you can get around 250 black ice from one node at least, which translates into 50 foundations worth of black ice. FIFTY. With no processing time! I can dedicate all of my furnaces to making steel! In fact while I’m making my trip to the north, instead of baking bricks (and then baking AGAIN into hardened bricks) I can be making the same steel the reinforced stone requires.

It takes about 10 seconds per brick, and 20 seconds per hardened brick. at 15 hardened bricks, that’s 450 seconds, or 7.5 minutes of processing time… for one foundation, which uses the same furnace(s) you need for steel processing. Even if you have 15 furnaces, it still takes at least 30 extra seconds each.

If I want 100 foundations (a 10x10 area), that’s 3000 extra seconds… 50 minutes. In 50 minutes I can go make another trip to the north with my furnaces producing nothing and come back and STILL be ahead. And that’s if I have 15 furnaces, all fueled and filled up with 1000 stone and 100 consolidant already crafted and in the furnace… oh and let’s not forget the smelter thrall.

All of this, and we still didn’t even get into the fact that steelfire and stone consolidant are both made in the firebowl and thus ALSO conflict for processing time. Or have even discussed that fact that because of these conflicts you are significantly increasing your fuel consumption, which also requires harvesting and/or processing time.

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13

I guess the best solution to this problem is to only use black ice…?

14

Black Ice is a non-issue when you’re past level 40-45… you can go to the Frost Temple speced as encumbrance/vitality, avoid fighting any giants (they’re easy to round up and leash) and harvest thousands of black ice just below the stairs.

When I went there myself to get the recipes, I came back with 48000 black ice… never had to harvest anything more, ever. But then again, I hate the look of black ice structures and I don’t use it for building myself.

15

I rather them lower the cost of reinforced brick down to black ice, than black ice up to reinforced brick.

If they up the cost, all the more new people get shafted (especially in PvP? Not sure… I don’t play PvP)

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16

Its not balanced dude. Black ice t3 bulding parts are soooo much faster and easier to get.

17

I support this. Please balance black ice and reinforced stone.

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This is the actual answer here if you feel stone brick is to hard compared to the next teir than use the next tier.

Otherwise stop complaining and farm up your mats and start the cookers.

If you want a quick build for less materials than black ice is fine. If you want the stone brick look than that’s just the cost of time it’s not difficult just time consuming.

19

Not really.

Cuz the amount of hardened bricks can be created from a FULL furnace is just ridiculously low because of the rates.
(EVEN in the improved furnace) you need at lest one slot for fuel need slots for stone consolidants, and fill the rest with full stone stacks.
You only get some hardened bricks. (in improved furnace) even less from normal furnace.
Without slot limit or way better conversion rates your theory would be working greatly.

But this way. if you wanna make a decent sized castle you need a constant grind for 4-5 furnaces at least and full day of work (including the hours of wait)

While you go out for one trip grab 20k black ice, then some drywood and resin (while drying normal wood)
and ofc clear assgarden a few times to get the steel.
(one trip means use your maproom to the frost temple, and after you filled your pockets (22k) use a maproom to get back to your base (or close))

The problem is with 22k stone you cannot make enough hardened brick to be comparable.
Not to mention how much easier to make insulated wood than shaped wood.

about time?
I swear it is at least 2/3rd less time to make t3 black ice than t3 reinf.stonebrick.
No matter how many workstations you own.

(edit more explanation)

So shaped wood versus insulated wood:
For 100 insulated wood you need 50 wood and 50 bark. and 50 resin.
no brainer. Just collect everything while you getting the steel from Assgarden. You will loot resin, bark, wood, hell even some shaped wood and insulated wood too.
put them onto the drier and maybe get some more wood to have the 50 resin.
wait a bit and you can have 100 dried wood 100 resin. insulated wood creation time is pretty short fortunately

On the other hand you need 7x times more wood for shaped wood and it seems to need more time to make.

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20

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
The simple solution is to give smelter thralls the same material cost bonuses as all others.
That way you get 2 bricks for 10 stone for a t4 smelter as opposed to 1 brick for 10 stone as it is now regardless of smelter.

This would halve the materials and time needed.

It would still not be balanced but a lot less time consuming. Black ice would still be quicker and easier.

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