Reinforced Stone needs to be balanced with Black Ice

I’d personally prefer an option that makes more sense, realistically… You shouldn’t be able to use the raw black ice without transforming it somehow.

IMHO, there should need to be some kind of brick produced from Black Ice… the way T3 Black Ice is handled is just lazy, you grab the raw ice… do some magic invocation and poof! a full sized foundation :smile:

You basically need T4 Carpenters as well as everything else. Shaped wood takes 7-10 wood per shaped without a t4. Whereas insulated wood is 1 dry and 1 resin with or without a thrall.

For whatever reason T4 carpenters seem to be the hardest crafting thrall to get.

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Bumping this thread because TestLive got updated with this patch note:

Needless to say, this is a half-arsed measure and won’t really amount to anything resembling balance unless the cost and availability of Black Ice itself is addressed. This might make Insulated Wood slightly more on par with Stonebrick in terms of time consumption, but only just barely so (especially since anyone worth their salt likely already has tons of fish traps for producing Ichor - it’s a small leap to go from there to producing tons of Oil). Resin itself is also pretty easily acquired from the trees in the northern highlands. Meanwhile, Bricks are 10 Stone to 1 Brick and Shaped Wood is 10 Wood to 1 Shaped Wood (without a higher-tier carpenter). 1 Dry Wood, 2 Resin, 1 Oil may bring Insulated Wood to parity with Shaped Wood but I find it highly dubious that it would put it to parity with the Brick on top of that Shaped Wood.

I hope this isn’t the end of any balance adjustments to the different building types. More work needs to be done. As it is, Black Ice is still the far superior option.

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I hate farming resin. It sucks. I think if they reduced the cost to make reinforced stone building pieces by half we would have a good balance along with these insulated wood changes. That’s just me though.

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Please read the test live patch notes they are balancing the two building types as we speak.

I’m not sure if that is enough or if it’s even a good change but they are testing it :slight_smile:

I think that they just need to balance the cost amount on the black ice buildings. That would make it more even considering the time spent.

oh, i just noticed the two above post :sweat_smile: i just commented on the original post :stuck_out_tongue:
I hope you like the link tho :hugs:

Nope. Back in the days T4 Carpenters where needed if you where aiming to mass produce razor arrows. Since archery was shafted, razor arrows surpassed by dirt sheap serpent arrows, while snake arrows still being a staple projectile, you don’t really need T4 Carpenters other then for bow recipes.

This change might actually work well. :thinking:

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These new changes don’t even make any sense.

The issue is NOT the wood! It never was! All that will happen from these changes is give Black Ice construction a glut of dry wood to use as fuel. Assuming the fishing has been fixed in testlive, you can get literally thousands of oil from nothing but twine, branches, a carpenter to make some fluid presses.

A t4 carpenter will just reduce the resin cost back to 1 anyways, so you only added 1 oil as a component for high end players, and for people without a t4 carpenter, they will just use double the bark to get 4 dry wood and 2 resin, then only use 1 of the dry wood, instead of 2 dry wood and using 1.

Dry wood and oil are the same quality of fuel.

So -1 oil… +2 dry wood from the changes. Black ice ends with more leftover fuel than before. Black Ice just costs more bark now. 4 - 8 bark instead of 2-4. This is assuming of course, that you don’t just use a pick on dry wood and an axe in the highlands and get all the ingredients anyways. And by all, I mean you get dry wood and bark, and then wood and resin. And you can use the wood and bark to make more of the dry wood and resin.

Drying wood takes the same time as baking hardened brick, but can be done in parallel with making steel reinforcements, and still needs far less processing time. THIS is the problem.

So we need 8 resin and 4 oil now for black ice.

This means a base process time of 8x40 seconds for the drying, or 320 seconds… which is STILL LESS than the 450 seconds needed with t4 smelters for the brick! AND I can do it at the same time as I make my steel.

The main thing to keep in mind with any balancing changes is to remember that you go at the pace of your slowest bench.

For Black ice, it’s the dryer. At 320 seconds per foundation, or if I have 8 dryers (no thralls required) 40 seconds per. If I have a t4 carpenter, I can still just use 4 dryers.

For Reinforced Stone, it’s the furnace. You need the 450 seconds (with a t4 thrall) for the brick, and then 75 for the iron, and 22.5 for the steel bars, for a total time of 547.5 seconds on that bench. The furnace ends up crafting 48 items during this process, so if you have enough resources stockpiled to keep 48 smelters going with t4 thralls, you can reduce this time to 42.5 seconds. With 48 furnaces with t4 thralls. Which is still more than the 8 dryers. with FOURTY EIGHT SMELTERS.

I mean, at least the time is somewhat comparable with that many smelters I guess. But it was like that before, you just need more dryers now working in parallel. It still doesn’t address the problem of 150 stone taking longer to harvest than the black ice and wood ever will.

You also nerfed insulated wooden buildings with this change. Where as if you had just changed the hardened brick requirements, the only building type to be affected would be t3 stone. The insulated wood building nerf is actually more substantial, because the likelihood of having a t4 carpenter at t2 building is much much lower than at endgame, meaning you are almost definitely going to hit the double resin requirements. There is also the significant problem that you don’t get the fluid press until level 28, so you have an 8 level gap before you can actually make any oil to make insulated wood, and then two levels later you get t3 building.

I guess I just don’t understand the rationale behind this change. Either I’m missing something or the devs don’t think the baking time for the bricks and the fact they compete with the steel is unreasonable, in which case I don’t understand the rationale behind that either.

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Maybe thats why bark is so “hard/boring” to farm . Some sort of bad balancing.

I need far more bark for my steelfire than I ever do for the insulated wood. Dragonpowder needs 50 steelfire, or 50 tar, or 50 bark for one. (an a metric ton of leftover leathers, a different issue), and you generally want to bring at least 50-100 with you for a raid of anything of substantial size. The bark needed for the wood and steel for building isn’t nearly as bad.

5000 bark to make the tar for 100 dragonpowder (t4 alchemist)
1100 bark for the steelfire and dry wood (300 for steel, 800 for wood) (assuming you don’t get any dry wood or resin while farming resources) for 100 black ice foundations.

If I have a t4 tanner and carpenter, it’s 200 for the steel and 400 for the wood, so only 600 for the 100 foundations. The same t4 tanner brings the bark down to 3334 for the dragonpowder.

Compare bark harvesting rate to charcoal maybe? it’s not only about bench, but starting from harvesting till placing building piece.

The problem with comparing bark to coal is that coal is far more rare than bark. You cannot mass-harvest it, you have to go find it and mine the 4-8 nodes available and then move on. even with a really good pick you are talking about 400-500 coal on a pvp server with 2x harvesting. This translates into 100 tar at 5 coal to 1 tar in a fluid press, you also can not improve this number at all, since no thrall works a fluid press.

With a t4 tanner 67 bark makes the same 100 tar stack, and you can gather it from nearly every tree in the game, and substantially more from dry trees, which can be found in large numbers in various areas of the desert.

Granted yes, you also need to get hides or pelts to make the tar, but I have never had that be a problem, the hides literally come to you, and with 30 survival and a good knife, you can easily get over 100 pelts from a single monster.

You would need to be able to harvest 8x as much coal in the same timeframe for coal to even compare.

I just get coal when I find it, and when I happen to accrue 500 coal, I turn it into a stack of tar, it’s not something I plan for or expect.

As an example, the area N and NW of the Black Galleon has flat areas with lots of dry trees. On a pvp server you can gather easily 1400 bark and 6-700 dry wood in 20 minutes or so with a good pick. In the middle of doing this you can kill 2-3 kudo and a bunch of antelope for hundreds of hides, then if you are feeling adventurous kill some sand reapers for their glands, take their eggs, and maybe make a quick trip south to peek into the galleon and club someone over the head before going back home.

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I hadn’t thought about the fact that the fluid press isn’t available until level 28, but now that I think about it I think the fluid press should just be given at level 18 anyway, because it’s ALSO needed to produce oil for weapon upgrades, which you get access to at level 26 (which means you spend two levels before you can even make those weapon upgrades… for what reason?).

But yes, even a cursory examination of the time scales involved make it abundantly obvious that altering the cost of the wood will not bring Black Ice and Reinforced Stone anywhere close to parity, and it most obviously nerfs T2 Insulated Wood structures more than anything else. Once again - either Black Ice structures need their Black Ice costs massively increased, or the supply of Black Ice itself needs to be curtailed - possibly by creating a composite material that is required to create the Black Ice structures the same way you created Composite Obsidian. As it is… it’s pretty nonsensical.

(By the by - the Black Ice craft on the Ymir religious structure is badly in need of being brought up to par with the reality of the abundance of Black Ice in the north. Specifically, the Frozen Temple. It’s just weird for it to be so incredibly expensive when Black Ice itself is so easily acquired in large quantities.)

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Thanks for ruining T2 with your epic whine. I am sure you do not care whose game you ruin, only that you get your way.

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Yeah, blame the players who want a more balanced game and who mostly talked about touching the recipe for Hardened Brick, instead of the Devs who did a stupid change without thinking things through, resulting in a change no player is happy about.
Flawless Logic.

???

What’re you on about? It’s not like we were pushing for Insulated Wood to get nerfed (though it really needed a nerf, I don’t even agree with the way it was done).

Black Ice is still OP as fug, so no one really won out here.

Nobody got their way. The change they made was bad. Black ice needed a composite resource to match hardened brick.

If they gave black ice a composite resource that could go a long way to balancing with reinforced stone as well. I am personally of the opinion reinforced stone takes too long in it’s current form and should be brought down while black ice brought up in requirements.

Right now, if someone raids a reinforced stone base and blows up 1/4 - 1/2 of it to get at what they want, you are set back significantly more than the cost of the explosives cost to the raider. In the case of black ice, the cost is far less severe, and you can generally speaking rebuild in a reasonable time frame. For me this is the balancing aspect that the building pieces need to have as their main consideration for their material costs:

If someone blows it up, how much time and effort would it take to rebuild? How does that compare to the time and effort it took to make the supplies to do the damage?

Right now it’s probably a little bit too easy to rebuild black ice (assuming fisheries actually work and you can get oil…), while reinforced stone can be devastating to lose significant chunks of your base.

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What you describe does not happen to me. The only times that has happened has been with server restarts, iirc.

I’m a solo player on pve server (1x) and have 2 private maps and 2 open to public. If your problem is demon blood do an Undead Dragon run, you will easily go out with 120-160 demon blood (used acheronian pick).

I think cost is fine but I agree that crafting time is way too long to be viable against other materials. Just forces me to think about living cold and naked in the north.