Hello Siptarians
So just a thought on the Stormglass building pieces…
Shouldn’t the ingredients include melted glass? Seems like an obvious suggestion right?
Lol
Like where exactly is the glass coming from?
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True although its just a T3 building skin piece.
Same as hardened bricks for example on frontier not making sense.
For the sake of clutter in the recipes I prefer to keep it this way.
But I also think some dlc skins should use the Black Ice recipes as well… which isn’t the case right now.
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I see more reason for black ice than glass on storm glass constructions. In my imagination black ice is a stone that was struck by thunder 
. I have a silly imagination, I know. But if devs decide it this way, it’s ok by me. Either way I am going to fix them 
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It’s the matter from the “Outer Dark”, as per the in-game description:
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That’s an awesome item desciption, but my favorite is the ladder. If you’re not aware, give it a read for a good chuckle.
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That. Was. EPIC!
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OMFG That was brilliant!
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LOL…true but i would actually push it to more standardize the T3 instead of diversify it. Black ice structures need to be the same as all the others. It’s just too cheap and cheesy and PVP is drowning in black ice boxes. Equating it all could encourage folks to actually design stuff.
It looks easier to some players to farm black ice than stones, yet I don’t believe there is much difference. I am saying this for 2 reasons.
1st the obvious
In any map the biome has some black ice nods, but “stones are everywhere” like @drachenfeles said long ago. You just open your door make a small round around your biome with the correct tools and build and you will have 50k stones in max 30 min. If you have more than one furnace you will have 5k bricks in some minutes, all you need is some organization, nothing else. Stones are way easier to get than black ice, especially in Siptah that you don’t have the frost keep. Plus stone constructions are way more beautiful than black ice.
2nd.
We keep saying here that black ice constructions are easy, have it crossed your mind that devs are informed about this opinion players have? Do you want tomorrow to see that now you need double amount of black ice to build something because it’s too easy? We have seen a lot of changes in the game because for some the game it was too easy 
. I am just trying to warn you here, they read everything, everything.
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Yes, and there was at least one dev stream (possibly more) where they said they knew this was unbalanced and that they wanted to fix it.
When people talk about black ice being “easier” or “cheaper”, they’re not talking about the literal ease of farming, they’re talking about a huge difference in cost. And make no mistake, it is a huge difference.
The materials you need for a black ice foundation are 15 black ice, 6 insulated wood, and 3 steel reinforcements. In contrast, any other T3 foundation requires 15 hardened bricks, 4 shaped wood, and 3 steel reinforcements. So let’s compare those.
First, let’s break this down into primary materials (i.e. those you farm for, as opposed to those you refine). A few notes on the methodology:
- Since both foundations require the same amount of steel reinforcements, I’ll ignore them completely and focus only on materials that are different between the recipes.
- I’ll use the lowest possible cost for the refined materials, the cost you would get from T3 crafting stations.
- I won’t include fuel costs because there are way too many variables to handle, but I will mention that there is an added fuel cost for every material that requires it.
- Some primary materials can also be obtained as byproducts of refinement processes. I’ll try to include that in my analysis where applicable.
To craft 15 hardened bricks, you need 150 stone, 3 resin and 9 plant fiber, and furnace fuel of your choice. Crafting 4 shaped wood requires 20 wood. When it comes to 6 insulated wood, the situation is a bit more complicated, since it requires dry wood, which can be obtained either by farming or by refining normal wood. If you farm it, the cost is 6 dry wood and 6 resin, and there are no fuel costs involved. If you refine it, the cost is 6 wood, with a total surplus of 6 dry wood and an added cost of bark for the dryer.
In other words, black ice foundation requires 15 black ice and no more than 6 wood. Compare that to other T3 foundations, which require 150 stone, 20 wood, 3 resin, and 9 plant fiber. All in all, just by looking at the material costs, we can already see serious imbalance.
In terms of farming, black ice is less common than stone, but you need 10x more stone. Also, it takes between 14 and 16 hits to deplete a single black ice node, and between 4 and 6 to deplete a single stone node. You can halve those values with the Hard Worker perk, but the ratio will remain more or less the same. Even if you know the best areas for farming stone, i.e. areas with high stone node cluster density, you’ll still need to spend a lot more time farming stone than black ice.
If all that wasn’t enough to make things severely unbalanced, there’s also the matter of crafting stations. You’ll most likely use furnaces for both builds, to smelt iron ore into ingots you’ll need for steel reinforcements, but black ice builds don’t require bricks. That means that, theoretically, you can build with black ice without using a single furnace, if you get iron and steel ingots by killing NPCs, whereas you cannot avoid using furnaces for other T3 builds. Of course, that’s an extreme approach and I don’t know if anyone does that – I certainly don’t – but the fact remains that for T3 builds that aren’t black ice, you’ll need either more furnaces or more time than for black ice builds.
In conclusion, black ice is much cheaper and easier to build. It’s also pretty fugly, so there’s that to “balance it out” 
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Hey! It’s not fugly! Ok so it’s kind of fugly, but the normal walls look very nice.
It’s just too bad that the rest of the pieces have the silly spikey bits
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I agree to most but I will stand to just one thing, it costs 1.000 bark to the drier to get only 1.000 dry wood and 500 resin. How many dried trees you have around your biome? How would you like to farm them when dry wood is rng and branches is the main with axe, or the most common to use the pick on them to get bark and leave again the rng to work for dry wood. Insulated planks are not so cheap either .
Yet my call here comes to the easiness to gain wood or stones that is literally everywhere. Once I went to a 40/40 pvp server, all the rare nodes were always empty, always. Stones and wood however even a 40/40 server cannot empty. This exact thing is what balance the situation. When you play to a busy server, especially pvp, rare nodes are either guarded, or empty. I send a joking message to admin saying him to put a machine with tickets of priority . I had to put the alarm on 4 in the morning back then to farm some black ice and obsidian nodes (gold, raw ash, you know) for my clan… It had 30/40. I found almost nothing. In normal or empty servers, yes it is easier, but in full servers, no my friend, not at all. However to fix 20 furnaces, the simple ones so you can have in 2 hours the bricks that you need to make a tier 3 construction is not so hard, especially when your clan is more than 5 persons, farming iron, stones, wood, bark and resin. It was crazy back then, I really miss these days. I hope one day this game will have this population again… One day.
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This is just a note, and is possibly a bit off topic
If you want bark grab a pick axe! You can farm the fuel for your dryer and the wood to be dried simultaneously. Plus you get branches you can turn into more wood, or use to fuel cooking stations, and resin to help supplement what you get from your dryer
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I agree, pickaxe has another secret too, it needs less starmetal to be repaired if you manage not to break it. It has a reason to be unlocked in higher lvls, yet… It doesn’t go on black blood. Being a farmer in pvec servers or pvp now it’s more difficult than ever. This change of the survival perk makes the black blood tools more and more viable. You cannot risk strength, armor(option Asuras armor) , vitality, or grit. You have to play full encumbrance and, 3 perks in survival, 2 perks vitality, 2 grit, 1 agility, and 4 strength to be able to defend your self, because you were farming 2 hours for others not your clan . If we had a pickaxe that gives the same amount in survival it would be awesome. But we don’t. I know that bark and resin now it’s easier, resin used to be harvested only from the trees of North, now it’s everywhere and I like that. Still dry wood is not so cheap and insulated wood. But a tier 3 carpender bench makes shaped wood very cheap. Woods are easier to be farmed than barks and resins even with a pickaxe and that’s I believe is a fact. I never said that black ice constructions do not look easier than brick constructions, yet… I am afraid that the cost of bricks ain’t gonna be reduced but black ice will be raised, that’s my fear, because if you find a server that will grand you good amounts of black ice you have a good chance to go fast on tier 3 items or even mix and match black ice with bricks to fix a fast tier 3 base. I am afraid the raise of black ice cost, that is all .
If however like @CodeMage said we have a slight reduce on the brick constructions this would be awesome, I am all in in this idea, bring it on please
“In my imagination black ice is a stone that was struck by thunder”
Action League Now!
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I feel like I relate to that scribe on some level.
I’m not for a moment going to dispute your maths, and yet I still find standard t3 ‘easier’ than black ice. It’s a bit like the eternal debate on ‘what is the deadliest snake’ - the Inland Taipan has the most toxic venom, yet has (apparently) never actually killed anyone on record (apparently all Taipan deaths are caused by the Coastal Taipan, which is a different species), while the Russels Viper, for example, has far weaker venom, but kills many people because it lives in populated areas and often gets stepped on. The problem is one of definitions.
If you take the pure mathematical approach, there is little contest between the two build types, as you demonstrated. But let’s look at a couple of points. Even ignoring @stelagel’s point about rare resources on populated servers (because as a singleplayer, I don’t notice that effect), the rarity of the resources has a significant impact. Unless you build your base close to one of a few specific locations, black ice requires a specific expedition with the intention of getting it (or a small outpost nearby), which adds that time as an additional ‘resource cost’ (or the cost of said outpost). Whereas the furnaces required for the stone are also needed for other resources, so their cost (except for running fuel) could arguably be considered far lower, since they’re needed anyway. (Meanwhile, of course, the dryer making resin and dried wood is also making ‘spare’ dried wood, which can be used as fuel. I’m honestly not sure which side of the equation to even count that on 
)
There’s also another ‘ease’ of gathering version to be considered - black ice, as noted, is usually going to be an expedition of some sort - travel, harvest as much as can be carried, travel back. Stone, wood, coal, iron, on the other hand can be mostly gathered the way I prefer to - spend a couple of minutes gathering some, dump it at the base and go do something else 
Each time I come back from wherever I’ve gone, I generally gather a few resource nodes just to fill my inventory on the final stretch back to base - I barely notice the brief time spent harvesting, and stocks build up over time. In that sense, I find hardened brick etc ‘easier’. (It’s also part of why I never use oil of bounty - although Charmain did recently explain a couple of points that make me more interested to try it next time I get to that stage.)
So, in conclusion, I can’t dispute that black ice is ‘cheaper’ but I can still find a way to dispute ‘easier’ (but I think we can all agree it could do with being prettier )
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Logic, reason, and disagreeing politely?
YOU MONSTER!
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Personally, I would have preferred Stormglass as a Black Ice recipe rather than hardened brick. Both for the possibility of translucency from the ice and because Black Ice on Siptah appears mostly in the desolation around the Tower, at the heart of the storm.
And near the vaults, further tying it together.
That is the lore side of my preference.
Mechanically, it’s just a skin on tier 3 build.
Flotsam added a new tier 1 that favoured wood over stone in build cost.
Tier 2 has Stonebrick and Insulated Wood.
Every DLC build set to date has used the hardened brick Tier 3 recipe rather than the Black Ice recipe. This one seemed the best option to use the other recipe.
Behind the scenes, by the level they can be crafter, I tend to find Black Ice builds less time consuming and far less boring to farm from (thus having fewer chances to get ganked while farming). On the Exiled lands, Black Ice is in environmentaly obnoxious areas, extremely cold often with giants about. Siptah is balmy, and at it’s coldest still doesn’t require much protection, and the creatures in the desolation/near the vaults don’t seem nearly as threatening as the Giants were, but that could be the forced perspective from the auto target talking.
I quit running enciumberence once I get a T3 or named bearer. The slots carry my load, and they are dmg sponges if caught out. Then I just hide them in a shack close to where I farmed and put them on return home to teleport mats back as I run back to base refilling my weight to 99%
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