josephm wrote:Armor takes about the same mats as jewelry with less pieces
Um, no. A full set of jewelry is 31/18 for 49 mats IIRC, where if you're talking about heavy armor it's 45/39/33/12 for 129 mats and light armor 12/12/5/5 for 34 mats, so either less by 1/3 or more by 150%.
Heavy armor has HPs that somewhat reflect this higher mat cost, but as I said before they should probably have more on a relative basis. Light armor has equivalent HPs. My point, again, is that with every HP 'hit' you take you lose more % of your jewelry set than for any other item you're wearing. When you get down to it, that's why there's a hue and cry over the changes...it feels like jewelry is degrading more rapidly than anything else you own. Well, guess what. It is.
Jewelry on the other hand, has less value over all because of it's lack of defensive properties
Actually, if the devs would bother implementing the resistances this would also be untrue.
Think about the people who craft making earrings. 2 mats per earring. These are going to be WAY more plentiful than armor
In talking with my competitors, I know for a fact I am one of a very small handful of jewelers that has deliberately leveled earrings and rings up to 100. Instead, almost all jewelers ignore most every subtree post-50 except diadems and occasionally necklaces as it is so difficult to level at 100 exp per item. You simply eat the 19 of 20 earring failures and 38 mats wasted that it takes to get one good earring set when your earring skill is 30 or 40 levels below your diadem skill, which is why most high level jewelers tend to like to be paid in seeds and amber. Plentiful failures to be placed on the vendor with stat bonuses that don't reflect the max potential stat bonus per ql of the earring, yes. Plentiful good earrings, no.
And there are a lot more armor crafters than jewelers. Hence, a lot more armor.
However your desire for that extra (hp) bonus drives the cost back up.
Again, kind of hard to make a high hp set if you're capped out at 199 hp per item, with even full supreme sets capped out at 160 hp per item.
And what the devs problably took into consideration is how to make that market balanced for everyone
You think the devs actually have thought about crafting as a profession after their unfixed nerfs post-patch 1? I have a bridge I'd like to sell you as well, unless you think overseer missions should pay less than the NPC and raw mat costs. I don't think there was any thought of balance whatsoever here. Instead, it looks like they finally got around to a long term bug - jewelry not decaying - and turned decay on. While I am very much in favor of them doing so, there was no real testing or feedback from the ATS. People getting upset when stuff gets changed without testing and balance issues arising is a natural result.
If you weren't complaining about jewels, you'd be complaining something else...what if something doesn't need a solution? You're going to sound like a broken record!
You know what? If you think everything's fine - which I'm gathering is finally the point of your rambling - why don't you start a 'Jewels should decay after 3 hours of use!' poll and see how much of a friendly response you get? Let the rest of us continue our dialogue into why people are upset, offer observations as to what's changed, and offer legitimate suggestions on what's unbalanced and what's balanced with changes.
Again, I stand to benefit hugely from the hyper-decay rate personally. I just tend to believe that if the devs aren't infinitely wise, they make mistakes. This is one, and its our responsibility as players to offer reasonable suggestions to improve it.
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