Trickle-down economics: Scrapper's to Taint

If you recall, a while ago I had made a post about my disappointment at the change that allowed spellbooks to be disarmed and my belief that it will adversely impact the market for Scrapper's Compendium. Since then we have had the facet driven trammel invasions which drop the rather powerful spell books with mods like sdi 30% lrc 10% mr 3. The aforementioned change coupled with the new drop has adversely impacted the market for Scrappers. This in turn has hit the market for taint; When I wrote my original post you had to pay 90-110K gold for one taint. Today, you can find Luna vendors stacked with taint at 70k per and you can find it for as low as 60k per at bank - This is a significant change when you adjust for the general inflation.

Scrappers were the driving force behind the demand for taint and now that has been largely removed from the game - My scrappers vendor has not sold a single book even though I have significantly dropped their prices. So, I have stopped buying taint which means my usual suppliers from guilds like RK have to find a new buyer and probably drop their prices. Taint is the bread and butter for people who do ML boss spawns as it had a decent drop rate and good value. However, the destruction of the scrappers market has started a chain reaction which will impact people who depend on ML spawns to make money.

I hope that in the future we will get more changes that encourage the ingredient based crafting like scrappers instead of the BOD route. The recent gardening change where hunters are required to collect ingredients for gardeners is a step in the right direction and we need more of it in all domains of the game. I think that the ML ingredients need some loving - some newer craftables based on these ingredients would be rather nice.

On a site note, I wonder if this will have an impact on the value of crimsons. If the reward for doing ML spawns is going down then, in short term, less people will be doing them which could mean fewer crimsons on the market. Hard to say because there are a lot of other factors involved and I hear you can get cinctures from the invasion too.

Bye bye Scrappers?

This post is about something that most people probably don't care of. Recent patch saw spell books being made disarmable. The change was effectively meant to make scrappers' useless in PvP (as disarm is not an issue in PvM). Why useless? Because scrappers mostly gives mods that a PvP'er would need to be sure that they can depend on 100% of the time. As a mage you can't afford to have downtime on Faster Casting or LRC mod when fighting another player!! By making them disarmable no one will use them again in PvP.

Now, I have not done any PvP in a really really realllly long time but I have not heard anything about an overpowering wrestling mage template. So, I was quite surprised to hear about this change. I am guessing the triple skill mod books might have been the issue.

This does not particularly affect me except for the part where I loved crafting the damn books. It was the last high-end crafting venue left in Ultima Online for me as I refuse to burn (duped/scripted) runics. However, scrappers were never a big money maker even before this change and now it will be that much harder to sell the books that I craft. Maybe I will go back to my early crafting roots and start up a potions business :)

I suppose I will just wait and see what SA brings in means of crafting to be able to jump back into it. Speaking of which, I am super excited about the slew of announcements they made regarding SA in the past town hall meeting! It is nice to hear solid plans regarding the future of the franchise.