Over the last few days, I have been leveling a new Psionicist in order to test out my new build. I have just finished the Arisen area, and was doing the rune quests. I discovered something that is somewhat foreboding and disturbing. Before I get into that, let me link to an old thread that was posted by Healshot about runes:
http://www.thesilentwarriors.com/index.php/topic,777.msg1493.html#msg1493The main thing to focus on is the rune values, at the bottom of the first post. It seems the values have been adjusted. Level 2, where two level ones are combined, now has the value of 1%, as opposed to 0.66%. In other words, the boost has been doubled. If that trend were to continue up to max, we could be looking at 15-20% buffs, per rune. That means a person with maxed out runes in all slots would have 30-40% offensive and 60-80% defensive buffs. That is opposed to the 12% and 24% of the old system, so it is a fairly large buff. Enough that a no rune player would stand no chance against someone with even the lowest possible new value.
Now that I got the value adjustment out of the way, now comes the more unsettling news: There is no longer a way to raise the level of a rune with out purchasing crystals. Crystals are a cash shop item, as opposed dust which is available in game. As opposed to going all dust, even slid all the way to the dust side, you are required to pay at least half the mid bar dust value. Furthermore, the dust required at that point has been increased dramatically. As I recall when I did this pre-patch in CB3, each crystal you knocked off added the 'mid-bar' required dust to the required dust. So, at level two, the mid value once was 100/10 dust/crystal, and the full dust value was 1000/0, or so. It is now something ridiculous. I believe the new full dust was something like 12800-25600/5 dust/crystal. Look at the chart on the linked thread again. You will notice that, should you decide to halve the amount of cashshop items to use, you are now paying between 100-200 gold for just a level 2 rune. Why they even left the option of doing it with dust is way beyond me.
Honestly, this could very well break end game PvP. It can, and will, make everyone who PvPs(being everyone, given the games mechanics) entirely dependent on crystals to survive.
Am I missing something? Is this the way it always was, and I simply forgot? Is anyone okay with this? I know its a free game, but come on. This is not a small reward and non-game breaking way to say thank you for supporting the game. This is a forced dependency in End game, where the dependency should be the lowest.
