Regarding relative commonness/uselessness of portal/wisdom scrolls

They can easily tweak the drop rates of both scrolls, if the testers determine there are too few or too many dropping.

I like the idea of rares costing 2 scrolls of wisdom to identify. I also like the idea of using portal scrolls to send in-game mail.

Currently, portal scrolls have a use that the portal gem doesn't give you: quick retreat from combat. The scrolls have an immediate cast time, so it's faster to open your inventory and pop a scroll than it is to cast the portal skill. This is planned to change, but people can still use it for now. They might even have plans to further the usefulness of scrolls over the gem.

I think if they changed the amount of scolls required to buy stuff from the vendors and removed the orbs required (maybe just have them cost scrolls, armor shards and whetstones), it would help create a sink for them. It seems like most people will only buy something from a vendor if its a WAY BETTER upgrade because they dont want to spend orbs on something that's only slightly better. Most of the time when you buy something from the vendor, you have to use a few orbs on it just to get mediocre mods and often it just gets thrown out or re-rolled anyways.

A vendor or place you could gamble for blue/yellow items would also create a good sink for low end currency.

One of the main reasons for a having a consumable currency system is to completely avoid currency sinks. We shouldn't be trying to find ways to get rid of them; we should try to balance to drop rate so there aren't enough to make us want to sink them in the first place.

"

whiteBoy88 wrote:

One of the main reasons for a having a consumable currency system is to completely avoid currency sinks. We shouldn't be trying to find ways to get rid of them; we should try to balance to drop rate so there aren't enough to make us want to sink them in the first place.

I understand that, but scrolls are a necessity early in the game so lowering their drop rate too much would only frustrate new players when they cant portal back to town or identify that new rare they picked up. As the drop rates are now though, it becomes almost pointless to even pick them up once you get a full stack of each. Once the feature to sell items to the vendor is enabled, it will only add to this problem because what's the point of holding onto items you find if they only sell for a currency that you have to much of in the first place.

As I said, they can tweak the drop rate. They can make more drop at low levels and less in the mid to high levels.

Why not do both? I wasn't suggesting that they create a sink where players spend hours gambling away all their currency (taking away from the action), it was merely just a way to create more uses and ways to consume lower end currency items. The necklaces that you can buy from vendors are already basically a sink (for casters) since you can buy a cast speed or cold damage one, use a couple of orbs and hope for the best. I personally bought several of them that didn't turn out any better than what I was using and traded them or threw them out.

Unfortunately in ARPGs there will always be low end items that become useless to higher level players be it armor, weapons, currency or consumables.

In all honesty, I hate the rarity of ID scrolls early, and would find a long-term shortage thereof really tedious. I found this with HG:L — you could always buy them, but I frequently found myself spending more on IDing things than I was getting back in added value from sold items. And it was just tedious, it didn't make the game any more interesting.

"

DragoonWraith wrote:

In all honesty, I hate the rarity of ID scrolls early, and would find a long-term shortage thereof really tedious. I found this with HG:L — you could always buy them, but I frequently found myself spending more on IDing things than I was getting back in added value from sold items. And it was just tedious, it didn't make the game any more interesting.

I think part of the reasoning behind that in HG:L was to make hoarding lower end items less profitable and I don't see that as a bad thing. We will have to wait and see how the barter system with vendors works once its enabled

Personally, I'd rather see the portal gem scrapped.

But that's just me.

"

Lace wrote:

Personally, I'd rather see the portal gem scrapped.
But that's just me.

Me too. It creates the problem of "useless" currency (that has already been described in this thread). Taking the gem out would reduce the available currency, as people would use scrolls more often. This has been brought up before, so we'll just have to wait and see what GGG does with it.