Hello Uo:Rers, Not sure how many of you do stone crafting but those of you that do have surely noticed a huge discrepancy between the difficulty level and loot reward of the 3 stone elementals (stone, sandstone and marble). At the present time, the only incentive I see to farm stone and sandstone elementals is for their ingots only. Marble elementals on the other hand drop around 500 gold, gems and a few magic items ALONG WITH the marble ingots. Since Valorite is easier to obtain than stone ingots I propose that stone and sandstone elementals be made stronger and more lucrative loot wise than valorite elementals. Currently Valorite and marble elementals are about on par in terms of difficulty and loot. marble elemental sandstone elemental stone elemental valorite elemental
You can only get stone elementals by using a gargoyle pick axe which also raises the level of ore by one (iron becomes dull copper and verite becomes valorite). "While using the gargoyle pickaxe to mine you will have a 20% chance to find an ore elemental. Depending on the colored ore normally found in that location you have a chance to find a marble, sandstone or stone elemental." The elementals do very poor damage to each other and are magic reflecting so melee is the best way to kill them. Stone and sandstone elementals do significantly less damage than marble and are easier to kill but their loot is pretty pathetic compared to marble. Gargoyle axes have limited uses so it makes sense to maximize your profit by only mining agaphite verite and valorite spots to produce marble elementals. The only incentive to mine stone and sandstone is for their unique ingots only.
Then the cost of their ingots should go up. Not everything should be "worth farming" in a monetary sense. You don't see people out farming skeletons and things except for the bones do you?
I'd like to think the difficulty is set quite right at the moment - take away the fact you need runebooks marked with ore spots, lots of gargoyle pickaxes and a specialized char to solo them (Alternatively bring more than one). It is still a huge time investmenet, even when I was mining at my peak I would be lucky to get 30~ ingots from a full run. Not to mention that marble is the highest "tier" of stoneworking, it really should be the most difficult to obtain. Difficulty shouldn't mean high hp/magic reflection, rather the whole process taken to achieve the goal. I'd like to think I can get some cool items without having to burn down a completely overpowered monster every time.
Yeah, lets not make yet another thing that requires a tamer to kill. It gets old. Leave them as they are.
For the record I dont have any runes marked and I use 2 chars, the miner spawns and the archer kills. I also never finished taming on my main char who has Magic/Resist/Music/Provo/Hiding/Animal lore and about 82.4 taming. She also has a polar bear mount now so :| I agree that marble should be the most difficult as the high tier. But if we are using a tier difficulty system then stone which is more rare than valorite should be higher in difficulty. I agree completely but if you agree that stone is more rare and more difficult to get than valorite (a higher tier) then it should be more difficult to kill the corresponding elemental.
The 'rarity' is the 'difficulty'. Otherwise, everything that is rare in this game should be more difficult instead of being just rarer. They're just two concepts that don't need to go hand-in-hand.
In the case of elementals specifically rarity and difficulty go hand in hand on a tier system. The fact the stone is more rare than valorite is obvious because you need gm mining for both and a special tool for the former. I am not saying everything rare should be more difficult. We are talking about elementals specifically. If the argument "its hard enough don't make it harder" is all there is, that is pretty sad.
