So I don’t know if anyone cares about this but I ran the numbers and was rather shocked and wanted to share. I guess for those who don’t know I should preface this by saying that in patch 10.1.5 Blizzard introduced a way to acquire the long coveted Tier 3 sets from Vanilla which were previously unobtainable aside from the option to buy them for exorbitant amounts of gold from the Black Market Auction House.
The new way to unlock the sets requires unlocking a special trader which sells some of the mats that you need to craft the sets. That is a fairly straightforward process that can be completed in a few hours or less. But then the real struggle begins.
Each piece requires an enormous amount of gold, 2.8 million for all 8 pieces, in mats from the aforementioned vendor alone. On top of that you need other mats that can be obtained from Scholomance and Naxxramas. And that’s not even the worst part.
You also need to gamble for tokens from the special vendor that have a minuscule chance of becoming the final mat you need to craft the actual set pieces for transmog. Each time you clear Naxx you get 5 chances to gamble and each clear takes about half an hour. So if you do it on ten alts each week it will take you about 5 hours for 50 chances which may very well not yield even a single piece. Alternatively you can buy them from the AH for about the same price as a WoW token so 250,000 gold or $20.
So all tolled you either need to spend 3,000,000 gold on mats plus countless hours farming or about 5,000,000 to buy everything outright. That’s roughly $400 worth of WoW tokens for 20 year old pixels that were artificially made into rare status symbols when they were initially removed by Blizzard.
Of course you don’t have to do any of this and it’s all just cosmetic but I have to say it’s rather obnoxious of Blizzard to finally re-release these items and then basically make it so painful to obtain that players might be tempted to buy them with a great deal of real money.
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The cost is fine. Tier 3 was on the BMAH as a gold sink. This just moved the gold sink outside of the BMAH, which is great.
The issue isn’t the cost. The issue is trying to get it crafted. No one should have to seek out someone else who had to have a full set first to craft this. Those requirements are just sheer stupidity.
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its 2.8 million for the vendor gold
the 3 million in mats you listed can be farmed easy
i agree on finding the player who has the achievement but i have all the items made
just need to find the bracers and gloves if i remember
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They were hard to get in Vanilla. They’re hard to get now.
I like how every time a gold argument is made, the price of the token comes up like that’s the only way to obtain said gold.
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They were a joke to get in BC. It’s just a tier set, not a challenge mode.
The only reason players decided it was some special thing was because it was put on the BMAH after Naxx was redesigned.
But that’s beside the point. The thread isn’t about how special it was. The post is about gold cost. Which isn’t a problem, imo.
You under stand this is like at best 1/8th the price of trying to buy it off the BMAH right?
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To me it’s all just equated to time… gold, farming raid, whatever. Time sink is time sink.
this right here
500K+ for the helm vs 1-5 million on the bmah
what if you … dont get the tier 3 tmog? it’s only cool because it’s hard to get, you know.
Plus we already knew this, we figured it out like 2 days after we found out how to get into old Naxx.
and what is needed with the frozen items also
so i had the foresight to get on farming the mats for the undeath metal
I can craft all of the sets if anyone needs.
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It’s brought up because it is very much relevant. Especially in cases where the alternative is countless hours of farming that was purposely designed to be tedious. Even if you work for minimum wage it will take you less than 2 hours to make the $20 a token is worth whereas unless you’re a pro at playing the AH it will take you disproportionately longer to earn the gold equivalent by playing the game.
At the end of the day when it comes down to it the only thing worth anything in life is your time, so yeah it’s very relevant.