No More Empyrean Merits to Reward Merits

[TheZag]

We might have been reading different parts of those first 21 pages of AE debate in the beta forum before it got split off and became 50 more pages in the general forum.

[Amaylia]

I wonder if it would be possible to just make things purchased with reward merits account bound?  Would that solve the farmer problem and allow non-farmers to still get more use out of our veteran levels?  I play my main almost exclusively, and I was really surprised when I saw the conversion to merit rewards was gone.. I read from one of the other posters that we could still buy super inspirations and sell those, but does that actually make it worth continuing to level a single character?  I already have all of the incarnate powers where I want them, so threads and incarnate materials aren't useful to me any more, and I really loved that I could play any content I liked and still be progressing my character in some way.

 

I'll still continue to play my main rather than alts, because I never get tired of that character, and I have other things like badge hunting and stuff that I can do, but this change is super disappointing and it makes veteran levels feel kinda pointless after one has their incarnate powers how they like them.  I do hope they are still considering alternatives. 😔

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, Amaylia said:

I wonder if it would be possible to just make things purchased with reward merits account bound? 

So, instead of inconveniencing the people who farm Empyrean merits to turn them into Reward merits, you're going to more significantly inconvenience everyone? Just what do you think these people were doing with their converted reward merits? I expect in virtually every case, the answer winds up at the Auction House, whether it's buying convertors and selling them directly or buying convertors and using them on cheap IOs to turn them into expensive ones to sell. At what point does what you get lose the 'taint' of having purchased it with reward merits? If I buy a recipe with merits and craft it, can I then sell it on the AH, or does the fact that the recipe was bought with merits make it account-bound, too? If I craft an IO and use convertors I bought with merits on it to turn it into a different IO, does that make the new IO account-bound, because I wouldn't have it if it weren't for the merit-purchased convertors? If an IO remains account-bound after being crafted from a merit-purchased recipe, does it remain so after being converted into a different IO, even if the convertor was obtained from a drop? If I use a merit-purchased catalyst on an IO, does that make the attuned/superior IO account bound? And now you've doubled inventory issues, because you're going to have to track the things bough with merits separately from drops or things bought on the AH -- four Recharge recipes, but two of them are merit purchases and two of them are drops, so they're two separate entries in your inventory. The same for convertors, boosters, unslotters, and any other thing you can both buy with merits and get as drops that stacks. For everything else, you're going to have to add a field to the item database to record whether that item is account-bound or not. And once the decisions about inheritance of account binding are thrashed out, the code to handle that will need to be written.

[FUBARczar]

My two cents...

 

Taking away the exchange was good, and makes sense.  I always thought it was odd that they could be converted since incarnate merits are completely different than reward merits.

 

Also a tell tale sign that things weren't balanced was that the conversion only went one way. 

 

Reward merits are for completing things.

 

Emp merits are simply for experience as an incarnate.