Cost of Boots of Striding and Springing

[Tony Cotterill]

I posted this question elsewhere but decided to repost when I saw a2007 date on the thread :)
I was wondering about the cost of Boots of Striding and Springing...
If you go by standard costings and build from scratch a combination of Boots of Elvenkind and Longstrider you get 2500gp (+5 acrobatics) plus (2000 x 1.5)=3000gp for the Longstrider. Total 5500gp which tallies with the book for Boots of S&S. However these non-standard boots give you an all round bonus to acrobatics, whereas the book boots only add to acrobatics (jump).
Should the book price of Boots of S&S be slightly cheaper? Or is there no distinction between an overall skill cost and a specific skill cost?
Why would you buy the book boots when you can build better ones for the same cost?

[Kirth Gersen]

Tony Cotterill wrote:

Why would you buy the book boots when you can build better ones for the same cost?

Sadly, Pathfinder is still stuck in the 3rd edition "We're not too sure of our pricing rules, so everything comes down to DM discretion" when it comes to custom items. In short, you're not allowed to build custom items unless you play a long and tiresome game of Mother-May-I and convince the DM to allow it. And because the function-impaired boots are already in the rulebook, most DMs will make you use them.

[Tony Cotterill]

Ah right. Historical reasons. Okay, thanks Kirth. Maybe we should just knock 500-1000gp of the cost of the book boots.

[Kirth Gersen]

Honestly, I think most magic items are overpriced except when it comes to skill boosts, and those I think are woefully underpriced in PF -- I'd personally maybe even increase them by a factor of 5 or even 10. But the rule in 3.5/PF seems to be that "skills don't really matter," so keeping them cheap is probably fine for a standard game.