Equipment costs discussion


Playtest General Discussion


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Much has already been said about weapon, armor, and especially ammo costs elsewhere. I'm not going to relive it here, but others may offer or reup their numerical insights if they want. I want to cover other things that seem oddly priced, especially among comparable gear.

Haste effects
A Haste spell amp is level 8 and costs 900cr.

A level 14 elite hyopen is 9000cr. It can do everything that a level 10, 2000cr superior hypopen can do, or it can make you quickened for 1 minutes. I'm not going to tell you it will never make sense to buy the elite version (it can counteract poison/disease but only using its item level, not yours), but please for the love of god don't buy this because you want to haste yourself.

Flight effects
Jetpack, level 5, 1600cr: 1 minute of flight per action activation, can't exceed 20', unlike the below Flight 4 spell options that can go your Speed. But infinite.

Fly spell amp, level 5, 250cr: 5 minutes of Fly 4 in a consumable.

Cloudy blue rhomboid aeon stone, level 5, 1600cr: 1 minute of Fly 4 once per day. 6.4x as expensive as the spell amp, same as the infinitely reusable jetpack. But doesn't take up an armor upgrade slot.

Ultralight Wings, various levels: At level 6 they're 2,500 cr, 30 vs the jetpack at 20, don't need activation if predeployed, but take up a precious augmentation slot and don't allow use of medium or heavy armor.

I don't have strong advice or a way to say any of this is wrong, exactly, but think carefully and especially if you want that aeon stone I would question why.

Invisibility effects
You can buy 25 invisibility spell amps for the cost of the 1/day commercial cloaking skin augmentation, 50 for the cost of the 3/day tactical version. Compare to the 6.4x consumable vs daily/permanent difference for 5th level flight. There's admittedly a hand and drawing action issue here with the consumable, but if you're a Kasatha/Skittermander or one handed weapon wielder maybe save that augmentation slot until the tactical version gives you 4th rank invisibility three times per day.

Speed! Effects

Haste consumables discussed above comes into this, as well as flight, but for land travel there's also the 5th level, 1600cr, Cardiac Accelerator for 1/10 minutes +20 untyped bonus to a climb/stride/swim, and the Speed Suspension level 4/8/12, 800/4000/16000cr, +5/10/15 permanent untyped speed boost. Your short ranged/melee Solarian and Soldiers probably want to look into both of these. I'd probably do the Cardiace Accelerator instead of the early Speed Supsension. I'm not sure there's an issue with relative pricing here.

Seperately, I think it is a mistake not to make both of these pieces of gear item bonuses to speed so they don't stack with each other and other pieces of speed gear.

Is there other speed up gear?


Xenocrat wrote:
Seperately, I think it is a mistake not to make both of these pieces of gear item bonuses to speed so they don't stack with each other and other pieces of speed gear.

I'm less sure of this now. Given ranged/flight meta letting people zoom around to close with or escape things at very high speeds at higher levels doesn't seem to be as much of a problem, you're paying for the typeless speed with a (currently) very restricted augmentation slot, and I like the way it ties into the winged Shirren flight speed issue, justifying their current set up if you can juice their airspeed this way.

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