TOPIC: What should a Relic and Legendary cost in 2024?

Ian Lee wrote: Why do people hold TGs from one year to another?

Either because they have an excess due to recipes not requiring what they generate or because they don't care to make some year's transmute. However, if the latter is the case, then either the transmute isn't that good or someone else will want to make it - average number of made. If the latter here, then you sell TGs to those people. If the former, then that's a development problem.

Even given how small the community is and how few relics/legendaries actually need to be made, there are still so many elements to behavior that have to make some general assumptions. A general assumption I would make (then design/develop to it) is that the same number of relics/legendaries will be made each year.

As for treasure affecting the TG balance, while that's rather important for DS/MH, making some complicated adjustments for other stuff. I suppose you could use an uplift factor of some percentage of stuff. Obviously, Golden Fleece aren't directly buyable, so would have to do some calculations for that, anyway. I'm just not seeing someone doing a lot of runs with a small buy. May look like such people exist to TDA, but I don't buy direct anymore and I put way too much money into tokens every year. Should be a rather high correlation to how many tickets buy and token amount bought. Note, not how many runs, as someone could do one run but buy 10 tickets.

Side stuff does throw off any sort of calculations. Mystic Orb recipe seemed less planned than Stalker recipes, for instance. As fluffy as trying to align generation to cost may be, how much components cost just doesn't relate in a usable way to transmute pricing.

Related to your point about the correlations between # of runs and $ spent on tokens, I spend waaaay more than I should on tokens, almost all via auctions, but my friends and I (I coordinate and supply tokens for our whole group) usually only do one run of each Dungeon, and last year we only did two total runs at GENCON. We've done as many as five runs at a couple of GENCONs (back when I had more friends playing and couldn't fit them all in one run), but that seemed like too much, it took away too much time from the other gaming our group does.

As a rule of thumb I think it would be good for the recipe values of Relics and Legendaries to be roughly:

Relic - $300-500

Legendary - $700-1200

Although that is based in setting where legendaries give small bonuses like +1/+1 to hit/damage, or +2 AC, or +2 Focus over a relic.

The class based legendaries were in some cases much, much more powerful than the relic versions and in those cases I think more separation in recipe costs is fine.

Overall I’d prefer Legendaries be relatively modest upgrades over Relics.

Rob F wrote:

Mike Steele wrote: I would aim for $300 for Relics and $1000 for Legendaries.

These are the prices a Relic and Legendary typically sell for on the secondary market NOW, it's not the cost of what it would take to make the item by buying all of the components.

Historically, if you wanted to craft a Relic by purchasing it's components you'd be around $450 and for a Legendary about $1,500.

The sum of the components has always been higher than what the crafted Tokens sell for on the secondary market.

All that being said I think the current system of one UR + Trade Goods and GP for a Relic, and one Relic + two UR's + Trade Goods and GP/Wish Ring for a Legendary is ok, however if TD keeps loading the treasure boxes with them then it's not going to matter much what price they shoot for in Trade Goods because people will just buy them from other people instead of crafting them.

Yes. Crafting has gotten very skewed. It's almost always cheaper to buy Relics and Legendaries on the secondary market (because, presumably, the prices are driven down by people finding them in dungeon treasure). I ran the numbers for all my transmutes last year. It was cheaper, overall, to buy than to transmute, in every case. The only reason I transmuted anything was if I already had most of the ingredients. It was less efficient to do it that way, but a smaller immediate outlay. (Yes, I could have sold the ingredients I already had and just bought the transmuted item and come out ahead on price, but, that was slightly more hassle, and I like the idea of transmuting, even if it's gotten really upside-down price-wise.)

Typical relics sell for around $300, and typical legendaries sell for around $1000 (some are less, some are more). When you factor in gold pieces (especially the Eldritch ore bar), and a wish ring, and a couple of URs, and golden fleece, and all the other trade goods, the outlay to upgrade from a $300 item to a $1000 item is far more than $700. I feel like $300-$350 for relics and $1000-$1200 are pretty fair prices, and, as far as I know, those prices have been pretty consistent for a couple years and are mostly determined by the secondary market. But, of all the ingredients also have a price determined by the secondary market. To make transmuting even slightly competitive with the market costs, you'd need to drastically reduce the ingredients in the recipes (of course, that would make relics and legendaries far easier and cheaper to transmute, and that might drive their prices down a lot further). Even if new legendaries are on a similar power level to old legendaries, cheaper recipes would probably render a lot of old legendaries obsolete. What's worse than that, is a lot of newer legendaries are MUCH better than older legendaries. Some older items like TaMor's Bracers, Surtr's Girdle, and Pharacus' Cloak are only slightly better than more recent URs. A move that puts more legendaries in circulation would drive power creep at a disturbing rate. Power creep, if not dealt with soon will wreck the game. (I have some ideas about dealing with power creep, but that's a different topic.)

Matthew Hayward wrote: As a rule of thumb I think it would be good for the recipe values of Relics and Legendaries to be roughly:

Relic - $300-500

Legendary - $700-1200

Out of curiosity, are there recent Legendaries that had a recipe cost of only $700?

I tend to think of Relics and Legendaries in terms of how much I would need to order from TD to build the recipe.

I think you should roughly be able to craft a relic with a $1k purchase, and a Legendary with an $4k purchase.

Note: I do not think the crafting should take up all the resources of a purchase of that size - however the most constrained resource should still be covered by this size of purchase (other than monster bits / fleece).

One thing I would encourage TD to do is to try to roughly match the proportions of resources in a years transmutes to the proportions of resources:

Distributed via token purchases

Distributed via treasure.

For example, like Mike mentioned Dwarven Steel and Minotaur Hide have become relatively scarce since they aren’t distributed much in treasure.

Similarly Monster Bits / Golden Fleece have been in a multi year glut because of the increase in the number of conventions and treasure distributed without analogous increase in recipe requirements.


If the transmutes for a year have a 3:1 ration of Alchemists Ink to Alchemists Parchment, and the ratio of those things in the token 10 pack mix and treasure is close to 1:1, there will be a scarcity of AI and a glut of AP.

Matthew Hayward wrote: I tend to think of Relics and Legendaries in terms of how much I would need to order from TD to build the recipe.

I think you should roughly be able to craft a relic with a $1k purchase, and a Legendary with an $4k purchase.

Note: I do not think the crafting should take up all the resources of a purchase of that size - however the most constrained resource should still be covered by this size of purchase (other than monster bits / fleece).

It takes 2 4K orders to get one Wish Ring. I haven't run the numbers on GP, but I don't think an 8K order gets you anywhere near an Eldritch Ore Bar. A 4K order certainly doesn't.

Mike Steele wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote: As a rule of thumb I think it would be good for the recipe values of Relics and Legendaries to be roughly:

Relic - $300-500

Legendary - $700-1200

Out of curiosity, are there recent Legendaries that had a recipe cost of only $700?

I don’t Know - probably not though.

Jason Brown wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote: I tend to think of Relics and Legendaries in terms of how much I would need to order from TD to build the recipe.

I think you should roughly be able to craft a relic with a $1k purchase, and a Legendary with an $4k purchase.

Note: I do not think the crafting should take up all the resources of a purchase of that size - however the most constrained resource should still be covered by this size of purchase (other than monster bits / fleece).

It takes 2 4K orders to get one Wish Ring. I haven't run the numbers on GP, but I don't think an 8K order gets you anywhere near an Eldritch Ore Bar. A 4K order certainly doesn't.

GP in transmute math is a bit weird since the Wish Ring bonus is substantial and only comes at the 8k price point.

an 8k order comes with 44k GP and a wish ring worth 15k Gp.

Legendary transmutes consume 40k of GP.

So you get around 1.5 legendaries worth of GP per 8k order.

I’m fine with needing to pick up ~20k GP on the secondary market to go along with a 4K purchase to make a legendary.

I suppose when you're buying large token orders (in the 8K range), you're going to end up with a lot of trade goods, and transmuting is basically something you can do with them. You'll also get a Wish Ring and can PYP for any URs you need for transmutes. So, those ingredients are probably worth more to you as a player if you send them in for transmutes. But, the actual secondary market values are currently pretty messed up.

Just about every time you send in a transmute order for a legendary, you're mailing in about $1500 worth of tokens to get a $1000 token. It's an instant loss. If you have to transmute the relic first, you're losing money both times. Yeah, I know people will still do that, but it's definitely not a good deal, monetarily.

Jason Brown wrote: It takes 2 4K orders to get one Wish Ring. I haven't run the numbers on GP, but I don't think an 8K order gets you anywhere near an Eldritch Ore Bar. A 4K order certainly doesn't.

This year’s 8k orders include 44,000 GP plus the traditional Wish Ring. That’s one 25k bar, three 5k bars, and four 1k bars. The 44k number is close to what it has been in recent years (42-43k if memory serves).

BeLinda Mathie wrote:

Jason Brown wrote: It takes 2 4K orders to get one Wish Ring. I haven't run the numbers on GP, but I don't think an 8K order gets you anywhere near an Eldritch Ore Bar. A 4K order certainly doesn't.

This year’s 8k orders include 44,000 GP plus the traditional Wish Ring. That’s one 25k bar, three 5k bars, and four 1k bars. The 44k number is close to what it has been in recent years (42-43k if memory serves).

Thanks for the numbers. That's higher GP than I realized, but not even close to getting a legendary per 4K order. Aside from the fleece, you could definitely get a legendary per 8K order, though.