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

Jason Brown wrote: 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.

My problem with people using numbers like these is that while individuals may be irrational, groups are not.

It is clearly worth it for a significant number of people to transmute rather than sell the components and buy the transmutes or people would try to do that more often ... and there would be a supply shift on TGs leading to them falling in price and a supply shift in transmutes to where they would become more expensive reaching a new equilibrium that didn't seem so off to people.

You allude to the reason people don't (always) do this - "it's a hassle" to sell. It's not just time and effort, but just because some auction gets $2 per DP or whatever doesn't mean I can just decide to sell any number of DP for $2 apiece. Tokens aren't commodities and there isn't some efficient exchange market. Then, factor in shipping cost, insurance, lost packages, package cost, additional time to research someone's reputation, or whatever.

Obviously, some people buy and sell TGs outside of auctions - the market is neither one extreme or another. Different actors do different things and tokens' values at an individual level are very different at any given point of time. Not just inefficiency due to limited information, but someone is going to value a particular token differently depending upon when that person gets it, which is not the same timetable as someone else. I've "overpaid" to get legendaries earlier, partially to check off the list, mostly because tokens have play value and all of the time spent waiting for prices to drop means not gaining the play value out of them. Other tokens, I'm perfectly happy to wait on. Someone may be getting out of the game or have more important expenses or someone may just have had a birthday or gotten a tax refund. Maybe someone essentially rents a high end token for cons by buying before, playing, then selling. See all of the people funding next year tokens by trying to sell before preorders. Or, people just don't all chase the exact same tokens.

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

This is exactly what I was going to say should be the cost to buy them.
...therefore, the material cost to craft them should be $400 for relic & &1250 for legendary.

I've always subscribed to the 300 / 1000 short hand, but crafting costs seem to have gone up substantially in recent years. Maybe that's subjective though.

Picc wrote: I've always subscribed to the 300 / 1000 short hand, but crafting costs seem to have gone up substantially in recent years. Maybe that's subjective though.

Based on current auction prices of materials the Greater Charm Bracelets cost $585 to craft. They are selling for less than $300.

kurtreznor wrote:

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

This is exactly what I was going to say should be the cost to buy them.
...therefore, the material cost to craft them should be $400 for relic & &1250 for legendary.

This is where my current thoughts are at. I think crafting them should be more expensive than buying. In reality, people who buy a lot of tokens or get a lot of treasure have a lot of extra TGs. Sure, they could sell those, but they are typically viewed as a "sunk" cost to put towards transmuting.

Keep in mind that on the low to average side, gold goes for $12 per 1K. So, the cost of a legendary starts at $480 (40K x $12) and goes up from there. You typically need 2 PYPs at about $90 each and suddenly you're already up to $660 before you even start looking at trade goods. You also have to take into account the cost of the relic needed to make the legendary. It seems like a legendary should cost about $800-$1000 not counting the cost of making the relic.

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).

I agree that an 8k order should have the components (outside of Golden Fleece) to craft both legendaries for that year (craft the relics and than convert them to Legendaries).

In general I would like to see the cost of relics come down, even if Legendaries go up a bit. It feels like crafting a relic should be less onerous to newer players. Ideally they would be closer to what you could expect in two $250 orders (or one $250 order plus a season of play).

400-600 for relic to make
12200-1600 for legendary

All depending on many factors but that’s a rough estimate

So yes there is a clear disconnect between the average prices of TG's and relics/legendaries, and I think that will always be the case, no matter how recipe costs are tweaked. I think there are a few factors that create this discrepancy:

1. Untransmuted items have flexibility. This DS can go into one of several different relics or any legendary. Once it's been transmuted, that flexibility is gone. There's zero demand for 0.5% of a legendary.

2. Power creep in token design may also be making players more hesitant to pay cash in the secondary market when an upgrade/reprint might be available next year. We know for sure that token design impacts prices of tokens. I personally held off for 2 years on buying Earcuff of Orbits, and while I know it's not a relic, it was priced like one prior to reprint.

3. Players value TG's differently, which is of course a no-brainer statement. However, the sourcing of TG's has wildly different costs including $250 pack purchases, $8K pack purchases and everywhere in between. Also, the dollar value of a dungeon run factors here as well. I track my tokens because I want to know what I spent on them. In order to do this, I have to assign a value to everything I receive in treasure because I may either sell it to someone else, which may or may not have tax implications, or because the token may become part of a trade or transmute. I allocate this based on the total cost of my tickets. Others will do it differently and may assign a $0 value to their tokens from treasure because they treat the money spent as the cost of the experience itself.

A couple example cases that illustrate this: Player A mainly sources their TG's through participating in auctions, so their additional cash outlay over their cost of tickets for a transmute will be towards the higher end of the "market rate X volume" equation that most people here are referencing. Player B pays for entire runs and mainly sources their TG's for that group from the dungeon itself. The net additional cash outlay to complete a transmute will be much lower and sometimes they pull Relics their team doesn't need or their builds evolve and they no longer need a token crafted previously.

The market situation we're in tells me that the net financial impact of Player B's significantly outweighs Player A's.

Also, we should ALL remember that this is a game and not a retirement plan. It's an expensive hobby and most of us here are fortunate enough to have disposable income that allows us to argue about the price of fun poker chips. At the end of the day, this niche market will dictate secondary prices through supply and demand.

Exbalz wrote: So yes there is a clear disconnect between the average prices of TG's and relics/legendaries, and I think that will always be the case, no matter how recipe costs are tweaked. I think there are a few factors that create this discrepancy:

1. Untransmuted items have flexibility. This DS can go into one of several different relics or any legendary. Once it's been transmuted, that flexibility is gone. There's zero demand for 0.5% of a legendary.

2. Power creep in token design may also be making players more hesitant to pay cash in the secondary market when an upgrade/reprint might be available next year. We know for sure that token design impacts prices of tokens. I personally held off for 2 years on buying Earcuff of Orbits, and while I know it's not a relic, it was priced like one prior to reprint.

3. Players value TG's differently, which is of course a no-brainer statement. However, the sourcing of TG's has wildly different costs including $250 pack purchases, $8K pack purchases and everywhere in between. Also, the dollar value of a dungeon run factors here as well. I track my tokens because I want to know what I spent on them. In order to do this, I have to assign a value to everything I receive in treasure because I may either sell it to someone else, which may or may not have tax implications, or because the token may become part of a trade or transmute. I allocate this based on the total cost of my tickets. Others will do it differently and may assign a $0 value to their tokens from treasure because they treat the money spent as the cost of the experience itself.

A couple example cases that illustrate this: Player A mainly sources their TG's through participating in auctions, so their additional cash outlay over their cost of tickets for a transmute will be towards the higher end of the "market rate X volume" equation that most people here are referencing. Player B pays for entire runs and mainly sources their TG's for that group from the dungeon itself. The net additional cash outlay to complete a transmute will be much lower and sometimes they pull Relics their team doesn't need or their builds evolve and they no longer need a token crafted previously.

The market situation we're in tells me that the net financial impact of Player B's significantly outweighs Player A's.

Also, we should ALL remember that this is a game and not a retirement plan. It's an expensive hobby and most of us here are fortunate enough to have disposable income that allows us to argue about the price of fun poker chips. At the end of the day, this niche market will dictate secondary prices through supply and demand.

ultimately what is missing is new players...With all the auctions and all the VTDs this has caused a greater supply. With out in person cons, getting new players to fall in love with the game like so many of us did ( for whatever reason one time or another) is not happening.

Jeff Martin wrote:

Ian Lee wrote: You have to define what you mean by value.

There is no one value for anything. Marc can give you averages of auction prices for components and you could do a comparison year over year on relics and legendaries using today's auction prices. But, that isn't remotely what I think of when I think of the cost of a relic/legendary.

Instead of thinking in terms of dollars, where there are all sorts of variables, I would look at what $8k bundles generate since those are the "in" way for people who are into relics/legendaries to get tokens. Certainly changed over time how much of a bundle was consumed by recipes, but, at a minimum, can get an idea of what sort of proportions of TGs should go into a realistic combination of what someone getting an $8k bundle would transmute.

Personally, I hate the model of URs going into legendaries, but my main problems with recipes is that they are too cookiecutter and out of line with what actually gets generated. That may sound contradictory, but I'd like to see one transmute path use different TG proportions but see the total universe of a year's worth of transmutes to align to 8k generation (ignoring that 8k's don't generate enough gold to make multiple legendaries and never to my knowledge have).

Thanks. This is good food for thought, but would it not then be a good idea to also take into consideration the number of TGs an average buyer receives in random treasure throughout the year? Someone could buy only a $250 UR pack in 2024 -- but acquire through many TD and VTS runs 100s of draws of Treasure Tokens to transmute into TGs.

Who is the average buyer/average player, though? The people participating on these forums are more engaged than many players. How many people do 1-2 runs per year at GenCon or GHC, and that's it? How much do those players spend on tokens beyond what they get from their runs? I have anecdata from myself and my friend group (before VTD sucked me into extreme spending), but I don't know what any of the actual data on that is. Should a relic ever be accessible to a player like that? To a group of players like that? Should a legendary? My personal opinion is maybe, yes, and no, respectively, but that question can drive how you aim to price things.

Ian Lee wrote: Marc can give you averages of auction prices for components and you could do a comparison year over year on relics and legendaries using today's auction prices.

Hey, that's me!

Yes, I can tell you exactly what you would need to "pay" in average auction costs to make recipe X. I can do this based on average auction prices from 2019 forward. But, as you suggest...

Instead of thinking in terms of dollars, where there are all sorts of variables, I would look at what $8k bundles generate since those are the "in" way for people who are into relics/legendaries to get tokens. Certainly changed over time how much of a bundle was consumed by recipes, but, at a minimum, can get an idea of what sort of proportions of TGs should go into a realistic combination of what someone getting an $8k bundle would transmute.

I actually very much agree with this line of thinking and I've brought it up several times in recipe feedback threads. From what I can tell, an 8k order right now lets you make:
- 1-ish legendary
- 2-ish relics (one of which feeds the legendary)
- Some Enhanced and Exalted

But again, this doesn't provide the full picture. A player reasonably has access to additional resources from treasure pulls. That supplements the existing recipes in all sorts of ways, from more GP to just pulling Wish rings to getting the URs you need to craft something (or trading for them).

The point about treasure not containing commons (and hence no Hide or Steel) is also well taken, but there's an alternate solution to the issue that isn't just "less of those in recipes". You could also seed treasure pool with an appropriate amount of 1x and 10x tokens to match the expected value of Hide and Steel.

Basically, my ideal world is that a player has multiple paths towards crafting:
- Play the game and get the materials through 10-packs and treasure pulls (or very lucky and pull it outright)
- Spend money, either targeted buys from auctions or just get your own 8k (1k, 2k, etc.)
- Some blend of the two approaches

The biggest challenge in my mind is that a player who isn't running max treasure will take years to accumulate the needed trade goods for a relic. Since 2020, you need around 100 trade goods per relic; that's a lot! It almost seems insurmountable to a new player to obtain by just playing the game, which is probably one reason why the auction group buys have exploded in popularity.

Also, for those who just want to see some numbers... here's what I see for trade good costs for 2020-2023

Relics: $300-$450
Legendaries: $450-$700


Notes

• This is just the trade good cost
• This does not include PYP, gold, wish rings, or any other special tokens
• Legendary costs do not include the Relic