DoV Black Market Merchant - Time for it's Arrival?

[Mathrim]

<p>With the proposed changes to Rygorr and Thurgadin armor on test, people are very quickly going to find themselves sitting on a ton of shards with nothing to spend them on.  With the ease of access/aquisition of Thurgadin/Rygorr gear, people are going to completely ignore TOFS and Rime zones in order to go after gems and better gear in Kael and Drunder.  Even the Dominace quest will be worthless if this change goes live since 2 out of 3 Dominance groups will be sub-par.</p><p>This also leaves the Dungeon Finder in a bad position as you will be cutting out 6 of the 12 DoV zones right off the bat from the lack of interest in loot.  Especially when noone needs the shards from those zones anymore.</p><p>It might be a good idea to consider adding a black market vendor into DoV just like we had with TSO and SF.  Put the common fabled and boss drops up there for a reasonable (40-70) amount of shards.  Leave the rare named drops solely for the zones.  This would give people an incentive to continue queueing up for TOFS and Rime since they can be done much faster and easier with PUGS to earn shards that will actually be useful for something besides an adornment.</p><p>I know the Rygorr and Thurgadin merchants have a few fabled items for 25 shards and thats great, but those few items won't keep your playerbase chewing through shards for more than a week or 2 at this rate.</p><p>If the developers do decide to go forward with the proposed changes on test, at least please consider and implement something for the playerbase to do with the shards from DoV besides adornments.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p>I see the same problem with shards being useless.</p><p>I'm also not keen on the changes as they are, removing the shard cost completely for Ry'gor gear does not sound like its going to really help get more people into places like Drunder.  Instead I'd rather see a third tier of gear where perhaps we need to hand in our Ry'gor gear and 40 or so shards to purchase it.</p><p>That would give players access to something to get average players into the harder zones and if they find them too tough they still have a path to progress on without trivialising the game (the T2 void shard sort of costs I think was a great balance between effort and reward).</p><p>Here's hoping these changes get some serious tweaks, otherwise I can see a good chunk of gameplay getting made redundant in DoV.</p><p>Definitely adding a black market merchant too would be good stuff, although maybe it says something bad, but I cannot really name one item from a DoV dungeon that would be sold at such a merchant.  Its not tons of proc's that I want to see, but a bit more variety, storyline and imagination put into the gear, RoK had some great items, TSO did well too, SF went overboard on the procs but at least had a few memorable items available.</p>