Sky Fortress adjustments

[Leostel]

I’ve talked in the past quite a bit about reward overlap and why I think that’s a problem, and the dungeon I keep coming back to on that subject is Sky Fortress.

(Previous discussion on reward overlap here: The State of PMU’s Economy)

Click here for a relevant quote from the above thread's OP

@Leostel

it is important valuable endgame items such as the Miracle Chest, Golden Mask, Exp. All etc are difficult to obtain or their value will take a nosedive eventually no matter what.

My first suggestion to help rectify the dwindling rarity of items such as the Miracle Chest and friends, is to crack down on “generalist” dungeons and make sure items intended to be sought-after endgame aren’t just picked up on the side during training, and require intentional investment to obtain.

While simply altering things like endbox drop rates will slow the creation of items, I think the most important thing to do is to remove overlap. What do I mean? Well, let’s look at Sky Fortress as an example. Running it yields several rewards to the player. It’s very easy to come out of the dungeon with a net gain of resources, sometimes an MC or golden mask, money (including items that exist solely to generate money from kecleon) AND it’s one of the best training dungeons in the game. If you frequently run, say, SF for experience, you will slowly amass raw, freshly-minted cash, miracle chests, and golden masks on the side. In fact, even if you’re there specifically to hunt one of the two major endbox items, you might wind up with the other while you’re at it. And this absolutely kills their value by flooding the market with unwanted, excess items.

With dusts being handed out like candy, there’s quite the abundance of what should normally be semi-rare non-consumable items. And at the end of the garden route, two items that are the “big rewards” of other dungeons can be obtained, leaving little reason to run either CCh or TC normal 99 for what should be their main rewards.

I have two suggestions to mitigate these problems:

1. Remove dusts from SR boxes, (optionally normal endboxes as well) and floor spawns, making the fake-exit boxes their primary source (perhaps with them being rarer or not at all present in lower floor fake exits for fire/ice/electric)
2. Remove the Miracle Chest and Golden Mask from the garden route’s end box, replacing them with new items exclusively found in Sky Fortress instead. As for what these 2 new items could be…

New items:

• “Gale Baton” A held item that gives the holder (NOT the entire team) the Cloud Nine ability.
• “Amber Tear” Increases the chance of recruiting defeated enemy pokemon by 6%~ (exact value negotiable) while in the bag.

Additionally, the secret rooms just feel like relic item pinatas and little else, largely with no unique loot in them. As for how to fix this, I’m less sure and would love some help coming up with ideas.

I’ve since found myself taking a softer stance on their actual payout values though, so I’m not as sure they need to just be directly nerfed as I once was. They may occasional pay out a large sum of money, but it’s infrequent enough I don’t think the average is actually all that high over the number of floors in the dungeon.

[Etaki]

Why is it always the rich players that complain about the economy and balance of money? It sounds like they’re trying to prohibit players from accessing money and rare items. Not talking about Leo in specific, but I can think of several rich players complaining about how abundant money is. How many PMU players can/have actually cleared SF garden? Personally I don’t see any issue with Rocky Shoreline or SF.

The new items sound interesting though needn’t be found in SF specifically.