A new and very frank note has been posted on the Neverwinter site that delves into a great deal of the history of the Astral Diamond market along with attendant admission that the system has not been scrutinized as regularly, or as thoroughly, as it should have been.
Comparing issues between PC and XBox One versions, Cryptic Studios has been able to identify several key factors that will be altered or included once the Underdark module is released later this fall.
Here are the changes that will be going live on PC for Underdark on November 17 and in the near future for Xbox One. These are changes that increase earn rates and decrease prices on both platforms:
- +50% Astral Diamonds earned for gameplay-focused activities: dungeons, skirmishes, PvP, and the weekly quests mentioned in a prior post.
- This includes the base activity, the daily rewards, and the daily limits to what you can earn for these activities (the stuff that Rhix talks about).
- An increase to the daily AD refinement cap from 24,000 to 36,000.
- Companion price reductions: we know companions can get pretty expensive. We think it’s fun to have several, though, and we want that to be viable. We also want you to be able to upgrade (increase the quality of) a specific companion if you love your pet, not just discard it for some other purple — right now that’s so expensive it’s not very practical. We think it’s OK for it to be a little more expensive to upgrade a specific companion. But it shouldn’t be ridiculously more expensive than buying a brand-new companion (of the upgraded color). With that in mind, we’re making some changes:
- Lower prices for the Wondrous Bazaar companions. These blue companions used to cost 650,000 – 800,000 AD; they now all cost 400,000 AD.
- Significantly lower costs to upgrading a companion at the lower qualities:
- White to Green: was 300,000 AD, now 50,000 AD
- Green to Blue: was 500,000 AD, now 250,000 AD
- Blue to Purple: was 750,000 AD, now 500,000 AD
- Purple to Orange is staying the same (1,000,000 AD).
- Exploit fix: There was a severe AD-farming exploit involving Planar Idols and Astral Resonators (items that appear in certain older lockboxes). Earlier attempts to fix them did not work. So we’ve changed how they work completely — they still give the same amount of AD to anyone using them without the exploit, but the exploit should no longer be possible.
Read the lengthy and informative post on the Neverwinter site.
