What is the point of white item merchants?

#0 - Aug. 7, 2007, 9:30 p.m.

Just something I was wondering about, what's the point of all the common quality weapons and armor?

Are they just there so players always have a way to train weapon skills with various types of weapons, independent of what's up on the AH?

Are the common quality weapons and armor a baseline from which greens, blues, and epics are based on?

Are they what classes wear when you do balance testing?

Are they just there to make the world seem more real? (In that an armor shop does, in fact, sell armor, just not any armor you would want to use.)

Nethaera

#7 - Aug. 7, 2007, 10:59 p.m.

White items are generally used as an inexpensive way of working up a weapon skill by some players since the dps is lower than a higher quality item. So, you can whack on a mob for longer and get more skill out if it than ripping through all the mobs in an area with a blue or purple item.

Some people like to buy some of the merchant items just to have them for flavor too.

There is a method to the madness for item quality and what is referred to as an item budget. Better quality items have a higher budget so often have a few more stat points available to them.

As far as internal balance testing goes, it depends on what the QA team is testing for. Generally we're looking at what we think players should be using or have available to them for a particular encounter or what we want the difficulty level of an encounter to be with certain itemization available.