Tagoria

Selling your armor increases your plunder pay. But it also means you waste a ton of amber on healing every day now that you're everyone's favorite xp cow, and you never get hired as a merc, and you fall behind in xp and stop making diamonds and cash as a gear merchant, and so on. Overall, I think it's a bad trade.

But what if you could get the best of both worlds?

Well, now you can! (Sort of.)

You'll need a partner. Someone you can trust, not just trust not to screw you over, but trust to show up the right time every day, etc. Every day, you sell him your armor at min, do your plunders, buy back your armor and his, wait for him to plunder, and sell his back.

So, no armor during the 2-1/2 hours you spend plundering, but you've still got it for xp hits, DRs, battles, etc.

Of course this isn't free. You have to pay market fees on two min-priced sales every day, and you lose enchantments each time you trade. But is it still a good deal? I think so.

Let's make this concrete, and take the worst case I can think of:

• You're both level 55, and that's pretty close to the top level in your world.
  
• You each just got ice armor in the last DB. (That makes it a tough choice--you're throwing away a lot of DEF from enchantments.)
  
• You each have 100 DEF from other sources.
  
• You make 120K/day in plunders with armor, but would make 160K without.**
  
• Your non-plunder daily revenue is about 50K.***
  
• Your daily healing costs are only 5K; as a rough approximation, this will go up proportionately as your DEF goes down, and it'll go up by your full healing cost if you have no armor and become the world's favorite xp cow.

So, here are your choices:

1. 168K/day, 202 DEF: Keep your ice armor with the 3 MEs and accept the lower plunders.****
   
2. 150K/day, 202 DEF: Buy 3 MEs back every day. This will also waste 21d/day.
   
3. 170K/day, 181 DEF: Buy 3 SEs back every day.
   
4. 194K/day, 160 DEF: No enchantments.*****
   
5. 188K/day, 158 DEF: Sell the ice armor, buy a scale armor, buy 1 SE back every day.
   
6. 192K/day, 153 DEF: Sell the ice armor, buy a scale armor, no enchantments.
   
7. 180K/day, 100 DEF: Go with no armor permanently. This also means no merc hires, falling behind in xp, etc.

I suppose an insane megatixxer might go for #2, but I can't even imagine doing that.

Ignoring that one, all of the other choices are better than the obvious #1 or #7 that everyone's doing. #4 looks like the best choice, but considering that you can probably get diamonds and cash for your ice armor at level 55 (which you won't get in the future), I'd go with #6.


* Do not attempt to actually eat your armor at home. All armor on-screen is consumed by a professional stunt eater on a closed picnic table.

** I have no idea if this last one is realistic for level 55, since I don't have records that far back, but at level 68 it's a bit over 160K vs. a bit under 200K, and that's about the same ratio.

*** 40K/day from wages, plus hauling, battle hauling, the DB amortized over two weeks, merc fees, etc.

**** You'll also save a bit of healing during plunders. But really, this is so minimal that it's barely worth worrying about. Plunders aren't where you take damage in this game, since companions were introduced. At most, it's 3K/day difference, so if you want to call this 168K/day, go ahead.

***** For this option, and #6 below, you can always occasionally buy SEs--on DB day, or when your horde has a close battle with your biggest rivals, or when you've got 3 merc deals lined up, or whatever.

The most important assumption there is that level 55 is near the top of your world.

If not--well, a 55 in a world of 68s won't be an xp cow no matter what, and will die just as fast against the top guys with or without armor, won't be giving up any serious advantages (you don't get good merc deals or gear-trading benefits anyway), and, for that matter, wouldn't get much for selling the ice armor now instead of later.

But then if you're a 55 in a world of 68s, you're not going to be at all competitive until you power-level your way closer to the top, no matter what your stats are. I'd just wear the fully-ME'd ice armor for the added advantages in xp hunting and battles and ignore all other considerations.

They changed the game a long, long time ago so the monsters match the best gear you own, not what you're currently wearing. So what you did with the stomach armor had no effect at all (except to make you take a little more damage).

That's why you have to actually sell the armor.

Hence this trick. Selling your armor to a friend to buy back later is the same as selling it permanently as far as plunders go; the game has no way of knowing you're going to buy it back later.

As for your upgrades, none of them are all that big. For example, going from the BAA to the Ice, if you're level 58 or below, is only 10 difference in your total DEF, and you probably have nearly 200 total, so we're talking about a 5% change or so. Considering how wide the variation is among the monsters (even the same monster--my last two plunders, the opponents had 61 and 109 DEF!), and how indirect the effect of the monsters' DEF is, you'd need a large number of trials, with all else held equal, to detect the difference with any degree of confidence.

In my case, the difference was 229 to 117 DEF in W1DE at level 70, and 222 to 112 in W1EN at level 68. That's nearly a 50% chance, and that definitely is noticeable with just a couple days of plunders.