Basically you can convert lesser Traitstones of the same color into greater ones. Here’s an example with a generic conversion rate.
20x minor - 1 major
25x major - 1 runic
10x runic - 1 arcane or 5x+ 5x - 1 mixed arcane
2x every color arcane - 1 celestial
The gives a use to excess traitstones, as well as an rngless way to obtain a specific traitstone you need.
This suggestion comes up so often we should petition the devs to create a “Traitstone Conversion Pipe Dreams” category for easier filtering.
Snark aside, while this sounds good to players (converting low-value resources to high-value resources), it is something the developers clearly do not intend to implement – likely because it disturbs the economic model in ways they do not like.
I know this, but…
I wish they would explain their concern. If they tied the conversion to gems, or premium currency, wouldn’t that actually PROMOTE the economy??
Not if they tied it to gems. I think gems are so screwed at this point. I don’t even know why anyone would buy gems anymore other than to show support for the Devs.
We need a new premium currency I think, so maybe? But I can’t say I see it happening.
Something similar I’ve noticed about all these requests is that they don’t take into account the actual value of the stones in their conversion ratio.
Every request like this proposes being able to convert minors to majors. No matter what the ratio of the convert is, this is a bad deal. You’ll need about 4 times as many minors as majors to trait everything, but only ever obtain 2 to 3 times as many. Unless, of course, you somehow converted all your majors to runics and could afford the exchange ratio to make more minors into majors into runics.
Exchanging majors to runics would be something everyone would do, because major drop rates are broken (as per above) and you always have more than you need. Basically, free runics. I’d rather they just fix the drop ratios going forward.
Exchanging runics to arcanes is actually kind of sensible, as waiting long enough past a certain point will get you the arcanes anyway by way of glory packs and grinding explore will get you both with some degree of regularity. Being bottlenecked by either one on an off week would require some degree of grinding either way. The subset of people that would be “instantly done” with arcanes were this made a thing are probably already done or very close already. As an endgame player in a guild that frequently finishes 5/6 guild tasks per week, being able to exchange runics for arcanes at such a ratio would be beneficial short term for the few colors I don’t already have too many of and want to trait something for but detrimental long term - exactly the kind of trade off you’d want in this sort of system. I probably still wouldn’t use it since I’m focused on the big picture and I still don’t see it happening, period, but these two are the only rarities that are even close enough in rarity and short term acquisition methods for exchanges to make sense.
Every request like this proposes being able to convert Arcanes to celestials. But celestials are far, far less likely to ever bottleneck you on anything. Exchanging 42 arcanes for a single celestial would be the bad deal of the century.
Very few of these requests bring up exchanging the same rarity for a different color, at, say, a 2:1 ratio, which would be sensible as the color bottlenecks are very aritificial in the first place (reds are most needed because the most are needed total, yellows are least needed but most dropped because Whitehelm is a thing).
I can’t see how this would be anything other than a beginners trap, like the ability to convert gems into gold or souls directly. How many gems would you be willing to spend just to straight up buy a certain color of traitstone? You’d have to take that number, then further reduce it to account for the fact that you’d be contributing lesser stones as part of the cost for this to be a “good” option. Although there are plenty of people that would use it even as a “bad” option. I mean, yeah, it would technically promote buying gems, but only by way of taking advantage of the lack of player knowledge.
I think there are plenty of resources to assist with player knowledge, but if that is really a concern, tie it to level. Can’t craft until lvl 800.