Here’s something I cannot understand…
You’re a level 170 magic-oriented character. You have scummed Spring Light Woods forever (note: since a couple patches ago, there are way more mobs on the map so it’s actually faster) to get two Wizard Bracelets from the Shardstatues at 0.15% drop rate and you’re very happy, because now you can equip this:
https://tos.guru/itos/database/equipment/602109
Effects: 106 mdef, 64 matk, 180 sp. Not bad for a level 170 char.
Now you have leveled your char to 220 and you’re looking for upgrades to your Wizard Bracelets. So the obvious choice is to turn them into Archmage Bangles (you’d like to get Mejstra Bracelets, but you wouldn’t have the silver to buy them from market or the patience to scum for 140 – yes one ****ing hundred and forty — Ominous Fragments). You have bought two really expensive recipes from the market because at level 220 you’re not high level enough to do Saalus where you can get the recipe… at probably 0.01% chance drop from the reward cubes. Now you need to get the mats… You already have the two Wizard Bracelets, and 4 Terraniums are really easy to get. All you need now are 16 Brown Tini horns… at 0.23% drop chance. Yeah, that’s almost 7000 Tinis you have to kill there…
Finally you have crafted your two Archmage Bangles and you are exhausted by all the effort. And you look at what you got:
https://tos.guru/itos/database/equipment/603108
Effects: 148 mdef, 80 matk, 58 critical matk, -112 SP recovery.
WAT?
At this point, the +42 mdef and +16 matk start to be really marginal increases, as your armor pieces are probably over 500 mdef each and your weapon over 2000 matk. And the 58 critical matk is nothing. But 112 LESS SP recovery… that’s probably HALF your SP recovery lost there! If this could be ok before when you could get 1000 SP recovery with SPR, this is clearly NOT fine now.
You can’t sanely put so much effort into an item that is this bad… so we need to find a solution here. Keep in mind, we didn’t go the Mejstra route, which would have given us this:
https://tos.guru/itos/database/equipment/603118
Effects: 148 mdef, 74 matk, +10 SP recovery
Same mdef, matk a bit lower, small increase in SP recovery. This should definitely have been the stats on the Archmage Bangle, but we can’t really buff the Mejstra Bracelet instead because we have Lynnki Sit and Akro Galia bracelets for the next tier and they’re not that much better.
So we would have to think about an intermediate solution for the Archmage Bangle. Clearly the SP recovery penalty has to go, but what to do about the rest? Lower matk a bit? Yeah we keep the small crit matk bonus and it should work:
Level 220, MDEF 74, MATK 35, CMATK 29
Effects: 148 mdef, 70 matk, 58 crit matk. Better than Wizard Bracelets, bit worse than Mejstra. This should definitely work and reward the investment put on crafting them.