<![CDATA[Relic of the Past Nerfed!]]>With six days till the release of the Shadowlands pre-patch on E.U (14th Oct), Blizzard has finally acted on the vast amounts of profit that was achievable on the PTR using the Relic Shuffle. To understand the Relic of the Past in greater detail, here’s my original post. Blizzard has added three vendor items, which will be necessary to craft a Relic. With the new additions, it has increased the crafting cost to craft Relics, meaning it’s now less profitable to shuffle these Relics to a vendor.

The Nerf:

Each profession has their own Relic crafted with different materials, this is also true with respect to the new vendor items, as outlined below:

With respect to the vendor items in Battle for Azeroth (BFA), these were only accessible from BFA vendors. The vendor items mentioned above may only be available from Shadowlands vendors. Wowhead hasn’t confirmed this, but if this is the case, you won’t be able to craft Relics when the pre-patch hits, instead you’ll need to wait until Shadowlands releases with all the new zones, etc.

When you craft a Relic of the Past I, it will also require one vendor item associated with that profession (e.g. Blacksmithing Relic will require Luminous Flux); the amount of vendor items required per Relic increases substantially depending on the Relic you wish to craft. I’ve outlined below a complete rundown of the number of vendor items needed to craft each Relic.

Relic of the Past I – 1 Vendor Item
Relic of the Past II – 2 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past III – 3 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past IV – 15 Vendor Items
Relic of the Past V – 25 Vendor Items

As you can see, to craft the Relics IV and V you need 15 and 25 vendor items, this means that there is no longer large amounts of profit, when crafting items to sell to the vendor. The nerf was a well-needed addition to the PTR, without it, there would’ve been people practically printing money! The knock-on effect would’ve vastly inflated the economy, and there would’ve been a reaction to the WoWToken prices too.

Don’t be disheartened, this Relic system should still be a great addition to the game and those that look to level will be looking for Relics, as they increase in level and look to upgrade their gear. The next couple of weeks will show how crafted items scale when Relics upgrade their pieces and some may turn out to be best in slot. So don’t be put off just yet, as there could be further markets in the future, only time will tell.

EDIT: Added on 14.10.2020
The Devs have also added a nerf to Relic V. They have reduced it’s level requirement and ilvl. The updated information is outlined below. I can only imagine this nerf, is to prolong the current BFA gear for level 50 characters.

Relic V
Required level: 47
ilvl: 54

Players Adapting, Have You?

What is also evident this morning is the rush to quickly offload materials to the Auction House that players have purchased/stockpiled to take advantage of the shuffle upon the pre-patch launch. There will be a lot of players this morning dumping these materials, hoping for others unaware of these changes incoming and buying up these materials. A tweet I saw immediately after logging in this morning on Twitter from @Hikons, shows the dramatic rush of players dumping their Runecloth on to the Auction House.

Be sure to drop a follow to Hikons if you haven’t done so already! Excellent gold-maker that plays on U.S. servers. He also streams on Twitch and uploads content to Youtube! Added links so you can check him out!

My Opinion:

I believe this to be a quick fix or desperate move from Blizzard to prevent the inevitable, they should’ve acted sooner and implemented a better system, that is after all, why we have Alpha/Beta for testing purposes. Instead, they’ve left it 6 days before release of the pre-patch to act, and here’s hoping it doesn’t have a detrimental effect on what could’ve been good.

Personally, I didn’t invest in this market at all. I wasn’t going to participate in the Relic Shuffle, as I’m aware of previous issues in the past, where Blizzard had handed out unfair bans/suspensions when it deemed something to be an exploit, especially when developers created the issues themselves. This is why so many Goldmakers were trying to get Blizzard to act quickly on this issue. I’m not stating this is or was an exploit, just merely playing it safe due to previous issues within the Gold-making community.

The best way I can translate this change to be a necessary one, is in the long run, if this method of Relic shuffling went live, the need for players to buy WoWTokens to get gold in-game would be non-existent. There would be an extremely easy way to earn guaranteed gold in-game (practically AFK) this would mean those that purchase WoWTokens, wouldn’t need to any longer and this would increase the prices of WoWTokens until they disappeared.

Please remember, these changes are from the PTR and look very likely to come in pre-patch, but future changes can and will happen. Please adapt accordingly. Only invest with gold you can afford to lose.

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