AQ potions are too expensive (for one very specific reason)
AQ potions are too expensive for one very specific reason: they force AQ to be boring.
I'm going to use my own alliance's values for example purposes, but I believe these calculations capture the essence of the problem across a wide range of alliances. Let's look at the AQ health potions you can buy for glory:
L3 health 6000, 160 glory
L4 health 9500, 260 glory
The best value is the L4 which offers 9500 health (to one champ) for 260 glory, which is 118.75 health per glory. How much glory do I earn per AQ week? Right now, it is 3850 for reaching milestone 30 (3000 glory) and rank 3864 (850 glory). Not the greatest, but not bad: its what we get for running 6/4/2 across three battlegroups. Certainly, it is better than average (rank 3864 probably places us in the top 10% of all alliances that do AQ).
If you were to spend all of that glory efficiently on AQ health potions, that is 770 per AQ day (3850/5) which translates to 91438 health restored per day. This assumes you don't ever die and need to use a revive, by the way. What does that mean in actual combat terms? Well, at the moment our prestige is about 10k, and on Map 6 we're facing attackers with attack values between 7k and 9k (generally in the vicinity of 8k, with some champion variability and scaling upward over the days). In rough terms, the typical attacker without significant fury, armor break, penetration, or any of that other jazz will be landing blocked hits on the order of 900 damage. I can sustain over a hundred such hits. That doesn't seem bad.
But I might be doing fifteen fights or more in one AQ day. Completely setting aside minibosses and boss fights, my AQ glory potion budget of 100 blocked hits amounts to about six per fight. Six.
Now of course, I don't necessarily have to heal that all back. I don't have to end AQ with all three champs at full health. But remember this is my potion budget if I never die. Dying tacks on more expense. I have to be careful not to let health get too far down. And this assumes I make basically zero mistakes (assuming you don't count taking a blocked hit to be a "mistake"). Any mistake at all blows these numbers up completely. Taking a single combo from an attack can easily cost 10-15k of health or more without criting. Many attackers can deal double or triple that amount. One combo can erase half your entire healing budget for the day.
And all of this assumes you spend *all* your glory on health potions, which is not a reasonable cost. That would make doing AQ almost pointless. In practice, averaging more than half your glory on potions is economically unsound.
Okay, but the logical thing to do is to not run maps where you are spending too much glory. That's always been the theory. And that is a valid option. However, look at the numbers again. *Any* map in which you are taking *any* risk at all is going to blow your glory budget. The only way AQ makes sense from an economic perspective is if you're spending only a small fraction of your glory on potions. And that can only happen if the challenge level is so low that it is almost impossible to make a mistake, because you're so powerful the fights are over before you *can* make a mistake. Or if the health pools of your attackers is so huge compared to the AQ defenders that the damage you take can be safely ignored (and does not need to be healed at all). If AQ is challenging, it is too expensive.
Which means the cost of AQ potions forces AQ to be boring. The cost of AQ potions logically compels players to avoid paying it, which can only happen if they are completely overpowering the AQ map. For AQ to be remotely interesting, it must be at least minimally challenging. And that means players must occasionally get hit. But AQ potion costs compared to glory rewards tell the players that if you're taking more than minimal damage, you shouldn't be doing it, and we're going to penalize you with high potions costs until you step down.
Basically, AQ potion costs tell players if AQ looks interesting, it isn't for you. And that tells me that AQ potion costs are *objectively* broken. It isn't a subjective matter of what I think they should cost. It doesn't matter what I think. The numbers say the cost of taking damage is too high for players to expose themselves to taking significant damage. But it is impossible for AQ to be either interesting or challenging if players never take significant amounts of damage.
And that's broken.
What should be done about it? Well, at the moment AQ potions are priced on the assumption that using *any* of them means you screwed up and should pay. But I believe that is an unrealistic target. If we want AQ to present some minimum level of challenge, we need to figure out how much damage we expect players to take on average when sustaining that level of challenge. We should *expect* some small level of "mistakes" and allow players to buy that many potions at a steep discount. All potions above that should then scale upward in price. That way, players see the game "push back" if they try to potion their way through AQ. A mistake won't cost a lot. Two might cost something. Three and you're no longer in mistake territory, you're just outmatched: time to consider stepping down.
That sort of feedback makes more sense to me, and it encourages players to do what Kabam claims they want to encourage: players should step up to higher maps when they think they can move up to them. But the current potion costs tell players not to do that until they are overwhelmingly certain they can do so easily. Stretching to move up is cost prohibitive.
I haven't thought about this long enough to say what the precise numbers should be. Some of that would depend on how the numbers shift around for different alliances doing different maps at different glory budgets. But I definitely think AQ potions should start off much cheaper than they are now, and should be much more available. They can ramp up to the costs they are now. Heck, I don't mind if they eventually ramp up to even higher costs. But the first one shouldn't cost what they cost. Not if the intent is for AQ to be anything other than a sleep walk. Because sleep walks are the only affordable AQ right now.
