Choosing a Faction: Cost Analysis Based on the Price of Legendaries and Exotics

When I was a new player, one of the central questions I had, when trying to pick which faction to play, was “Which faction is the least expensive to get into?” For Pox Nora that question depends a lot on the prices of runes on trading site that is central to our rune acquisition: Pox Box. The vast bulk of trades happen through that site, and while many bemoan this fact, the trading opportunities on the main site are obnoxious enough to make it still the best source of runes for many players.

So in order to help answer this question I looked at the cost and availability of non-core exotics and legendaries for each of the factions. Core runes were left out due to their ease of acquisition and the fact that their cost has a negligible impact on the cost of acquiring runes for the faction. I looked at three primary indicators to determine how difficult it was to acquire the runes of a faction:

1) Mean price of the runes for the faction (split into legendaries and exotics)

2) Median price of the runes for the faction (split into legendaries and exotics)

3) Percent availability of the rune on the pox box store.

All three of these are subject to change based on availability of runes at any given time, but time constraints prevented me from tracking these over any period of time. Additionally, outside of particular shocks to the system (of which there have been several lately…) these prices should stay fairly consistent.

This is the results of my analysis.







There are three big take-away from these charts.

1) If you are concerned mostly with cost of runes, then Forglar Swamps or Shattered Peaks is the best bet. They are both among the three lowest in costs. Using availability as a tiebreaker pushes Shattered Peaks over the edge as it is the second best faction from an availability perspective.

2) If you are concerned mostly with being able to buy the runes you want than Savage Tundra is the way to go. It has the third least expensive legendaries, is in the lower half of costliness for exotics, and has a truly excellent 95% availability rating.

3) Good luck to any new player trying to get into Underdepths and Forsaken Wastes. Forsaken Wastes has the most expensive exotics, the second most expensive legendaries and the lowest availabilities. Underdepths is not much better with the most expensive legendaries and the second most expensive exotics.


And that is pretty much that. Hopefully this will help you as new players determine which faction you want to get into!

Edit: Table shows up like crap. If anyone wants to see it, let me know and I will just send you the excel file or something.

 

Nice Work

 

Excellent job.

 

Such a huge difference between exos and legs
PB must be really desperate for profits if he going to set it this high

 

It's interesting that just by giving a quick look at your values I see how insane were the price changes Decondor made. SP Legendaries were worth a lot more.

 

SP and FS have historically been easy to get into, often due to a glut of the runes and not really enough players to suck them all up (except for when one of those factions was FotM)

SP in particular had/has a decent number of unique runes (g'hern) released as legendaries or exo or what have you that work mostly in themes, so there're a bunch of extra right off the bat



UD and FW have always been hellish to get into (fittingly enough), IS and KF have rarely been that much better.

 

What does FotM stands for?

 

Flavor of the Month.

 

Thanks! I am a new player, and this helps.