Silly Question - Why rent? (in General)

k - in keeping with my reputation of asking silly questions, I have been thinking about rentals.
Renting stuff lets you beat higher-placed opposition, however, by increasing your PR it decreases your rewards. So you don't actually progress any faster than if you'd bought a base item and upgraded it as you went along.
It's fine if you want to try things out (although that has its downside too ;-) ), but as a means of getting ahead it isn't that effective is it?
Or is it? Please someone put my mind at rest that I'm not running rent bills up for nothing :-D

VC

1. To lower the number of people who can steal clan points from you.

2. To have an item to increase power to your minion while you use your remaining money to invest in something else (such as upgrading another item)

3. I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Renting: If you have less rare weapons it gives you a chance to use something more powerful. A lot of armours are in there quite cheaply for a long period of time so you get the benefits of rares without the cost.

Non rares are more expensive to upgrade in the long run than rares so it isn't worth doing. You're better off renting better weapons until you can afford your own rares.

With regards to PR and rewards - you don't have to rent the biggest items in rentals. Bear in mind that you have a weapons allowance. So you can rent a fairly large sword for instance without it increasing your PR. Do some experimenting to see how large a weapon you can use before your PR jumps up hugely. And actually if you are able to fight higher you'll probably make better rewards. Unless the increase in PR is so huge the higher fight level should at least make up the difference in reward if not better it.

I rent a lot, mainly because I'm poor! When my chars have been at higher levels it meant I could compete with the people who owned large items for a fraction of the cost.

With my latest character I bought several low level bows at escalating sizes and rented several so I could increase my weapon power without having to invest in my own bow which would have cost me nearly a 100 times more to have a weapon at the size I'm using right now.

Running a tank team you do need the best weapons available for your size. But if you're talking about progression, having money around to save for your own rares or buy BA (which is actually the best way to progress more quickly) is far more valuable in the long run.


Don't know if any of that made sense or has convinced you , bear in mind it is only 930am!

To rent or not to rent? If you have a lot of money buy your own but make sure it is the best you can buy.

If not....RENT!

when you hit the higher ups, believe me, you'll want to use them!

1. right - I can see the clan thing, although I haven't dived into that side of the game yet.

2. This is really my point, by increasing your power, you are decreasing your rewards. Better to save your money to get something when you are ready for it?

3. lol, me neither, but I'm trying to keep one eye on the cricket

Replace 3 with

3. To feel powerful.

Because you can.

I fight as high as I can without losing too much and it takes a really big jump in PR for your rewards to start decreasing. And if that's happening when you rent then you're not fighting high enough to benefit from the increase in PR.

If you're not in a clan then it's worth it sometimes to use some BA just to test the waters of where you can fight without losing too much. Actually battles where you have to fight the same person twice, losing the first battle but winning the second, at higher levels than normal can net you more rewards than two winning battles at lower.

Once you're in a clan that's not good for clan points. You may want to start thinking about joining a clan because if they're getting a bonus then you get higher rewards anyway.

My brain hurts now and the wife is making breakfast so that's all for now!

Cheers all for your contributions, I shall now go away and ponder more inane questions

VC

JW, I think with the addition of the penalty for second fights, there are few instances where fighting someone you have to hit twice produces decent rewards

Penalty on second fights? I thought there was only a penalty for draws?

I may be deluding myself but my xp rewards from fighting this way certainly add up nicely. But it's only worthwhile if you're attacking people much higher in score. At the same level or just above it isn't worth it over a longer period.

Hitting someone twice depends on their Score vs your PR, as do all rewards. So it you hit up quite a bit, you'll get just as good or better rewards than hitting someone with a Score the same or worse than your PR.

On the subject of renting.
As was posted previously, if it's in your NW Weapon allowance, then it's to your benefit.
Certain armors don't add a whole lot of PR so those are fine, and in some cases you might want to rent a corn to help boost your E's spells or AG's/CoI to see how well they work for your Mage.
Also, when starting off, I would always recommend Renting until you know what items are best for your character(s) so that you don't waste big money on buying some rares only to discover that you got the 2nd best for your character. Not to mention that early on, you'll rise fast in MPR so your Weapon allowance will rise much faster than you can grow your own weapons from the CB2 made from fighting, unless of course you use USD to buy CB2.
Renting also helps cause instead of paying 100% to the BS, you can get a forger and save at least 20% (which in most cases is more than enough to cover the costs of renting an item and then some) while they pump up your gear and you don't have to worry too much about what you are going to do in the meantime while you don't have your gear.
Last but not least, if you do the math, alot of times you'll find that the 7 day rentals are cheaper than the smaller timed ones.
IE EB's rent for 8k per day or you can rent them for 7 days at 30k with maybe a difference of a +1 mod. I would take the 7 Day rental, the one days are annoying in the fact that you might not be around to re-rent it again, but at least with a 7 day rental, you'll have 7 days where you don't have to worry about re-renting the item again.

Yes, thanks Mikel. I think where I went wrong initially was renting the best ELBow I could, at an NW of 10M (I'm at PR 130k), on the assumption that 'bigger is better' :-)

"why not?"

The penalty that Novice is speaking of is that you get decreased rewards for beating an already weakened opponent.

Shade - can I assume you're talking to me?
The 'why not' for me, is that a big weapon (fnaar) enables you to beat hitherto difficult opponents. Unfortunately, not 'that much' bigger opponents, due to them having had more XP spent on their stats/skills/spells.
So, the gain in being able to beat opponents, is (in my present experience) less than the reward decrease you get for having more PR, and thus less Score/PR ratio.

Or am I just confusing things again?

VC

The whole point of items and power weighting is that you get _disproportionate_ gains in effect on your power to the MPR gain.

Let's take an easy example: I have a wall and I rent [40, +30] armor. The armor increases the MPR of the wall by 30 * 0.1% = 3%. For magic, the armor blocks 30 * (2.1/5)% damage = 12.6% more hitpoints.

12.6% more effective power (walls only train HP) versus 3% more MPR is a disproportionate gain.

Blocking physical damage and blocking physical damage against VB are also disproportionatly effective, but are left as an exercise to the reader.