I received a mail ingame recently posing the following question concerning the feathered cape that one can purchase from the Snipe Hunter as a reward for a number of tokens:
I saw that the cape isn’t autoloading or pvaultable. That’s a lot of points to dole out for something that won’t last more than a boot…. Not to mention how hard it can be to find a hunter sometimes you don’t catch up with one until a couple days before a boot. Any thoughts on changing it?
The thing is this: Yes, we know it’s expensive. Snipe Hunt rewards were designed and intended to be both difficult and time-consuming to obtain. We don’t want everyone on the mud running around with all the snipe prizes. This was intended to help maintain a sense of accomplishment and prestige once you’ve worked for enough tokens to start picking these things up.
But with the feathered cape in particular, there’s a balance concern. The feathered cape allows its wearer to fly. It exactly duplicates the racial ability of the sylphs. While we were okay giving this ability to non-sylph players for a limited duration, allowing them to keep it long-term will make that racial ability pointless.
When Raganim implemented the racial abilities, he worked pretty hard to ensure that races which are less desireable and less commonly played had more interesting racial abilities to help balance things out. (This is, incidentally, why lamia have the most useless racial in the game.)
So, to answer the question, yes. I have thoughts on changing it. My thoughts are that it will not be changed, because a lot of work and consideration were put into the design decisions which have made it the way it is now.
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