Feldon Marks of Manaar are the heroic armor/jewelry/weapon-buying “currency” of Sentinel’s Fate. Much like the Void Shards of The Shadow Odyssey, Marks of Manaar allow players to buy baseline armor, jewelry, weapons, charms, cloaks, etc. although those players should continue to run dungeons in the hopes of finding rarer, more powerful items.
In The Shadow Odyssey, entire armor sets were available on “Void Shard” merchants. These merchants were all located in one place (Moors of Ykesha), and offered complete sets of armor in Tier 1, Tier 2 (+crit mit), Tier 3 (Ward of Elements), and Tier 4 (TSO x4 raid zone armor). The bonuses of these armor sets were so powerful that finding replacement armor was rare.
In Sentinel’s Fate, item upgrades are scattered amongst “Marks of Manaar” merchants, dungeons, x2 raids, and x4 raids. There aren’t really the same powerful sets of armor, which gives more options for itemization, at the cost of players needing to do a lot more research (and studying loot websites such as LootDB and EQ2 ZAM) to discover all the options.
It’s also worth noting that in Sentinel’s Fate, there are two sets of Marks of Manaar merchants. The “Tier 1” merchants are located in the city of Paineel. The “Tier 2” merchants are sequestered away in Moonfield Hamlet. A recent Game Update added another vendor in Moonfield with many of the powerful items from dungeons available for purchase with Marks of Manaar. This was done on the basis that entirely new items would be added to the dungeons to keep up interest in plundering them.
Today we have an update from Rich Waters on the subject:
I don’t have details to share right now, but we’re likely adding more things to buy with marks in the next game update. So if you have extra marks, it’s worth holding on to them.
Im Hoping they add more things to the Raid Token vendor – after buying the sublime weapons and upgrading the armor im left with a surplus of these…
hopefully the remaining armour slot items that are near impossible to get outside of begging for alts in instances (legs, head, ).
I’ve preferred teh token method of armour aquisition since they introduced it in TSO, you can happily play your main and not have to beg for items for alts, because you know that your makinfg enough tokens to outright buy those items at a later date, groups get the classes they want, and instances get run faster because of it.
This token system works great for the time being, but if yet another token system is introduced in velious, I think this is getting kind of silly at this point. Either some kind of token conversion will need to be introduced, or some rework of the current itemization system, especially previous tier content.
I just wish they’d allow us to trade in void shards for marks. Gaining void shards for running level 90 dungeons (Befallen etc) is ridiculous.
The marks of Manaar thing just didn’t work at all for me this expansion, while I do not raid I still did not find one item worth buying from the Moonfield vendor much less the T1 (which was worse then my then current T2 voidshard armour).
Its probably the cancellation of the item degredation thats mostly to blame for it, but also the decision to put fabled items on the BG vendor and to try and split raid and non-raid itemisation up in a extreme way (no resists etc) that resulted in a lacklustre mark system.
I guess that they could put equivalent PVE gear to the BG gear in terms of stats on the mark of Manaar vendors since its already out there, long term though there is a hell of a big correction needed in itemisation (either that or we will need 2-3 more stats to allow us to upgrade).
They went back and put resists on all gear, and they put yellow adornment slots on Marks of Manaar gear. If you haven’t looked at Marks of Manaar gear since before GU56, it’s worth another look. A lot changed.