The appearance of Intermediate Magic Essence Armor Plates immediately set off a frenzy.
News of the Candlelight Trading Company spread like a virus. In just over ten minutes, the already cooling hype surged back to life, and players grew even more frantic than before.
The Light Stone was merely a common item. While helpful to players, it didn't actually boost their stats — it was an auxiliary item. But Magic Essence Armor Plates were different. These were genuine stat-boosting items, and the boost was far from trivial.
Many elite squads and elite team players out in the field did only one thing upon receiving the news — rush back to the city to buy from the Candlelight Trading Company. If they were too late, others would snatch everything up, just like with the Basic Magic Essence Armor Plates, which had already become the stuff of legend.
In those legends, many players had risen to become today's powerhouses simply because they'd managed to grab Basic Magic Essence Armor Plates early on. Some ordinary teams had transformed into today's top-tier teams, capable of challenging Hard Difficulty team dungeons and even Hell Difficulty team dungeons — though Hell Difficulty team dungeons were limited to ten-man instances.
Twenty-man team dungeons were far too difficult for the average independent player. The gear requirements were prohibitively high, and the skill threshold was equally steep — only a handful of guild elite teams could manage it.
"Leader, I just heard the news — those Intermediate Magic Essence Armor Plates are highway robbery! Five gold coins each! Even if we wanted to buy them, we couldn't afford it!"
"They are expensive, but we have to buy them no matter what — even if we have to borrow the money. Last time we missed out on the Basic Magic Essence Armor Plates, I regretted it for ages. You know how it is in team dungeons — it often comes down to just a sliver of damage or defense short of clearing. We just couldn't improve our gear, and a few lucky teams managed to snag three Basic Magic Essence Armor Plates. They brute-forced their way past the boss."
"Now one Intermediate Magic Essence Armor Plate is worth three Basic ones. If our MT gets three of them equipped, that dungeon boss will go down easy. And won't we earn it all back then?"
……
Many independent teams in the field maps sprang into action. Those who could pool their money did so, and those with deeper pockets headed to the Virtual Trading Center to buy gold coins first.
For elite teams, scraping together five gold coins was relatively easy, but fifteen was a different story. Even so, they gritted their teeth and scraped up the fifteen gold — painful as it was.
After all, the stat boost from an extra piece of level 25 Dark Gold equipment was simply too massive for an MT.
A typical twenty-man Normal team dungeon dropped Iron Rank equipment at best, with Mythril Rank appearing only with absurd luck. Each dungeon had three to four bosses, each dropping two or three pieces of equipment. On average, that meant ten pieces of Iron Rank gear, plus dropped currency and mob loot — a total haul of four to five gold coins per Normal team dungeon.
And that was before deducting the team's various expenses and experience losses, so the actual profit wasn't much at all.
What's more, that had to be split twenty ways, leaving even less for each person.
But the rewards from Hard Difficulty team dungeons were on a completely different level. Bosses almost always dropped at least one piece of Mythril Rank equipment — sometimes even two. Even the mobs had a chance of dropping Iron Rank gear. Better yet, only Hard Difficulty dungeons dropped certain essential raw materials. Combine all the income sources, and a single dungeon run could net over ten gold coins — more than double the returns of a Normal dungeon.
This made many public teams drool with envy. Running Normal dungeons was barely enough to fill your stomach, but clearing a Hard Difficulty dungeon? That was living high on the hog.
Every time you walked into a bar, you'd find some impressive team monopolizing the place to celebrate clearing a Hard Difficulty team dungeon. It was enough to make anyone jealous.
Now that everyone had this chance, they were naturally willing to fight tooth and nail for it.
In an instant, the entire Candlelight Trading Company was mobbed by players — though most of them were just there to claim their spot in line.
That's right — just to claim a spot.