Balancing

Hello i got a question if somebody could help me :

How's the best way to set item prices in a AoS to be balanced ?

In my case the standard gold drop is 50~ can u help me ?

Exell doc, calculate how much money one could theoratically make over how much time, and decide how fast you want people to increase in power compared to the experience and levels they would have gained from killing that same amount of monsters.

Nope wrong answer, calculating never works.

Just give your items some approximated costs,
and then play your map over and over until you find out:
what items people abuse - so you can nerf them or increase the price
what items people never buy - so you can boost them or reduce price.

I'd go with the excel calculations. You can approximate the amount of gold and experience a player will have at any given time and decide what kind of bonuses they should have given that gold. Maybe at level 6 you want them to have either 2 "ok" items OR 5 "starter items", and at level 6 their gold will be around 1500, so make your starter items cost 300 and your OK items cost 750.

After you get your base prices, tweak them as you see fit. Remember to consider the value of an item slot as well, an item that gives 50 agility should cost a lot more than 10 items that give 5 agility since you can only carry 6 items.

I'd go with remove items from it.

I always wanted to do that... so I did!

I'm all for theoretical practice, so I'd go with a spreadsheet as well. Alternatively, you could go the other way around, first choose item costs and then tweak the player income. I did this for a map idea I never finished, I wanted the ultimate items to cost 1000 gold because that's such a nice number, so that was my starting point and everything else was made to fit that.

Well for now I'm doing the approximate method then ill check out how does it work :D well right now i have few more things do to and there should be the first release of the titan arena ... i just hope ppl will like it :( so its not a total waste of time :P

It's my opinion that the effort and time you spend making a spreadsheet (which is not the real thing) could be spent getting as much progress as testing. You'd be surprised how enlightening a single map test with friends can be, and how inaccurate the 'predictions' are. Emphasis on 'opinion'.

Winging it with approximate values, then adjusting to fix problems, will work well enough for your purposes. It forces you to do a lot of testing and you'll get an intuition for the map.

However, having an accurate existing spread sheet makes it a lot easier to add new items later on and have them be balanced on the first try. It will also give you a grasp on the theory behind how the map.

Yup i agree 50 % percent of a map making is testing :D
most bugs can be only found playing a lot :) but there is 1 thing that is important : to find testers that have strange ideas of testing that guys find the most strange bugs :P