D&D 3E/3.5 Wings of Flying - 3.0 vs. 3.5

[MerakSpielman]

Now, this has probably been discussed before, but I missed it.

Our DM gave us, as a reward for completing a quest, any single magical item worth under 8000gp. We're officially playing a 3.5 campaign, but we still have our 3.0 books, and since we were all shopping for our reward item at once, some of us were looking at the old 3.0 DMG. We figured, how different could they be, right? A few minor differences in price, sure, but nothing tremendously unbalancing.

So the player of a wizard, looking at the 3.0 DMG, picks out a Wings of Flying. It costs 5600gp, but it was a nice item and he thought it would be fun. Nobody really thinks twice about this decision, or thinks it's unusual in any way.

Then, looking through the 3.5 DMG a few days later, we notice that the price for the Wings of Flying has increased to 56,000gp. It's gone up by a factor of TEN!

We have no idea why. Perhaps it WAS underpriced before, but surely it wasn't THAT underpriced.

What gives?

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Wings of Flying allow you to fly an unlimited number of times a day, for an unlimited duration each time, regardless of encumbrance. Were they truly 5600gp in 3.0? It seems an insanely cheap price for what it does...

 

[dcollins]

My original printing of the 3.0 DMG says 5,500 gp.
Official 3.0 DMG Errata changed that to 22,000 gp, for what it's worth.

I believe that 3.5 the fly spell was changed radically reducing the duration, correct? Which would imply that all-day flying ability from the wings would become that much more valuable, relatively speaking. (Personally we still play and prefer the 3.0 rules.)

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

IIRC, the 3.0 Wings of Flying had a 20' wingspan, so they could not be counted on in your typical dungeon-crawl. The 3.5 Wings allow you to "always" be flying a 60' move, good maneuverability. That is a big boost for the grunt in platemail, even after paying the price for a less than perfect maneuverablity.

 

[sullivan]

Wings of Flying allow you to fly an unlimited number of times a day, for an unlimited duration each time, regardless of encumbrance. Were they truly 5600gp in 3.0? It seems an insanely cheap price for what it does...

That was a screw-up that, as dcollins mentions, was errataed. The 3.0 Winged Boots only allowed 2 hours/day and cost 12,000gp. Maybe the 3.0 authors thought that the 20' wingspan was balancing enough, but that's only for indoor deeds. Outside no way. Plus magic item costs aren't really that much about balance when you do the custom cost calculations. So having an item that far out of wack causes benchmarking problems and such.

P.S. That isn't the only sub-8,000gp item that was seriously tweaked from 3.0 to 3.5. Boots of Striding and Leaping and Kicking Butt got errataed in 3.0, and then seriously toned down in 3.5. Also a lot of the skill bonuses got lowered between 3.0 and 3.5, for example Boots of Elven Kind.