New Zoo & Armory Levels: Worth the hassle?

With the recent addition of new levels in the Private Zoo and Armory, many players are asking whether the new items are worth the pain of collecting all the parts needed for the upgrade. When my buddy Michael J asked this question on the Mistyfied Mafia Wars fan page, it made me think "that's a good question!"

He wrote: 

Sorry to hog the feed! I'm curious as to other opinions concerning updating Zoo and Armory shops from level 10 to level 15. It seems to me the only advantage is extra parts to collect, but the buildable items don't do anything better than the current ones available at level 10? [Assuming you build Shark for +3 attack, and Full Body Armor for +1 attack and defense, I guess?] Your thoughts will help me decide how important it is; I thank you in advance!

Personally, I utilize these property builds for the items that increase my permanent skills. As you can see, the original +3 attack item, the Tiger Shark, only requires 28 animal feeds and 1 exotic animal feed to craft. The new item requires 44 animal feeds and 4 exotic animal feeds. The new Coconut Crab has slightly better stats equipment-wise than the Tiger Shark. Meh to the eh. 

Same story with the +3 defense items. A significant increase in the needed animal feed and exotic animal feed, and a slight improvement in equipment stats.

 

For the +20 health item, it's again the same story: higher cost in animal feed and exotic animal feed, slight equipment stats improvement. 

For me, animal feed is not a problem. The exotic animal feed is a different story, but I still never have a problem obtaining them. I just post a free gift link for it to my news feed and a few minutes later enough players have taken that free gift and returned it.

As for the item stats, I suppose they're ok. It's fun to have all the "best" equipment, but since skill points account for the majority of your character's strength, I'd suggest building the items that add to your skill points.

Since all of the new Private Zoo items supply equal skills to items that we were already able to build, the trade-up is in the loot stats. Some players care about loot, others don't. I suspect many will just continue with building the animals they were already building, if they were only after the skills.

 As with the Private Zoo, the Armory also saw a couple of items added which do not give you any permanent skill increase when you craft them. 

These skills were available with pre-existing builds:
+10 Health
+1 att / +1 def
+2 nrg / +2 stam
+1 att
+1 def
+1 stam

If you're after skillz, then building the Desert Eye is silly, because there's already a better item +2 energy / +2 stamina that can be built for fewer parts.

Where we do see an improvement is the addition of the +3 attack and +3 defense items, which is considerably better that what is given by the pre-existing items.

So to answer your question Michael J, the armory upgrades do provide better opportunities for building skill points. The Private Zoo offers only better equipment stats, for the same skill increase :)