I
turned off my auto-repair. The current cost of repair is 7% of original value.
My Heavy equipment: (Total: 138856 Repair: 0~9717)
Milanese Plate - 31632 (2214)
Milanese Sallet - 8811 (616)
Cased Greaves - 4262 (298)
Plate Mittens -10817 (757)
Longsword - 6660 (466)
Steel Shield - 10422 (729)
Long Dagger - 390 (27)
Dagger - 260 (18)
Plated Charger - 65602 (4592)
My Lite-Heavy equipment: (Total: 91434 Repair: 0 ~ 6395)
Red Coat of Plates - 15012 (1050)
Sallet with Visor and Coif - 8811 (616)
Rus Cavalry Boots - 206 (14)
Mail Gauntlets - 3427 (239)
Longsword - 6660 (466)
Plate Covered Round Shield - 4156 (290)
Long Dagger - 390 (27)
Dagger - 260 (18)
Charger - 52512 (3675)
Well, since auto-repair is turned off, that means I can use the equipments until they are completely in Unusable states, literally. (Except my Plated Charger, Stubborn (-1) requires 7 riding, which I can only use my +1 Well Bred Plated Charger until it's Stubborn)
I earn about 10k~20k of gold before I have to manually repair all my broken junks, which covers the repair cost and have excess gold earned.
But at some point, armors/weapons at -2 or -3 states are almost as useless as Unusable, so I can see why we only need to
pay once to repair an item from -3 to 0 (or +1, +2).
I've been manually repairing ever since first generation, and I can say I have not lost any gold or have any finance problem.
The downside is, if your weapon is -2 (Cracked for 2H), it reduces the speed and dmg so much that I just repair it before its unusable.
You see, with auto-repair on, you have to pay for every single time the equipments are damaged, while it's off, you only have to pay 'once' to fix a completely unusable item back to normal.