How I would handle Crafting Specializations and Masterworking/Enchanting

Some initial considerations:

• Devs need some element of randomness to prevent the economy from being flooded with perfect items
  
• Devs need to encourage specialization to foster trade amongst crafters
  
• Players need some measure of control and predictability over the output of their crafts
  
• Players need the investment of experience into specialization and masterwork skills to be meaningful
  
• Crafting is heavily focused on the concept of components being combined to create items

I see the simple solution as moving the randomness from the item property level to the intensity of modifier and incorporating the addition of ingredients to control what item property is applied.

These masterworking and enchanting ingredients would be possess a range (X to Y) of possible intensity and be categorized into Tiers. For example: a common Pristine Bear Paw might grant a blade a 5% to 10% damage increase on whirling blades, whereas an uncommon Pristine Bear Paw might grant a blade a 7.5% - 15% damage increase on whirling blades--essentially (X + A/2 to Y + A) as you move from tier to tier.

What this also allows for is gating access to more powerful components behind skill requirements for masterworking and/or specialization such that only the experienced and specialized crafters could work with the most powerful of ingredients, but unspecialized crafters could still create meaningful crafts.

How would this impact the current skills?

• Base Masterwork skills would still determine the success rate of masterworking attempts
  
• Item Type Masterwork skills would increase the minimum value of the intensity range
  
• Specialization would have the following impacts:
  
  • Increase overall success rate for crafting items for that skill
    
  • Increase amount of durability restored when repairing
    
  • Increase the chance of recovering components and materials when salvaging
    
  • Increase the overall success rate for masterworking
    
  • Further raise the minimum value of the intensity range

There should come a point where with enough experience applied to masterworking and specialization skills that the crafter would be guaranteed to achieve the maximum intensity for Tier 1 and possibly Tier 2 ingredients with a successful masterworking attempt. Referring back to the above common Pristine Bear Paw example, with 100 Masterwork Blade Weapon and 100 Blacksmithing Specialization, the range would be 5% (+ 2.5% + 2.5%) to 10% damage increase on whirling blades--hence 10% to 10% intensity.

Randomness of item power would still be maintained and controlled by an exponential intensity curve, such that resulting crafts will most commonly be found in the lower half of the range, but the results would be predictable and manageable for players.

Other Changes

Masterworking and enchanting should be moved to a new series of crafting stations (still tied to their original skill) so that crafters can have a more meaningful UI for this important process. Here is a rough mockup:

 

Very nice design, @Oakenhammer.

@Bzus @Chris

 

Great Ideas Oakenhammer too bad they fall on deaf ears ... I gotta say '' Just rerolls '' for crafting spec its like that movie ..'' Give them nothing but take from them everything '' ... Crafters bear the burden of huge losses when creating an item , we have a huge chunk of ingame gold sinks attached and as a reward for specialising what do we get ? Rerrolls .

 

For me this is the key to making gear crafting work, not every craft needs to be perfect or the most powerful item I can ever create with my skills, but every craft should be useful as it is what I designed to build for a given deck/char build.

Regards
Spung

 

That is really cool! Nice Job @Oakenhammer

 

Elrond, You are not considering how much time and effort the dev's spent finding the perfect solution that can be said with a straight face but yet fixes nothing and satisfied no one. In all seriousness though, I think I agree with your sentiment on this topic. They found a band aid, stuck it on there and are considering this problem solved. On to figuring out what other rusty worn out crap drops we can add to the game and then make patterns from.

There may be some unseen coding limits blocking what the community would consider an adequate fix, but the utter lack of transparency or any real form of communication or dialogue is very frustrating. We spend a good deal of time discussing various fixes and possible solutions and there is no acknowledgement that anyone has even bothered to look at them. Even a discounting based on any reason they want to give would be better than silence, lip service and re-rolls.

 

I think what you're describing would definitely be a lot better than what we have.

Tbh I don't even see any reason why specialization is necessary to have a better system where people who invest a lot of time and effort in a specific thing have more to show for it. Just having less steep diminishing returns in the current system would help to do that.

Specs make a lot more sense for combat, because the benefits happen in combat. The benefits from crafting specs are permanently imbued onto items that give the same advantages to anyone that uses them, regardless of spec. That just makes multi accounting ridiculously effective relative to putting in a bunch of time and effort crafting on one account.

 

It was actually said in a live stream when they delayed crafting specialisation that they where going to

1) Discuss what to do internally.
2) Make a plan by the end of that release.
3) Share it with the community for feedback.
4) (They didn't actually say this, but I assumed it was implied, else why share it?) Refine plan based on feedback.
5) Then it may take a few releases to fully implement.

Have seen no evidence of 3 and 4.


Regards
Spung

 

Not just rerolls... rerolls with another gold sink. I think all the devs started smoking crack since they're working from home now. That's the only reasonable explanation that I can come up with for their new plan.

Nice job @Oakenhammer I like this idea, if only we could re-roll the devs and pick you.

 

I think it went more like this

Hey, any ideas about fixing crafting?... Umm Crafting is broken?

So, Great job getting all these rusty patterns in for the next release guys! Lets see, whats next?... Ah Crafting, Plan? (Crickets) , Just tell them we will give them whatever they want.

You can pick your own stuff now!!

Oh, wait... Um no picking your own stuff.. How bout re-rolls?

TBD

 

Now, that's a bit unfair. Some of them might be using meth.