Making a crafter mean something - instead of skill should be Also per Item

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by odyssey2003, Mar 24, 2021.

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  1. odyssey2003

    odyssey2003 Avatar

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    As others have mentioned in another post a crafters time seems to be worth very little at the moment especially when Chris has nerf the whiskey and other things to come. I have invested a lot on whiskey and my whiskey is no better than anyone else in the game and that should NOT BE as now I have no one to sell it too as anyone can make it with the same stats!

    right now almost everyone is self sufficient and that is what is truly killing things for crafting and its because its per skill level and not per item. if we changed that so that it take both skill level and item experience to be able to make it so that it be of any good then that would make the difference that may change the game so that it makes being a crafter worth it as players will want to buy from a crafter rather then invest all the time it takes to make that item themselves.

    So the food buff on " Bear Surprise" for instance would have a much better buff stat coming from a person whom has made 100k of it compared to non crafter that has made 100 times.

    Also remove that RNG of the making of armor and weapons. so many of us disagree with it as it makes no sense having it as its really not necessary and just creates waste of time and its really not fun. perhaps make NPC fights more brutal towards armor and weapons if there is not enough role over.

    You make a sword 100k times with a very high skill level then you will be able to make a kick ass sword ( but you will not be able to make other weapons just because you have the skill level ! you must also have item experience.

    At the moment I should have one of the highest stats on whiskey as I have invested a crap load of time on it. this would make me feel a whole lot better about the nerf that was done on whiskey as I deserve it for all the time I have put in it and anyone else that has put a ton of time into an item like I have in whiskey!.
     
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  2. cikken

    cikken Avatar

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    My goal has been to be able to explore and fight in different, higher level, challenging scenes. To accomplish that goal, I need to make my skills and my gear stronger. I have been reading on this forum about optimal builds and gear. I am starting to get somewhere with my build now that I am adventure level 103. In the last few weeks, I have been able to fight in the front part of Ulfheim with a pet. I had originally envisioned my character as a leather wearing archer. Once I started doing tier 4/5 scenes, it became painfully obvious that a pure, leather wearing archer was not going to be able to cut it without significant investments into some of the magic based skill trees. From further research of forums and wikis, I realized I would need to take some of these magic skills into the 130/140 range to make an effective defense with leather armor. I could not see myself stagnating in tier 4/5 (and only some of them possible) zones for the foreseeable future at my then current daily xp rate. So I needed some skill tree or trees that I could take to GM to get me over the hump and still remain an archer. With a lot more reading and searching, I remembered that I had played around with taming earlier and had gotten those skills to the 60/80 range and no specialization. I decided to GM all of the taming skills needed to control/summon a pet and to GM taming specialization. So I took advantage of the double xp week and got almost all of those skills to GM. It was still not good enough. I could barely handle a wyvern and reaper if I provided the DPS (while the pet tanked) and a whole lot of pet healing. So I decided to work real hard for a couple of weeks to save up 25,000,000 xp to raise the taming specialization to GM. Now my pet tanks those same wyverns and reapers comfortable. The pet can even pull them off of me as long as I don't do any damage if I get the aggro. I am finally seeing a path that may one day take me to a pure, leather wearing archer. But it is not without its perils. 5 or 10 seconds of having a wyvern attacking me will take around half of my health.

    But,

    What about my gear? The limitations I am encountering in Ulfheim is showing me that I need better fitted gear. How do I afford the prices to have gear made that fits my build? I have currently been buying gear in the 10-30K range that sort of helps me. Since I am only able to make around 10k a day from a tier 5 zone with vendor sellable drops, (I make very little from Ulfheim as far as vendor sellable loot goes) it is kind of hard to save up for gear pieces on vendors that match what I need better when they are selling for 100k+ a piece. I imagine a custom ordered set would be outrageously expensive for me. So that leaves me with the choice of to either try to level the crafting skills myself or farm something like silver ore to sell to other players. From reading this post and other crafting posts, I can see that raising crafting skills is a huge gold sink even if I farm most of the materials myself. Repetitively farming silver ore or some other crafting material over and overs, does not seem like an enjoyable way to spend my time. (I do realize that I will need to do that farming regardless of whether I craft it myself or have someone craft it for me.) Right now, raising crafting as I can afford it as I go seems to be the best path forward. It seems almost unsurmountable to buy one very good set of armor much less that same set over again as the duration of the original set wears away. This economy does not make it easy for an almost pure adventurer to make headway. And the changes that I have been reading about that make it harder to be self sufficient as a crafter does not seem to help. So I guess I will muddle along. But there seems like there should be a way for crafters to make money and sell their wares to an adventurer on an adventurer's salary.

    (I realize that I am way behind where most of the existing server population is at and that is partly why everything is so expensive to me. The average player is much higher level and more established with the ability to make much more daily gold. But there should be a way for a newer player to make headway in the current economy.)
     
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  3. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    I appreciate the thought of this post, thank you very much for making it. While some of the changes you propose would benefit me greatly (I am primarily a crafter in game, and have put many resources into it) I am not sure I agree with most of them.

    As a crafter I am certainly not self-sufficient. I buy 10s of thousands of ore and wood every month, and hundreds of beetles, thousands of carcasses. Recent changes (removing pecan nuts, cinnamon bark, and browncap mushrooms off of vendors) have also greatly improved this situation. It would take me hundreds of hours a day to gather the things I use in crafting.

    I also make tons of gear for folks and sell lots of food, sometimes in 1k or even 10k stacks to resellers. Others out there are not self sufficient either, and it's evidenced by their consumption; I believe the fine purveyors of Eat More and Succeed could also attest to a hungry Novia.


    The first problem here is a logistical one. Either there is a different stackable food item for every possible stat level, or even more unwieldy, those 100k bear surprise would take up 334 trunks, which I believe is roughly the container limit on a Castle lot. It also makes a nearly impenetrable pay-to-play wall (not in RMT terms, I mean in-game resources) for anyone to break into the market. I have a barrel of 100s of thousands of food sitting inside my Lava Lunch shop.

    If I can churn out that quantity as a high level crafter I can also afford to sell it incredibly cheap. At the moment I mostly charge roughly my cost, and cook largely for the crafting XP. If I, or someone like me, can supply the entire game's population with food that's significantly better than what most anyone else can make, and can do it at cost, what incentive or even reasonable means do other crafters have to break into the market? They would never be able to compete, and to even try they would have to eat (hehe) massive losses for an extended period.

    The devs have recently made big strides in making crafting more accessible. Enchanting trains faster on fewer ingots than it used to, item durability is guaranteed, crafting XP from meticulous collection is much more easily earned, and new crafting jewels make buffs to both gathering and production cheap and available. I'd be worried creating such a barrier to entry into some markets would contradict some of this great work.


    This is so much of the fun of crafting for me! I doubt I'm in a majority there, but I have changed an opinion or two, and hope to see more people embrace the RNG nature of the crafting system. It leads to fantastic strategy and skill, which brings us to:


    To craft truly great pieces you really do have to be a skilled crafter. You can get stats close to those of the masters with much less XP, but the true skill is in mitigating risk and understanding the RNG, in knowing builds and knowing what stats to apply, in making weighted decisions about masterwork/enchant order to boost beneficial skills or apply them in an order that preserves durability for future rolls. Changing between the masterwork and enchant tables as a piece evolves to get the most out of your blanks and ingots in accordance with the rolls received.

    This is already a very long response (sorry, I love this subject) so I won't carry on too much. At the risk of a little self promotion, I'll link to a video where I talk a lot about why I love the gear making side of crafting, and go over the basics of some of the skills it requires- the ones that aren't just numbers on a stats page.


    I for sure understand this feeling of investing a lot of time and effort into something and having the reward be greatly reduced. In terms of whisky, it's still profitable (and was recently given two large profit boosts, including a nice one just yesterday) and honestly I'm thankful we still have it. There are very good reasons the devs like to keep profitable crafting loops minimal, even the very labor intensive ones like whiskey production.

    As much as I grind out food and, yes, lots of whiskey, I am mostly a gear focused crafter. The recent changes that I praised above have made it easier to be a crafter, and gear crafting at a high level is differentiated very little by stats. It's many fewer hours of work to become a high level crafter than when I started, and because ore mining is both amazing XP and also so very highly profitable, it's also one of the most lucrative things for a new player to do. These changes have, in a sense, undermined (hehe, sorry) all the work I've put into crafting. But the truth is, they are a good thing. Other folks want to have a way to craft, they want to have a reason to craft, and now they have both these things.

    There are still improvements to be made to the system, and even with tons of work from the devs it will never be perfect, it never could be perfect for everyone. The changes over the last few releases have been excellent. I am excited to see where these new alchemy avenues lead, and the road beyond.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2021
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  4. odyssey2003

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    In my opinion there is a balancing issue when it come to roles or role playing. and example of such as a while back one of my guildies was hunting down the clockwork dragon. He was getting so much ingots that he was getting more than if he went and mined it! he did the right thing and told the devs this and they lowered it but there are still many off balance's in this game as to date that needs rectified.

    As one of my characters is a crafter I figured I would go for the long haul and instead of strength of character I would invest in time and slowly build up inventory to sell. So I invested in whiskey barrels after barrel and chopping wood and also buying it so that one day it would pay off, 2 1 /2 later after having Ten of thousands of barrels the devs decide too much money being made by this and they nerf it to a point that its no longer really worth as one can easily make much much more hunting in a level 8 or 10 area.( Which is not that hard to do if you have been playing for about a year )

    The money I was actually making was per month and not per day and also it was not NET it was brute as I was also buying some of the stuff such as wood,barley and sometime iron. So I was not making any more than someone else investing in fighting in areas at very high levels making $250.000 a day or more! I was not even making a fraction of that but the devs still nerf it. To this day I still don't know why they figure it was needed BUT one things for sure it makes it seems that fighting in this game is the preferred way to make money UNLESS you are monopolizing crafting in someway of form which old timers have a clear advantage on due time to advance leaving younger players will little chance.

    NOTE: They are working on balancing now and have been for many release now so we will see how it unfolds. I still have high hopes for better crafting balancing so that there are many ways for make a decent living in this game if you put time and effort into it and hope that TIME spent is actually worth something in the future.
     
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  5. Elrond

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    Making a crafter mean something

    Not gonna happen ... As Darkstarr once said in a stream ... People would riot .... the ones who cant be bothered with gathering xp ...
     
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  6. Lars vonDrachental

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    I personally prefer a system where your specialisation has meaning and this way not everyone can achieve everything. But I guess it is difficult to transmit that even if you are not the best your work is not worthless. The most basic solution for transmitting your work is not worthless would be if NPCs would buy crafted items for a reasonable profit. This way you might find some player to pay for your product but most of the time you might just sell to an NPC...but I guess the changing prices for resources are still a problem that needs constantly adjustment and this way the NPC prices would have to be e.g. dynamically calculated on this days/weeks/months/years average sales prices of the needed resources and a small addition for profit.
    Just a short idea but a possible way of specialisation could be the counting of your avatars recipe usages. E.g. you have to at least create something a fixed number of times (e.g. min 200). The first recipe that is reaching this number is getting your personal crafting specialisation recipe and similar to exception items you are able to create masterly items while crafting. Just the highest recipe counter is defining you specialisation. If your specialisation is currently Cainmail Boots with 243 crafted items you would need at least 244 crafted Dragon Stew to change your specialisation. I personally would suggest that this kind of single recipe specialisation is active across all crafting skills as this would create the most interaction between avatars.
     
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