Wolf/bear hat nerf - profits somewhat misleading...

I see that wolf hat profits are getting nerfed.

Previously it took 32g of crafting fuel (16g curing salt, 16g wax) to create one wolf hat. You could sell these wolf hats for 100g...to process them in bulk required a lot of upfront crafting fuel. In order to make them you also needed to:

Go kill wolves, then skin them. (not making money)

Instead of selling the hides on a vendor you have to process them into leather, then into leather straps. (which takes time and costs you money from buying fuel)

Then finally you combine the straps with wax to make the hats (time, not making money)

Finally you have to sell them at the vendor. The reason the profits are misleading is there is a lot of time involved in farming the wolf heads and hides before you actually get any profit, and when you do get profit...it's all at once. So maybe you end up with 20k in profit, but then you have to re-invest a chunk of that profit back into crafting materials.

Guessing the profit will be reduced even further by 25% .. sigh.

 

Here is what I had written up for costs...

100g per wolf hat.

Costs: 2 Curing Salts (16g), 4 Wax (16g), 1 Wolf Head, 1 Animal Hide (2 to make 2 leather, but only need 1 leather for the 2 straps), Tanning Knife (2 Uses 1.6g), Tailoring Scissors/Bone Needle (1 use each 1.6g) = ~ 35 gold assuming no failures. Each failure costs ~-9-17 gold depending on step. At 89 Tailoring (Skill Window level, + Gold Engaved Tools on Benefactor Craft stations) it is common for me to fail one to four attempts out of 20.

In an hour and half, I had collected 30 heads and enough animal hide for the craft. Little other loot because animals drop nothing else. Spent half an hour crafting. Sold items for 3k + another 500g in random loot from other NPCs that were between me and more wolves. Had to restock reagents as well.

Rather than nerfing wolf hats, other craftables should come up in price to be worth at least a little more than their base item costs. The NPC economy makes little sense in that potions are valued at 40g but often require 60g+ worth of reagents.

I cannot sell these crafted items to players because the amount of items I need to raise skill is far far more than any player demand could ever make up. Even if I was the only tailor in the game.

 

If you can craft something, that NPC's will pay you more for than they would for all the materials, and fuels combined, then you have found a bug.
You are only supposed to be able to craft to sell to NPC's for a profit in offline mode.
Online mode, you must sell to players to make a profit on a crafted good, otherwise all refining and crafting are intended to be a time and gold sink.

Congradulations on finding this bug, and getting to use it before being fixed, but dont expect to be able to keep making a profit selling bear and wolf hats to npc's.

 

I call BS.

 

Poor thing, your are in for a world of tears...
Watch any dev hangout, any A.M.A, any chat log, or even ask @Chris yourself.
It has been explained over and over, That Refining, and Crafting are by design time and gold sinks, designed to remove original gold out of the economy.
Only by selling to other players, does the transfer of gold make a profit for the crafter, sales to NPC's of crafted goods is by design a money losing action. (except in Offline mode which is supposed to be the only place that is a profitable action)

here's a good post about why it's that way https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/time-to-talk-about-economy.21848/

 

If this is the intent we need to fix the pre-requisite number of items needed to advance in skill. When hitting 80+ you are crafting more items than player demand could ever reach, which is really bad design if you actually want player crafting as part of your economy.

 

I believe, most people gather with gathering skills turned off, to build up massive producer xp pools, before crafting 80+, that way they get a skill point every attempt or two, (e.g. less than 30 items crafted to go from 80-100)

Or they continue to use locked repair/salvaging to raise it instead.

E.g. I raised my Blacksmithing to 80 just by salvaging stuff, before I crafted anything.

 

What is considered a massive crafting pool? I do this and build up 100K crafting XP pools and then need to make 40-50 items for a single level in the 80s - currently at 89 (in addition to salvaging 20-30 items, with my refinement skills locked to recover some of the xp spent on salvage).

 

million +
Anything over 300k will see the Proportional Xp spend of 70+ skills kick nicely.
But that's only good for a few clicks then you need to get some more xp.

 

So being able to make a bit of profit via crafting means, even if it was significantly less money per hour than adventuring (and requiring adventuring itself to acquire the materials), is a bug?
That really disheartens me about the entire vision of the game. Crafting is meant to be a black hole of gold and the only way to afford it is to spend hours grinding? That sucks.

 

It seems my expectation of what a good crafting XP pool looked like was way off then. Well, guess I needed a lot of silver ore to up my masterworking anyways...

Any tips on filling craft XP pools faster? My current method is the mines where I get about 500xp per ore and 100xp per crystal. Mining is locked in at 60 - not sure if changing that would affect XP per tap or not. But I know unlocking it eats more XP than gained typically.

Thanks for the tip!

 

Depends on what your goal is. It takes remarkably little skill to be able to craft basic products. Certainly 10 hours invested will give you the skill to create almost any product you want - I believe some of the houses take a bit more skill. However, if you aren't OK with stopping at 65 skill then yes, you have to grind. If it was easy for people to do, there'd be no economy. Everyone would just make their own stuff.

 

I think the problem being brought up is that the only realistic way to advance as a craftsman is to be an npc hunter. It isn't just a matter of doing more of X to become an awesome X.

 

No the only way to afford it, is to actually have Player customers. And be very very smart about how you level it.

Right now, everyone is a crafter because they can't afford to buy crafted goods, so you have tons and tons of downward pressure on the price of crafted goods, as people forget trying to make a profit and instead strive to lose less money, and push other crafters out of the market.
Which makes the value of Gathered Resources greater than the value of crafted goods in the player market as well as the NPC market.
Today everyone has a dream of "being the best" crafter and the are blowing tons and tons of coin and time to get there.

6 months from now, the crafter market will look more like what you are expecting, right now, everyone is striving to be a "big fish in a little pond".

I think everyone will eventurally figure out they should get to adventure level 50, so they can gather any material they want or need. And all crafters are going to be gatherers/farmers of one sort or another just because of how much easier it makes leveling refining/producing skills.

For maximum xp per hour, with least amount of xp invested, and I didn't plan to actually be a miner.
I would take Mining skill to 90% chance to mine (mid 70s) , swiftness to 80, and leave meticulous at 0 and survey at zero. (you earn no xp for failures only spend it so 90% success is a good place to target, more or less depending on what you are comfortable with)

Invest in a swiftness potion, and then dedicate that week to mining. with all locked mining skills.
If I got a meticulous proc, I would jump to interrupt it, that will give you the second harvest, and your xp and cost you no additional time per node.

Then I would go into my favorite mine.
If that mine is based on the Graff Gem mines template. (easier to clear but never safe)
I would run down to the final Gem room and mine all the ore first (500 xp), and skip gems, then while waiting on ore to spawn cherry pick the most valuble gems (100xp), I wouldn't loot any elementals I had to kill to slow down their re-spawn, and I would just stay in that room for hours.

If that mine is Etceter, (slightly more xp per hour, harder to clear, but safer longer)
I would sprint my way down to the 3rd level, skipping the first two floors.
I would bust out the walls, and kill all the spawn and not loot it. I wouldn't loot any letters or open the lich room. Then I would just start in the cooper room near the Lich room entrance, and work my way to the gold and iron room near the other lich room entrance, then sprint back to the cooper room and start over.
After your third loop you should have all the spawn dead and can safely mine for atleast 4 more hours before getting any more spawn.

 

As an aside, if you have access to a cotton farm, the profit margin is better if you use cotton straps, rather than leather straps, since wax is cheaper than curing salts.

----

The biggest problem with Wolf/Bear heads is there is nothing else to use them on other than hats... I have 550+ wolf heads in storage, and cannot be bothered to do anything with them other than make wolf hats to sell to the NPC merchants.

If there were more uses for them, then selling to the NPC merchants would probably be less appealing.

But since there is not : To the NPCs they go.

 

Haha, you mean you don't think you can find 550 players to buy your wolf hats for more than 80 gold a piece?

 

And that's just me... Add in the thousands I'm sure others are sitting on, and we could be swimming in hats.

Talk about over-saturating the market. No one would buy them.

 

Had a couple friends give me heads during the great gold crunch. Had hundreds of them, and didn't get them all sold before the merchant price fix. My backstock being sold all at once probably didn't help things. To be fair, I sold a good number at the 61 gold price as well. I had taken to selling them because I could at least recover fuel costs. Before gold earn was nerfed I was typically re-salvaging.

 

I don't have an issue with the crafting levelling progression, but, as mentioned, the complete reliance on adventuring/grinding to afford it.
There is no player market for most items unless you enchant ridiculously high or sell consumables, and even then you're hard pressed to recoup costs.
The hats gave a way to actually make a bit of money crafting - not a lot, nowhere approaching the amount of gold you can grind in equal hours spent adventuring, but some.
If anything, I think there should be more ways to do this, not less.

If 50,000 gold is going to enter the economy, why does it matter if it enters by trivial mob slaying or crafting/selling to npc? As long as it enters in approximately the same rate per hour?
What we've got atm is system that encourages fighting over any other activity.
There's never going to be a market for bulk crafted hats, people only have 1 head!

 

Why let that stop us?