Crafting and Upcoming specializations

Good day all...

@Chris @DarkStarr

So we are coming up to the "Big Changes" for crafting specialization around the end of the year and I have seen very minimal discussion in regards to this topic. I have GM'ed all the producer skills prior to this announcement I HOPE we can have the option to respec our crafting trees after the "Crafting Specialization" is added like you did with Adventuring skills. So here I go.. My thoughts and ideas on crafting as it stands and things that should change and I am doing this from a blacksmith's perspective and this might be a bit long Please add comments on your "Chosen skill set"

Harvesting
A few releases ago we were told that the amount of ore we can mine was going to take a hit and we expressed our frustration about it and we were told that they have been reset back to where it was prior. Well I can tell you in Spectral Mines this is not the case. PRIOR to your statement and update, all the nodes were on individual timers and the nodes would re-spawn individually and not globally in the room like it is now. Monsters in the mine do not re-spawn on global timers so why not set the ore back to where it was prior to that patch? I used to be able to pull over 240 ore from this mine per hour and make close to 150k in producer pooled points. As it sits now I am lucky if I can get 160 ore and 100k producer pool points per hour. Please reset this again because it takes a LONG time to get enough Producer Experience points and I had to spend 6 months in Spectral mines to get enough points to where I could GM all the rest of the crafting skills after I had already GM'ed the blacksmithing related skills.

When you nerfed miners due to someone stating they can harvest a few nodes over and over without being attacked you should either move the nodes OR place a monster there so they cannot AFK mine. Have someone spend time in a mine to FIND these darn spots and not completely nerf the ENTIRE mine for one section... This is a HUGE Quality of Life issue for crafter's, fix the issue and do not blow up the damn entire scene because of issues like this.

Refining
160 ore turns out to 80 to 90 ingots if your lucky when you smelt using scraps. When you then take those ingots and make them in to say meteoric or white iron your now down to 40+/- ingots. You then need to create sheets, wire, etc and after an hour of mining and 15 minutes of smelting you can make 20-25 of these items. Now we move onto actually crafting items..

Sooo...

Production

Now our 20-25 of these raw materials can be used to make an item.. So from the said materials I can either make 3 Chest pieces or 7 gloves as an example. With my skills I am at 28% chance to make a exceptional piece so I need to make 5-7 of each item in order to obtain one or two exceptional pieces. This is another 15 minutes of work. I am OK with this and just documenting the process, good sets of Armor should take awhile to make and not be a given.

Specialization
Please provide us with some feedback as to how many we will be able to specialize in. We have the three above areas (Harvesting, Refining, Production) and can we have say 2 or 3specializations so we can have one in each area?? One for Harvesting skill, one for Refining skills and one for Production skills. This way we can specialize in say blacksmithing related skill sets with one in each area. Each area impacts how good a Blacksmith can be and what types of materials they can produce over time.

As we gain levels in harvesting, we now gain increases in specialized items such as tin, nickel, tungsten, increase the amount of gems vs fragments you harvest, etc.

As we gain levels in Specialization say smelting, we will could gain skills such as increasing quality on the type of ingot we produce or even lessen the amount of materials it takes to make an ingot. This would be on items such as coal, ingot molds, etc.

As we gain levels in Production based skills, after say 70 specialization we now get to pick our first masterwork, at 85 you now get to pick your second masterwork, at 100 you now get to pick your third masterwork, etc. Another option or add you can do is say starting at 60, then 75, then 90, etc you can make the same item as before just with one less ingot needed all the way down to no more than half the materials needed.

Why all the levels? To make it beneficial to keep gaining skills in these skill tree's.

Soooo.... Thoughts, comments??

Thank you for everyone who took the time to read this!

Respectfully,

Malimn Calfyre

 

Hmm ... i thought they announced crafting specialisation for the end of this year .

 

If they had, I must have missed it... so I am sorry about that.

IF so, it does not hurt to put something on the table to discuss or get the darn discussions started so we can have some input into the system.

 

Yes, crafting spec isn't even on the Q1 schedule

 

Fixed the "Next few months" comment

 

As far as im concerned i feel like crafting was thrown under the bus ... again ... By moving craftin spec time table to end of year port wants us to know crafting is low priority for them .

What do we know so far ..crafting spec will allow people to choose mw/enchant ... however if thats all it will do everyone will just have spec at lvl 1 just so they can pick . I hope this will not be the case and spec will work just like combat spec works ..enhancing all the skills one chooses to specialise in.

With that being said i would also like to know more about the existing plans for crafting spec .. we could help alot more /provide feedback or suggestions if we are given a direction .

 

I agree with you Elrond on being thrown under the bus, All we keep getting for answers is that is how WE (Port) wanted the progression and skills to go. Combat skills can be GMed in a couple of hours minimum while ours takes a WEEK to get one to gm

As far as the spec one level, Lets say they stop at 70 and go to enchant or masterwork again, then the RNG kicks in with same options as now. As they gain in skills, they can pick items at each level.

Just throwing ideas out

 

From what my addled brain recalls from live streams the specialization is for crafting not for harvesting aka mining, forestry, fishing etc. It was stated that you can choose 1 per character (aka enchanting, mw carpentry, mw blacksmith, mw tailor) .. Don't lawyer them bro.

This means that on one character you can choose the enchantment or masterwork result when that character has specialization. So one toon cannot both masterwork and enchant a specific type of item.

In the Q1 scheduled changes further dilution of your random choices will occur before specialization making it even harder to obtain an item with the stats a particular play style wants. This has been booed heavily for the decision to make it even worse than it is now, without specialization . NO comment on why they want to punish crafters further before finally giving options.

As for the mines, I agree, the rates in spectral are far from favorable before their self described "botting prevention" changes.

For me the survey skill should be more beneficial to the pure gatherers and allow for multiple tin, resin and other t2 components instead of making them highlight in a scene. IN addition I feel that if you trained meticulous gathering skills when you get that 2nd, 3rd strike on the same node you should gain additional producer experience rather than just the one time value and I been saying this for years. This would not be a specialization but would induce spending xp in that skill for a boon.

My 2 cents for today. I may add more in the future, but I have beat this dead horse so many times and it has fallen on deaf ears.

 

My crafting is on hold until they get some sort of official response. I am not going to waste time training skills just to have to respect skills.

I agree...I would love a quick fix for meticulous that just doesn't destroy the node nd you can mine it again. As it stands right now meticulous hurts your gathering time compared to not havinging it when in an area with enough nodes.

 

Yes, more information is really sorely needed as to how this is going to work. Will specialization affect repair? Salvage? base exceptional chance? Limiting to 1 production skill makes a limited sort of sense, even though no single crafter will be able to "complete" any gear - something easily circumvented by specialised alts - so easily in fact, that it begs the question why limit it at all? If I'm spending thousands of hours grinding producer XP, does it really matter if I do it on one character or many? But I digress.

As far as I see it, specialization is the band-aid to make the broken, horrible rng infested system somewhat more palatable. It would make a lot more sense to fix that, and have specialization add extra perks/benefits, instead of being a REQUIREMENT for viability. But if that's what its going to be, so be it, can we please get some more information as to a) when can we have it b) how it will work? This is for me probably one of the most critical issues with the game and it seems there's just no information as to what the plan is. Its frustrating.

 

I know nothing has been communicated about non production specialisation, but personally I think you should be at a minimum allowed one per tree ring. Ie one for gathering, one refining and one production per character.

But I would prefer no limits on specialisation, as it will just give me reasons to use alts. I would prefer the cost to be great enough that specialisation is the preferred CHOICE rather than mandated by the mechanics.

Make specialisation a skill below the specialised MW and ENC skill. So multiple per tree. With this the amount of XP required to specialise in every armour/weapon and enchanting it becomes pohibitive to being optimal, but not impossible, to do them all.


Regards
Spung

 

I'm also less concerned about RNG. More concerned about a level playing field.

The fact that a piece of gear has 20 options in MW and ENC has the same number of options as a piece of gear with 10 is crazy.

The amount of tries to get EXACTLY what you want should be the same for all gear types (on average) with or without RNG.

Specialisation should be an advantage not a requirement. A non specialised character should be able to make gear as good as a non specialist. There should be a competitive advantage to being a specialist, NOT a monopoly by being a specialists.


Regards
Spung

 

Personally, I think they should just put a skill point total on crafting, that way you can spend it where you like.

 

This is a really bad idea with our current system, especially since the gathering/refining skills are thrown in the mix.
I've seen this in other games, and everyone just ends up being a gatherer on their character that goes and does stuff, and makes an army of alts to cover all other requirements.
Limiting us to one specialization with a hard enforced limits is going to result in exactly the same scenario.

It also means that pointless frivolities like fishing which are fun but not useful would end up being completely ignored by serious crafters due to the point spend requirement. It means I can't "waste" points investing in refining batch size/speed, to remove some of the inconvenience from yet another one of crafting's dubious systems, without crippling myself elsewhere. More alts. MORE ALTS.


The diminishing returns and costs of skills ensure that most people already specialize to some degree. The specialization skill itself costing millions is going to be very prohibitive on its own. I see no reason to limit or even encourage players to have to "split their time" across multiple accounts in order to actually function as a crafter. This seems backwards and stupid and directly agains the whole "classless system" we were sold.

Particularly that you consider the gains beyond say, level 120, in anything, are so minimal for the amount of time required you will reach a point where there's simply no point in earning crafting XP anymore because nowhere you put it is going to make a bit of difference. Personally the main thing that's kept me in the game this long is that even though the vertical growth plateaus I can expand into other areas. Its one of the game's biggest appeals, which is getting promptly curtailed by "specialization" if its implemented as a hard limit.

When adventure specialization was added, some of this same sentiment was felt, but not being a specialist doesn't make you completely useless in any particular tree. With the key mechanic of crafting specialization being bypassing the RNG (basically, fixing what's broken in crafting), it becomes a hard requirement without which there's simply no point in crafting gear as a non-specialist.

I'd much prefer, if as Spungwa suggested, that they tie a specialization passive to every sub-skill in the mw/enchant line, and make it cost a fortune to raise to the level of 'no RNG'. People could still raise as any as they wanted, but it would be extremely prohibitive to do so. This fixes the "make more alts" problem for the most part (although not completely, as some would probably find it easier to grind xp on several alts in tandem rather than on 1 character).

I really hate that in order to stop suffering under an archaic, rng-dependent broken system, that the magic fix is going to be "make more accounts." Because from what we know of the planned implementation, that's the obvious and only answer. I expected better.

 

Not hitting every point but yes .. its just going to be a grind on alts thing to compete, which not everyone can do. Nor could everyone become 'specialized in all things' if more crafting spec counts per toon were allowed .. But without naming names there are some that beat the drum constantly on their public forums about how it not fair everyone can gm all crafting skills, all hunting skills, where clearly they don't understand the systems in saying this especially in crafting. I do want to beat some sense into some folks seen as the face of this game sometimes when they constantly spew uneducated garbage, most especially about crafting.

I do also feel that once you have done something so much aka reach a certain skill level, you should be free of your chains of the RNG that currently exists in crafting. The dilution of the outcome by more choices in the past few years has just been horrible as I and many others have stated. Specialization is one step to the game's feature of best gear crafted by players albeit a few years too late, while many of us have suffered from the RNG wagon train.

Those of us playing since persistence have plunged millions and millions and double the hours before double producer experience into our crafter mains, and having them be kneecapped suddenly by one specialization is a hard pill to swallow even with the RNG chain breaker. I understand you cannot please everyone when you have to revamp major systems which specialization is basically doing. While we only know the tentative plan we can only guess at the end result. I hope more feedback is considered in these changes by actual crafters, not devs that play at crafting.

Specialization that strengthened the power of the enchant or mw would be one way to do this, and for all others just stop the RNG maddness and let all choose to even the playing field a bit. I know some older crafters would not like this cause of competition and the hours they have spent perhaps, but to me it is one way to fix the RNG system for all, and then allow you to capitalize on the time you have already spent in the millions in xp and hours in leveling up things on a single toon.

Just an idea.

 

I haven't even bothered with masterworking and enchanting until now. I also suggested a couple livestreams back that the experience pool be shared between characters on the same account (like the bank and virtues are). This would make it at least possible to move that hard earned experience to another avatar and it would give people a reason to purchase extra character slots. Chris said that they would consider it. I'm not holding out hope though.

 

I don't often disagree with you @kaeshiva but I'm sorry but not everyone wants an army of alts, in fact I'd suggest the vast majority would not go down that route. Just like the vast majority of players in a normal successful MMO are not crafters but adventurers. One of the issues with the crafting system now is that everyone can be self sufficient and the vast majority are pretty much. This becomes a massive hit on the profitability for anyone who wants to be a pure crafter. if the skill points were set at a level where you could fully complete 2 from each tier or virtually all the crafting skills but none of the tiers below, then people would have to trade and interact. They could be fully proficient on 2 on each tier and supply themselves or rely on others and be master crafters. Lots of roles for everyone.
One of the main issues we have is this problem of not enough demand and too many crafters, by allowing every player to be every profession, so if there are a 100 players you have the equivalent of a potential crafter profession pool of 500 crafters. This comes back to the solution of limiting the crafting skill pool to limit people to only a few professions reducing that crafter numbers down to 200 from the 500.
I understand those that have already spent the points would be shafted by this but I'm sure they could just cap points at the level they are at, so those points aren't wasted.

Totally agree with no RNG above a certain level.

 

Don't get me wrong, Nevyn, I don't WANT an array of alts. I think having to have an array of alts in order to be able to craft -any- piece of gear (since you at the minimum, need the enchanting and masterwork components) is a shortsighted, frankly, baffling way to fix crafting. And you're right - many people wont go down that route, just like many people don't bother with crafting at all now, since it is so incredibly wasteful, and instead work with crafters who've already eaten the millions of cash sink to get it levelled up to get what they need.

The sort of supply system you describe cannot and will not work in Sota unless something dramatic changes with resource acquisition vs. consumption as well as the cash sinks on the crafting end. A crafter cannot buy resources, make anything out of it, and sell it for profit. There is no way to advance crafting at any sort of reasonable pace unless it is funded by adventuring. Specialization will make this worse, not better, as now a crafter will need to not only buy resources to make the goods but also employ the services of other specialists to end up with an end product, that likely still wont sell for much markup because supply and demand will still be out of whack.

This is exacerbated by the fact that people can and will use alts to be able to actually make a final product, and while you're right, not everyone will? Enough will that the limitations become arbitrary and for the most part, moot.

You mention people who are already past the limit "just cap it" at the level they are at? I have every single producer skill at grandmaster, except for the pointless meticiluous/survey in skinning, and the blacksmith masterwork skills, because my husband does those and there was no need to duplicate. I have many crafting skills in the 120-140 range. I have just shy of 7000 "points" in crafting if I add it all up.. I'm sure there are people who have even more. I have enough pool to push this considerably further, but I've hit the point of "diminishing returns" where putting 10 million XP into something wont make a noticeable difference, so I'm waiting to see what happens with specialization and saving my xp accordingly.

Specialization basically means that the millions and milllions XP I've got in non-specialized things are completely pointless. Ok, fine. So I reallocate those elsewhere for even less noticeable gains. (It will cost me something like 60 million producer experience to increase my enchanting success rate by 1%).

So basically, specialization tells me, its time to stop crafting, its time to stop developing my character, and instead spread my efforts out onto a new character because of some completely arbitrary imaginary line or limit being imposed. It fundamentally changes things.

People specialize anyway. I certainly have a few skills considerably higher than the others because they are the things I make most often or for my own personal use.. If you want a spear, or leather armor, for exampleI can do it reasonably well, but there are people who have focused on such things who can do considerably better than I can. I'm much more likely to recommend another crafter I know who focuses n such things. The system of diminishing returns is working to encourage people to diversify. Adding costly spec skills will further encourage this. Adding a forced exclusion limit simply isn't necessary as it is trivially bypassed by another account. Its essentially saying that in order to be competitive as a crafter you have to mess about logging on and off a lot and manage multiple characters. I think this is pretty dumb, personally. But I absolutely think that the "getting rid of RNG" is long, long overdue, and I'll take it any way I can get it.

 

I have to agree Lace - I know you've been crafting since the beginning too, and we share a lot of the same frustrations.
I think the first step really, would be to do away with the RNG nonsense, completely. Just get rid of it. It serves no purpose except to create a bloat of junky/unwanted items. It makes no logical sense that an artisan with thousands of hours and millions of gold invested in their craft, and enough experience to grandmaster something 40 times over, cannot do something as basic as choose what effect they are putting on an item. I've long felt that this RNG element was contrary to the well thought out, robust material bonus selection that makes material choice so important, and then invalidates it with a random whimsy roll ruining untold pieces of gear.

I would then view specialization as a way to increase potency or increase efficiency. Specialism should not be a requirement for viability, but rather, an augmentation to existing efforts.
Specialisation should not be mandatory to make a viable piece of equipment, instead, specialists should be able to make it cheaper and faster and more reliably. Perhaps have access to unique effects, higher salvage rates, exceptional chances, etc.

 

To be fair one of the main reasons for this is the fact that everyone can craft everything themselves at a pretty low level. This also means as I suggested above that each player is the equivalent of 5 crafters/5 gatherers/5 refiners. you instantly increase demand by removing that by up to 60-80%.

The whole system needs work - RNG is a massive part of it but that is more about removing the junk and making items affordable and less frustrating to produce. But currently if you have 140 blacksmithing and I have 100, I can still have a change of producing what you can. its worse in crafts that can produce consumables, you can start knocking out the potions you need with very low alchemy for example, or why can a lvl 80 crafter make epic plate, etc. Harder tiers for moving up the armour tables, etc

In a player run economy you are only losing money if there isn't the demand for what you produce (everyone can make it or nobody wants it) or it is at a ridiculous cost to make that doesn't warrant the value of the item (RNG). All pretty easily solved by the skill points cap/removal of RNG/ a review of recipes and not dropping consumables on loot and player craft able items on loot or vendors. Having game vendors buy player crafted items at a tiny profit and then then making their way into the loot table would probably be a good thing for all concerned instead of the RNG junk making its way there just now. Vendors could also sell tier 1 resources as and when gold/inflation needed controlled.

In the recent agriculture post there was an argument that farmers should be able to make money from whatever they sell through vendors. A more sustainable option when talking about recipe reviews would be to remove non player produced items from consumable recipes and replace them with agricultural output. If the aim of the game is a viable crafter economy.