Crafting exceptional items

If exceptional items could be crafted while batch crafting, the market would soon be flooded with them and it would drive down the value of crafters.

I love crafting items one at a time trying for that rare exceptional item. Anything less would break all immersion right?

Can we also make it to where you can only hold enough materials at one time, for the single individual item we are currently crafting? It's just not immersive to imagine holding 40 bolts of cloth while making an apron is it?

 

I guess we should just leave it as-is so everyone can clickity click, clickity click all day long and feel special about how many clicks they've accomplished.

 

I thought that was the whole point. Am I wrong?

 

If tedium is your thing, sure.

 

Lets say we craft 100 items and then also put 3 enchants and 3 MC's on them with say 80 skill. This is really rough math, but just to prove a point. This would give you a +12ish item that for big players is common and required.

100 Chain helms
-75 non-MW (25% success)

25 Chain helms
-12.5 broken Enchanting (estimating 50% success but probably far less)

12 Chain helms
- 6 broken MC (estimated 50% success but probably far less)

6 good chain helms left.

Add in the terrible Portalarium math

2 good chain helms left (hahah, joke... but not really).
*** And chances are they arnt even the specs you really wanted.


This is a topic that keeps getting ignored by our devs and they really are not in touch with the community on. Most people now have to rely on 1-2 people who can craft this stuff for them and have finally reached GM's after playing the game 14 hours a day since persistence to get it. While that vast majority of us who are causal would take years to even get close.

I challenged the devs in the last telethon to start their day at 8AM and go farm enough mats to make 100 items like Bronze adv chain mail and turn them into +10's that give them the exact specs they need. It of course got ignored.

 

The best armor in the game is supposed to be crafted by players. Those +12 etc pieces should be much rarer to obtain than artifacts etc.

If everyone in the game can craft high end items whenever they want, they wouldn't be rare or provide a robust crafting economy.

I've farmed tier 5 zones for 2-3 months straight and have gotten exactly 1 artifact, high end crafted items should be at least as rare if not more so than artifacts.

If people aren't spending days and weeks crafting for a single high end piece, then suddenly the resource based economy would plummet.

That would make having to constantly grind for more resources pointless.

 

It's not tedium, it's immersion. I hear it's a big driver of development decisions. I like it, don't you?

 

At the risk of derailing this further, I like the explosion rate/difficulty of crafting +12, but I don't like the RNG and my annecdotal experience is it is streaky and fails more than stated odds dictate.

 

As I've said already, exception iron bindings are identical to non-exceptional iron bindings, there's no way to flood the market with them.

 

I wasn't suggesting a fast track. I am suggesting that pressing e to gather water or plant a single seed (for example) is really time intensive. How much water can you gather in an hour of pressing e? And is it really that awful to batch gather or plant (again for example). after awhile, gathering water or planting a seed isn't much fun anymore

 

This is a serious issue that affects the entire crafting dynamic in general.
A grandmaster of a trade should by definition be making exceptional items nearly all the time. I mean, maybe every now and then they have an off-day. But you're a grandmaster.

No, there's no danger of flooding the market with exceptional items. In fact, better exceptional chance will help reduce the amount of low durability junk people list on vendors to try to recoup any shred of the cost.

Crafting is not profitable. There are 0 examples in the game currently of being able to buy a stack of resources, make something, and sell it for profit. Absolutely impossible.
Gathering the materials yourself will always 100% of the time result in a higher profit from selling the raw materials than crafting anything out of it.
The main reason for this is NO customizability and HIGH waste HIGH breakage.
Levelling crafting is a huge cash sink with little to no chance to sell anything. Even high end stuff you can't break even on the expenditure in fuels and materials. This has been a problem forever.

I craft for a lot of people. People will come to me and say hey, I want a suit of leather armor. They'd like it to have dex, maybe strength, and avoidance. Great. As a crafter with 20 or so skills at GM and beyond, I should be able to do this fairly simply. But I can't give them a price. I can't even give them a list of materials. All I can say is to bring me hundreds (hundreds!) of leather materials and hundreds (hundreds!!!) of ingots, and we MIGHT maybe get something viable out of it. I'm not going to use my own materials to try and maybe get what they want, because I'm not going to be able to sell it for anywhere near what those materials cost me. Crafting has become a services-for-materials industry.

I'm okay with the cost of levelling up, the millions-of-gold worth of mats I've dumped in to level up, the 1500 hours of mining I've done to finance this in materials and xp. I like the idea of being an artisan, its the main reason I play, I have no objection to spending months levelling up the skills to be the best I can at it. It just seems that even when you get to where you're "grandmaster" you still can't make what your customers want. Grandmaster should mean something.

What we really need to see is:

Proficiency at GM? - more exceptionals than not. Honestly, I'd expect near 100%, if we're talking "realism" and "immersion." I dont' care if I have to do them 1 at a time or if I can batch. Its not important and not relevant to me. The % chance needs a serious, serious boost.

Masterworking at GM -more control over choices, or at least more options. New choices keep getting added to the 'pool' but this reduces the probability of getting what you actually want instead of one of the dozen of 'junk' or 'irrelevant' options. Trying to get the two masterworks you want on something before the success chance plummets usually requires making 5 or 6 of the item - for items like boots/gloves that need to be exceptional before you even begin, try making 20 of them to maybe - MAYBE - get something useful.

Enchanting at GM - again, more control over choices or more options. If someone wants 'strength' on an item, not only does the item have to live through repeatedly and over necessarily punitive failure rates, it has to pop up as one of the three choices. When there are a dozen or so possibilities - more if you've got a gem in it - the likelihood of getting what you want gets lower and lower.

The result is that crafting is like a giant slot machine that you just keep pouring money into hoping for a nice payout. And as with a slot machine, you'll never get out what you put into it - the house has to win.

I love crafting, and I don't think it should be easier, but it sure would be nice if it was viable to take custom orders or estimate how many materials someone would need to get a reasonable set with what they want on it.

 

@kaeshiva for me i think the problem lies that GM is 100. To me, I think we skip the "master" stage, and as a result of being a GM in something at 100 we set ourselves false hopes

It does seems stupid as someone who has skinned more bears than I swear any sane human should, that i can still repeatedly fail to skin a bear like 8 times in a row when the random generator is having a bad day. same with harvesting plants, trees and mines.. when you as a player can almost do the thing blind fold.. so should your character.

as you say, at GM we should be exceptional, and I dont think theres anyone who disagrees, failures should be near on never, and exceptional very likely.. because you are a hardened pro.

For me, master at 100, would set a better expectation. You have worked hard, you have been recognized as skilled, but, like any martial art person who attains their black belt, they tell you, now they start learning, you get to master you have blindly followed instruction, you may have worked out a few variants that work, but to achieve true master, you now have to understand and perfect.. to be GM.. it also then gives recognition to those who go past 100 to attain further skill and a recognition of that. If 100 were a max.. sure.. but its not.. (although has anyone really got to 200?)

 

Yes Liz, I agree.
The only issue is we have to consider the experience costs of going beyond the current "grandmaster" level.
Consider that the most producer exp one can churn out in an hour is about 100k - this is the "following someone around doing nothing but skinning 500xp mobs" threshold where I spend 0 time fighting. (GM skinning/GM swift skinning/TB tool/Skinning speed artifact belt and expedience potion). You really can't get more than that. If I'm mining I can push about 60k on a good day. That's a more realistic number for people involved.

Getting enough experience to get a tradeskill to GM, then, takes about 20 hours of producer "grind" to get the experience. For someone who plays a few hours a day, this will take a couple weeks. Of course, you'll have to make trips to drop things off, and do something with all the stuff you pick up, etc. etc. But that's your baseline. Its far, far, far slower than 'grandmaster' in comparative adventure skills and this is assuming you're trying to optimise, not just grabbing the passing tree or bush.
And then add however long to grind up the skill, which in some cases is very easy/cheap (blacksmith/carpentry you can salvage loot and fly up in an hour) or very expensive (enchanting subskills taking millions of gold worth of materials). Then there you go, its at 100.

Do I think it should 'end' at 100? No
Is pushing beyond 100 reasonable? A bit, but beyond a certain point, absolutely not.
1.2 million experience to GM. 8 million experience to level 120. I don't have anything at 120 yet, but I do have something at 116, and I can tell you that its about a 3% success chance increase over GM. I assume at 120 I'd maybe get that up to 4%. And the investment in experience is nearly EIGHT TIMES what it took to get to GM. For 4%.

This system is precisely why people are not specializing and are GMing everything. Because beyond 100, the benefit is simply not worth the effort because you just can't get producer exp in those kinds of quantities.

If the scaling were a bit more linear, and you told me I could invest EIGHT TIMES the exp and I'd be 50% better, I might think about it. Anything beyond this point is quite simply not worth doing.

120 would be a reasonable grandmaster level, but I'd expect it to be 'grandmaster' - ie, not failing basic crap, ever, making exceptionals most of the time, and being able to have some control over the output (say, 8 choices instead of 3 on masterworks).

200 is not even achievable at this point, in producer.

You'd need 16709249906 experience. Assuming 60k producer an hour when trying, it would take you 31 YEARS grinding 24 hours a day with no breaks just to get enough experience at current rate you can get experience. Do the math. That's a laugh.

 

The water issue is already been addressed from the telethon.

I think the wording I used I incorrect for GM. I meant to say GM of Master crafting. The point to doing 1 at a time is to gain xp on the procs on master crafting. Batch has no effect on this for a reason. If you batch process as I mentioned this would power level the Master crafting based on the previous discussions which is what would ruin the current economy by flooding the markets with master crafted gear. Doing one at a time to only gain the Master craft is how it needs to be in order to keep high end gear limited and keep the market prices worth anything of value for trade.

 

I have read through this entire thread. I backed in 2015, and quit. Came back 14 days ago, And through all this complaining about already GM people and how they think stuff will ruin the economy. All arguments are invalid at this point, You can buy Bulk materials sit in town on your butt and just gm any craft skill, so how fast you get there is all in how much $$$ you want to spend. Your chance of making an exceptional does not change no matter Batch or Single.

 

I understood your chance of making an exceptional item was 0 if you batch created items. You could only create them by clicking on the craft button for each item.

 

your sit in own on your butt concept may be technically correct but your gonna have to spend enough money to buy a car for that method to work. no matter how many mats you buy... you wont GM a thing w/o the needed XP in your pool. You can buy raw ore for example.. and then smelt it all 1 click at a time praying for exceptionals which give you more XP but most of your clicks will give you 20XP. HOw fast you get there is about more than $, it's about effort. I just raised a couple skills so I could make a half decent weapon for myself.. I have a pool of 2M XP which by the by is nothing relatively speaking. Even with that amount it took a ton of ingots just to get my weapon Masterwork and Enchanting skill levels to 32 which is just the beginning of opening up the better modifications.

not quite Zero but close. you have a chance for the 1st item in the batch to be exceptional.

 

Also Have a gm crafter in party for that extra quick, and also one mining party and you can rack up some serious xp .