Crafting System Revision

I still dislike the pattern system in general -- not for a logical reason, it just feels clunky to me for some reason. BUT, using patterns this way would solve the problem with my idea where there are too many different types of equivalent versions of "finely made" -- i.e., a bunch of different cosmetics that don't exist in hierarchical ladders. My way, they'd have to create those ladders; by using patterns instead, you do get more options with fewer recipes.

But that won't help overall if most of the recipes are still the result of adventuring instead of practicing your craft. Recipes need need need to come from crafting quests, from tinkering or exceptional rolls while crafting, automatically with skill increases, or for the lower-level recipes, be more easily found from NPC vendors, in every region -- a starting crafter shouldn't have to go cross-continent to find recipes for items that ought to be commonly available. All of those options would work both online and in the offline game.

The only recipes that should be dependent on adventuring are for really rare and powerful items that even expert NPC crafters wouldn't know how to create. Being dependent on adventurers to buy mats, that's reasonable -- but not to buy recipes. They don't make adventurers come to crafters to learn how to use adventuring skills. Adventurers may buy gear, but their glyphs come automatically with skill increases -- and they get those skills from trainers, according to common sense. Recipe acquisition is an essential part of crafting; treat it as such, not as a side effect of adventuring.

Then when you've got the recipes, they need to be reworked so that the mats required for each one are reasonable compared to the output. Some of the existing ones are, some really aren't.

Those are the really big essentials for me -- recipe acquisition, recipe ingredients, making exceptionals/failure mean something for all types of crafting, and making the outcome of crafting be a direct result of your skill in crafting, with no more than a touch of RNG to mediate it -- not a result of RNG, or a result of your skill in adventuring or your skill in socializing.

Everyone else is all about the enchanting/masterworking, but I'm trying to refrain from getting into that until I have more experience at that level. But I can't help but believe that if you fixed the above problems for low- and mid-level crafters, the benefits would carry over to high-level crafters as well (and provide a logical model to use elsewhere).

 

This is where I think additional components should come in, plus the aforementioned base recipe + mods, as some of the recipes already do. Part of the problem is that becasue of the discovery system, each recipe had to be 100% unique. Which is fine, but in some case that has led to things requiring way too much of a material, because it was easier to make a recipe just require more wood than it was to make it require some other component, which would have also needed a unique recipe, and some art assets, etc.

 

a skilled carpenter may want to make an ugly table, if it fits the space being decoed.

 

Very true, I'd even like more ruined and crappy deco.

 

I'm not a fan of patterns either. After making a dozen gothic tables, a carpenter wouldn't need a pattern/blue print to make more of them. It's just another pointless resource that we would a) have to buy from an NPC vender (imagine the list of hundreds of patterns on that vendor) or b) have to rely on pattern drops to make items *shiver* (which would give me the reason I'd need to just cash out and leave the game all together).

 

I think you missed the part where I said craftable patterns