Lesser potion value nerf?

Nothing in patch notes but the lesser health potion is now value 5 instead of 20.

This was the one thing in game that you could buy mats and craft, turn a (very very) slight profit on reselling back to the vendor.

 

Which is exactly why it was changed. They do not want any craftable items that allow for

1) Spend Gold at NPC
2) Craft Something purely from those items
3) Profit

They are concerned about runaway gold earn feedback loops.

 

So there really is no way to be a pure crafter

 

Mechanically: Not without some kind of seed money to buy harvest-only materials.
Practically: Even with the above, maintaining steady sales of profit-generating goods to players in the current game economy is a rather heroic endeavor on its own.

It is designed as a Gold Drain. Adventurers earn coin, pay Crafters for Goods, and a portion of what the crafter receives is destroyed by purchasing vendor materials. The problem is that the market for buying and selling crafted goods is sparse between the ease of every player able to craft "good-enough" gear, the penchant for players to use pledge/reward/store equipment, and high cost of purchasing more rare materials like silver. Further complicating the system is the difficulty in letting people know you actually have goods for sale.

 

Yes, more accurately:

Adventures earn coin.
Crafters earn coin adventuring and pay enormous sinks on resources and fuels. Crafters try, often unsuccessfully to sell crafted goods at 90% loss hoping to recoup some of the investment.
It makes me sad that this is the intention, but until the failure rates and randomness are addressed and it stops requiring making 20 pairs of boots to get 1 somewhat close to what someone wants, I don't see it changing. In fact its been further exacerbated by adding artifacts to jewelry and weapon/shield slots that are often more desirable than crafted goods, and by the addition of "drop only" recipes. As a "crafter" I spend 90% of my time killing things to either get cash to support crafting (as it does not even come close to supporting itself) or gathering materials since buying them at the current rates ensures I'll make a loss. There seems to be some shortsightedness here - ie limiting coto repair to "help" crafters, when the reality is now that no one will pay an items cost since its now disposable.

The ability to earn gold - a fraction, of what you'd earn in similar time adventuring - at least made focusing on crafting somewhat possible, if you were willing to accept the much hampered progress. And now this is also gone.

Why does it matter where the faucet is? If a crafter could earn 1/3 of the gold per hour crafting and selling to npc, compared to an adventurer farming weapons and selling to npc? Surely the much slower pace accounts for the lack of risk?

 

I make plenty of money as a crafter. I also farm my own mats. I don't recoup all the cash I could get if I sold the mats directly, but I get a good amount and I gain skill with the mats I use. There's no doubt that if you want to do crafting without putting in real $ to buy mats, you're going to have to adventure both for mats and seed money (and producer exp for that matter). Its also harder at first because until you get your skill up you can't make anything people want, since the small population we have really just wants high level items. That barrier to entry should come down a bit once we go live and have a broader player base. Regardless, if you can break that barrier and get your skill up to where you can make weapons and armor with 3 masterworks and 3 enchantments, you're going to start rolling in the dough.

 

Untrue, actually.
I'm not a starting crafter. I'm a grandmaster in tailoring, tailoring masterwork, cloth masterwork, enchantment, armor enchantment, weapon enchantment, carpentry, blacksmith, carpentry masterwork...hell, I've even GM'd cooking, milling, and all the swift gathering skills. I've spent 2000 hours inside mines grinding ore, and in 100% of the cases, I make more profit selling resources than anything I could possibly craft. If something actually survives to 3x/3x masterwork enchant, it costs hundreds of thousands in explosions and nobody is willing to pay enough for a single succesful piece to account for all of the failures. The only thing I can actually turn a profit on are consumables like scrolls, and even that's a waiting game. I just see no good reason why the ONLY faucet MUST be from fighting. If you're assigning a value to a player's time, it shouldn't matter what they're doing. I understand that a faucet that doesn't entail "risk" shouldn't be as lucrative, but not having any other faucet at all except grinding trivial mobs en masse day after day, is not sustainable, especially since you can spend 20-30 hours gathering materials and due to the RNG and break rates have nothing to show for it. The system is far too punitive, there's no demand for crafted goods, the pitiful demand that there was is slowly being trumped by "best-in-slot" artifacts, and nobody's going to spend the 250k it took to craft that really nice chestpiece when they know its going to be worthless in a few weeks of fighting in it since there's now a limit to repair.

 

Wow! I don't have a third of that time in the mines...I can't even imagine the time you've spent smelting .

Ideally, crafters should be a gold sink for adventurers. It would be nice to be able to vendor some stuff for profit, but that's dangerous for the economy (though it could be done with light touches).

One of the major problems I see with crafting (and have commented on before) is that the price of ore is artificially inflated because it is valued based on it being a means to raise crafting skill rather than as a simple raw commodity used to produce goods. Crafters are forced to flood the market with junk just to raise the skill to get the shot at fighting the RNG boss for a decent output. These are some things that I think would help:

-Provide alternative methods of raising craft skills (e.g. quests, puzzles, exploration, etc.). This would do a few things:
1. It would reduce the price of ores, bringing some balance between adventuring and crafting in terms of gold earning. This reduces the overall cost of crafting, bringing prices of crafted goods closer to what the market will spend.
2. It would curtail the endless production of junk people craft to level skills. Ideally, people should only be crafting something when they want to make something. For the small market that exists for entry level goods, this could help get prices closer to fair value (which also might be lower due to #1.).

-Provide more control over item bonuses during enchanting and masterworking. While we do need breakage, and we shouldn't have complete control over bonuses (to create a gradient of item quality), at GM levels you should have at least a 25% chance of being able to select from all possible bonuses on an enchant/masterwork.
1. This would reduce the overall cost of items, creating more items of high value (that have a market) without creating a glut of 'perfect items' with the best, handpicked stats.
2. Since this bonus occurs at GM level, it's still not accessible to all but the dedicated crafter group.

-Provide a few pieces of high end deco recipes that can only be crafted (not in the add on store) that are gated by crafting level and recipe complexity (not rare mats). These recipes should be consumed on use (not stored in the recipe book) and the products be one of the few things crafted that can be vendored for great profit. Recipes should be rare drops that come from activities crafters do (not mob drops). Think of it as 'quantitative easing for crafters' .