Player Crafted Items are not better than Artifacts

There's no objective way to claim that player crafted items are anywhere close to as good as artifacts.

1. I wish the development team would stop saying player crafted items are better than or just as good as artifacts, it's totally incorrect in several important ways:

• You can't create crated items with +10 INT for example. I mean sure if you have unlimited time, gold and silver and 200 in all your crafting skills - maybe then it's possible. But no one is making these items in game now. No one.
• The negatives for artifacts do not offset the power of the artifact in most cases. There are some exceptions, but on the whole if you're getting +10 INT you probably don't care about -10 something else because it doesn't really impact your character's power the way you're building it out.
• The market for player crafted items is horrible in comparison to artifacts. Which is a damn shame because this should be one of those things that separates our game from other games. We should be giving players a lot more options to craft really cool stuff that they can sell and use. But instead we give all the cool functionality to the artifacts. (i.e. you can't make rings that turn players green, you have to get the artifact (frogkin ring) that does that) This is why artifacts (on average) likely sell for 10 items more than player crafted items.

2. I wish the development team would recognize that by creating a market where the best things are "dropped" by mobs, player crafters are not really needed and go back and redesign the economy appropriately so that player crafters are more important than stuff you found on random skeleton mage #595958384.

• Yes, of course you can masterwork and enchant artifacts, and that's cool. And yes, that creates an opportunity for player crafters to do something of value, and they're not "left out". But at the end of the day anyone that levels up a few crafting skills can do a moderate job of buffing up their own artifacts, and the crafting options are not something that are super important so if you don't do that, who cares? You already have the bulk of the power and all the cool options from the artifact.
• Looking forward we really need to get a lot more crafting options that can't not be duplicated by artifacts and we need to put some kind of "player skill" into the crafting system that gives "good" crafters an advantage over dabblers. Something like regional resources and crafting being impacted by astrological events.

 

I think it's more a case where the intent and final goal is for player crafted items to be superior.

The current situation may be partially due to weakness of the enchant/masterwork system and too high of a break chance at higher skill levels. This means on average, crafted items are going to be worse than the fixed stats of artifacts.

 

I like the crafting system, I have no problem with the RNG, I understand that break chance keeps the economy under control. That's not what the problem is here.

This is a case where the development team robbed Peter to pay Paul (so to speak). Artifacts are good in relationship to the player crafted alternative. It's unfortunately not as simple as making crafted items easier to make. Even when you have great crafted gear, you have to sell it at much lower costs before someone will choose to spend money on it vs. an artifact that is simply better than anything you can make yourself. It's also not as easy as just turning up the power of player crafted gear, that would just reduce the demand of artifacts ruining a part of the game that some people find interesting and fun.

It's a big mess, and I've already detailed how I think it should be cleaned up in the OP.

 

My point is that they work on different things at different times, and this has caused artifacts to leapfrog past crafted items. But they want crafted items to be better, so they will be when the devs can get around to it.

 

I would like to think you're right about this, however the devs have made multiple statements that they feel artifacts are not better than player crafted items right now. That's one of the main reasons for posting this thread, because I think that's incorrect.

 

I'm in complete agreement with you here Drocis, and have said the same for a while, that artifacts are quickly filling in the "best in slot" for nearly everything. The latest trend we've seen in addition to artifacts, are 'rare drop materials' required to craft the best craftable in slot. There is far too much emphasis in "going out and getting a drop off monster4821238" which is eclipsing the player crafting.

I do have a problem with the RNG, however, as this is what is holding crafting back in a lot of ways. If a high level crafter at least could customize gear, this could potentially allow a particular slot to be 'best' for a particular build, i.e. better than the related artifact. However since the chance of getting the bonuses you want even on a mid-tier piece are currently less than 1%, artifacts quickly become a lower cost alternative! This makes little sense to me and I continue to be disillusioned by the addition of more and more artifacts - which lets face it, are really only obtained in bulk by the hardcore repeat boss farmers for the most part who then sell these on to the rest of the community.

A crafter already can't make money; as a crafter, the irony is laid on thick that I need to go farm artifacts, to sell for money, to be able to afford all my materials/recipes/fuels to craft inferior gear that I then cannot sell. This is a non functioning mechanic that ends up with the player making more money if they avoid the crafting system entirely.

 

I agree ..and to post 2 examples :

1. The anomalous ring called Lich Kind 50 death attunement - and the craftable version ring with 5 death attunement and/or 8% summon creature power.
2. The warlock chain vs the necklaces we can craft with + 3 stats and some boosts to elements that most people dont use because well the warlock chain is obviously much powerfull.

There goes the jewlery craft.

 

Artifacts ARE player crafted items now apparently

 

I think it was a good move to allow players to masterwork and enchant artifacts, but I don't think that fixed the overall problem of having a non-crafted item fall off mobs. This was great for creating short term excitement in the game, and artifacts are certainly a compelling feature. But neither of these things helps to further the original goal of making the player crafted items "the best".

 

The entire scale and scope of crafted items seems a little broken to me. Does anyone buy +2/+3 items? Does anyone even buy +4/+5 items with any regularity? It's super easy in this game to use starter gear up to the point you can afford top end gear. Everyone can make base level stuff with ease, and nobody wants to buy your mid-tier gear. 99% of what a crafter makes ends up being unsellable goods. If a crafter is not also an adventurer, they may as well just give up because affording raw gathered resources to start yourself out with is also nearly impossible.

And now artifacts to compete with at the top end where people will buy things? Nail in the crafting coffin if you ask me.

 

It's a slippery slope regardless.

If crafted things are purely the best (IE require no mob component in the form of artifacts/salvage materials) then loot is dead. Loot literally has no point in that scenario. Personally I think if you want the "best" stuff, you should be required to be killing the hardest things in the game that might actually *require* the best stuff. Hence a happy marriage between PvE and Crafting (or PvP for that matter with different acquisition requirements for base materials).

Now I agree 100% we're NOT at the magic place I listed above. As stated in the OP, artifacts are way better than many crafted things and just because you can MW/Enchant them doesn't make them magically a craftable item. That's a REAL stretch lol.

@Elrond mentioned the warlock chain and personally this is ALMOST the perfect case scenario for what I'd like to see. It has both difficult to get recipes so it's somewhat exclusive in who can craft it and it also has pain in the ass material requirements needing a lot of stuff you need to gather. The only part that I think needs some work is the random nature of the rings' acquisition. You can either get them off a really hard boss or some piddly "weak" elf in a T5 zone.

For me, the "best" stuff in the game has no purpose in the hands of a noob unless they bought their way to victory. The best stuff should be tailored and expected to be acquired by the people doing the hardest content (as ideally the hardest content should require it). We're getting closer to that situation with salvageable boss drops, but still a ways to go.

I think it was a mistake to advertise "The best items are made by crafters" without some explanation. Crafting simply cannot by itself produce the best gear as if it does, then loot can't hold enough weight to be important. I probably rambled entirely too long and didn't explain things well. Oh well lol.

 

Adding components to mobs is a great way to diversify crafting ... and to keep killing/looting profitable. And no i dont think removing artifacts is a solution either... but i think they need to give us more options in crafting also to maintain a balance.

Lets take the earth build for example :
You have 2 lootable options for ring slot like brittle brawn ring with 40 str or the 10 earth attune ring... on the other side we have the craftable ring version with 5 earth attune and earthquake dmg.I wonder which people use the most .

 

Loot from mobs should be varying tiers of craftable resources. Not finished products. That's really the big problem that artifacts screwed up. Artifacts were great for the short term "fun" but horrible for long term economic sanity.

 

For me, you, and likely many others that is a perfectly viable solution. I am not sure that works though for people that have no interest to craft things. I guess it becomes a target audience issue at that point because the people that have no interest to craft would, in my view, not enjoy loot in that fashion.

 

That's a fair point to consider. My personal solution would be to close the crafting loop by making players "lose" items when they died to mobs. The mobs would retain those items and other players could pick them up as loot. So you could still go out and pick up player crafted items on random drops and this way it wouldn't screw up the economy.

 

That's an interesting concept with the gear recycling of sorts. I think crafting is way too punishing though to have a further system of then losing your stuff... I mean people avoid PvP like the plague for that very reason so as kind of a *tested* concept, used extremely loosely since our player base really isn't in any sort of matured form, I don't think that's a good route to go down.

Now if they relaxed some of the misery in crafting so that gear could be more *throw away* then that's another thing entirely. Right now it's so painful to try to replace or reproduce "ideal" stat gear that honestly the concept of losing it after all the pain/suffering/time/money/etc. that went into it just isn't worth it. Really another discussion though entirely with the crafting system's mechanics.

 

Actually as an aside, some of the reason artifacts are so popular is that you're able to skip the horrific aggravation of the RNG crafting system. I hadn't really considered that too terribly much that people will often use even sub-par artifacts over crafted pieces just because it's effectively so much cheaper to do so. IMO that's an equally important problem as is relative strength between the two.

 

No, that's not what's happening. We know that because players could simply buy "good" player crafted gear on the cheap. Artifacts cost much more than player crafted gear (on average and generally per item). People dislike the RNG, there's no doubt about that. But it doesn't have any impact on why people go after artifacts verses buy the cheap player gear. It takes a lot of time and energy to grind out artifacts. It doesn't take much of either to visit a player vendor.

 

This is definitely where we disagree. Or I just can't find good vendors. One of the two, but I've never seen any actually decent crafted gear at what I'd call cheap. Even if they sold it at cost it'd be outside my tax bracket, especially with the weirdness of the % with the third enchant/MW.

If you're talking about ~5 stat potency gear with 2 Ench/MW's then that's fairly reasonable. If you get lucky you can have decent enough stats on those to be contented. I'm thinking more along the lines of getting that gem enchant that you wanted along with other things when I'm talking about the misery.

FWIW artifacts really aren't that expensive anymore either with them dropping from supply bags fairly regularly. Naturally the best artifacts are excluded from this list (lich ring for example).

 

I guess when I look at artifacts on the low end of the spectrum I'm thinking about something around 20-45k. And when I think about a multi-enchanted, multi-master worked item I'm thinking that it's not uncommon to see that at a price point below where those low artifacts are. It's certainly a crap shoot what you'll get in terms of gem's or procs, but it's really more about value. The artifacts are more general use weapons. Who can't use an extra +10 STR on an item that probably has other advantages beyond that? I mean it's just not a fair playing field, and when you compare random just about any random vendor it's pretty obvious this is broken.

Here, I literally took the first player vendor in the marketplace forum as an example, and look how crazy stupid this is...

He's selling +10 to +14 wands for 15 to 30k.

But look at the artifacts! Everything on that list besides the Emry's Harp is higher than that.


Look at the wands for sale. They're lowest selling point is the highest of his player crafted wands that are +14! Do you know how hard it is to get a +14 wand? I mean if you have tons of silver and gold it's not that hard, but it's expensive and it takes a lot of tries. Here the Artifact wands are selling for almost twice as much and they're not even +14, they're just "special" and you can't duplicate them as a player.

It's really a broken and dumb system, and it's not just this player vendor either. I see this all over the place.