Player Crafted Items are not better than Artifacts

I confess I didn't pay much attention to wands since I don't use them. I do know that wands are especially rough to "do" because you need some REALLY specific stuff on them for them to be "good". +14 or whatever unfortunately doesn't mean anything because of the RNG. Apparently that attunement proc is especially rare, same with the XXX arrow if applicable. Spells function so much different than weapon skills as a result of attunement that I think you end up with this crazy setup where if you get the rolls you want, you're now going to legitimately feel the power boost and if not life just sucks and your wand isn't anything special. Physical based weapons (outside of bows with the new bowstrings) are much less... "prone" to being all or nothing. There's definitely a best, but it's not such a huge skew like you get with wands.

Also keep in mind that the prices for stuff you see are generally the stuff that's waaaaaaaaay overpriced so nobody touches it and the reasonably priced stuff is usually sold in the forums or you just get lucky on some secluded vendor kind of deal. For example I've seen those artifact wands down as low as 20k over a month ago before my GPU died. Those actually sold since that's a much more realistic price. I don't recall ever actually seeing a +attunement wand on a vendor... my impression is that the vast majority of all things we see on vendors are people's mistakes that they're trying to recoup some losses on. Sad by-product of how terribly expensive and mat intensive it is to actually make something you want due to the RNG.

 

My main issue at the moment is that in order to be a crafter, not only do you have to finance cash sinks for all adventuring related expenses, you must then also AGAIN finance crafting as crafting in its current iteration does not make you a profit. Forget the tremendous expense of actually levelling the craft, even top tier items rarely sell for a fraction of the material cost due to the number of crappy items (rng) and due to the break %.

A crafter must be an adventurer first, crafter second - even obtaining base materials requires steady fighting throughout the game. Adding special bowstrings and blades and the like is a nice addition and can add some variety, but honestly I'm a bit irritated that these items are often superior to what you make with hard gathering/refining labor.

So we must make time for adventuring and levelling up, and for gathering, and for refining (which is no small chunk of time, I was spending 30 hrs a week staring at refining bench during work, I finally made an alt account to deal with it). Then for more refining to make your bindings, sheets, straps, and so on. And then the actual crafting. All of this is after the immense time and expense sink of getting to the level you want to get to. I have NO problem with having to invest time to be a successful crafter, but it seems that the bulk of that time - is fighting stuff. Each change we've seen since persistence has made this more the case:

- Increased fighting required in gathering scenes i.e. mines, increased mob difficulty in many cases (or more annoying mobs) particularly via uncloning. Ore acqusition has become less and less efficient patch by patch.
- Removal of discovery system requiring crafter to have yet another cash sinks buying recipes
- Removal of many recipes putting them in random loot bags, forcing crafter to have yet another cash sink or spend hundreds of hours grinding just to fill their book
- Addition of bone armor, requiring a crafter to buy costly pieces or be able, essentially, to boss farm alongside the hardcore adventuring elite
- Significant increase in obsidian chip requirements for crafting obs gear, and increased difficulty of the obsidian forge again requiring crafters to be even better fighters
- New 'salvage' items bowstrings blades etc. requiring a crafter to spend time farming mobs (fighting!) to get more materials

This, combined with the 'best in slot' artifact drops completely trivializing jewelry and to a good extent, weapons. Oh, and cabalist hoods are far better than any headpiece. And belts aren't crafted at all - and I'm not talking about boss-drop-only-recipe-needing-boss-drop components, here.... well, what's left for a crafter? 99 out of 100 things you try to make are garbage or blow up and the one surviving semi-ok item probably wont sell because someone's got a better artifact for that slot. The removal of infinite COTO repair actually hurts us here; people aren't buying replacement gear off someone's vendor they're farming mats and finding someone who's invested the time and money to become a crafter and getting them to make new stuff, or doing it themselves. At least if I made a sword and that sword would last for more than a month, I might be able to charge what it actually cost to make once you consider the tremendous waste, but nobody's gonna pay 500k for an item that's junk in a month.

To answer an earlier posted question, no, nobody buys +2-6 gear, not really. I do sell a few pieces at FAR below cost just to get rid of it. I even have a 'free samples' box full of +8-9 stuff with non-optimal bonuses that doesn't even move. And its FREE.

Crafters need to waste less and have more control over output if we have any chance of competing with artifacts.
Crafters need to waste less and have more control over output if we have any chance of making a profit.
There needs to be less focus on fighting, and more focus on tradeskill development to achieve this.

Instead of blowing stuff up and getting nothing over and over again, having salvage give you all the components back MIGHT bring us part of the way to where we need to be, so you could at least try again for the low low cost of more gold/silver ingots (lol). You'd still likely need to blow 20k on fuel for that crafting session, but it'd be a much better place than we are now.

Else, give us the freedom to pick the bonus, please, please, pretty please.

There's just too many levels of fighting the rng.

Random chance to get weapon drop
Random chance to get the component on salvage
Random chance to get excpetional
Random chance to not blow up
Random chance to get the bonus you want
...
Actually getting a mid-tier (+7-8) item with the exact bonuses you want is LESS than 1% chance. Even lower if you're putting a gem in it further diluting the pool of choices.

You want some randomness? Fine. But this is absurd.
I'd say we could use some consistency on at least SOME steps of the process.

Cost up what something would cost, if you had to make 100 of it, not even thinking about the gold/silver cost here its already astronomical. Will someone pay that much for it? Of course not.

I get that there needs to be a way for items to leave the economy, but here's an idea: how about making it so we generate less garbage in the first place? Howabout salvage giving back a non insulting amount of materials? How about increasing control at the cost of more materials needed? I'd happily pay 50 ingots instead of 5 per enchant if I could pick my bonus and it wouldn't blow up. Ultimately you're still going to be limited by durability. What if cost doubled for every bonus you wanted to add, with durabilty as an ultimate limit? The point is that you could cost up exactly what someone wanted, and make it. And sell it. And have an economy. At the moment, the only thing people really sell is leftovers which is why they clutter up vendors for months until someone buys them for 5% of the cost to make to use or you get frustrated and vendor it all for 1% of the cost to make.

 

I'd like to see the artifact essences be useful in crafting. Something similar to socketing, where weapons could have 1-2 artifact slots. Either the act of "socketing" an essence gives you a choice from three artifact-level enhancements (and a chance of the item breaking), or it works like gem socketing now, where it doesn't break the item, but then adds artifact-level enhancements to the possible MW/enchant results.

 

This is clever.

 

@Chris - I know this is a crazy week with the patch, but this is REALLY good information that she wrote up here. I think this sums up the reality of the short-comings of the crafting system as a whole and something you guys really need to bring back and discuss. The reality is, realistically, there is no economy for crafters because RNG is too awful. You guys need to figure out a way that a crafter can create non-garbage stuff at a reasonable price w/o being able to flood the market with it. Right now you guys have the not being able to flood the market down perfectly lol.... problem is it's impossible to sell anything because it's so prohibitively expensive. I think the vendors with stacks and stacks of their "mistakes" aka garbage is case/point enough that while yes you can craft up some junk pretty easily... it's worth less than the raw materials.

 

You do a good job explaining some of the problems, but like many players you seem to feel the solution is less randomness, less challenge, less work, more easy...

I understand and agree that the current crafting system is a huge and expensive grind, and that overall it's not a lot of fun and there's a lot of waste involved. I get it. But what I don't want to see is "more easy" and "more predictable" at the expense of the already broken and fragile economy. If we replace some of the pain points with easy, we'd only see a shift in problems that would result in more people crafting, more items no one wanted, and more high end stuff flooding the market.

The idea behind the current system, at least, makes some sense at a macro level. Crafting is hard, it's work, it requires patience, and if you want to be really good at it you're not going to be surrounded by 1000's of peers, it's going to be a fairly exclusive club.

 

So they are definitely in drop a pebble and watch the ripples mode. The refining pass where, as an example, you get more ingots per ore refinement is their next pebble in the pond as mentioned in the last telethon. I think they are going to wait and see how those increases resource yields will affect the system before making any more changes.

 

What are the stats and durability of those +14 wands? That can easily explain the price point. If you put a premium price on a junk item then it wont sell. +14 doesn't anything to me unless it has the stats I want. I hate crafting and gathering. I really don't want the best gear that a mob drops to be crafting materials or some random player made item that does nothing for me.

 

Sure. But adding artifacts was like tossing a giant boulder in the pond. So why not balance that out with larger more effective moves? We've been waiting for refining for years.

I don't think saying the devs are being cautious is really what's happening here. I think that for whatever reason artifacts were "cool" and "fun" so they put it in. Now it's time to radically adjust the player crafting so that per one of the key goals of the game player crafting is "the best". That's how this game is supposed to work. That's what the plan has always been.

 

Part of the design for the multiplayer component is indeed to give strong reasons to interact with other players. This was reiterated in the 2018 Q1 update. The idea is that you take those crafting components and either have a crafter make you something or sell it to someone else to have something made. I would find that perfectly reasonable if the middle-game of crafting was solved. Crafting is almost pure coin sink. Crafting profit relies upon adventurers buying things. You can't just sell crafted goods to NPCs and earn a living (A living I would qualify as enough for Row Lot Tax.) Loot that bypasses the crafter basically removes the crafter from the game. Which should be fine in the offline experience, but breaks the intent of the multiplayer experience.

 

The problem is you don't have any of that anyway because crafting is far too expensive. The crafter is completely a non-entity in the economy, the gatherer is actually the driving force that moves coin, unless the crafter sells their stuff far below what it actually cost them to produce it. The forums are pretty case/point of that. You see three things being traded: raw materials, artifacts, and rares. Crafted gear is almost completely absent (and if it's present you could probably sell the raw mats for more).

So in essence this is actually a multi-tiered problem that isn't just solved by fixing one thing. While you're correct that artifacts may, in theory, bypass the crafter... You need some immediate gratification style loot. Artifacts fit that bill perfectly and crafting needs to effectively be "fixed" before much help can be done otherwise.

 

Actually I kind of feel the opposite. I think it should take more time investment, not less - but I think it should rely on persistence and hard work, not lucky rolls.
The problem with crafting is that it relies on a luck roll times a luck roll times a luck roll over and over. This is not skill? This is arbitrariness. And its crap.

At the moment, I have invested approximately enough experience to grandmaster enchanting EIGHT TIMES OVER. And my net bonus benefit for doing so is +5% chance on 2nd enchants and +7% chance on the third. This is clearly a system that does not reward the investment of additional time/effort appropriately. Likewise, someone who has taken one of the base tradeskills beyond the 120 range gets a similar insult of benefit to their exceptional chance for doing so. This is the first problem.

Each step of this process could be tweaked to reward player time/investment to create a better system.

1. Exceptional Chance
A grandmaster should be making more exceptionals, than not. Someone at level 120 (grandmaster 7 times? in cost) should be making them 100% or nearly 100% of the time.
This would save the player a considerable amount of 'base materials' which is a large part of the crafting waste.
Nonexceptionals at the moment are, for the most part, too low durability to anything with, so are either a) wasted (salvaged for nothing), b) vendored, or c) have a couple bonus thrown on and sit languishing on vendors for days trying to get something back. The only thing the poor exceptional chance is doing is making players farm 3-4 times as many materials and it simply isnt necessary. Investing millions of exp into your trade should do a lot more to mitigate this.

Suggestions: Seriously increase exceptional chances to reduce 'garbage' crafts bloating economy and mitigate crafting costs, or ramp up salvage so you're getting 90% of your materials back so you can repeat as many times as necessary. As crafting the item gives almost no experience, being able to craft-salvage-repeat would not be an effective use of the player's time for grinding XP. And even if it was...well, I mean, getting crafting xp by actually crafting? It wouldn't be such a bad thing.


2. Random bonus chance
There's no differnce whatsoever between someone who has invested 300k xp and someone who has invested 8 million exp.
I'm firmly of the belief the random bonuses should be completely done away with and compensated by an increased cost of application.
But if we must have it, at the very least I'd suggest a 4th choice at level 80, a 5th at GM, a 6th at 120. It would still be possible, albeit less likely, to end up with complete junk
Currently there are just too many poor options in the bonus pool resulting in far too much try try again, even when things don't break.

Suggestions: Increase number of choices with higher skill, or do away with choices entirely and require higher skill investment to unlock better options.
Add an additional component for specific stats - IE if you want strength, add tungsten, if you want int, add black cutworms, ...would give a use to some of these items too that tend to just pile up and get vendored. This would serve in increasing the cost per craft but giving player more control over output.


3. Break chance
Again, benefit for exp investment here is an insult and the curve, especially post 100 when things start costing millions, should be revisited.

Suggestion: Someone who has achieved grandmaster shouldn't be breaking anything on the first attempt to mw/enchant. Scale the 95 to 100%. A single enchanted/masterworked gear is still not going to sell and from my experience these 'first time breaks' are often the most frustrating- especially if you're finally got the enchants right and it breaks on 1st masterwork, or vice versa. Basically kick the whole thing up a level - 1st go 100% 2nd go 95% 3rd go 82% (instead of 95/82/43 as is current). What's the harm? Nobody does less than 2x/2x at the moment, and usually beyond this you're getting into the realm of the durability is worth more than adding some +crappy health bonus. Being able to choose the bonuses we wouldn't have to keep blownig stuff up trying to get what we want we could just make it and be done.

So what's the balance?
- Increase cost of mw/enchant to mitigate making things less random and less breaky. Either by adding additional components to specify different bonuses, or flat increasing the number of ingots, or both. Consider doubling the cost for each successive enchant/masterwork to mitigate the change to a more reasonable break system. I think you'd find in the end the same number of materials end up getting used but the system become a lot more enjoyable for both crafters and their customers.

Benefits -
Being able to actually quote a price for crafted goods because they can be crafted with some consistency
No garbage/crap filling up vendors - this stuff gets recycled by the crafter as part of the level up process
Different crafters will sell wares with different stat priorities according to their own or their customer's preferences
Reduced focus on loop farming mines for 12 hours a day to get anything done, increase focus on time spent at crafting table to hone your craft.
Increased usage for non-ore components that currently have little/no use.

Again, I'm not saying "make it easier" I'm saying "make time investment into levelling crafting more meaningful."

If I have to make 20 of something to have a chance at getting the thing I want, I'd rather use the same time/materials that it takes to make 40 of the same thing to guarantee what I want. At least that way I can say, this is what it costs.

 

Semi-recently they degraded the exceptional % chance as stock GM (100) with prosperity dropped to 27% from 28%. Unsure of the rationale for that. One other possibility to make things more worth it would be to have the base skill scale the stats of the equipment once the asymptote was reached within a margin of error. Consider this similar to how enchant weapon and armor increase effectiveness of enchants as they level up. So in that case a blacksmithing 120 player would create weapons and armor that would have better base stats (durability, effectiveness, and/or metal effectiveness) regardless of exceptional or not than a base GM or non-GM smithy.

 

I believe the biggest issue with this right now is that players do not totally have control over the stats thier crafted items recieve. What youre presented with has to be chosen, whether you want it or not and it has a good chance to break when you do.

With artifacts you always know what you’re getting.

 

If all this you posted would be implemented all the items you craft will sell for mats cost only because everyone will be able to make them and some people here i noticed they prefer to pay mat cost but not the work put into making the item. Take ingots for example people buy 1k ore for 50k and they expect to buy the ingots resulted for the same price .. even though it actually takes hours to make 1k ingots.Luck and randomness give you a good feeling when you actually manage to GET IT ALL AS YOU WANT. Yes there are issues with crafting but making it more easy is not the issue.

 

Well, right now you can't even sell things for a fraction of material cost. Being able to break even would be a significant improvement.

Even so though, I don't think it would be a case of "everyone would be able to make everything" any more than it already is, I'm pushing for skill investment to be more significant, not less. Nothing in any of my suggestions would change this one way or the other.

The reason why everyone diversifies and levels everything is because there's no real advantage to pushing things higher. A level 100 vs. lvl 120 crafter in anything is a barely noticeable difference for 7x the cost. Especially in terms of the RNG - a level 80 enchanter and a level 120 enchanter have the same chance on the roll-for-bonus, actually, the lower level has an advantage as their option pool isn't diluted by the "durability effectiveness" option.

Its a real problem, as your example with the ingots, that people think a player's time has no value. This isn't true of everyone, anyone who's dabbled in the system enough to understand how it works will usually compensate you for time spent. But its true enough. I think the addition of refining skills may help this in some regard, but again, there's nothing to stop people from simply levelling all of them. And that will do nothing to address the above lucky roll times lucky roll times lucky roll problem, which is the central problem with the whole system.

 

Thats because the player base is not big enough and because the current challenges ingame dont actually require high end gear. (except for bosses which are probably done by 5% of the player base). A solution would be to make crafters more versatile ..able to adress a larger pool of players not just those 5% for the high end items. For example if we were able to craft miners gear ..say with chest pants helm so on and wed be able to add 0.5% gathering time bonus at lvl 80, 1% at lvl 100 that will increase the pool crafters can adress to...

People are already crafting ALOT ... theres hundred of thousands crafted items on vendor - the difference is a large portion of those items are junk +2-+8 ...

Put an item on vendor one made with 100 masterwork/100 enchant and another with 120 masterwork/120 enchant you will find there are differences ..not huge..but enough to be worth the investment for someone to spend a little extra for that 0.x % . And yes they have the same chance to get a good roll but a lvl 80 will probably get 23 attune on an item while a lvl 120 will get 26-28 attune which again matters.

 

Since the options are already tiered, then maybe each tier reached increases the total number of options as well. I.E. enchant proficiency 1-19, 3 options, 20-39, 4 options. and so on.

 

I'd love to be able to make gear to improve gathering and/or crafting.

I'm not disputing that skill level matters - a bit - for the potency of the enchants, but as with all skills, the curve ramps up quite quickly and there's very little to be gained post-100 (and even less to be gained post 120). I think it could matter a lot more, in that it could mitigate the waste and RNG. Something else to do with all the +2-8 junk instead of shoving it on a vendor would help drain all the crap nobody will ever buy/use out of the economy and giving crafters more control would result in less of the stuff even being made to begin with.

 

That is a function of the Producer XP Earn/Spend system. If you do not save up a million+ producer XP before even starting, it is going to require grinding that many more crafted goods out. And you only get a good xp boost the first couple times you make an item. After that it quickly drops to 20 xp per for gain. So you either have to go crafting other stuff outside of a chosen trade to build your xp pool or spend time mining/skinning to rebuild your pool. Losing coin the entire time and praying you can get something back for it. +8 is about the limit if all you are doing is masterworking or enchanting. Otherwise you'll break it. You want to do better than that? Oh, that's a second skill to grind out with expensive and/or time intensive materials.

More time investment per item, with increased skill gain per item could fix a lot of the market flooding. You need to make less items to raise your skill, but spend a similar amount of time making those items. That sounds a lot more feasible with the Episode 2 thoughts of crafting mini-games.