Discussion: Can/Should Crafting be Made Easier?

[asaseth]

About keeping the grind down, as one person nited above, you get the same exp for creating something with no boosts as you do for creating something with full boosts.

Now, if money is relatively worthless, at this point in time, and to keep down the grind, why not make it so you get more exp when you build something with boosts? Those that want to have crafting patterns for EVERYTHING can do that, but for those of us who only do one or two things, and have to suck up every available resource we can get our grubby little hands on just to grind, but have bought the boosts packs, which are more than a bit on the high side, well... We wont have to suck up so much mats, cause we will be getting that little extra bit of exp.

As an asside, I did the math, but I am unshure of it. What I see is that creating four earings gets me about as much exp as creating one diadem, but the diadem uses 2 more mats for no more exp. Can anyone else confirm or discredit this? Just a little thing I noticed.

[zumwalt]

My answer to the thread question:
Can/Should crafting be made easier? No.

Absolutely not.

On my worst nights when I start crafting, in 30 minutes I can do 8 to 10 levels.

On my best nights, I can do upwards to 20 levels.

I just spend 3 or 4 nights during the week filling my packers with all the mats I need to craft that much stuff.

How much easier do you really want it to be?
I can harvest Q120 mats, and craft Q90 armor / Q70 weapons / Q50 ranged / Q40 Jewelry.

[plarfman]

hmmmm should it be made eaiser.....no.

I have no problem with it the way it is and I dont see the point of making it any easier. Who wants to max all there skills out in a week or two as it is the lvls come pretty fast and toss in a guild and some friends donating you mats and it wont seem so bad.

[ozric]

My answer to the thread question:
Can/Should crafting be made easier? No.

/agree

(10charminimumpostfiller)

[usinuk]

As an asside, I did the math, but I am unshure of it. What I see is that creating four earings gets me about as much exp as creating one diadem, but the diadem uses 2 more mats for no more exp. Can anyone else confirm or discredit this?

Nope. Try making sure both earring/diadem are the same level, using same level grind mats.

Diadem uses 10 mats - so 1000 exp at even level with even level grind mats. Earrings use 2 mats, so 200 exp per set at even level with even level grind mats. This is also why heavy armor/weapons are so much less tedious to craft; even using -20 lvl mats you still end up with something like 20 mats * 75-80 exp/mat (don't remember the actual decline rate off the top of my head) = 1500-1600 exp per -20 2H sword. Trust me, after grinding 50 levels of earrings as a separate line you start experimenting...

Back to topic...

As has been noted in a lot of other posts, item availability at level 100 or under is very much a commodity business - low margins, readily available, price wins over quality all the time. Why? Level 100 mats in this last patch became much, much more accessible to harvesters once aggro mobs in 50-100 areas went down; it is very easy to TP into Winds of Muse and get access to every choice Tryker q100 mat without doing much, if any, dodging. Fleeting Garden is a bit tougher (as Matis always is), but compared to pre-patch 2/3, harvesting q100 mats is not at all tough.

And harvesting, given the patch 1 nerfs, now completely drives crafting ability. I now have two harvesting lines over 100, would have had a third (PR) there this week had it not been for the nuke-nonPVPable-choice-PR-mats bug/feature, and am now working on a fourth as a direct result of trying to keep my max harvest levels down while still feeding the beast that is crafting. I can also guarantee that I would have never pushed harvest like this had it not been for patch 1.

Here's my point. Money does have meaning to a crafter, up until something like level 120-level 130, where the level 100 NPC grind mats stop being useful. The problem is that no crafter under level 100 or so has enough money to really be able to afford using grind mats. (Past that point, where you start selling relatively hard to find items, you can start making margin on crafting again.) And once you make q150 items that make you a lot of money, those q100 grind mats are useless unless you want to level another line.

All that is needed to make crafting easier is to restore what was broken in patch one and let crafters craft without having to spend 5x their crafting time harvesting - by giving them access to money under level 100 so they can buy grind mats. Restore overseer missions to where they pay 2x the cost of grind mats. (Put a level limit on them so you don't get 100k every 90 minutes from a no-risk mission.) Redo the basic pricing schemes of the NPCs, so that you don't lose 50% of mat costs selling an NPC a brand new item. Make NPC mat cost equivalent to that of choice quality player-harvested items...so you still get incentive for people to buy player mats (choice gets bought over basic NPC items everyday, and a 20% discount for player harvested NPC basic mats works too), but it stops making NPC pricing prohibitive. And offer q150 grind mats at appropriate costs. Be nice to have something to spend money on if you have it.

Very simple fix to make crafting 'easier' - fix the worst part of the grind, which is getting mats. Disharness it from harvesting and make it a stand alone profession again and whlie the grind is bad, its not dominating your entire game experience as it is now.

Other than that, the profession doesn't need any real changes, although there should be a look at bugs like the success rate issue. (I once did 200 earrings at 80-81% success rates and came out with 65% success rate. No response to ticket including my offer to send in the log. No surprise.) And the q100 splits should take a look at combining a couple of lines - the hardest of hard lines to grind are the ones using the least mats. Maybe those should be combined.

[foreverb]

My answer to the thread question:
Can/Should crafting be made easier? No.

Absolutely not.

On my worst nights when I start crafting, in 30 minutes I can do 8 to 10 levels.

On my best nights, I can do upwards to 20 levels.

I just spend 3 or 4 nights during the week filling my packers with all the mats I need to craft that much stuff.

How much easier do you really want it to be?
I can harvest Q120 mats, and craft Q90 armor / Q70 weapons / Q50 ranged / Q40 Jewelry.

Zum, when you get to 180q items i'll be happy to hear your say on this. But as you have nothing above even 100 your still pretty much ignorant to the crafting branch.


i myself can craft 150 pikes, 100 lances, 100 large shields, 110 ranged 2handed weapons, and nothing is below 51 in my crafting branch. i also harvest 200q mats.

My girlfriend that plays this game crafts 180q heavy armor. As i have helped her alot in this conquest i'd like to think i have some knowlage of the higher level crafting. I cry when i think about 200+

[tetra]

Zum, when you get to 180q items i'll be happy to hear your say on this. But as you have nothing above even 100 your still pretty much ignorant to the crafting branch.


i myself can craft 150 pikes, 100 lances, 100 large shields, 110 ranged 2handed weapons, and nothing is below 51 in my crafting branch. i also harvest 200q mats.

My girlfriend that plays this game crafts 180q heavy armor. As i have helped her alot in this conquest i'd like to think i have some knowlage of the higher level crafting. I cry when i think about 200+

Im 141 harvest and need to spend about 2-2.5hrs getting 1511 exp per node rather quickly (careplanning is pretty stable exp) in order to level . I cry when I think about what will happen to my ability to even attempt ranged fighting once my crafting level passes my harvesting level .

[lyrah68]

I think that storage of mats is WAY too low as it stands, I also think that materials are WAY too scarce. I am not too sure that this will change. I mainly hope that the intentionally depletion of PR nodes stops.

With PVP in the PR, Intentionally depletion of essential PR nodes IS grounds for a guild to hold those nodes for the use of those that will mine them responsibly and respectful of the needs of others. I feel that those that are working to keep the PR nodes at 0 unit counts are dispicable.

[grimjim]

I think that storage of mats is WAY too low as it stands, I also think that materials are WAY too scarce. I am not too sure that this will change. I mainly hope that the intentionally depletion of PR nodes stops.

With PVP in the PR, Intentionally depletion of essential PR nodes IS grounds for a guild to hold those nodes for the use of those that will mine them responsibly and respectful of the needs of others. I feel that those that are working to keep the PR nodes at 0 unit counts are dispicable.

That's not what's happening.

There's a bug/feature causing them not to respawn/refill without a server reboot.

[josephm]

Crafting at higher levels is also built to become top heavy. I can understand the need right now, but with the amount of items it takes to level at higher levels, there are going to be more higher level items than lower level. The decay is quite a bit faster of course, but what happens when there are tons of high level crafters? Hopefully there will be just as many high level fighters...though groups typically have 7/9 people running around naked.

I'm guilty of this sometimes. It depends on the number or healers to keep my hp/sap up during the fight rather than in between. Because of this, my decay is 8x slower than the poor tanks.

We also have leveled Brithlems amps about 30-40 levels the past couple days...and we spend a lot of time fighting, leveling combat skills on mobs that only drop one or two mats. So for only 2-3 of us pooling our resources on of us has launched up to higher levels in a very short time. Bri is now on the cusp of our high end harvesting skills. We've been in email organizing a rotation for people so we can level their crafting skills. If we can get a full harvest group of 9 in, not only can we powerlevel one harvester up at about 3 levels an hour till we have to switch, we can level each person to the cusp in one day.

Between Bri and I alone harvesting and selling amps we've made approx 2-3 mil now in a day and a half, just selling to vendors. Money is just not a problem for us.

As for supplimental skills I can sit all day harvesting 90ish mats off kips without being touched. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to gain 40+ levels in an 8 hour span, + make a couple million dap...that could goto mats. I don't spend money on mats though, just some new eq, TPs, and the GH.

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