Please streamline Armour Crafting!!

[dakkon3]

For the love of god Nevrax, please remove the insane tree splits that occur after lvl 100 armour crafting. Currently, Armour crafting and Jewlery crafting are the most tedious and insanely time consuming aspects a player can attempt to lvl in this game. From my experience no other tree skill has such ridiculous splits. After lvl 100, armour crafting splits into six different trees! SIX! At this point you are forced to level each individual piece seperately, which many people have already calculated at 300,000 mats to raise armour crafting from lvl 100 to lvl 150. Does noone see a problem with this? Even after Patch 1 and the low xp rate for the other three skill trees of Melee, Magic and Harvest, people will reach lvl 250 in all of them before a crafter can even get to 150 in armour crafting. There is a serious imbalance in that regard. There are lots and lots of people who are already over lvl 220 in either melee or magic or harvesting, yet i havent seen ANY crafters out there who are above lvl 120 in heavy or light armour crafting because even with heavy guild support the 300,000 mat requirenment is just unfathomable of a goal to reach. I personally see little if any inclination to continue heavy armour crafting when after a week of harvesting ive only been able to go from lvl 100 heavy armour crafting to lvl 102. Its impossible to keep up the grind when you see little if any progress being made in your primary skill. The other three skills at least have the enjoyment of seeing a good amount of progression after grinding their melee or magic or harvest for a week. Not so with crafting.

My suggestion is to eliminate the six individual trees for heavy armour and have it be one tree just like in all the other skills. For example, if you want to lvl pike in melee you have 2 hand fighting up to 100, 2 hand piercing up to 150, pike up to 200 and master pike up to 250. Same goes for Harvesting, you have Desert Forage up to 100, Advanced Desert Forage up to 150, Expert Desert Forage up to 200, and Master Desert Forage up to 250. Why not do this with crafting. Currently we have Armour crafting to 50, Heavy armour Crafting to 100, and then??? 6 different trees for each individual piece. After 100 it should be Advanced heavy armour crafting up to 150, then Expert heavy armour crafting up to 200 and Master heavy armour crafting to 250. I dont see any reason to make crafting armour such a tedious and time consuming chore by splitting it into 6 different trees. If they dont rebalance armour crafting, in a month we will see a lot of lvl 250 melees running around in Q120 armour. Not my idea of balance, especially now that mobs are insanly strong and high quality armour is more important than ever.

[parisg]

I just dinged lvl 50 in armor crafting and I dont believe my eyes... I feel like Heracles trying to clean that giant stable.

Forget about the chore in front of you. The question is also what in the world are you going to do with the masses of SP that you would get by levelling 6 branches. I dont see any other stanzas coming in anymore.

[aylwyne]

As someone that likes to do a bit of everything, I can certainly see your point.

However, I don't think the game designers expect someone to master all lines of a skill in any short amount of time. It's like that in other skills in the game. If you decide to generalize and try to build several items, it'll take longer. If you specialize and build one thing, you could reach 250 MUCH quicker.

It's really the same in all branches, some more than others, due to the amount of splits as you pointed out. In melee, you could become L250 in one weapon but still be low level in all the others. If you want to raise your skill in all weapons it'll take a lot longer.

[Fred1l1]

at least extend jewelry up to 100 before it splits...splitting jewelry at 50 is just crazy! :|

[parisg]

Basically the splits prevent people from leveling. That is their only purpose. What I am missing are extra stanzas that you would receive along the way. Give me to make that extra pair of boots. Give a sword master a nice special attack. Then I would understand the split because it adds to the atmosphere of the game.

Currently the split is only an extra grind.

[tinpony]

Basically the splits prevent people from leveling. That is their only purpose. What I am missing are extra stanzas that you would receive along the way. Give me to make that extra pair of boots. Give a sword master a nice special attack. Then I would understand the split because it adds to the atmosphere of the game.

Currently the split is only an extra grind.
Not sure if this is an intended side effect, but splitting armour also ensures that people will be making all 6 types of heavy armour and reselling it for the market. With the easy availability of grind mats, I can make a fair selection of good armour (not wonderful armour, but good) and resell it cheaply to those people going through 4 suits of heavy armour a day. Check out light armour vendors and you'll find dozens of skirts and vests at q100 and under but very very few gloves/boots/sleeves. Last night in Pyr, I only found 2 pairs of nonNPC gloves.

Tin.

[jjm152]

Basically the splits prevent people from leveling. That is their only purpose. What I am missing are extra stanzas that you would receive along the way. Give me to make that extra pair of boots. Give a sword master a nice special attack. Then I would understand the split because it adds to the atmosphere of the game.

Currently the split is only an extra grind.

I haven't really looked at armor, but evidently there are extra weapons you can create at skill 150 in a specific weapon that have special particle effects on them. I've seen a couple floating around.

I think that may be the reward intended. It seems kind of meek to me, especially in the case of armor where you need several pieces to be effective.

It would be nice if there were superior armors (not just in looks) or the ability to add special attributes to armor you create other than the standard hp/stam/sap/focus

But yeah, it does look like just an extra grind.

I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if the population was larger and there were more people working on crafting. That way you may be able to get your vest from one guy... you pants from another, and so on.

However right now there just aren't that many crafters in any particular land for that level of speciality to pay off.

Good idea in theory, but unfortunately the low player populations make it rather painful in practice.

[eegreen]

I think what the many splits in the Armor Crafting skill tree is meant to do is make each crafter specialize. By this I mean only make boots, or only make vests. I have read, and agree with the posts about how tedious it is to level armor crafting from lvl100 to lvl150. The problem may be that the designers of this skill system didn't want you to be able to level all the branches of armor crafting easily.

Making people specialize has its advantages and disadvantages.

One advantage is that you have to interact more with other players and NPCs to get the gear you want. Another is that with crafters specializing in just one piece of armor, the quality of that piece will be much higher than if they leveled all pieces.

A disadvantage of this is the monotony of making only one piece of armor over and over again. Another is that it is hard to find a complete set of matching armor (quality, color, dodge/parry) if you have to buy it from many different sellers.

I'm only at level 19 crafting, so I haven't had to specialize yet, and may not have a full understanding of the system. But that's how I see it from what I've expereinced and what I've heard people say.

[swayzo]

This is how I see it. Ok lvl melee or magic too 200. Then kill lvl 100 mobs for crafting items. Should be able to do it fast and farm lots of mats. Unless you have a guild then tell them to farm mats for you specific ones to hold on too.

But yeah it would be great if they streamlined it.

[buzyb77]

i have no problem with the Branching trees because i think some People Can make Better Hats than others

[jjm152]

Frankly there are not enough people on the server in any specific realm that you will have enough people specializing in enough variety of armor pieces to put together very many suits past QL120 or so.

I seriously doubt the situtation will improve either. My guess is eventually people will start wearing mixed race armors and mixed stat armors because of this. It takes a huge amount of materials just to get through a single branch of the third tier crafting skills. I think someone estimated somewhere in the tens of thousands range. Heavy armor has 6 of those branches to go through past skill level 100. Thats pretty nuts.

If there were more people crafting in the game, I'm not sure this would be an issue... as it stands right now the situtation for people who stick with the game is going to get fairly desperate a couple months out from now.

[usinuk]

I disagree with the OPs argument. To me, I view each subtree as an opportunity for a great source of skill points. Please don't change an entire skill tree because a few people are frustrated that they can't powerlevel.

Trust me, I've gone through sheer misery having to level earrings and rings at 85 exp per when you use grind mats 30 levels below your skill, but the 800 skill points I've gained since level 50 doing those two plans to 90 have paid for hp boost and a couple of ammo plans. Took an hour per level; you do the math on how many times I clicked 'take item' and 'craft item' before my fingers went numb.

But...what most non-crafters don't know is that you only need ONE subtree under the main tree leveled up to craft anything in the main tree at the higher level. That is, if you are level 110 in heavy armor boots and level 100 in everything else, you can attempt to craft level 120 armor. (For that matter, you could try to craft level 120 light armor even if you're at level 51 in it and 110 in heavy boots.)

Granted, the success rates stink when you're not leveled up in that particular subtree. But, assuming you don't want to spend 300k mats, this is the way to do it...you certainly won't fail 300k mats worth of times. And honestly, given how much they've pandered to harvesters with the instaregen (a huge mistake IMO) can you really say mats at higher levels aren't really going to be a problem? Furthermore, if you have mats its really not that hard to advance in the armor lines; when you have to spend 20-30 mats on an item, even when you're down a number of levels you still bang out like 2K exp per item. (Compare that to the misery of leveling low-mat requirement jewelry and you'll understand why there aren't a lot of jewelry crafters.)

I look forward to getting to the armor split precisely for the same reason I like the jewelry split - it will allow me to do things like take medium qual plans and other race plans so when I start harvesting in other lands I can actually do something with the mats. QL100 wondermats mean we can now level up to 130 easily, which should supply most people in the current environment.

What does need changing are crafter missions and raw mat prices. The crafting nerf this last patch was severe, subtle, and uncalled for. It needs to be fixed or there won't be any young crafters to do all this, nor will experienced crafters be able to pay for the grinding required. Both were just really, really dumb nerfs.

[borg9]

What does need changing are crafter missions and raw mat prices. The crafting nerf this last patch was severe, subtle, and uncalled for. It needs to be fixed or there won't be any young crafters to do all this, nor will experienced crafters be able to pay for the grinding required. Both were just really, really dumb nerfs.

Some facts about the missions to highlight this subtle and really dumb nerf!

2 missions that were in Crystabell in Tryker. These are lvl 50 crafting missions.

Pre patch:

Mission 1

5xql60 Hvy Vest
+5xql50 Medium pants

Mats required for mission 225 (allowing 20% extra for item degrades 270 mats)

Pay for completing mission 452k dappers.

effective value per mat 1670 (ql50 & ql60 mats required).

Mission 2

5xql65 long sword
+5xql60 hvy vest

Mats required for mission 240 (allowing 20% extra for item degrades 288 mats)

Pay for completing mission 557k dappers.

effective value per mat 1934 (ql60 & ql70 mats required).

exceptional return, maybe a little too high.

Now after patch 1 and patch 1++

First all the items require medium quality look!

but the return on these missions has been reduced to 50k each!

using the numbers above this values a ql50-ql70 mat at around 251 dappers.

The merchant will by default pay of 800 dappers per mat if sold direct and players are currently paying more.

So to do the mission, rather than a profit to re-invest in crafting or other things, it cost you 448k if you buy the mats, or if you harvest them yourself you will effectively lose 488k because you could have sold them to the shop.

This doesn't make any sense to me, not matter how hard I look at it positively.

Crafting missions were the only way to keep pace with the guild hunters without making everyone harvest.

[davosaga]

Total streamlining could be a badthing making you lose of a hell of a lot of SP, but making the split latter could also be good because as it is atm is just stupid.
You can be lvl250 in one weapon.. which is cool.
You can be lvl250 in one school of magic.. which is cool.
You can be lvl250 in medium armour gloves.. plain stupid.

[trcroyle]

I'm one of the masochists who like the system the way it is, but I wouldn't complain if some of the crafting branches were made 'easier' just so long as some remained mind numbingly hard (yes, I'm a jewelry specialist). Mid-range armor and weapons seem like nice candidates for streamlining to me, though I do think they should get painful at the high end.