Crafting Clarification for Expertise System

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December End Game Update

Based on feedback on the High Water Mark (HWM) system and our desire to have a compelling and diverse end game, we are making some major updates in our December 1.2 patch.

Our goal for the end game is to provide a variety of activities that all provide compelling rewards and interesting challenges. In this article, I’ll discuss 3 big changes we’ll be making – improving our end game gear progression, increasing rewards for some end game activities, and tuning difficulty of end game content.

Expertise & Gypsum System

Since New World’s launch, we’ve heard the feedback from our community that the HWM system was not communicated effectively, promotes a single monotonous activity, had too much randomness, and was a bit too grindy. So, we are completely revamping the system to address these concerns. This new and improved HWM system is called Expertise.

In the December update, Expertise will govern the highest drops you can get per slot, much like HWM did. But starting in early 2022, it will also govern the effectiveness of your gear. This means if your War Hammer Expertise is 520, and you equip a 550 Gear Score War Hammer, the weapon’s effective Gear Score will be reduced to 520. While we understand to some players this may result in a temporary reduction in power, we believe in the long run this will result in more rewarding progression loop that can’t be bypassed by buying gear off the trading post.

A major improvement provided by Expertise is that a player’s Expertise per slot is displayed on the inventory screen, as well as the average Expertise of all equipped gear. Additionally, each time a player gets an Expertise bump, a level up banner will appear showing their new Expertise Level. Note that the Expertise system unlocks at level 60, so this information will not be shown until then.

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The second major improvement we made is adding a way for players to control their gear progression. To achieve this we introduced Gypsum. Gypsum is a new resource that is found by doing a variety of activities. Gypsum can be crafted into Gypsum Orbs, which can then be turned into special caches called Gypsum Casts. Gypsum Casts are gear type specific and when opened guarantee an Expertise bump for that type of gear as well as an item of that type. So if you really want to increase your Bow Expertise, you can craft Gypsum Bow Cast. Players can earn Gypsum by doing 7 different end-game activities:

  • Obsidian Gypsum – defeating level 60+ open world named bosses, typically found in Elite Landmarks
  • Sapphire Gypsum – defeating the final bosses of The Lazarus Instrumentality and Garden of Genesis
  • Ruby Gypsum – found in Outpost Rush Caches
  • Emerald Gypsum – found in Trade Skill Aptitude Reward Containers
  • Citrine Gypsum – found in Arena Caches
  • Amethyst Gypsum – found in Breach Caches
  • Topaz Gypsum – found on hostile creatures Level 55+, but only after consuming a special Attunement Potion that can be crafted at a Tier 5 Camp.

We believe that providing different ways to collect Gypsum will allow players to play a variety of content, while always finding at least a few activities they love to progress in their gear score. Engaging in these activities for 30-60 minutes a day will earn players enough Gypsum of that type to craft a Gypsum Orb (except for Topaz since the Attunement potion can only be crafted once a week). After players have earned sufficient Gypsum for an Orb, they won’t earn more for 23 hours. Gypsum Orbs can then be crafted into Gypsum Casts of any weapon, armor, or trinket type. Note you can only craft any type of Cast, once per day. Opening a Gypsum Cast will guarantee an Expertise bump and reward players with a random piece of gear of that type with Gear Score equal to the new Expertise level. We’ve introduced a new Kiln crafting station in all end game zones that allows players to craft Gypsum Orbs and the various Gypsum Casts.

Note that we’ve tuned down the general chances of getting an Expertise bump to compensate for the guaranteed bumps that were added with Gypsum. Elite chest odds were reduced a little, but open world named enemies were reduced a lot. But we have increased up the amount your Expertise increases with each bump to make Gypsum Casts and the random bumps feel more valuable.

Reward Improvements

To ensure all our end-game activities provide compelling rewards for the effort and risk involved, we’ve reviewed them and made some adjustments. We will continue to audit our rewards for each activity and make further adjustments as necessary.

For this round we’ve focused on Expeditions. Our goal is that Expeditions are super rewarding experiences, since they require a time-investment to craft an Orb and are challenging content. We’ve made 4 adjustments to make them more rewarding:

  1. Each expedition boss will guarantee a random Expertise bump
  2. We fixed all chests in Lazarus Instrumentality and Garden and Genesis so they have a chance to provide end-game Expertise bumps
  3. Added Item Shards as a guaranteed drop for Expedition Bosses and as a chance to drop from Elite Chests
  4. Added guaranteed Sapphire Gypsum drops for each Expedition Boss

Items Shards are a new crafting ingredient that enables players to craft an item with a specific Attribute Bonus on it while still being able to use a Craft Mod to guarantee a perk. Item shards are guaranteed to drop from Expedition Bosses and have a chance to drop from Elite Chests in Expeditions and Elite Landmarks.

And as discussed above we’ve added Gypsum to a variety of our end game activities. This should make all those activities more rewarding, since they will result in gear progression and one guaranteed good drop from opening the Gypsum Cast. We felt that War and Invasion were already rewarding enough and due to their limited availability wanted to be careful about making them even more rewarding. Arena Bosses also guarantee an additional random Expertise bump, which along with the Citrine Gypsum hopefully make them rewarding activities now.

Difficulty Adjustments

We’ve made several adjustments in the end-game difficulty to compensate for some accidental overtuning we did in the November patch. We improperly set several enemies to a difficulty level above what we intended. With these changes we hope to find a middle ground between the too easy end game content we had pre-November and the overtuned HP sponges we had afterwards (the upcoming December release notes will provide more specifics on those changes). Remember level 66 Elite Landmarks are supposed to be really hard, requiring very optimized gear and consumables. With the changes to Expertise, players can progress their gear in a variety of ways before venturing to those end game areas.

We’ve also modified 2 other Elite Landmarks to become end-game POIs. The Malevolence Elite POI in Edengrove was upleveled to level 66 content and now has 6 Elite chests that can all provide end game Expertise bumps. And the Imperial Palace and North Dynasty Shrine Elite Landmarks in Ebonscale reach were also upleveled to level 66 content and 8 Elite chests were added. Now there will be an end game open world area in each of the end game territories (Ebonscale Reach, Shattered Mountain, Edengrove, and Reekwater).

Conclusion

We’re sorry that the end game experience was not at par with the start of the game and hope these changes start to remedy that. We’re not done yet and will continue to refine, improve, and add to our end game over time. But hopefully these changes will create a better foundation to build off. Everything other than the Expertise’s effectiveness on gear (which will be released early 2022) will be available tomorrow to try out in our PTR. Please let us know your feedback on the Expertise and Gypsum system in the PTR feedback thread .

Zin

Hello,

I was wondering if a dev could chime in and clarify how this new systems ties into crafting if at all?

There are some of us who spent a good amount of time and resources to get our crafting trade skills to 200. While I understand you’re trying to prevent people from just buying cheap high GS gear from the trade post, there are some of us, like me, who have 200 Armoring and 200 Weaponsmithing and made their own gear as an alternative to elite farming in myrk/siren/mangled/mines/mal etc.

Is my grind not worth the same as someone else’s grind? How do we quantify that and why?

Seems like this system is rewarding people who are at or near 600 GS HWM/Expertise already and forcing the rest of us to grind just like them even though we already did that grind a different way.

I would hope there is some form of acknowledgement for our grind as well in this new system. Grinding to be able to craft 580-600gs weapons and armor for what? Just so they’re effectively whatever my “Expertise” is??? At least make 200 crafting worth it. I would highly suggest, if the system goes live as planned, that you allow crafted gear to lock in multiple crafting mods…

V/R

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Here’s the TL;DR for the Dev Blog: “We’re sorry the HWM system didn’t work, we’re gonna make it more of a f***ing moronic grind.”

Yeah. Not for me. As soon as the new “Expertise” system hits, I’m out.

Edit: Edited a word out to satisfy overly sensitive snowflakes.

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makes elites less effective and more difficult, but does add a new item to balance it… then they put a 24 hour timer on it. like what

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So we are forced to run around and mindlessly click on chests all day?

This is actually the worst shit I have seen in any mmo, and I have been playing MMO’s for 17 years.

I am not even exagerating.

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Yep. AGS think that’s what “fun” is supposed to be. They have absolutely no clue, and they’re not learning from feedback. Oh well, there are other games coming out soon, made and run by teams that at least have an idea what they’re doing.

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Making dailies and craft jewelries make absolute no sense after patch 1.2.
People put in more time should be rewarded more.
AGS just gave me a good reason to spend more time on other games instead of this one.

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It makes buying better gear pointless and crafting better gear pointless at the same time. Truly a well thought out and clever change.

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I’ll tell you this as blunt as it is - if you are a crafter you get it in the bu… without lube. And yes, I’m a crafter myself.

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Great post I want to know the details as well. I did not grind watermark either I spent a long time trying to max out as many crafting skills as possible. I already feel like my 200 skills are worthless. If I cant even craft my own 600 GS items anymore then what was the point? If that is the case I think I will be done with this game. I know many others that feel the same that are crafters.

I can kind of understand the people that just bought GS items going down but that is awful. If I can just craft to increase my personal GS then that seems pretty fair because its a heck of a grind to 200. Mats, and trophies ect

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Who are you going to sell your crafted items to if u say u kind of understand the people that just bought GS items going down? You are happy with simply equivalenting your crafting profession lvl to HWM ? It’s hard to think that this is what crafting is supposed to be in a game.

Crafting is being destroyed by this and PVE is made much much harder to progress and get into the endgame.

PVP might be the only improvement long term even if it is not pleasing to know we worked our ass off to get better gear to perform better in PVP just to have that taken away from us.

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One aspect of importance is going to be how much you need to do to trigger the aptitude rewards in crafting, since these will be a source of watermark-increases. It might be possible to raise your VM by crafting, or that might be too slow. We dont know yet.

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Ok, let me give you a simple example. I tnink we all can agree that voidbent armour is quite popular these days and many people are wearing them. Now imagine half of these players would get a nerfed gs 500-520 voidbend armour set for no reason. Would you think they would ever craft another set after they hit gs 600? Tbh. I don’t know what rewards in crafting you are talking about at all. ^^

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I’m working under the assumption that the gear retains it’s gearscore, and will slowly get better again as you level your expertise.

It’s a limiter, not actually modifying the gear. If thats the case, they wont need to recraft that gear-piece.

If they actually modify the gear-piece, then no, no one will craft that thing again…

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This is still terrible even if the item retains it’s GS witch I think it does. If people are forced to get their expertise to 600 then this only makes everything crafted worth much less. Once you are at 600 expertise u can cast your own items and get drops as well. The point of crafted items was that you would use coin to get the items instead of grinding for them.

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Also why would you spend more on a 600 item that gets scaled down when you can buy a cheaper item and see what drops you get while leveling expertise to save money? Specially since by the time you hit 600 whatever you bought might not be good anymore due to changes from patches during that time.

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So the Expertis system is bad for crafters since it lower the buyer potantial (people need to grind anyway so no point to buy good gear since its not more effectiv then bad gear you just have to swap is less often). I would give you that but on the other hand you get the crafter specific Gypsum when ever you overlevel (at lest this is my assumption for the Trade Skill Aptitude Reward Containers) in your craft and can rise your own experties (we still don´t know if its tradeable right?).
Then ther are now Item Shards that give you a way to fix the attributes on top of one perk make craftet items less random (2 instead of 3). You will howerver have to buy them from people running the endgame dungeons or do them on your own.
I think its another nerv overall for the market for crafters but a slight improvment on the BIS hunt.

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Its also bad for “looters”, why would anyone want to buy the 595s i get from chests when they’ll be downscaled to 510.

I am not a crafter but I also get my gold from selling gear, this system is horrible for crafters, looters and especially new players that will now take even longer time to catch up.

Literally 0 players will benefit from this system, even I that already have my HWM capped on most items will get nothing from the expertise. I don’t understand at all why would they want to implement this.

I think the Gypsum system can be good, I love the changes to malevolence and the ebonscale pois, but this expertise system shouldn’t make it into the game.

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My thoughts exactly.

Blizzard does this all the time; systems within systems.

It’s fucking annoying.

Guess it’ll be back to ESO. They know how to handle player progression: aka you getting out interesting gear set combinations, and do it once.

((I came back to a 5 year old account. Didn’t need to level grind or get new versions of my gear. Just picked up where I had left off.))

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I feel like the easiest solution is:

Reach 200 armoring? No more armor scale down. Reach 200 weaponsmithing? No more weapon downscaling, etc.

Grinding out 200 armoring/weapon smithing/arcana/jewel crafting are enough of a grind that this is a fair reward in the new system.

This way, you still can’t just buy your way to 600gs, but you can still craft yourself there too.

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As a 200 armorer who has had my 595-600 gs armor and 580+ weapons for months now. If this gets implemented I’m going to quit the game. My armor “expertise” will be 569, my weapons are 540s, and jewelry is floating at 500. My average gearscore will drop from easily 585 average down to less than 570. I shouldn’t be penalized for not playing for the “expertise” grind, particularly if the change is retroactive.

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