As everyone knows, you can only obtain crafting reagents from crates. While this is great from a new player perspective, when you are crafting for gold income this is not realistic. Yes you can use a converter, but they are way too expensive and you have to convert from other reagents.
The crafting is limited to the amount of people who are walking around farming crates. Why is this an issue? The price of tier II and above directly relates with the availability of reagents. If there is no other way to obtain them than gathering them from crates, those who only gather crates control the prices on all crafting materials tier II and up. This, then makes people who level their armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, engineering etc. completely reliant on either gathering the materials themselves or be at the mercy of the market.
When you are spending all the time getting iron, fibers, leather etc. you don’t have time to then go get the reagents. Additionally, when the new players slow down, there will be a massive decline on availability of reagents, which will then raise the prices massively on all tier II crafting materials and up. Update to this, given the amount crafted with Blue reagents, the grey reagents from low level players part really doesnt matter, but the original point still stands.
Solution 1: Add daily quests or repeatable quests that you can do to obtain crafting reagents.
Solution 2: Add an entire new skill for looting from crates that allows the player to obtain more reagents or loot higher level crates.
Solution 3: Allow raw resources for use with item converters.
Sorry for the long post, here, have some common health potions XD.
Refining materials should not be the bottleneck for crafting. I do not understand why they reverted the fix related to the drops of refining materials from chests last week. Tier 4 and 5 gathering resources (ore, fiber, wood etc) is essentially worthless because no one is able to refine their raw resources. And because players are farming for the legendary tier 5 resources there will be a overflow of tier 5 raw resources that can never be refined. The prices of tier 5 especially will fall to about nothing.
Even though the drops of refining materials might have been slightly too much it was way better than what we have right now. I definitely think that they need to increase it again and/or add additional ways to obtain them.
It currently costs less to level from furniture 150-200, than 100-150, despite double the xp from 150. If this doesn’t explain it to them, nothing will. Potent Solvent IS CHEAPER THAN WEAK SOLVENT on my server. LMFAO Sandpaper is 5x the price of solvent. And the Material Convertor is a money loser to convert. They had it working fine lol. The real issue isn’t that we can’t level. I can level all day, I JUST HAVE TO DO IT IN THE SAME SPOT I BEEN SINCE DAY 1
yeah, the current reagent acquisition doesnt make you want to go out and get it, it makes you want to stop crafting.
and the cost of swapping stats via table is too high.
also, since almost everything good for crafters needs high level chests, opening midrange chests just to gather feels like a waste of time, and high level chests generally need groups to be efficient, which is not how most gatherers/crafters play.
Nothing is forcing you to use tier 3 reagents. Which is something you should avoid also, if you analyze the benefit of using tier 5 reagents you can walk away with larger profits/savings even if the reagent costs 4-6 times as much as tier 3 reagent. However use a calculator and do the maths before going all in.
As for demand and supply it sounds like you have spotted a potential market where you can make some good coin if your willing to do some chest farming. If the time investment of farming reagents is not worth your time the price is effectively below market value.
teir one reagents are exactly as much of a bottleneck as teir 3, probably more so actually
the acquisition method is the same, open random chests for 8-15 items, 1/4 chance to be the item you need. swapping is cheaper, thats about the only advantage.
Also, this isn’t about making money, its about it bottlenecking crafting.
gathering items generates way more items per time frame than you can realistically refine per time frame. This makes the main hardship of item crafting opening chests, not gathering, or crafting.
I’m not opposed to opening chests as a form of gathering, but it can’t reall be improved, and the amount of progress toward your goal is low.
I have a solution that I believe will not be difficult to implement, nor will it dramatically make it too easy to level. Let’s use woods as an example. Allow every wood tier, lumber, wyrdwood, ironwood, to be made WITHOUT any sandpaper at all. But also, give 0 bonus pieces. Then, allow sandpaper to be an optional ingredient with a drop down menu just like a crafting mod or azoth, when you use it, you then get a bonus just like it is now. Simple, problem solved, you don’t have to rewrite the entire world, and crafters can go gather ALL OF THE MATS in the game and progress can resume. Perhaps drop the rate back to day one drop rates if implemented, which will increase the cost of sandpaper but it’s just a luxury item at that point anyway, and when a player has enough gold to speed up the process they can choose to do so.
I was so happy when they changed the drop rate from chests and made the refiners so abundant. The way you acquire refiners is horrendous. Is a chemical, let us craft it.
Also, some basic components for cooking are pretty hard to get, the recipes that just required a type and rank of an ingredient is OK, but the ones that require specific componentes like sugar or salt that only drop from crates are terrible.
I can add to this topic that one of the tell tell signs that I expected to happen is happening on my server. There are 200 total ironwood planks on the entire server market. Why? Because harvester/crafters have quit farming high lvl mats, and are again harvesting basic mats to avoid using crafting reagents again, which means you got people like me back in lvl 1-26 zones farming greenwood. I have 508 hours played, and im still chopping green wood. So my production of epic materials has come to a complete halt, your game is going to lose a lot of players soon when people start hitting these walls people like me are face up against. Currently LvL 200 Armor, 170 Jewel, 200 cook, 175 Eng, 105 Furnish, 70 Weapon, 170 Arcana. <-----And on the verge of quitting…the time invested already is the only thing holding me on.
Ran high lvl chests today, not elite but reekwater areas, the gold repair cost alone and potion cost, and time sink totally not worth it and that is including not getting killed, just getting beat on. Blue reagents are best farmed through “zerg trains”, like 90% of the games goodies. So again, back to farming low lvl mats to lvl crafting, which is the real problem, forced into same sht non stop.
I’m fine with how we get flux and such. My issue is that the higher my smithing gets, the harder it is to find flux. I’ve got stacks of tannin and solvent. It feels to me like there’s some algorythm that adjusts drop rates based on professions.
I think armor/weapon drops are equally afflicted. I’m s&s, ls, iin heavy and all i really get are light, medium armor, great axes, hammers and rapiers.
You just convert for flux, buy crossweave, buy convertors or run faction missions to aquire them, and then covert to flux, flux has always been most expensive. Armor/Weapon drops have no bearing on crafters, we craft, we don’t rely on drops.
an hour or two per day… running between all the various supply crates in the mines, the zombies villiages, anyw ereh they can be… praying you will end up with what you actually need for whatever that day… like flux, but no the RNG gods hate you and all that running gives you say 13 of those and 300+ tannin, 40 cross weave, and no sandpaper etc…
i liked that one glorious week where everything dropped… i didn’t give a damn some couldn’t sell it on the market… i could craft damn it!