Feedback on the state of crafting (armoring) and why it just doesn't add up

[rayco]

TL;DR : Crafting feels underwhelming, unrewarding, and overall a huge waste of time and effort compared to buying loot off the trading post from level 1 to end game.

Background

As a solo player approaching 200 armoring I feel the crafting experience is wildly underwhelming and not worth the time investment.

I can only really speak to armoring, but I imagine this feeling / situation isn’t unique to it.

At this point I’ve sunk nearly 30k gold, untold amounts of azoth, materials, and time into reaching 191. The value I derived is as follows…

• Wore a crafted set from 20-25 and then replaced it with cheap loot from TP

• Wore a crafted set from 40-45 and then replaced it with cheap loot from TP

• Wore a badly crafted t5 set from 55-60

• Crafted a 527GS set which I’m currently replacing with 560-580 loot from TP as crafting armor with a score that high is exponentially more expensive than the loot on the TP.

Negative value

To upgrade my gear from here, I would need the following to craft a Orichalcum Plate Breastplate at a range of 576-582 (prices based on my server) (gear score based on 3x minor trophies, armorer earring, armorer pants)

• 16 Asmodeum @ 1,500g/ea = 24,000

• 12 runic leather - none on market, materials would cost 113g ea = 1,356

• 7 phoenix weave - 350g / ea = 2,450

• Spicy cabbage soup - 400g

• Sunk costs (not included):

  • Armorer gear (~1000/piece)

  • jewelry (500)

  • minor trophies (150)

Total: 28,206g

OR

I can buy a 583GS Corrupted Breastplate off the market with my stats for 300g.

Seems like an easy choice to sell all my materials and just buy stuff off the TP.

Why would I bother throwing away essentially 100x the gold for potentially a worse piece of gear?

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The disconnect given the above example

Similar feedback was brought up during beta and I believe there was a dev post stating that the intention of crafting was to be superior to looted gear.

This seems technically true when looking at the best of the best gear, as only the highest gear score gear can be crafted. That said, the journey to that point is miserable, unrewarding, and yields extreme negative value along the way.

Issue Summary

Heavy investment

• Large financial investment (taxes, materials) with poor return (output is difficult to sell and never adds up to the cost of materials in)

• Storage space - the amount of materials required means constantly fighting with storage

• Resource Investment - raw number of materials in the hundreds of thousands.

• Time Investment - the amount of items to craft and materials to gather is insane.

Low or negative value GS from 1-600

• The value of the crafted gear will always be far less than what I could get selling the materials.

• GS gaps - levels 30 and 50 both have gaps at which gear can’t be accurately crafted.

  • Can try using superior materials for lower tier items or bad materials for higher tier items, but results are unpredictable

• It is always far more cost effective to just buy looted gear.

  • All of the above does not warrant the value derived. I leveled armoring while leveling and all throughout I rarely wore my crafted equipment long as it was far easier to grab random loot off the trading post with the stats I wanted for <50 gold a piece.

  • Even at 60, the writing is on the wall, and the approach of buying loot is just more practical. Grinding materials for hours or days to be able to roll the dice on a piece of gear that might have a higher GS vs waiting a few weeks for folks to get their watermark scores up and post 600 gear for a few 100g a piece.

Ideas for improvement

Would love to know if others agree or have had a similar experience to mine and would love to hear some other ideas on how this can be fixed or improved.

My suggestions

• Crafted gear raises watermark - If I just hit 60 and I craft a chest with a GS of 550, my watermark should raise to 550 to provide value to my invested in crafting.

• Crafted gear has a unique bonus / 10% more stats to make it more desirable or actually valuable to equivalent GS looted gear

• Material costs for each recipe drop dramatically and 500+ GS scales better / smoother with materials.

[BeyondTheEdge]

It’s sad. I’m about level 120 or so in Armoring with the intent of being able to build my own bags and you’re not giving me any hope.

I’ll add to your post that the amount of stuff gathered, smelted, tanned only to salvage (throw away) away thousands upon thousands of items you have to make simply to increase your armoring talent is one of the most depressing things in this game.

You mention that you bought things off the TS, I always get better drops just playing the game, no need to go to TS unless you want top gear.

This means crafting is broken: I should have some use besides a few T4 bags - which I could have bought off the TS for a fraction of my real cost of time in gathering and salvaging.

[rayco]

Raising the skill for bags seems fine, those are still a hot item that have demand.
One of the biggest problems with armor is there’s just too many builds to pump out gear and expect it to reasonably sell. Plus it’s not efficient exp to build a whole set vs just making gloves so you’re increasing your risk actually trying to make something that you can sell.

Also, only reason I buy gear off the TP is to get the stats I want vs the RNG stats I loot

[rayco]

Well, I did it. Got 200.

Immediately went to craft a top tier bag to see this happen.

Resulting GS was below the possible minimum. As many already know, endgame crafting doesn’t even work correctly either

[zhu]

The endgame crafting/gattering experience is here to take all the happiness away from players who haven’t had mid lvl30 burnout. I just gave up on Void Ore for now, I just can’t accept the fact that I have to camp a node to get a rate item that problably will takes 10k~20k orichalcum ores to drop. The amount of basic resources you need to use to level up a profession just don’t fit in my mind. The endgame resources (orichalcum, ironwood, etc) are much much more cheap than the basic resources.

Very overwhelming.

[Salade2PhaPha]

The fact is someone who will up 60 in 3 months will be full stuff 590∼ with the TP it feel like it’s designed for a full loot pvp like their first idea.

[Atomation]

Crafting is definitely a huge waste of time. I went in as a crafter from the get go, because I thought it would be fun. To some extent it was. But of course, it never paid off, so I more or less stopped trying.

Crafted gear needs to have a unique set of perks, that is only acquirable through crafting. I’d suggest that all crafted gear just have an extra % chance to get a “Crafted” perk tacked on, so it just has an extra statistic of some sort, beyond what normally would be there. This would both make crafted gear interesting and also fun. Also it means if you low roll on the other stats, the unique trait might still make it usable to someone, if it’s the right perk, and therefore have some value on the trading post.

Crafted gear should have a bit more player control over what type of abilities the crafted armor has. After all, you are making it yourself! Why is it so unbelievably random? And such a large percentage of the perks are completely trivial-to-useless, it’s kind of frustrating. I could understand keeping it not totally pre-deterministic, but let’s at least make it a smaller subset of attributes you get, based on the subset you select. For example, the subset could just be a weapon class, and then the gear you craft would be biased towards values and attributes that would be beneficial to that class. Currently things are just so wildly random, it feels like it’s only like that so we need to spend thousands of hours to get the gear we actually want. Of course, this makes crafting awful, because gear gets obsoleted so quickly even by other crafted gear, let alone what’s on the auction.

Maybe we can use crafted gear we have already towards new crafted gear? Like, basically upgrading, but you still need a bunch of mats and sufficient skill in the profession, but then the outcome of the new item would be similar to what old item you used, but better. Then at least we wouldn’t feel so bad about just salvaging the item we worked mega hard to craft 5 levels ago, but is now completely useless.

[rayco]

Maybe we can use crafted gear we have already towards new crafted gear? Like, basically upgrading, but you still need a bunch of mats and sufficient skill in the profession, but then the outcome of the new item would be similar to what old item you used, but better. Then at least we wouldn’t feel so bad about just salvaging the item we worked mega hard to craft 5 levels ago, but is now completely useless.

That would be great, especially as I sit here with a ton of Asmodeum but holding off on crafting anything because I lack other high end components.

To build on your idea, maybe a low cost reforge option that would let them keep some of the RNG elements by letting crafters reroll perks / stats on already crafted gear.

But yeah, the overall experience just feels so bad right now. Sunk 5k into an armorer set and a bit more into high quality food and crafted a new 550-560 set and then IMMEDIATELY replaced my new pants with ones I found on the TP with GS 580 and the same stats and better perks.

To your point, we should at least be able to choose more than just 1 perk.

It’s unfortunate that there seem to be bigger fires to fight for the game right now. It just wasn’t ready. They should put an Early Access label on the steam listing