Hi all,
first a disclaimer:
I haven’t reached lvl60, nor have I maxed all of my tradeskills. So I can’t comment on the end-game state of crafting.
I have played the game for just over 300hrs, mostly farming, crafting and lately doing some more town boards.
(and just exploring, the game looks beautiful, even with a “dated” GPU…)
As I’m playing solo on a low Pop server, my game-experience might be very different from yours (& developer intentions)
Some things in the crafting-system struck me as odd though:
For crafting the basic items (eg. iron GA, steel GA, starmetal GA, …),
you require a specific resource (iron ingot, steel ingot, starmetal ingot, …)
and one or more resource types (for GA: wood, leather; you are free to choose which tier you use)
Salvaging these items, gives you a chance to get some of the specific resource (iron ingot, …) back.
So far so good, this makes sense to me.
- An exception I came across are the gauntlets (there might be more).
For some reason their ‘specific resource’ is the relative tier in leather, but on salvaging it gives back the ‘named metal’
eg.
A starmetal V-gauntlet requires:
*layered leather (specific) + cloth (type) + metal (type) + death (type)
So the cheapest version of this is crafted with:
*layered leather + linen + iron ingot + death mote
Salvaging it gives back starmetal ingot though.
This brings me to my main concern:
I like the way they build up the recipes:
*one specific resource + one or more item types.
But while you’re leveling, there is no incentive to use higher tier resources.
You need to craft a ton of items to lvl-up. (not a complaint, just stating a fact 
)
So you can count on RNG to give you a few good rolls for personal use and trading.
And you produce everything as cheap as possible, because a starmetal V-gauntlet crafted with:
layered leather + infused silk + oricalcum ingot + death quintessense,
will give the same XP as the one in the example above.
Maybe they could base the XP you get for crafting, on the ingredients you use.
recipe XP = (X * resource1XP + Y * resource2XP + ...) * lvl/tier/recipe/tradeskill-multiplier
I don’t mean buffing the XP through the roof, or a quick fix with random values put on all crafting resources.
But a calculated logical approach with an xp-value based on tier, rarity/availability, gathering/farming-time, usage in recipes, …
Additionally I’d like to see more ‘intermediate recipes’ for Cooking and Arcana.
Giving a bit more flexibility for upgrading low tier resources, because they can pile up quickly while gathering (eg. Pork, juicy ham, stems, …) and tradeposts are saturated because the items aren’t used in those quantities. (again: Low Pop server and you can only make so many sausages… 
)
For example, I like what they did with hyssop in the arcana recipes.
Lastly a thought about the Town Boards…
I’m not a 100% sure how the missions are rolled, but they seem to take your tradeskill lvls into account.
For the ‘deliver resources’ missions, it seems to work this way at least.
I haven’t seen anything similar for ‘hunting/culling’ missions. I’m lvl 200 skinning and they still ask me to hunt the same rabbits, so there’s room for improvement there.
What I’d like to see is an option for the quantities you will deliver.
eg.
‘deliver wyrdwood planks’, add an option/slidebar to adjust the amount of planks you will deliver.
or for an armor set: give an option to craft 1x, 5x, 10x armors…
The rewards should scale respectively!
This might give crafting some more value in general:
get a big order and spend time farming and crafting for bigger XP, gold and territory standing at town boards.
Instead of blowing your azoth jumping from Town Board to Town Board (my faction only owns 1 territory, so that might change things)
Anyway, looking forward to hearing how you guys experienced the road to lvl200 tradeskills.
And there are bound to be a lot of downsides/loopholes/general problems to my ideas, hope to see some feedback.
Have a nice day.
