I’m gonna do a TLDR first to try to organize my points:
The 1.1 changes to crafting progression were a mistake, because they:
A. Made most players frustrated as it seemed to benefit exploiters and resource dupers
B. Hurt the average and casual players that didn’t have a lot of time to grind them before the change
C. Made a huge number of players completely abandon leveling crafting skills, as the grind needed is now over triple for most trade skills
D. Break the economy as they require more refining reagents on a moment where the prices of reagents already started to increase due to the player number decline
The 1.2 changes are going to make things even worse as they add even more resource and reagent sinks, as people with max level are gonna spend resources to gain gypsum
And so:
Hardly anyone will attempt to max their crafting skills
The long version:
The crafting progression changes on 1.1 were already very poorly received by the community, I personally saw dozens of friends completely giving up on maxing new crafts since they were implemented, the only few people that were happy with it seems to be those who had already mastered one of the affected crafting skills.
They appeared to have heavily benefited people who exploited bugged recipes, duped resources, or had much more free time to grind everything before the change than the average player
It also didn’t change the fact that trade skills are still hard to monetize later as LEGENDARY crafted items are still BIND ON PICKUP, so crafters need to rely on pure RNG to craft anything that might be worth selling (in a market flooded with items with high gear score from loot of high watermark players), and the dev blogs stated that this is intentional and designed, despite countless feedbacks of players complaining about this.
It is hard to blame people for losing interest in doing triple the grind for a skill that in the end might only give them a weapon for personal use. And trying to skip the grind by buying the resources right now has a near prohibitive cost.
But the 1.2 changes will make matters even worse…
Now players who have reached 200 already will once again start to consume materials and reagents to get gypsum chests, in a economy that is already dealing with the very limited supply of these items, ironically in both high and low pop servers, as high pop servers have high material prices for ingots, for example, while low pop servers have high prices for reagents.
It will become clear for most players that crafting will be mostly a waste of time and money, it will be both easier, more profitable and less tedious to just grind expertise on PvE or PvP caches, and to just RNG items on loot instead of RNG crafting.
Well, for cost probably, on my server you can find 580+ items for 300 gold on the market, most 595+ with decent stats sell for around 2000.
To craft items on this GS you would need multiple of the T5 rares like asmodeum, which sells on my server for around 350 each. And you would still RNG the perks and/or attributes.
my server 590+ with the stats I need are 5k+ and I’ve been looking for some upgrades for weeks. But yeah I don’t care too much about it I do it for fun.
I disagree to this, honestly it is not much different, yes they did increase required XP, but they also increased xp gained from a single item, before the update i was at 125 arcana, and it took little to no effort to get it to 200 anyways.
I understand that some people might not have enough time for skilling, but it’s not essential. For long term survival of the game ,this was a really good change.
Yes they did increase the XP for higher tier items, but even on the highest tier 5 still requires 3 times more items crafted to reach 200. This is the case for armouring, weaponsmithing and engineering.
As I recall they stated in the PTR pre-1.1 the idea was not to increase the grind and number of items needed, but to make people craft the highest possible tier, but in the end it did increase it by a little over 3 times.
Jeweling is bugged rn so I’m not considering it. Furnishing is still the exact same and Arcana did improve a lot and got easier, maybe not easier if you calculate leveling it through crafting magic weapons, but with potions now it is a lot easier indeed.
yep i did it with magic items, only few hundred potions during those levels which didn’t really matter.
They had to make this change to balance trading. Regular Tier 5 mats were pretty useless since every 1 was just crafting tier 1 items for xp. They made them viable again in this update + people didnt properly level Smelting/Woodworking/Tanning/Weaving/Stonecutting as they were using tier 1 items which hardly gave any xp. This was a game balance change, and after few months, people will have forgotten the old system anyways.
Here an item with the right attributes and good perks can go well over 5k too, but most “decent” items, with the right attributes and maybe just one good perk, usually sells between 1-3k, which is very reasonable
If you craft one of these, you have control over the attribute or one perk, so most of the times you will get a “decent” item and rarely a good one, the fact is, the “decent” item won’t be profitable to sell, you can still sell it ofc, but probably for less than the mats were worth, only a good RNG item will be profitable, and not by that much, so in the end my point is, in a trade perspective, maxing crafting is not appealing.
The only good thing of maxing these is that you will be able to make the legendaries and expedition replicas for yourself, which is great, for sure, but would be even better if you could sell them
My gs is 586 and I’ve been trying to upgrade my 520 faction shoes for weeks. I need a double perk item, because it’s not worth buying a 595 with 1 perk and losing the other, and I cant find anything. So I might be helping myself to just start rolling shoes when I get 200. Unless I find one before that.
But mostly I do crafting when I am bored of pvp and to chill. I pvp a lot, so it’s just something I enjoy doing. I would probably still level crafting if I was 600gs. It will be fun to gamble rolls that I could potentially sell for 50k. Plus with the new patch coming you’re going to get rewarded for leveling past 200 so that will be a nice change.
Ah I had that same situation with my faction gloves, took a while but I upgraded it later for a 588 that had just one good perk, but was a meta one for the Greataxe (the gravity well one), so it seemed better anyway, and I didn’t have to buy it as a guildmate gave it to me from his loot. Finding a double perk one is tough, but if you get 200 you can make the expedition replicas, that give you more control than the regular RNG, if you are already this close might as well just finish the grind lol
Can’t make those since I need +int. Expedition replicas have split stats. I’d roll the shade walkers probably. And yeah I sacrificed as much as I can on my other 4 pieces for class perk pieces so my shoes I need specific otherwise my build feels nerfed.
I personally feel that the changes made in 1.1 were needed - albeit needed when the game launched, but you can’t have everything.
The problem is that the changes in 1.1 and the upcoming 1.2 changes have basically exposed a number of issues.
The biggest issue is that crafting is super hungry when it comes to consuming resources - you need thousands of resources to level a skill up to 200 and it now looks like you will need thousands of resources to gain gypsum**. In short there aren’t enough resources in the game. You either have too many reagents and not enough raw resources (high pop servers) or too many raw resources and not enough reagents (low pop servers). Both situations are a nightmare and compounded because higher level refined resources require all of the previous refined resources (Orichalcum is changing in 1.2 which should help). What’s worse is that resources are effectively burned because not many items are sellable.
My own thinking is that we need servers to be dynamic based on the server activity - so refining reagents need to boost on low pop servers and node spawn times need to reduce for high pop servers. It’s something that almost needs to be “set” as nightly based on a weekly average, so over a holiday period (more people playing), we’d see a slight dip in items.
Do I think this will reduce the number of people levelling crafting? Not on the 1 ~ 100 grind. The 100 ~ 200 grind, absolutely because we have bottlenecks on all servers which kicks in the law of supply and demand and economics takes over on pricing.
** I’m excluding aptitude chests because I view them as a gradual bonus as you craft end-game items and not something you should be grinding towards (but that’s a personal opinion)
It is and it isn’t. The issue is that you need both raw resources (easily farmable on a low pop server, potentially awful on a high pop) and refining reagents. I find that for refining reagents I end up on the trade post to supplement what I’ve picked up because you can generally gather more resources than reagents in the same time.
I played runescape years ago, but nothing particularly heavy. I did play star wars galaxies though, which had a pretty decent crafting system. In principal each resource had a quality value (e.g. poor quality fruit vs high quality), so you tended to gather crap rubbish for grinding out crafting XP and then use the high quality stuff for making things you wanted to use/sell. The poor quality resources were super abundant, whereas the high quality you really had to search for - plus each week the spawns changed so there were different quality resources about, it added a really interesting dynamic to the game because if you managed to grab a certain spawn you could create better items. The biggest thing in SWG is that when levelling you manually crafted each item, selecting the resources to use and then making it. I think that grinding out to be a master chef required tens of thousands of crafts, basically the bottleneck wasn’t resources it was the time you wished to invest in getting there.
I’d say the 1.1 and 1.2 changes are basically nudging players into picking a primary trade skill. I also think the changes are encouraging players to choose between being gatherers or being crafters.
The upside is that market activity sees a boost for resources. The downside is that crafting for the purposes of selling on the market is less attractive.
You have never played runescape then lol? Try to get a lvl 99 skill there. Shit takes months. They should have had it so it took quadroople the amount of time to max any skill since launch. This game no no where near as grindy as people claim. This is actualy the fastest pace mmo iv ever seen. Theres no reason anyone should be able to max any skills with in a matter of a few days. But yeah they did fuck up with making it longer. Like i said it should have been harder from the start