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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Hunting / Animal Husbandry balance discussion
Taiisien
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I love to gather and craft in nearly every MMO, and Ashes offers more than most games. Currently I am attempting to play / test as many artisan classes as possible and I feel that the Hunting and Animal Husbandry classes are out of balance compared to others. Here is a list of what I have seen that seems off...
Hunting - Spawns are much more spread out compared to other gathering skills such as Mining, Lumberjacking, and Herbalism.
Hunting - Collection grants the same xp per harvest as other gathering skills despite having less spawn locations.
Hunting - Collection grants 1 harvested item per spawn compared to other skills giving 2-5 per harvest.
Hunting - Selling harvested items sell for the same price per item to a vendor as other gathering skills, despite less spawn points and less harvested items per collection.
Hunting - Collection has unknown resource produced, you can gather either an animal used in husbandry or a carcass used in cooking and leatherworking, but you don't know which you will get until it has been gathered. No other gathering skill does this. If I mine granite, I know I will get granite, If I collect daffodils I know I will get daffodils.
Husbandry - Processing gives a 50% / 50% chance at receiving a Beast of Burden or a Mount. Lets be honest, most people that are attempting AH are trying for mounts 99% of the time.
Husbandry - Processing takes 30 mins and grants 500xp compared to other skills roughly 2600xp (@Roshen did talk with the team and this should be adjusted).
Husbandry - Processing takes a minimum of 55s for one 30 minute process, this greatly exceeds other 30 minute processes and again only in husbandry this can still result in an unwanted item.
Husbandry - Processing does not take into account animal rarity. If I process rare (blue) wolf into a mount, I would expect different stats on the mount because the resource was rare.
Husbandry - Processing grants only one item for the 30 minute process, other skills take far less time for a single process, 30 mins is only when batch processing.
Husbandry - Processing is one and done, the end result of the process cannot be used in any other process to allow for continued xp, this is the only skill like this. For example, If I collect a wolf carcass I can use the tanning station to process this into wolf hide, process again into tanned wolf hide, process again into wolf leather, each time gaining xp for the tanning process.
Currently, my only form of Husbandry xp has a 30 minute timer attached, I would really like to see this at 10 - 20 minutes max. At current xp levels (getting to level 10 skill takes 40,000 xp) that's 80 processes which equals 40 real life hours and at the lowest cost of 55s per process equals 440 GOLD. If the xp gets raised to say 3000xp per process, level 10 skill still takes 14 processes or 7 hours or 77 gold minimum. If the xp gets raised say to 3000xp per process AND the timer were reduced to ten minutes, level 10 skill would be 14 processes, 2.5 hours (5 hours if time was lowered to 20 mins) and 77 gold minimum. Now this may sound too quick, but the xp required per level is drastic, at level 20 it looks like this (xp needed is 160,000) that's 54 processes, 9 hours (18 hours if 20 min processing time), and 297 gold, it only goes up from there.
Overall I am enjoying the process of finding animals, collecting the animal or carcass and then turning that into useful things, I just think that there needs to be a balance pass to bring everything in line with other gathering and processing skills. As it stands right now, Hunting and Husbandry receive the least xp and the least coin, will take the longest to level, and cost ~10 times as much or more. I want to continue to enjoy the process and continue with these two skills, at the moment though, its rough. @Roshen could you please have your team look into these other issues as well.
Hunting - Spawns are much more spread out compared to other gathering skills such as Mining, Lumberjacking, and Herbalism.
Hunting - Collection grants the same xp per harvest as other gathering skills despite having less spawn locations.
Hunting - Collection grants 1 harvested item per spawn compared to other skills giving 2-5 per harvest.
Hunting - Selling harvested items sell for the same price per item to a vendor as other gathering skills, despite less spawn points and less harvested items per collection.
Hunting - Collection has unknown resource produced, you can gather either an animal used in husbandry or a carcass used in cooking and leatherworking, but you don't know which you will get until it has been gathered. No other gathering skill does this. If I mine granite, I know I will get granite, If I collect daffodils I know I will get daffodils.
Husbandry - Processing gives a 50% / 50% chance at receiving a Beast of Burden or a Mount. Lets be honest, most people that are attempting AH are trying for mounts 99% of the time.
Husbandry - Processing takes 30 mins and grants 500xp compared to other skills roughly 2600xp (@Roshen did talk with the team and this should be adjusted).
Husbandry - Processing takes a minimum of 55s for one 30 minute process, this greatly exceeds other 30 minute processes and again only in husbandry this can still result in an unwanted item.
Husbandry - Processing does not take into account animal rarity. If I process rare (blue) wolf into a mount, I would expect different stats on the mount because the resource was rare.
Husbandry - Processing grants only one item for the 30 minute process, other skills take far less time for a single process, 30 mins is only when batch processing.
Husbandry - Processing is one and done, the end result of the process cannot be used in any other process to allow for continued xp, this is the only skill like this. For example, If I collect a wolf carcass I can use the tanning station to process this into wolf hide, process again into tanned wolf hide, process again into wolf leather, each time gaining xp for the tanning process.
Currently, my only form of Husbandry xp has a 30 minute timer attached, I would really like to see this at 10 - 20 minutes max. At current xp levels (getting to level 10 skill takes 40,000 xp) that's 80 processes which equals 40 real life hours and at the lowest cost of 55s per process equals 440 GOLD. If the xp gets raised to say 3000xp per process, level 10 skill still takes 14 processes or 7 hours or 77 gold minimum. If the xp gets raised say to 3000xp per process AND the timer were reduced to ten minutes, level 10 skill would be 14 processes, 2.5 hours (5 hours if time was lowered to 20 mins) and 77 gold minimum. Now this may sound too quick, but the xp required per level is drastic, at level 20 it looks like this (xp needed is 160,000) that's 54 processes, 9 hours (18 hours if 20 min processing time), and 297 gold, it only goes up from there.
Overall I am enjoying the process of finding animals, collecting the animal or carcass and then turning that into useful things, I just think that there needs to be a balance pass to bring everything in line with other gathering and processing skills. As it stands right now, Hunting and Husbandry receive the least xp and the least coin, will take the longest to level, and cost ~10 times as much or more. I want to continue to enjoy the process and continue with these two skills, at the moment though, its rough. @Roshen could you please have your team look into these other issues as well.
2
Comments
You need a mayor to build specific building for the spexific craft to make apprentices tools from my understsnding
The apprentice hunting tool comes from the node building for cooking. on my server the New Aela node is currently building our cookhouse.
Also it makes no sense in the perspective of being an expert of AH: why there is RNG on this profession? Am I an expert or just a random that is trying their luck? In all the other professions every product costs much less and is not attached to dumb luck, hoping to not get bankrupt.
Lastly, the mechanic of needing to travel the map constantly to level up in the fastest way AH is not really something I consider enjoyable gameplay and again no other profession requires this much travel.
TL;DR: Hunting and Animal Husbandry need to have a rework on the yields and xp gained, randomness should be removed entirely, if I wanted to gamble I would play poker.
Founder and Guild Leader of -Providence-
It's absolutely stupid right now, despite that I still got to journeyman hunting in order to test taming the turtles. I honestly regret that time spent especially with servers being wiped in a few weekends. Unfortunately the 2 professions that I am most interested in (farming and AH) are total placeholders. I am not planning to return to AH until maybe P3 to retest it. As you said there are so many things wrong with it, unbalanced, and such insane RNG.
Not to mention that when you say find a heroic wolf or an epic bear and you go through the AH skill - you have no idea what you are going to create at the end. If you open the window sometimes it shows BoB, if you close it and open it again, sometimes it will show the mount. I want to know exactly what I am getting so I do not waste the material. If I have an epic bear and I click the RNG button and it shows BoB I want to be able to cancel, lose the gold and fuel but get my epic bear back. Again, no other profession has you play this guessing game about what you will actually receive at the end of the processing time.
The whole artisan feels bad. Everything about it.
In the future, I would love if you as the AH journeyman could ride your mounts around the world to 'train them' to improve their stats before you go to sell them. For example, each mount has 5 stars for riding, combat, and storage. Novice AH can acquire the 1st star and improve the riding speed of the mount through experience of riding it. Apprentice can fill in 2/5 stars (journeyman 3/5, master 4/5, grandmaster 5/5). These stars would only be unlocked by someone with AH.
Perhaps you buy an Epic bear mount from someone but you are not an AH and it only has 1/5 stars in riding and 0/5 in combat and storage. It would be cool if you could give the mount to your master AH guild mate and pay them to increase the stars from 1/5 riding to 4/5 riding thus increasing the speed, jump distance, agility, etc.
I absolutely love your idea, it would make a huge difference from animal husbandrist to animal husbandrist - some will want to spend the time to do it VS others may prefer to just sell the mount as it is for time constraint reasons. It would offer a lot of variety and offer the possibility to specialize more in different parts. The same could be done as well for beasts of burdens, where you use the bob you created for your caravans and this way you can train them and make them better for reselling - and only someone with a specific level in animal husbandry can do so. Though this would require the possibility to add and remove bobs freely while this is not the case at the moment.
That being said, working with what we have, removing the 50/50 and just letting us select which one we want would be preferred. Having rarity of your animal effect speed/Hp/abilities of the mount would also be nice. Breeding will definitely be interesting when we get it to see how this effects things.
As I stated in my write up on this. If you are only hunting to supply Animal Husbandry you will have way too much supply to process all of it. If you are doing Tanning at the same time you will have way too many animals and not enough carcasses to keep up with your Hunting without over farming. (not to mention that Tanning grants the least amount of exp than any other processing job from what I found.)