Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Crafting exp rates
Savic Prosperity
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
if progression was supposed to be part of phase 1 roadmap the crafting exp rates need some serious changes
now i only did end up getting tailor to 10 to make sure my math worked out from what i had seen on the external site called ashescodex
so i did a bunch of testing and some math below
minimum item costs novice 1 -> 10 (no shirt exp bonus since not all have it)
ignoring the time it takes to process and gather all the items none of this feels "great" i would say the armor crafting professions only feel okay at best.
I havent looked into what it is from level 10-20 or anything past that since i cant confirm personally what exp looks like from those crafts but the intertwined system of crafting only gets worse as you get higher in level which in theory sounds cool but in practice is pretty bad if you're making hundreds of crafts
I do not personally like the idea where you flood the market with hundreds of crafts to level your profession, especially since nothing is even trying to be balanced in recipe cost to exp ratio. There should be some sort of flat value of every item you need to craft the item is +50exp in the result exp would help normalize the exp between crafts within each profession so you're not incentivized to make the same item 250 times
The disparity in being able to farm a lot of materials between these crafting professions isnt even remotely close is a part of the issue.
grem skin for leather for the armor professions is only okay because you can go to the starting area in lionhold and mass kill them to get grems and because they give you 5 per carcass, i actually dont mind how it is to get the grem skin at this time because of this, i assume the otter leather will be semi similar in practice
when you compare grem skins to copper/ruby/zinc the ore nodes are a lot more limited, the respawn rates seem a lot slower, and you cant guarantee which of the ores you will get. This doesnt include running around and trying to figure out where they could spawn when you dont know anything vs how naturally you can figure out that killing grems makes huntable grems spawn, nor the fact that you need significantly more ores than you do leather
So if you made it so you only needed im just gonna spitball 400 of each ore/main material, it is a lot more doable, you would have significantly less 'crafted' gear in existence (or just getting sold to npc) and it would feel more inviting as a base to a person wanting to try out crafting.
to get the amount of flax currently needed for tailor is an extreme amount of time sink since you can find some when looking in flower fields but may end up wanting to try to farm the 500-600 dung instead since you dont know what to look for either. Unlike the snowdrops and dafodils it doesnt seem to have a logic to why it spawns where it does it just is in 'certain areas'
Say you could be teleported to each gatherable node, no competition, no run time, just pure mining, it might be an hour straight of gathering the fatter ore nodes to reach 2k of one ore, and then you have over 33hrs to cook the ores into fragments (or x2 if red ink for scribe), this also doesnt include gathering the fuel for that, the time it'd take running back and forth managing your storage. Obviously you dont have to sit there the entire 33hrs but the chances of you getting 2k ores and then turning them into fragments instead of just doing medium loads constantly is just unlikely.
The time it takes to just gather enough mats for the 'easier' crafting professions you could already be level 10 and have made novice tier gear obsolete. The current prices of the whole crafting process makes you forever poor. None of which includes for what reason would you give up your mats for the node progression until your profession hits 10. Yes, if you have a big guild and everyone gets you 50 mats you can level it very fast, but whether its 10k mats or 500 a big guild can get past any wall very fast and it should not have an individuals crafting tuned to the idea of 30 people funneling one person mats when they could just level to current max level instead. I know some apprentice key crafts are missing but that isnt a reason to make it this way.
All this is to say i need to see some changes to feel more confident that crafting is considered part of the progression of the game tuning of phase 1. It doesnt feel like anyone who likes crafting has had a pass on it, I cant have hope for phase 2 adjustments to just 'fix' everything when the only changes to crafting and gathering the entire phase 1 has been nerfs outside of a subtle and hard to test 'increases tier 1 mining locations/spawn rates'
ps: recipes are too hard to get to drop, if they are at intended rates they are too infrequent that it should be where you might find some yourself within reason but to 'fill out' your crafting list you buy the missing pieces
now i only did end up getting tailor to 10 to make sure my math worked out from what i had seen on the external site called ashescodex
so i did a bunch of testing and some math below
minimum item costs novice 1 -> 10 (no shirt exp bonus since not all have it)
- arcane engineering 2k copper, 250 ruby, 250 magic powder (copper focus)
- weapon smith 2k copper, 250 oak wood (shield) [profit margin version with same exp rate is mace with 2004 copper, 167 oak, 167 basalt]
- scribe 2k ruby, 400 magic powder (any craft, not pylons) (can do guild scroll recipe for 400 rubies and like 70 gold)
- tailor 534 flax, 267 grem skin (feet or gloves)
- leather working 534 grem skin, 267 cotton (feet or gloves)
- armor smithing 534 zinc, 267 basalt, 267 grem skin (feet or gloves)
- jewlcrafting 110 exp per 6 ore craft = 2164 copper/zinc
ignoring the time it takes to process and gather all the items none of this feels "great" i would say the armor crafting professions only feel okay at best.
I havent looked into what it is from level 10-20 or anything past that since i cant confirm personally what exp looks like from those crafts but the intertwined system of crafting only gets worse as you get higher in level which in theory sounds cool but in practice is pretty bad if you're making hundreds of crafts
I do not personally like the idea where you flood the market with hundreds of crafts to level your profession, especially since nothing is even trying to be balanced in recipe cost to exp ratio. There should be some sort of flat value of every item you need to craft the item is +50exp in the result exp would help normalize the exp between crafts within each profession so you're not incentivized to make the same item 250 times
The disparity in being able to farm a lot of materials between these crafting professions isnt even remotely close is a part of the issue.
grem skin for leather for the armor professions is only okay because you can go to the starting area in lionhold and mass kill them to get grems and because they give you 5 per carcass, i actually dont mind how it is to get the grem skin at this time because of this, i assume the otter leather will be semi similar in practice
when you compare grem skins to copper/ruby/zinc the ore nodes are a lot more limited, the respawn rates seem a lot slower, and you cant guarantee which of the ores you will get. This doesnt include running around and trying to figure out where they could spawn when you dont know anything vs how naturally you can figure out that killing grems makes huntable grems spawn, nor the fact that you need significantly more ores than you do leather
So if you made it so you only needed im just gonna spitball 400 of each ore/main material, it is a lot more doable, you would have significantly less 'crafted' gear in existence (or just getting sold to npc) and it would feel more inviting as a base to a person wanting to try out crafting.
to get the amount of flax currently needed for tailor is an extreme amount of time sink since you can find some when looking in flower fields but may end up wanting to try to farm the 500-600 dung instead since you dont know what to look for either. Unlike the snowdrops and dafodils it doesnt seem to have a logic to why it spawns where it does it just is in 'certain areas'
Say you could be teleported to each gatherable node, no competition, no run time, just pure mining, it might be an hour straight of gathering the fatter ore nodes to reach 2k of one ore, and then you have over 33hrs to cook the ores into fragments (or x2 if red ink for scribe), this also doesnt include gathering the fuel for that, the time it'd take running back and forth managing your storage. Obviously you dont have to sit there the entire 33hrs but the chances of you getting 2k ores and then turning them into fragments instead of just doing medium loads constantly is just unlikely.
The time it takes to just gather enough mats for the 'easier' crafting professions you could already be level 10 and have made novice tier gear obsolete. The current prices of the whole crafting process makes you forever poor. None of which includes for what reason would you give up your mats for the node progression until your profession hits 10. Yes, if you have a big guild and everyone gets you 50 mats you can level it very fast, but whether its 10k mats or 500 a big guild can get past any wall very fast and it should not have an individuals crafting tuned to the idea of 30 people funneling one person mats when they could just level to current max level instead. I know some apprentice key crafts are missing but that isnt a reason to make it this way.
All this is to say i need to see some changes to feel more confident that crafting is considered part of the progression of the game tuning of phase 1. It doesnt feel like anyone who likes crafting has had a pass on it, I cant have hope for phase 2 adjustments to just 'fix' everything when the only changes to crafting and gathering the entire phase 1 has been nerfs outside of a subtle and hard to test 'increases tier 1 mining locations/spawn rates'
ps: recipes are too hard to get to drop, if they are at intended rates they are too infrequent that it should be where you might find some yourself within reason but to 'fill out' your crafting list you buy the missing pieces
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Comments
On a side note. Animal Husbandry's gold sink is a bit insane atm, even if people do somehow decide to buy the beast of burdens it's more than likely a loss. I would like for Animal Husbandry to gain some sort of buffer, for if you fail at making a mount, you have an increased chance the next time you do it to get a mount and vice versa. If you fail at beast of burden you have an increase change of beast of burden the next time. This means you have a bit more control of what you will get as an end result the more you fail at one, but it's still based in RNG.
This part is so real
The rewards from crafting weapons specifically are undeniably really powerful, but there are bottlenecks on top of bottlenecks and there simply aren't enough resources in the world for most the crafting system as a whole. Good post
As soon as you have to match the rarity of 2,3,4, or more materials of the same level of rarity, gathering the materials increases the gathering/trading difficulty exponentially.
The second problem is that most processing has no "game" in it. It is just a chore. They need to add a consumable or cosmetic by-product like alchemy has, or a drop, like gems dropping from ore and stone processing. There has to be a mechanic in there for material gain. Risk/reward is a key pillar of design, and almost all of Artisanship doesn't meet that at any level, not even close, but processing has no reward whatsoever.
There is a fundamental game design issue, that is the elephant in the room for any sandbox game, and Intrepid have to deal with it at some point. It is the balance between casual/solo/PvE play, and hardcore/group/PvP play. It is really difficult to make a game that can please both sufficiently, making them co-dependent, to get them to play the game at all. And you need both to be really successful, or maybe even viable.
This has been posted enough and even Videos on it by Jamie Choas etc to where I seriously doubt there are any plans to address this in Phase 1. Too bad as a lot of people put a ton of work into it and hardly a difficult fix in multiple ways.
The fact that most games and WoW gate(d) PvP behind getting good end-game PvE gear, doesn't make the opposite any better.