Artisan Quality Rating and Unintended Snowballing

Aquinas

I recently learned that a crafter could abuse 'Artisan Quality Rating' to create legendary items out of non-legendary materials. First let me describe how this works:

Hypothetically the artisan is a tailor - the artisan could use uncommon or rare materials to craft a rare Apprentice Tailor's Shirt. This shirt has 'Tailoring Quality Rating.' That quality rating is then used with common/uncommon materials to craft a heroic tailors shirt with a higher tailoring quality rating. You continue to repeat this cycle until you get legendary tailors shirt with 393 Tailoring Quality Rating. Along this path you only used common/uncommon materials and ended up with a legendary.

From this point, now that you have the legendary tailoring shirt - you can craft legendary items in plenty because of the Tailoring quality rating. This has to be an unintended consequence of snowballing.

I understand the mechanics and systems behind artisan shirts and quality rating and I think those mechanics and systems are very cool and rewarding. If a acquiring a legendary tailor shirt is all it takes - what is the point of the gathering artisans?

This little work around makes gathering completely irrelevant. Once everyone were to use this work around, there would be no use for heroic, epic, or legendary gathered items when you can just use common items + legendary shirt and craft legendary items.

Hopefully I was able to properly explain this work around.

Azherae

How does this make Gathering skill itself irrelevant, though?

If I can't gather Vanaelia Vines (this is made up) until Master Herbalist, the Tailor can't make any Legendary Vanathread Pants because they have no Vanathread.

I definitely see that there's a snowballing effect and I don't like it either, I agree with that part of the post, I'm only asking how this invalidates the gathering artisans.

Aquinas

Since what I described is currently going on in Alpha 2 then we can project this trend out.

The legendary crafter would never need legendary or epic materials to craft legendary gear - they would at max need heroic materials and then the quality rating brings their craft to epic or legendary status.

The gathering professions have no incentive to get the recipes and tools that increase rarity, furthermore gatherers will optimize for the fastest speed and quantity. Gatherers would then just be getting a massive amount of materials in which the prices for gathering trend to 0. People would stop gathering and then there would be a shock to the system as not enough materials are being introduced to the game. Eventually the value will find its equilibrium, but the damage is done. Many players who were previously interested in gathering would be dissuaded from doing so because getting epic/legendary materials are not as lucrative.

As you suggested, the only value these higher level gatherers would have is to collect higher level materials in bulk since the rarity is irrelevant and what I described above repeats but in every tier of gathered materials.

To your point @Azherae, it wouldn't completely invalidate gatherers, but it would invalidate what is perhaps the most dopamine hitting aspect of gathering and that is finding epics or legendaries out in the wild. Without that dopamine hit, not many people will want to dredge through those artisans just to have to make their money off of spamming AHs and stalls with materials.

*secondary knock on effects - If a gatherer makes most of their money from harvest a massive amount of resources instead of fewer and more expensive ones, then they will be forced into using caravans to move all those materials around the world to sell. This then forces gatherers to take on substantially more risk than other professions would incur leading to further frustrations and burnt out*

Azherae

Thanks, I agree, was just wondering if there was something I missed there.

There's probably ways to 'solve' this, but I hate them all too. Games with 'gathering gear' that does the things that such gear does in Ashes always irritate me in the first place though, so...

(legendary tools with greater Durability are ok)

Aquinas

I hope there is, I really enjoy the idea of quality rating. It is a fun mechanic and it feels rewarding when you can push your crafting gear higher and get that tangible benefit.

zxbiohazardzx

The biggest perk i have with current system is how " easy" it is to become legendary. they need to tweak the numbers down.

nothing wrong with professions being able to supply the market with gear or resources. Common Gear, Rare Gear, Special Crafting Sets all work out well, so do potions, enchants etc. it all works fine with rarity levels. as long as we ensure that anything above "rare" actually remains that. it should not be common for every player to run in legendaries or epics without huge time investments. that means that we lock it behind world-bosses for PVE and we lock it behind grand-maester and legendary inputs for the crafting.

that would also mean that gatherers need a certain skill to mine good ores or quality herbs etc. it would mean that processors need a skill to process said goods at that level. and there is no "cheating/cheesing" the system with epic-legendary "shirts" to boost quality from common to legendary with a 100% chance

zxbiohazardzx

In my following suggestion Professions would all be treated in a simplified mechanic that would make all relevant in the "triangle of balance"

- In order to obtain a rarity, ALL inputs (materials) MUST be that rarity (shirts can compensate for 1 at best)
AND crafter level should be matching (shirts still have quality rating but quality rating is the sum of all inputs, and the rating-bridge of eg a legendary shirt+pants cannot bridge multiple rarity-gaps

Profession Levels explained
none = common quality max (or dampen stats to hit this range)
apprentice = uncommon quality max (or dampen stats to hit this range)
journeyman = rare quality max (or dampen stats to hit this range)
master = epic quality max (or dampen stats to hit this range)
grand-master = legendary quality max (or dampen = 0%)

would apply to ALL professions meaning (examples below)

- Gatherers would get profession-level appropriate rarity items from trees/ores/herbs/fish etc
- Processors would get profession-level appropriate rarity items from processing the raw gatherings
- Crafters would get profession-level appropriate rarity items from processing the processed materials


This would put the gear-rarity and availability on-par with PvE and other systems in place whilst making the "specialisations" way more valuable. For example if a grand-master lumberjack would be the only one able to gather legendary logs and a grand-master Smelter would be the only one being able to smelt legendary ores, it would make economy scale more around skill-basis and less about whomever gets to wear the legendary shirt/pants the fastest to just dominate a market completely, as now a guild or subset of guilds would need to dominate ALL profession-chains in the triangle.

tl;dr: change the mechanics and make skills matter again!, nobody could/should prefer the "artisan with shirt/pants goes legendary printing" we have at this moment. it feels the above mechanics are more intentional and allow for horizontal and vertical progression more

ShivaFang

Gathered item rarity seems way too high right now.
Based on other systems, each tier of rarity should be 1/10th the chance than the previous.
Legendary mats should be a 1/100000 chance of dropping (currently its much higher).

If this were the case across the board, then we wouldn't have the 'flood' of legendary items we currently see. They would be extremely rare and you'd only have a handful of them on the server that would be outclassed as people generally get closer and closer to level 50.