Complete item drops availability VS Crafting time/effort/cost

Yesterday, a Forsaken Marauder lvl 18 elite mob dropped a Blue Bronze Great Spellsword (the level 10 craftable) which is an absolutely amazing weapon for my level 17 mage. Didn't even farm for that long to get the item drop, as green/blue items, although not super common, are not very rare at all in this phase. Then I took a look at the artisan system to check the comparison in time/cost/effort.

If I wanted to craft this item, I would need all of these materials in Rare (blue) quality:
20x Rare Copper (Tier 1 ore)
40x Rare Tin (Tier 2 ore)
2x Rare Weeping Willow (Tier 2 wood)
3x Slate (Tier 2 stone)
1x Giant Bluebell (Tier 2 Herb)
1x Rare Animal Fat (Tier 1 Hunting)
1x Regular recipe (Bronze Great Spellsword is a common recipe drop)

Now in terms of professions required:

Level 10 Mining: to craft the apprentice pickaxe, and then find 20 rare copper ore, 40 rare tin ore and 3 rare slate stone. (Any miner knows just how monstrous a time investment this is, even with all the +Mining Rarity gear currently available in the game) Move the ore to the node with apprentice smithy station.
Level 10 Metalsmith: Process 20 copper fragments, 40 tin fragments, and then smelt that into 20 bronze ingots (processing time of 1h20+processing fees). I can then find the Rare grem carcass from novice hunting, and process it myself with novice tanning into Rare animal fat.

Find someone with:

Level 10 Lumberjacking: to craft the apprentice lumberjack axe, and then find 2 rare weeping willow wood. Move the wood to the node with apprentice woodshop station.
Level 10 Lumber milling: Process the weeping willow wood into timber, and then into a plank and a board. Move the processed wood to the Stoneworks station node for further processing.

Find someone with:

Level 10 Herbalism: to craft the Apprentice Herbalism Scythe, and then find a Rare quality Giant Bluebell flower. Move the herb to the node with Apprentice Textile Mill station.
Level 10 Weaving: Process the Giant Bluebell into fibers. Move the processed plant to the Stoneworks station node for further processing.

Find someone with:

Level 10 Stonemasonry: bring the slate, the processed blueball, the processed weeping willow wood and animal fat to the node with Apprentice Stoneworks so that person can make the mold. Move the processed weapon mold to the Smithy station node for the final craft.

At each step of the way, the gatherer/processor has to risk material loss due to PVE or PVP death:
1) Ore to the Smithy node
2) Giant Bluebell to the Textile Mills node, and then to the Stoneworks node, and then to the Smithy node
3) Weeping Willow wood to the Woodworks node, and then to the Stoneworks node, and then to the Smithy node
4) Slate to the Stoneworks node, and then to the Smithy node
5) And finally, with all the materials at the Smithy node, one can craft the sword with:

Level 10 Weaponsmith: to use all these materials coming from all over the world to make the Blue (Rare) Bronze Great Spellsword. This crafting skill alone takes such a ridiculous amount of copper/zinc to get to level 10, I have yet to find a single level 10 weaponsmith on Vyra.

That then gives me the same sword that dropped from 1 random mob we were steamrolling for XP anyway, with 0 risk as it cannot be dropped on death.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love how involved the whole artisan system is, and how it encourages player cooperation, all in an environment where each movement between every node is a risk of death and loss. Exactly the type of social and risk/reward experience that Ashes of Creation is all about.

However, at this time, only heroic gear, and arguably only epic/legendary gear is truly worth all this effort and risk (heroic level 10 gear is about on par with the lvl 20 blues that are currently dropping).

Now if I remember correctly, Steven mentionned that item drops are much higher than intended right now because crafting is still in its barebones state and not the focus of this testing phase, which is perfectly fine. I mention it here because I hope complete item drops will be much more aligned with crafting in terms of effort/time/cost.

And so in future phases, I truly hope the entire crafting system isn't trivialized by drops. To be equal in terms of effort and risk required, anything blue or better should only drop from the biggest raid bosses in the game, never from regular mobs. Or perhaps even a unique material and a high level recipe, as Steven mentionned in the past.

Even green gear should be an exceedingly rare occurence, otherwise you completely invalidate that tier of crafting (same social effort, time and cost as above required for a green item, but at least the gatherable materials only need to be green instead of blue).

Especially since the whole game revolves around building nodes to allow crafting of items, with the gathering and movement of these ressources being a key part of almost every system in the game, with the risk of loss due to PVE/PVP at every corner. Even with only the Riverlands, you're looking at hours of riding around on the map to get these materials to all the stations and back. I can't even imagine when you have to go all over the world of Verra.

Hopefully, come Phase 2, with the more developped Artisan system & talent trees, completed item drops will be reduced to something exceedingly rare to be more in line with crafting, and to make crafting even white and green items a worthwhile endeavor. The December 20th wipe would be the perfect time to adjust it. Thank you for reading!

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Comments

Nval1d

interesting post here...im curious to see how Phase 2, with the more developed Artisan system will be

StrickenII

I'm right alongside you on this. With the current 3-day play time, there's insufficient hours to even get to the buildings necessary to accomplish the crafting as it is. I am hoping that once we go to the 5-day play weeks, there will be slower grind, less dropped gear, and more focus on crafting. Definitely still include mob grinding, but to get the recipes and mob-location-specific materials necessary to make the stuff, with the one-off < 5% drop rate for any completed gear (and much less for higher rarity than even white, scaling).

Veeshan

Im hoping with phase 2 in regards to this
- They greatly reduce completed gear drops (we know they inflated it for phase 1) should be hunting recipes over gear from mobs imo
- Gear drops only drop as a white quality maybe green off bosses but i think white varient works fine here anyway since they bosses drop the recipes for that specific gear piece they drop anyway
- Player stores getting added (We know this is coming soon and has been upped on the priority list)

this way there incentive for people to stop grinding mobs to rush levels and work on the node aswell since ur now limited on good gear drop it gets harder and harder to level if u focus on one task due to lack of decent gear

Ludullu

Yep, I've been yelling that full gear drops from normal mobs is just insane. I get it that it's for alpha and all, but holy shit.

I've suggested this kind of distribution for gear in the past:

Artifact rarity - single pieces per server
Legendary - a dozen
Epic - a few dozen
Heroic - a hundred
Rare - a few hundred
Uncom - a thousand
Comm - a few thousand
Poor - sold by the vendor, so infinite

And my personal preference for those rarities would be that power increase is minimal between the rarities, as opposed to HUGE difference currently in A2.

I think that this kind of rarity distribution would really create a game where when you see a dude with a rare/heroic item, you'd go "oh damn, his guild really put in work for that". And anything on top of that would truly be a "holy shit, I've heard about that item dropping".

Mobs should never drop anything above common. Elites should never drop anything above uncommon. And bosses can obviously drop anything, depending on the size of the boss (i.e. 8/16/24/32/40 players to kill it) and on the drop chances of said gear, but the loot should be limited to maybe 3-5 items per kill.

In other words, I want the names of rarities to truly matter rather than just be "oh, this is my 10th rare drop today" kinda shit.

Zapatos80

I personally like how items rarity scale right now (even though the tuning is still a work in progress, obviously), given how a craft of each tier is exponentially harder to make, and extra risky to lose these epic/legendary materials on the many, many trips between nodes. I love that I had to spend a lot of time making friends and negociating with a lot of people and work both within my own skill set and other people's. It's exactly the experience I expected from Ashes.

I do agree that NPC vendor = baseline white. Regular mobs = slight chance at a better white. Regular elites = extremely rare chance at a green. Blue+ extremely rare drop even from bosses. What makes more sense, as Steven stated in the past, is bosses dropping a unique crafting material that you can fit into a recipe that already requires epic/legendary mats to make something amazing (thus not invalidating all the steps/requirements of crafting and keeping the risk/reward). Thanks for your comments everyone!

nanfoodle

Crafting at low level should be very quick and easy rewards. Should not be a large chore but designed to get you hooked on crafting early. So you learn how to craft. Should be useful as well. People spending the whole day trying to find a few copper nodes seems out of balance.

Get us into crafting and make it so you can make useful common items for gear easy to get. Greens should be only 10-20% harder. Blues and up should be full on work.

Aquinas

When you read the process that you outlined it is wild how much harder it is to achieve the crafted weapon vs the dropped weapon. It also has this weird effect that if a blue drops, even if you do not want it - you use it because it is so wildly better and crafting the weapon you do want is not worth the time.

For example, I wanted to level up and play as a magic archer. From 1-9 I used my starting bow and then a blue wand dropped. In an attempt to continue to play as a magic archer I asked global to trade blue wand for blue bow, after hours of asking and no takers I just gave up and now I use the wand, unfortunately. But as you said, why would I go through all the work to make a bow when I already have the wand and I can just focus on leveling up instead.

Now, one thing to be nit picky about your post is with player stores and localized auction houses it will be substantially less tasking to find these materials rather than finding someone to make it or level up the professions yourself. Naturally people will be selling them because they have already crafted them and want to secure a profit for those goods.

Also I like @Ludullu comment in regards to rarity. Right now there are currently waaay too many blues being dropped that it makes player crafting feel like a grind just to get to master or grandmaster where as each step of the artisan should feel like it is serving a purpose.

Savic Prosperity

thank you for kinda laying out my issue with the current basic system they put out for us in a clear way. I definitely feel like this crazy cost to craft things also makes it so if you want to be a crafter you dont want to donate your resources to the node until you are done (or heck why donate to node when you can just sell it for personal profit)

i also want to add onto this, that during phase 1 i felt they should have done wild swings in trying out different ways of balancing the crafting pipeline before putting in whatever they were planning for phase 2, this system also effects how they balance node progression
high resource costs to make stuff? make resources crazy common/respawn see how that would play out
keep resources the same, and reduce the cost of resource crafting in general
or like significantly increase exp per craft, but change how we get resources/resources required per item
IDK really but just crazy things like that

i personally dont like where you need like 500 items in the market to get to the next tier so that means anyone leveling the profession would flood said market with hundreds of items so whats the point outside of 'i have all these epic/legendary mats' All this means is unless you are the first person leveling the profession, you make 0 money from crafting

as an example of the current system you need about 2k rubies to level scribe to 10, but rubies are also used to make hp potions. Why are rubies fairly uncommon if they are supposed to be used as a frankly weak consumable? i dont get this approach

Zapatos80

Aquinas wrote: »

Also I like @Ludullu comment in regards to rarity. Right now there are currently waaay too many blues being dropped that it makes player crafting feel like a grind just to get to master or grandmaster where as each step of the artisan should feel like it is serving a purpose.

Right now, the only things truly worth crafting is level 10 epic/legendary. lvl 10 heroic = lvl 20 blue that are dropping.

ShivaFang

Honestly the drops are fine. Most drops are common/uncommon and rare are few and far between (and often the subject of bickering and hurt feelings on the rolls)

I have as yet never seen anything better than rare drop.

Crafters can easily make better than rare gear if they acquire the materials. I have absolutely seen heroic and epic crafting materials handed to me to process (which I hand back when I'm done - unless I just straight up trade them from my stock). Heroic and epic gear is better than rare, so crafters really do make the best shit.

Zapatos80

I agree, crafters do make the best items. But it's only epic/legendary materials. (Heroic level 10 is slightly inferior to a level 20 blue). Drops currently invalidate white, green, rare and heroic mats, and all the interrelated systems (everything mentionned in OP, plus node/station progression).

1Problem

this is quite possibly the worst post I ever seen. killing people and mobs is more important than you roleplay cutting daffodils, also when you're fighting mobs (assuming group size (6-8) 6-8 farmers would be fully geared before 6-8 mob farmers.

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