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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Questions and suggestions on the new Artisan material requirement changes
lamina5432
Member, Alpha Two
Hello wanted to make this thread about the new artisan material increases to express opinions and request a response on it from Intrepid. Making the thread in alpha general over the artisan section is to get some different eyes on it. While I appreciate the hard work the team puts forward some miscommunication or slow communication causes a lot of discontent like with this change. Also would like to ask about some of the ideas that come to mind from reading the fan wiki and determine how viable they sound since I'm not a developer. I just want a more detailed exchange on the current artisan system's feel.
First the catalyst for this post was the changes on the server release that multiplied some artisan crafts by 27 times the amount of raw resources needed. Intrepid has walked it back a bit but some still need 8 times the amount to be made mostly the tier 3 recipes and tier 1 recipes were almost completely reverted though some are still 2 times more expensive. This was a change in the artisan system with no warning and communication which took as far as I could tell everyone off guard. As it pertains to one of the main systems in the game that people have collected data and made charts to keep track of the non-communication aspect was I think a little abrupt on Intrepid end. Not asking for a full statement when these things are iterated on, but communication that a change like this is in the works and the idea behind such a big overarching change would be appreciated.
Now I still would like to disagree with these changes being implemented, but I will try to infer the reason for them. I can think of three reasons after observing and discussing with people for the past two days. First guess there were too many legendary items by the end of phase 2.0 by the end most level 25's had at least a few legendary pieces of gear. Second reason is that there was too much left in the storage such that some players created alternate characters to act as secondary storage. Third and last that I can think of is they were trying to rebalance the speed at which adventurer's get gear and level with the artisan systems leveling and crafting speed.
Approaching the first guess I can agree there was the way many legendary pieces of gear by the end of the first part of phase 2. The problem with this being a reason to increase the material requirement is that it doesn't address the underlying problem which stems from this being a test and with so much of the artisan system missing. The reason that I can see the large amount of legendary gear is from the lack of a degradation system, more importantly a permanent degradation system so that those items would disappear over time. Having a permanent durability loss would allow a cycle to form which I think is going to be needed especially when we hit max level in this game in the future. Which is basically where the last phase ended up with most players being at max level for 2.5 months which allowed the build up of top quality gear. The next part of this connects with the next reasoning of people having too much stored away.
About midway through the last phase maybe a little before I'd already heard of people having overflowing storage banks such that alts were made with the sole purpose of having the extra storage space. If this is the reason for the increase in material requirements I think it would be a gross misunderstanding on why that was happening. The connecting point between to much legendary gear and overflowing storage was that heroic+ rarity materials were just common enough that players wanted to have only the best they could get. If you look at the two exceptions to this hunting and coal. A lot of people tolerated a generally lower rarity piece when these two materials were involved. So the slight seeming availability of the higher rarities meant a lot of players waited and gathered them instead of slowly upgrading the gear they had over time.
Another reason for the overflowing storage is the lack of an easy trade environment. First the basic market we had was barely usable till the added the material search function and honestly still not great but it's alpha. I'm not expecting it to be very usable in a lot of aspects. I'd just like an explanation about the change when the economy itself is in such an unfinished state because of missing systems like these. One of the biggest reasons for raw material stockpiling was the specific needs of each recipe for different types of processed goods which points to another missing system the wiki states.
Q: Are crafting materials going cross tiers? For example, using higher level materials in lower level recipes, or low level materials in a higher level recipe? Is that allowed?
A: Yes.[8] – Steven Sharif
and
Recipes have slots for required and selectable crafting materials. Adding higher rarity selectable materials increases the rarity of the crafted item.[34][35][36] Choosing different selectable items can also result in crafted items with different statblocks and unique properties.[37]
Both would let a more flexible use of materials cutting a bit back on the stockpiles.
Finally the last guess from why Intrepid implemented this was to try and balance the leveling between artisan and the adventurers that go grinding, losing a majority of the mob drops. Two problems with this, the mob's can still get higher rarity gear that now takes longer but is still comparatively faster then building the nodes up and have crafters build up the artisan skill they need especially with an increase in material requirement. As an example of how off balance the current system is there is already level 10 heroic gear drops from bosses and not a single apprentice building up. I wouldn't be surprised given there are level 25's after two day's that world boss gear has already entered the game.
Also our guild spreadsheet person SabuMaru did some math using the previous artisan processing system compared to the current one which might be an eye opener. Guildies once gathered to make 50 gear sets in 36 hours for a siege so
50x10 gear pieces
every item takes about 20 raw material ( for the math )
then every one of that is for JM 3 steps of processing
50x10x20x3 = 30.000 raw materials
that is 120 x 250batch size processes
taking total of
480 Hours / 20 Days
so in those 36 Hours we had ~ 14 people working on this
( Mains and Alts )
This was pre-half revert back
NEW MATH
50 sets
10 pieces per set
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is at least 3 into it 1 and 3 cycles for load of these things
50x10x40x3x3x3 = 540.000 RAW materials
is ~8500 Hours / 360 Days
OR .... we needed 240 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result
current
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is atleast 2 into it 1 and 2 cycles for load of these things
50x10x40x2x2x2 = 160.000 RAW materials
is ~2560 Hours / 160 Days
OR .... we needed 71 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result
So the time investment went way up for processing it's 4-5 times the effort. Then if we look at the gathering time -
say 100 materials an hour as a base it would take
160,000 / 100 = 1,600 hours with the incre
ase in time between each rarity being about 4 times the effort every time
it comes to being 6,400 uncommon
25,600 for rare
102,400 for heroic
409,600 for epic
1,638,400 for legendary
Even splitting that over a 50 man guild it's 32,768 hours per person.
I asked for help writing this and have been reminded to also point out the processing cost for these extra materials per level starts to add up since it is another multiplicative.
As the base of the gathering system, I don't think Intrepid truly thought through the amount of time required to do basic crafts with this kind of material inflation. There is one last possibility but I don't think it should count as an actual guess to make these changes and that the artisan skill tree might affect processing ratios. Which feels like a stretch. I think a lot of the complaints and speculations could have been avoided with some more of an input from Intrepid because this does kill the motivation every time I look at it.
On to some theorizing and suggestions which I'm putting forward in hopes something helps balance out the current systems. I feel like in the future with the systems Steven put forward like land management and the more interactive moving veins after emptying one would erase a lot of the problems this change was trying to deal with. These changes seemed to ignore the static resource farming that was going on as a a big reason legendary gear was so readily available. I do feel that just having the regular possibility to have heroic+ spawn in the world also isn't good. I'd rather there be special spawn or growth systems in place that would allow the rarity to go up for a resource. Example like a forest growing and the trees getting denser in the center of it with some being higher rarity or they haven't been chopped over a period of time and the tree grew bigger requiring extra tools or time to chop with some of the materials coming out being higher rarity.
There needs to be a look at the storage system as that is also a problem especially with storage bags now locked behind crafting itself. With the rarity system the way it is there needs to be a way to hold more of the same resource at different rarities because it takes up too many slots for the lack of stack amount you're going to get so it wastes the stack size it could have. The only two ways I see to solve this while also keeping six rarities is either add more bag slots to the bag and lower the stack size or the other stack all rarities together but allow drop downs for each "pocket" in the bag. This problem is also why as a JM miner and JM herbalist I used only the JM mining bags to hold my herbs because I didn't lose that much space comparatively.
This also doesn't solve the node storage problem but that's more about the specialized storage being mostly useless and the storage crates only partially working. If you want specialized storage actual differences like the bags are required not a general halve the space but stack limit is now 44. There really needs to be a higher cap I think for node storage, but I could easily be wrong here. We are also getting guild and freehold storage sometime in the coming months so we'll see how that feels.
The last few suggestions are based on making the game feel good instead of just being about balancing. One a fellow guildmate asked was to change the selection for turn in commissions to always take the lowest rarity.
I'd like to point hat the balancing of lowering all drops probably isn't a good experience. Though this is a test I've seen people suggest adjusting it to more of a material drop system to help ease the feel a lot. No player likes seeing nothing but money drop but with the crafting economy being what Intrepid seems to be looking for I think a compromise needs to be made somewhere. A second idea I've seen is there being an ingrained depuff on the dropped gear from mobs like either a 50% stat cut even a 25% stat cut would work. As someone who focuses on crafting, seeing people already getting rare and heroic drops while we don't even have apprentice buildings online is a friction point on this side of the argument.
The last suggestion I have for here is after witnessing 3 server starts there needs to be a fresh server growth system in place because the disparity as players already hit max level compared to how fast the nodes get online and the artisan buildings built is a large disparity. I will say I have no idea what the fresh server growth system would entail but I see the need after seeing this three times over.
Would appreciate any feedback on this post and wouldn't mind a response on some of the reasoning for the changes Intrepid implemented.
First the catalyst for this post was the changes on the server release that multiplied some artisan crafts by 27 times the amount of raw resources needed. Intrepid has walked it back a bit but some still need 8 times the amount to be made mostly the tier 3 recipes and tier 1 recipes were almost completely reverted though some are still 2 times more expensive. This was a change in the artisan system with no warning and communication which took as far as I could tell everyone off guard. As it pertains to one of the main systems in the game that people have collected data and made charts to keep track of the non-communication aspect was I think a little abrupt on Intrepid end. Not asking for a full statement when these things are iterated on, but communication that a change like this is in the works and the idea behind such a big overarching change would be appreciated.
Now I still would like to disagree with these changes being implemented, but I will try to infer the reason for them. I can think of three reasons after observing and discussing with people for the past two days. First guess there were too many legendary items by the end of phase 2.0 by the end most level 25's had at least a few legendary pieces of gear. Second reason is that there was too much left in the storage such that some players created alternate characters to act as secondary storage. Third and last that I can think of is they were trying to rebalance the speed at which adventurer's get gear and level with the artisan systems leveling and crafting speed.
Approaching the first guess I can agree there was the way many legendary pieces of gear by the end of the first part of phase 2. The problem with this being a reason to increase the material requirement is that it doesn't address the underlying problem which stems from this being a test and with so much of the artisan system missing. The reason that I can see the large amount of legendary gear is from the lack of a degradation system, more importantly a permanent degradation system so that those items would disappear over time. Having a permanent durability loss would allow a cycle to form which I think is going to be needed especially when we hit max level in this game in the future. Which is basically where the last phase ended up with most players being at max level for 2.5 months which allowed the build up of top quality gear. The next part of this connects with the next reasoning of people having too much stored away.
About midway through the last phase maybe a little before I'd already heard of people having overflowing storage banks such that alts were made with the sole purpose of having the extra storage space. If this is the reason for the increase in material requirements I think it would be a gross misunderstanding on why that was happening. The connecting point between to much legendary gear and overflowing storage was that heroic+ rarity materials were just common enough that players wanted to have only the best they could get. If you look at the two exceptions to this hunting and coal. A lot of people tolerated a generally lower rarity piece when these two materials were involved. So the slight seeming availability of the higher rarities meant a lot of players waited and gathered them instead of slowly upgrading the gear they had over time.
Another reason for the overflowing storage is the lack of an easy trade environment. First the basic market we had was barely usable till the added the material search function and honestly still not great but it's alpha. I'm not expecting it to be very usable in a lot of aspects. I'd just like an explanation about the change when the economy itself is in such an unfinished state because of missing systems like these. One of the biggest reasons for raw material stockpiling was the specific needs of each recipe for different types of processed goods which points to another missing system the wiki states.
Q: Are crafting materials going cross tiers? For example, using higher level materials in lower level recipes, or low level materials in a higher level recipe? Is that allowed?
A: Yes.[8] – Steven Sharif
and
Recipes have slots for required and selectable crafting materials. Adding higher rarity selectable materials increases the rarity of the crafted item.[34][35][36] Choosing different selectable items can also result in crafted items with different statblocks and unique properties.[37]
Both would let a more flexible use of materials cutting a bit back on the stockpiles.
Finally the last guess from why Intrepid implemented this was to try and balance the leveling between artisan and the adventurers that go grinding, losing a majority of the mob drops. Two problems with this, the mob's can still get higher rarity gear that now takes longer but is still comparatively faster then building the nodes up and have crafters build up the artisan skill they need especially with an increase in material requirement. As an example of how off balance the current system is there is already level 10 heroic gear drops from bosses and not a single apprentice building up. I wouldn't be surprised given there are level 25's after two day's that world boss gear has already entered the game.
Also our guild spreadsheet person SabuMaru did some math using the previous artisan processing system compared to the current one which might be an eye opener. Guildies once gathered to make 50 gear sets in 36 hours for a siege so
50x10 gear pieces
every item takes about 20 raw material ( for the math )
then every one of that is for JM 3 steps of processing
50x10x20x3 = 30.000 raw materials
that is 120 x 250batch size processes
taking total of
480 Hours / 20 Days
so in those 36 Hours we had ~ 14 people working on this
( Mains and Alts )
This was pre-half revert back
NEW MATH
50 sets
10 pieces per set
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is at least 3 into it 1 and 3 cycles for load of these things
50x10x40x3x3x3 = 540.000 RAW materials
is ~8500 Hours / 360 Days
OR .... we needed 240 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result
current
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is atleast 2 into it 1 and 2 cycles for load of these things
50x10x40x2x2x2 = 160.000 RAW materials
is ~2560 Hours / 160 Days
OR .... we needed 71 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result
So the time investment went way up for processing it's 4-5 times the effort. Then if we look at the gathering time -
say 100 materials an hour as a base it would take
160,000 / 100 = 1,600 hours with the incre
ase in time between each rarity being about 4 times the effort every time
it comes to being 6,400 uncommon
25,600 for rare
102,400 for heroic
409,600 for epic
1,638,400 for legendary
Even splitting that over a 50 man guild it's 32,768 hours per person.
I asked for help writing this and have been reminded to also point out the processing cost for these extra materials per level starts to add up since it is another multiplicative.
As the base of the gathering system, I don't think Intrepid truly thought through the amount of time required to do basic crafts with this kind of material inflation. There is one last possibility but I don't think it should count as an actual guess to make these changes and that the artisan skill tree might affect processing ratios. Which feels like a stretch. I think a lot of the complaints and speculations could have been avoided with some more of an input from Intrepid because this does kill the motivation every time I look at it.
On to some theorizing and suggestions which I'm putting forward in hopes something helps balance out the current systems. I feel like in the future with the systems Steven put forward like land management and the more interactive moving veins after emptying one would erase a lot of the problems this change was trying to deal with. These changes seemed to ignore the static resource farming that was going on as a a big reason legendary gear was so readily available. I do feel that just having the regular possibility to have heroic+ spawn in the world also isn't good. I'd rather there be special spawn or growth systems in place that would allow the rarity to go up for a resource. Example like a forest growing and the trees getting denser in the center of it with some being higher rarity or they haven't been chopped over a period of time and the tree grew bigger requiring extra tools or time to chop with some of the materials coming out being higher rarity.
There needs to be a look at the storage system as that is also a problem especially with storage bags now locked behind crafting itself. With the rarity system the way it is there needs to be a way to hold more of the same resource at different rarities because it takes up too many slots for the lack of stack amount you're going to get so it wastes the stack size it could have. The only two ways I see to solve this while also keeping six rarities is either add more bag slots to the bag and lower the stack size or the other stack all rarities together but allow drop downs for each "pocket" in the bag. This problem is also why as a JM miner and JM herbalist I used only the JM mining bags to hold my herbs because I didn't lose that much space comparatively.
This also doesn't solve the node storage problem but that's more about the specialized storage being mostly useless and the storage crates only partially working. If you want specialized storage actual differences like the bags are required not a general halve the space but stack limit is now 44. There really needs to be a higher cap I think for node storage, but I could easily be wrong here. We are also getting guild and freehold storage sometime in the coming months so we'll see how that feels.
The last few suggestions are based on making the game feel good instead of just being about balancing. One a fellow guildmate asked was to change the selection for turn in commissions to always take the lowest rarity.
I'd like to point hat the balancing of lowering all drops probably isn't a good experience. Though this is a test I've seen people suggest adjusting it to more of a material drop system to help ease the feel a lot. No player likes seeing nothing but money drop but with the crafting economy being what Intrepid seems to be looking for I think a compromise needs to be made somewhere. A second idea I've seen is there being an ingrained depuff on the dropped gear from mobs like either a 50% stat cut even a 25% stat cut would work. As someone who focuses on crafting, seeing people already getting rare and heroic drops while we don't even have apprentice buildings online is a friction point on this side of the argument.
The last suggestion I have for here is after witnessing 3 server starts there needs to be a fresh server growth system in place because the disparity as players already hit max level compared to how fast the nodes get online and the artisan buildings built is a large disparity. I will say I have no idea what the fresh server growth system would entail but I see the need after seeing this three times over.
Would appreciate any feedback on this post and wouldn't mind a response on some of the reasoning for the changes Intrepid implemented.
1
Comments
Also, in support of the work put in by your Guild's equivalent 'spreadsheet person', I can say:
"Intrepid, the point at which we become vitriolic and don't play is when a single useful body armor piece for a guild member takes/costs over 150 man-hours, 3-4h a day over 8 players in the appropriate location for building up toward it, over 5 play sessions."
(I've attempted to encode as much 'data' as I could into that without another essay, but it shouldn't be taken as 'this feels good/about right', it's definitely 'this is the limit').
I don't remember it now exactly and I'd need to sift through my P1 vods, but I'm almost sure that I didn't even see that much loot drop back in P1. And what's even weirder is that a third of the drops I experienced came from mobs 3+ lvls below mine. I thought they were supposed to have EVEN LOWER chances to drop anything, let alone a full item.
So this kind of drop rates in the context of insane material requirement increase sure makes things feel like crafting is still useless.
My personal main suggestion to resolve this would be this:
- mobs only drop parts of gear (i.e. crafting materials relating to the full item)
- crafters need to combine those parts into a bigger part (not yet a full item)
- and then use those big parts to craft the full item, while adding other general mats
Both crafting actions should give crafting xp.This way mob grind will directly generate crafting work, directly give crafters xp w/o requiring other general mats, and would slow down the meteoric rise of hardcore players.
Like, after my 2h of farming HH today, I feel like any attempt to even try and craft something for myself is utterly useless, cause I could simply spend more time farming those mobs. Especially considering that the rarity of drops would be definitely higher than what I'd be able to get through current crafting. And, on top of that, the items I was getting were lvl10, while we can't even craft that shit.
It's also not necessary to have mobs drop zero gear, the important thing is to have them only drop certain types/slots of gear, so I'd actually have to ask you what exactly you've found them to be dropping.
I feel like discussing crafting at this time is just repeating the entire design stack due to the fact that none of it seems to be implemented, and if the droprates genuinely haven't changed much, we're just gonna have a lot of players coming by to tell them the same things again.
I'm just glad to hear that they at least want to go in the direction of what they originally pitched. I find myself missing the OG playloop more and more lately as I play more of other MMOs and really feel that missing aspect.
Eh, I'll just repeat as always:
Goblins drop Earrings (7% droprate, -1% for every level over them), Deconstruct Earrings, get metal fragments/nuggets, use 5x for one ingot.
Goblins drop 'scarves', deconstruct into thread, use 6x for one cloth or similar.
A 7% diminishing droprate across two items (i.e. they can share it) leads to the average player/group getting 1 drop every 10-15 kills, which makes it so that 1h of play probably leads to being able to make SOMETHING, but not so strong that you'd always choose to grind mobs instead of gathering.
Well, I hope they figure out something...
Arcane Mind's Helm from Arsonist 17:45
Snactus Skulker's Bracers from Archer 21:28
Uncomm Bracers from 1* Aggressor 51:37
Brass Wand from 1* Cleric 1:03:11
Uncomm Tin Long Spellbow from 1* Ranger 1:05:17
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Pauldrons from 1* Aggressor 1:22:12
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Mace from 1* Aggressor 1:27:29
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Shortbow from 1* Aggressor 1:36:52
Uncomm Sanctus Skulker's Boots from 1* Ranger 1:55:22
Rare Copper Long Spellbow from Lvl7 Raider 2:36:33
Uncommon Copper Short Spellbow from lvl7 Raider 2:40:31
Maybe we just misunderstood something about what was said?
That said, I didn't watch the whole thing, and I don't think anyone feels like writing a screenparser for just Glint drop frequency for something we can just ask, so yeah, what's your feeling on if less Glint is dropping?
And on the topic of gear drops. I just raided Dusty, because of the servers going down, and he was talking about looting 40 items in ~4h, as a party.
I really got no damn clue where they reduced loot chances. Dusty explained it as "mobs outside of your direct lvl range (+-3) have become way worse in terms of loot", but imo that's barely a damn change then. Only hardcores went for 6++ upward lvl difference during farming, so while it might be a good thing to slow them down a bit, the fact that we literally already have lvl25 (since, like, 2 days ago too) - it's obvious that those loot decreases didn't do shit.
And considering that I dropped a few items even from mobs that were outside the 3lvl range, I feel like even that side of drop rates is poorly controlled. I'm sure I might be somewhat lucky (cause today I got big drops as well), but I'm not THAT lucky.
That's just a clamp on skilled players with no real economic ...
No... what?
My head hurts.
And I've seen people say that all the lvl25s have gotten there "naked", because they obviously fought upwards and would've probably not gotten any real loot for that.
And my example would fit his reasoning as well, cause I either fight weaker mobs or ones within 3lvls of me and I've gotten mad loot. Several people literally told me to report my loot, because "that's waaay too much".
Do not punish skilled players for fighting strong creatures, even if you do not reward them for doing so. Forcing us to fight only mobs that are too easy relative to our skill and preparation is just asking us to get bored and leave. Explicitly punishing us for doing so is just telling skilled players to fuck off.
We don't need more drops per hour. We don't even technically need better drops. We will find a way to make our game experience interesting, if you let us. But if you punish us for seeking challenge and succeeding (especially relative to those who don't), nobody who seeks challenge will play your game.
It also brings into question economic design, because if this works both ways that means stuff *below* your level by a lot also doesn't drop anything, and eventually you'll make a situation where if a server's population is stable with not a lot of noobs coming in, that people would have to make alt accounts to keep lower-level crafting going.
I really hope I'm wrong. All I want is to hit mobs, get some kind of leather or "gear meant for monsters that I can't wear" that I then need to disassemble, and go glue those bits together with ore to make armor or weapons. I hope you can deliver on that.
I personally liked this, because it meant that newbies would always have a way to make good early money, but I do understand that "just make an alt" is a disliked approach to when the newbie faucet dries up.
I think that breaking down lower-level items into crafting materials for stronger gear is one of the better systems for handling this kind of thing. It means you can give low-level players easy access to weaker gear (they just need to grind normal mobs for a bit), while still giving them an incentive to continue fighting in the same areas after they get it.
I really, really dislike games where players are disincentivized from trying to fight monsters stronger than their level range. If skilled players are capable of working out strategies that let them take on very strong enemies, they should be rewarded for it, not punished. I'm a bit more ambivalent about reduced droprates from mobs that you've leveled past. I can see scenarios in which this is both a benefit and detriment.
Let's think briefly about high level play rather than low.
Ashes is balanced around parties of 8. Which means if you're going into a dangerous area to collect, and possibly fight over, materials or mob drops, you will be expected to be in a group of 8. If you aren't, you will probably die (at least, this is what happens at night in reasonably profitable locations in Throne and Liberty and what I've experienced in other games a little).
So you need to go to a place where you get the correct droprate on most mobs, in a group large enough to defend itself, and then those mobs would need to also be challenging while being 'only' a few levels over. They could expand the range as you hit level brackets like other games, but then it's back to band-aids that people have to learn.
But then, thinking about the OP, how do you actually gear up and is this just going to create the huge gap we see in nearly every Korean-styled MMO? Because those situations are 'unfavorable' for us at minimum. Basically, if you say 'grind gear', and then you can feel the gear, but then you also have to upgrade it, and enhance it, and have 10+ slots, and customize, across all players...
The level of the mobs is going to have almost no meaning relative to the level of the players. Sure, a lot of this is because Ashes is obviously at this point missing all of the other progression spaces and liminal experiences that take up playtime, but I'm only talking about the fact that 8 players with 'Ok' gear unenhanced will either be 'entirely unable to meaningfully fight mobs 3 levels over', or '8 players with great gear will experience no challenge from anything but still farm them super fast'.
This is a problem in TL now and that game has at least 3 stopgaps against it, along with smaller parties and instanced content, and minimal Artisanship.
In Ashes this would be much worse. Artisanship grind + enhancing power grind + (SPECULATIVE) gear drop limits is another disaster recipe. That said, this could just be someone spreading misinformation that Intrepid will unfortunately now be forced to clear up, so there's that.
- mobs have 3 types of loot groups
- materials (both specialized and general)
- full gear
- horizontal enhancement items
- when killing mobs at your lvl - gained xp is normal, gear drops are normal (normality figured out through testing), materials and enhancement are lessened
- when killing under your lvl - xp is higher, mats are higher, gear and enhance is lower
- over lvl - xp is lower, enhance is higher, gear and mats are lower
At release people are farming mobs of roughly their own lvl and get gear for that. The gear allows them to fight above their lvl, so they can now enhance their gear. Enhanced gear makes the fights easier, so they level up to those mobs faster, enter their lvl range which enables their gear drop tables. Any unfilled slots of gear can be filled by fighting weaker mobs solo (i.e. on people's additional time) and crafting it.Depending on the finalized leveling speed (cause it sure still feels insanely fast), skillful players could use the enhancement they got for killing stronger mobs on the gear they get from said mobs once they get into their lvl range, rather than on the previous tier.
This suggestion might heavily rely on proper horizontal mob difficulty. So, say, your group is lvl15. You're fighting low 20s lava mobs. They're giving you fire resist enhancements. While you were getting enough of them for your entire group, you've reached lvl18-19, so now low 20s is the "gear drop table". So now you have a choice, do you use the enhancements, make the fights easy as hell and grind the higher tier of gear real quick, or do you keep up the challenge by fighting low 20s ice mobs, who'll still be giving you gear, but now you don't have proper resists against them.
And so, that kind of situation could only exist if switching mobs horizontaly is a viable difficulty choice, rather than saying "well, the only challenge for us is when the mobs are several lvls higher than us". Ideally this would depend on party's skill builds, which would in turn need to be fairly limited in their switchability (so, none of the current "I can switch my entire build on the fly for no cost"). So if your mage is a fire one, your summoner chose an ice elemental (which is weak to fire) and your bard has earth-based buffs (if we even get that kind of granularity in our buffs) - lava mobs would be somewhat difficult for you before you get resists to them, but, after those resists, switching to smth like "wind mobs" would still keep the difficulty relatively high, even if the mob lvl is now not as higher than yours as the lava mobs' was when you started fighting those.
I'm not sure if I'm making any damn sense with all of that, cause I feel like I got lost in my own thoughts along the way
Because the choice isn't 'use the Enhancements', it's 'craft gear with the enhancements'.
And the OP is about an econ thing. If we are skilled and beating up the Lava mobs without Fire Resist, we won't put in any effort to ever craft Fire Resist, or to ask for it. There's no way we'd detour to do over 80 man-hours of work to get a Fire Resist for the grind/leveling part of that mob experience if they weren't posing a challenge, especially in a PvX game.
tl;dr works in 'The Fence', not in AoC as we understand it now (this is probably still unclear but obv explaining it would take so long).
But I get the point. Even if there were fire mobs on later lvls, it would simply make the current farm useless, cause the reward would have no function for a long time. And if there's several alternative paths through lvling, the economic impact of fire resist enhancements wouldn't be big enough to justify the time spent.
Would doubling down on horizontal effects be too much (both in terms of economic impact and the build balancing side)? So, say, you could use "drop of lava" as both a crafting material, that would give you a fire resist dial, and as a direct enhancement material that gives you fire resist directly. So, in theory, you'd be able to craft an item with FR and then add even more FR to it, if you have 2 drops of lava.
I'd imagine it wouldn't create more use-related confusion for people, cause we already have items that have several uses with branching craftability growth. And the economic value for drops would, at least in part, come from PvP too, cause it would help you fight a fire mage. Which could kiiiiinda work for my lava/ice example, cause if your group uses fire resist enchancement and then goes to fight the ice mobs, theoretically, groups with fire mages would be present there (cause it's easy for them) and now you'd have PvE difficulty, while also having PvP ease, so in a way this kind of approach would serve as a PvX tuning tool.
This was kiiiiinda how some private L2 servers worked on release. The easiest elemental stones to get were Divine ones. And a lot of mobs would have divine weakness, so people would just use these stones to make their attacks have divine attribute, at the start of a server. This would then mean that boosting divine defense (by switching stones to Dark ones) would help you in pvp. And then, anyone who'd go out of their way to farm some other elemental stones to change their attack attribute would have a bigger advantage in pvp, cause others wouldn't have as big of a defense agaisnt them.
According to OP's data, it would take around 130 hours with the types of numbers we'd see, to even try that "Double Fire Resist Set", probably more on a Tank.
So, definitely worth it, but then the 'correct' thing to do is 'only farm them when they have the most drops' (which would be true no matter what, but IF the limit is above also, it means you can't get a specialist head start).
So, maybe Double Fire Resist gear would help in PvP, but in terms of 'I would like to fight mobs while they are still a challenge and still profit', nah. It would just be the usual modern 'You're too good at this so we have to nerf either your rewards or your fun'.
Which, btw, is fine, because in most games, people like that have the option to choose fun and still get to keep pushing, but if there's one thing Throne and Liberty has absolutely confirmed for me, it's that PvP games don't let players do this for long, and grindy PvP games multiply that, probably about as much as they multiplied the resource requirements for crafting (TL somewhat gets a pass because its econ design is worlds better than anything Ashes is even capable of being).
So going with both the systems Intrepid currently has like the deconstructing kits which then leads to the tempering system. With also the wiki's referenced proposed ideas like
-Recipes have slots for required and selectable crafting materials. Adding higher rarity selectable materials increases the rarity of the crafted item.[31][32][8][33][34][35][36] Choosing different selectable materials can also result in crafted items with different statblocks and unique properties.[37][38] The developers are considering whether the selectable rarity system should also apply to Processing recipes.[32]
-Recipes may have an XP component, where crafting that recipe multiple times can level up the recipe and unlock better results.[33][44]
and - Deconstructing/disassembling rare item drops from bosses can yield recipes that can be used to replicate that item.[43][48]
If we actually used all these systems in conjunction and had appropriately high but deteriorated or debuffed full gear drops. They could allow a much more free flowing economy between the players that would allow an increase in drops in such a way with not affecting the artisans. It would really depend on how the eventual market and auction house system ends up feeling also but I think this might lead to a better feel and inter-reliance on both sides.
The concepts from the wiki are solid, but the implementation has been 'all over the place' for quite a while now, and I don't think anyone outside of the Dev team and maybe Phoenix Initiative knows why it's like this.
It's definitely one of those confusing things in the AoC design space where most people read the above things you mentioned, imagine or visualize the relatively obvious ways they would be implemented (or just have historical perspectives from other MMOs) and then get what Intrepid serves up and wonders what's happening.
That's part of what makes so many aspects of the game hard to discuss (unless, again, they're getting tons of positives from PI and the dominant guilds, but for some things, even that hasn't been true). They say X, a lot of the playerbase seems to think 'oh yeah that sounds good/makes sense, everyone knows how that should work', and then get... stuff like this, with no clear understanding of why it happens.
(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).
Also, how's this for a radical idea. Any lootable gear should only have a single substat. And when you deconstruct that item - that's gonna be the substat that the resulting material will transfer to the crafted item. So if you wanna have a sword with +con and +str - you gotta get 2 swords with the respective stats.
I just dunno whether this should be a full alternative to the general materials impacting your substats or if it should be a required part. I'd imagine that people would complain about too much rng in crafting, if this was a required part.
You already know where to find this implementation, don't you?
On another note got some exact math on crafting 50 sets of gear an important number given that it's base guild size. Received from another guildie who mathed the whole thing out.
The Total Processing time for 50 sets has gone from 300 hrs 40 mins to 1326 hrs 10 mins - an increase of 341% (or multiplied by 4.6)
Total Raw materials have gone from 7740 to 87420 - an increase of 1028% (or multiplied by 11.3)
Still seems way over balanced even if they wanted to do an increase in requirements. Not even counting how much more time and materials it will have taken to go from level 10 to 20 in a crafting artisanship.
An interesting topic that came up in my guild was that they might want more granular modifications for recipe's and an idea was proposed to make everything need ten times the amount of materials though a definite modification would have to be made. I thought an idea would be when we process raw materials they could result in a lot more goods. Such as an ore making a 3-5 fragments instead or even more if you want to go that way. It would lead to a similar ability like they have from the gear stat system right now of adjusting the sliders much more minutely than right now where every single change is a lot on the recipes. This also lends to a common complaint of a whole forest going into one bow that I see.
It would also allow for some more interesting merged crafting recipes a fellow guildie gave the example of mixing different inks in a scroll for different results. Though this would result in a bigger storage adjustment. In tune with that what about having city use only crafting bags and we are also getting access to crafting and processing from storage to help with that. have so much larger numbers in town would also allow a use for material transport caravans a system pretty much by the wayside right now but with some numbers played with I think would them become a viable reason to use caravans that way.
Enough for now but there is always more problems I'll bring up over time any thoughts are appreciated.
This would probably require an adjustment to the recipes where high rarity results don't require as many mats in them, cause otherwise we'll never craft a super high rarity item, but this particular feature could come from the "recipes leveling up" thing they mentioned. A crafter makes several items from the same recipe and their skill at executing on that recipe lets them make the thing at a higher rarity with a lower mat requirement.