Profession/crafting/repair Paradox

I'll start with my conclusions. Professions and crafting need some love. I think:

• Repairing/scrap should be more universal: make some or all non-crafted gear require it to some extent. Maybe make infinite durability a rare perk/ability or something
• Professions should level much more quickly
• The difference in XP between including and excluding ingredients should be softened, either by reducing the ingredient XP bonus or just raising the XP baseline

Some of these bullets might seem extreme. If you have a knee-jerk urge to reply to my bullet points, please read my reasoning below first. If it's too much to read, then please come back after you improve your attention span.

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I've been primarily leveling my resources and professions since starting. Right now my professions are each above 50, my resource gatherings are each above 60, and my combat level is 62. I should therefore be creating much or most of my own gear out of sheer aptitude. But I'm not, because I can't, as detailed below.

If you're focusing nearly entirely on crafting levels like I am, you've got to gather/process the resources, and craft the resources. As you go on doing this, your levels should improve such that you can gather the next tier of resources and craft better stuff, etc. Higher tier stuff resides in higher combat areas so you naturally have to level your combat just to access it. So far, so good.

The problem is with the actual items that you craft. All of it is junk. Not most of it: all of it. At any given time, you're doing one or more of the following:

1. Slapping on crappy ingredients simply for the huge XP boost
2. Using no ingredients because you haven't found any for this particular craft type
3. Selling your worthless creations to the smith for money
4. Using money to identify gear you found while resource gathering
5. Using money to buy better gear on the trading market

Nowhere is there room to actually thoughtfully construct an object for your own use.

The gear your find in (4) and (5) is always better than anything you can make, and you can always afford it because of (3).

If you use throwaway ingredients for the XP boost in (1) that's great, but it's much more than not using ingredients. So if (2) happens to you (esp. Jeweling and Scribing), then it takes a nightmarishly long time to gather the ingredients needed to make enough items to level up.

Since it takes so long to level up professions, then you're never going to be making gear that's appropriate for your own level. Like I said, I nearly exclusively leveled professions, and they're still 10+ levels behind my combat level.

By the time you've gathered up useful and interesting ingredients, your combat level will be high, so you'll need a high profession level to craft anything that would be useful for your level. Bear in mind, I've been focusing on professions. If I'm supposed to explore and fight more to obtain more ingredients, then the combat/profession gap worsens.

And on top of that, crafted items have the curse of durability, so they will need to be constantly repaired. Loot items do not have this massive drawback.

This effectively means that crafting worthwhile stuff can not happen until you're insanely high level—both in professions and in combat. So lower tier crafted gear that can compete with legendary gear is impossible unless you're literally a high-level player creating something for a player far below you. Again, this results in gear you're not making for yourself.

Profession levels seem like either a charity gesture, or an investment that only begins to pay off near the highest tier possible. It is not useful for you any time before that.

If I'm wrong or overlooking something key here, please let me know. But as it stands, professions don't seem appropriately rewarding.

PS: There seems to be no tayloring station in Olux.

 

repairing all gear would be insanely annoying and after years without it, it's a feature that absolutely nobody would want, even if it's better for the game (which I'm not saying it is)

i agree with your other two bullet points. leveling professions usually isn't by making good items. occasionally, I make a set of gear that I use. By occasionally I mean every ten or twenty levels. Even in endgame, where it takes many hours to level up using "junk" items.

and yeah, everyone is crying about crafted gear being insanely overpowered, but for everyone except the top echelon of players who craft endgame gear, it's really not... the leveling is quite unintuitive (other than high tier material and high tier ingredient = more experience)

also, sometimes there aren't all 8 crafting stations in a town

 

Well when I say "other things should have durability" I don't mean frequent, excessive repairing. Non-crafted items could sometimes have a durability rating, or make it very high, or whatever. Like I said, it could be a new ability or drawback.

Scrap/repair feels like a highly underused mechanic, and while I understand why it exists for crafted items as a drawback equivalent to duration reduction in e.g. potions, it is such a crafting disincentive that... well I explained all that already.

I am thrilled to see that refineries are being removed and that gathering tools now have durability. I assume that scrap will be used to repair them, and that seems like a better limiter than carrying weight.

I understand that some towns don't have all stations (why not though, honestly?), but when you're a town as big as Olux and have seven of the stations all together in plain sight, it implies there's an eighth nearby somewhere. It would be right at home near the bazaar tents among the other apparel-related stations. Apparently at least two other people have asked about this on the forums if you search. I can't post links yet.

Crafting stations would be a nice thing to show in Wynntils.

 

Would it be that bad if durability was just removed from crafted items? It would make them far more viable and would remove the need for stupid repair scrap. I realise that durability helps to balance some ingredient effects, but these ingredients are often very rare and a better solution would be to give them drawbacks too rather than them just wrecking durability.

 

I agree, remove durability nerf some abilities and turn all scrap atm into emeralds so people aren't cheated!!

 

I agree with all your points and I believe they are valid, but I have a theory on what craftable items are for.
crafted items are meant for the high-level players with nothing to do, it's supposed to be a massive grind so it takes forever to finish
while I think the system should change as you suggested, I don't believe it will because of this reason

 

Personally, gathering professions are fine for me (although I haven't gotten into the absolutely soul-crushing part of the grind yet), but crafting professions are time-consuming and (because your combat level goes up so much faster than even one profession level) difficult to justify investing time in. One idea I had was to give us new ways of earning Crafting XP.

The reason there's such a difference between leveling times is that we have so many ways to gain combat XP: killing mobs, quests, dungeons, mini-quests, discoveries. With crafting XP, it is only crafting items, which encourages people to make throwaway items. One possible new method could be having Crafted Items absorb some of your combat XP earned while using the item into the relevant profession. This would have a cap per item (for example, 5-10% of the XP to the next profession level) and would encourage making items people actually use.

This is just one possible (and possibly bad) solution, but I agree with your larger point on profession grinding nonetheless.

 

Another thought: crafted items should be able to use items from different tiers.
For example: using the cooking station with both Salmon (III) and Rye (V). Maybe the crafted item would be based off the lower tier of the materials used, but it would allow you to actually use leftover materials in a meaningful way, rather than to have to just sell or toss them because of limited bank space.

Obviously, amounts would need some tweaking, but I don't see why I'm not allowed to cook a meal out of Trout and Oats.

 

I had a quick glance at your profile, and I think you're working on Tier 2 stuff?

Tier 3 is where it started to drag for me—here I noted that it was mostly Scribing in particular holding me down, but Jeweling was a bit harsh too.

Tier 4 was a massive annoyance because one of the four resources was comparatively sparse to obtain.

Tier 5 required travel between Wynn and Gavel to obtain the four resources in workable abundance. It's at this point that you need to plan your trips in advance and have travel scrolls on stock.

I'm currently working my way through Tier 6. Continental travel is still required, and one of the resources is a PITA to obtain because you're constantly being attacked by rapid-fire ranged enemies.

I gathered Tier 7 stuff in advance and it was just as annoying as Tier 6. I have the feeling that incremental tiers will only get harder and harder to juggle, not even accounting for the more limited carrying weight and how you need to make more runs because crafting costs more raw materials.

 

I recently got back into the game and realized I'd rather wait until it's easier to level up all the professions. I decided to put all my energy into Woodworking which is why those are my highest gathering professions.

I'm sorry if I came off the wrong way, I understand I am still very early into the system and I'm sure it will only get worse. However, gathering professions will be easier due to the new upcoming miniquests. Nothing of the sort has been announced for crafting and I'm not sure miniquests would really work (people would still be making items just for XP). What do you think of my suggestion?

 

I've been thinking about this. Yeah, it can be done, but you'd have to do the following:

• Come up with another drawback instead of durability (negative stats—plenty to choose from, but you'd need to make sure that you're not removing stats that your ingredients are also adding)
• Enforce all future crafted items to use this new drawback system—as per above, it would need to make sure the negative stats don't conflict with the positive stats if possible, and it may not be possible to tell what items originally went into making the item
• Procedurally modify every already-crafted item to implement these new drawbacks
• Remove the repair/scrap functions from blacksmiths, and have them buy now-useless scrap for emeralds

It's hard. I don't have a solution. I honestly think durability/repair should be either universal or non-existent.
What I do know is that the scrap system is a bit silly... you should be able to repair with emeralds, since you're asking a blacksmith to do it rather than doing it yourself. And that if the 1.19 implements scrap/durability to gathering tools, that will be a bit better.

Yeah, this is a good idea, however it won't work for impermanent things produced from Alchemy and Scribing and Cooking.
Maybe using those types of items would also give you relevant XP?