Why do crafted items have durability?

In your opinion, why do crafted items have durability? Obviously crafted items can be more powerful than non-crafted items at times, especially since they can be created to tailor to your ideal build. However, why is this a justification for durability? What is it really adding to the game?

I'd argue it would be better to slightly nerf the ingredients themselves and remove durability alltogether. Professions are hard enough (or rather time consuming enough) to do, I don't think we need even more of a punishment for using them. Could someone let me know what I'm missing here?

It seems to be that durability just decreases how much crafted items are used, for the worse. The 2.0 update is going to completely upset the balance of gameplay, so you can't really use the upset of balance as an excuse when talking about removing durability. I think it may be best to remove it alltogether. That way profession users can sell crafted items better and players will want to use them more. When it comes down to it, durability is just annoying and it adds nothing to the game.

Let me know if you agree, or if something has gone over my head here.

 

in with world profession are hard every update prof get easy nothing hard

and remove the dura is like add new item type i think the item a balance with dura

 

Sir I do not understand what you're trying to say...

 

Durability is a key balancing aspect of crafteds (necessary penalty -> if you mindlessly stack strong stuff you'll end up with 1 dura)

It also allows for more variation in ingredients (ones with big tradeoffs, others that are safer slaps)


if you have an idea that won't murder ing diversity while preventing abuse, then yeah sure, but i doubt that's true
inb4 "ok so make those with dura above a certain threshold infinite use and those below the threshold unusable"

 

It doesn’t have to be that way though to get rid of durability. There’s already a limit to how many ingredients you can put in the crafting table, and you can simply just restrict the number of ingredients you can use on an item based on the number of stars it has. For example, an item could only have 1, 3 star item at most. Ingredients could use a rebalance anyway; a decent amount of ingredients are redundant (Bat Ear & Forest Web, Warped Skin & Leather), missing niches in terms of IDs, arbitrarily restrict IDs to certain professions (being locked for either Woodworking or Weaponsmithing, but not both), or just useless. From that alone, there are plenty of ways to be more diverse and balanced.

 

While the current way durability works isn't exactly ideal (both in what makes it go down and how it's repaired), it is important.

It allows for ingredients to have different power levels while still allowing for reasonable balance- of course this could be done through some arbitrary limiting points system, but that's very needlessly restricting and a soft limiter like durability allows for a lot of creative freedom in crafting an item specific to your needs without having to jump through hoops such as "max 1 T3 ingredient" or whatever.
edit: while i was writing this dr zed above here posted and all i'm gonna say is that limiting it this way is as if you were limited to using 2 legendaries per build. no nuance, legendaries are now expected to always uncontestedly be better than lower tiers, limiting tons of creative freedom that would only be justified if balancing was not considered important

Crafted items are also not just inherently better than normal items (even if ingredient power was brought down a lot -which is harder than it seems considering how low some of the values already generally are- the ability to minmax for damage output on an individual item would still eclipse all but a few non-crafted items), they're intended to be your average guy's replacement for mythic power items without having to go through the experience of lootrunning (replaced with the experience of professions except it's affordable to just not do it this time).

Crafteds are in a way made to be overpowered, and that means that they require an additional limit normal items don't have (or, if you will, normal items need a very good reason to be used over crafted items) and the durability system allowing you to use crafted items within a limited amount of fights but make them relatively dissatisfactory outside of those is in my opinion a very valid system in concept. There's just some major issues with the way durability has been implemented that makes it somewhat unfair (such as hit amount over damage taken or even another factor such as time spent in combat or something) which I hope will be changed one day.

 

3-star ingredients aren't meant to be on a single item as many times as lower-tier ingredients anyway due to their high durability cost. So it isn't really more restrictive than the current system. Furthermore, I don't understand how legendaries being generally stronger than lower rarity tiers somehow limits creative freedom; legendaries have generally been stronger than lower item tiers since Wynncraft's existence, yet no one has ever said that the rarity tier itself limits creativity. There's more to creativity than item rarity, and 3-star ingredients are already better in general than lower-star ingredients... That's the whole point of having item rarity; it balances out powerful stats by making them less available to everyone. If it were otherwise, then no one would ever use them. Besides that, that doesn't mean that lower tier ingredients would never be used; the same way that lower tier items like Rares are still used in builds. Rares and Legendaries already can have unique tradeoffs, so I don't see why 3-star ingredients and 2-star ingredients can't be that way either. Through the proposed system, at least you won't have to worry about ingredient durability being bypassed by other ingredients, which makes balancing more complicated and this more prone to imbalance.

Plus you can easily have nuance and balance by having negative IDs or other downsides for ingredients. It's already done with ingredients and regular items all the time. Or rebalance ingredients to be more unique and fill more niches. Trying to balance with durability isn't a good concept because an OP weapon still makes a boss fight trivial even if you have to repair it afterward. And that's the whole point of getting rid of OP stuff; to make sure that fights don't become trivial. There's been a bit of power creep, and having items that are purposely more powerful than regular items doesn't help with that at all. Durability just makes things tedious and gives crafted items another major downside they don't need; they already have a major time and effort investment to craft one by yourself. Another disadvantage they have is that unlike mythics or fables, they don't have major IDs and lack spell cost IDs. So they aren't really substituting for actual mythics. (Not that I would actually want crafted items to have major IDs).

 

Note before I say anything: I just got home after a 9 hour shift and it's 1 AM and I am very tired. Take what I say with a grain of salt.

Why is "mindlessly" stacking strong stuff an issue. If you can just add strong ingredients, said ingredients should be difficult / costly to get? Why do we need durability as well to punish them further? Also like you said, just stacking items like that is mindless. They could still benefit by using effectiveness increase ingredients like bob's tear to get a higher percentage overall. I personally think that the challenge in collecting ingredients, materials, and leveling up crafting professions is more than enough balance to ingredients.

I do agree that durability creates the potential for more variation, but I don't think that is inherently a good thing. I could argue that if I have both apples and rotten apples, I'd have a larger variety of apples. I still don't want to eat the rotten ones though...

I agree with this, although I dislike the idea of restricting crafteds to just 1 3 star. I like the simplicity of "add up to 6 ingredients" and basically leaving it at that, ingredient complexity aside.

Same argument here. People seem to act like the profession grind isn't an adequate cost for overpowered items. People can lootrun and get mythics, which are quite powerful, yet no one is imposing some "additional" cost on mythic items. IDK I just see the profession grind as enough of a cost.

At the very least, if profession users can't get rewarded by getting to really enjoy using their crafted items (at least I don't enjoy it when Im constantly worrying about it degrading), then they should be more involved in the repair process IMO. But this makes durability even MORE annoying for non profession users which makes them less sellable so I couldn't tell you what to do there. I just feel like overall durability is an unecessary balancer. Professions suck enough, ingredients can already be hard to get or costly to purchase, and materials can be as well (although are easier now with raids). It just seems like another step that doesn't really need to be there to me.

 

they should just makes it so ingredients work like set items if you want to remove durability and keep it balanced.

like for example: if you use 2 large lapis a set bonus would occur that gives -2 defense, +1% water damage and -2% spell damage.
if you use 3 it becomes -3 defense +1 agility +2% water damage and -4%spell damage
if you use all 6 it can be something like -7 defense +2 agility +6% water damage and -12% spell damage

it would keep items balanced and make creativity even better.

well obviously not all ingredients should have bonuses like that.

 

this really isn't true, the stars reflect only the droprate/rarity atm.
having your suggestion implemented would at the least have ingredients have a point system to work as you would the ing tier be.

 

I recall when the crafting system was being developed, durability specifically existed as a power limiter so that if you just stacked overpowered ingredients you'd end up with 1 durability.

 

I understand why the balancing team decided to add durability to crafted items because without durability, crafted items would just have a clear advantage over regular items due to overpowered ingredients however this has completely discouraged me from getting into making any crafted gear for myself. I just don’t want to deal with having to constantly use 2 stacks of scrap to repair all of my gear just because I walked somewhere with it on. It’s just something that I’d rather not worry about while casually playing an MMO.

Instead, I would prefer there being no durability at all with a completely different ingredient system. This system would be something like what was in Kid Icarus Uprising where different “ingredients” acted as puzzle pieces in a large grid (In Wynncraft’s case it could take up a single or double chest inventory). In this system, the better ingredients were often mush larger and had weird shapes making it hard to put several of them on one item. Sure, this would be a nerf on the low durability high power crafted items, but maybe durability could still remain an option to boost the stats of items before crafting rather than being required. This suggestion probably deserves its own thread and implementing it would probably take like 2 years, but I think it would make professions more appealing to a larger audience.