In Defense of Tier 3 Materials from Raids

Hello, cheese2Uman here.

I've seen several threads recently discussing how they don't like tier 3 dernic materials dropping from the new raid. However, I, for one, am a fan of tier 3 materials dropping from raids in general, and wanted to share why I think it is a positive thing.

The Downsides:
The main downside of adding tier 3 crafting materials as raid rewards is that it makes gathering less profitable. This is because with tier 3 materials significantly easier to obtain, the market supply drastically increases, and the market price decreases as a result. However, I don't think the new raid in particular will do much to worsen this particular issue. Tier 3 level 100 materials dropping from the Canyon Colossus Raid are nearly as good as tier 3 dernic materials, and were already tanking dernic prices before 2.0. However, now let's look at the positives of tier 3 materials as raid rewards.

Benefits:
1) Benefits to Crafters:
Lower Costs for Crafters: With tier 3 materials becoming significantly cheaper, crafters are able to craft items at a lower cost, allowing them to turn a little more profit when selling their crafted gear. Additionally, a lower cost of crafted gear allows many more players to be able to afford these items, increasing the demand and causing crafters to gain even more profits. From my experience, most gatherers are also crafters to some degree, so while they may lose some profits in gathering, they gain profits as crafters.
Lower Barriers to becoming a Crafter: Having tier 3 materials drop from raids also makes it viable for players to choose to specialize in crafting without having to go through the grind of gathering, as they can more easily buy materials from the trade market to craft with. Overall this will cause more of the player base to get into crafting gear, which I personally find quite fun, and it will also lead to a larger variety of crafted items on the trade market.
More Viable Crafting Options: Finally, cheap tier 3 materials allow for a wider diversity of crafted items, increasing their utility and giving proffers a wider range of viable items to craft. Personally, as someone who crafts food and potions, tier 3 materials would be pretty much unviable to craft consumables with if it weren't for the reduced prices due to raid rewards. This is because it is not really worth it to spend large amounts of money for a consumable that will only last for one play session. But with cheap tier 3 materials, consumables that would otherwise not have enough duration are able to be viable options.

2) Benefits to Consumers:
The greatest group to benefit from tier 3 material raid rewards are consumers, which includes almost everyone playing Wynncraft. As mentioned above, with crafted materials becoming less expensive, they are becoming more accessible for the average player to buy, allowing for a greater range of options and experiences for players and not simply restricting crafted builds and lootrunning to the rich alone.

Thoughts on Gathering:
Current Uses for Gathering: While gathering is not really viable anymore for tier 3 materials, it is still useful for gathering mass amounts of tier 1 materials, which can still be sold for a good amount of money to those trying to level up their crafting professions, and can also be used to make cheap consumables (I might be a little biased on this since I focus on crafting consumables).
Suggestions to Improve Gathering: Nevertheless, I agree that gathering does not hold a lot of benefit now aside from crafting consumables. However, instead of taking away tier 3 material raid rewards and the benefits I mentioned above, I suggest adding some buffs to gathering to make it more viable again. These could include:

• Add gathering speed ids for armor and accessories and/or add gathering speed ingredients that don't exclusively drop from rare mobs.
• Change gathering speed so each % of gspeed actually increases your gathering speed instead of being like the old intelligence system where you need a certain amount of gathering speed to have any effect at all.
• Add more nodes in gathering spots so gatherers can continuously gather at a spot without having to wait for nodes to regenerate.
• Increase the odds of obtaining higher tier materials from a node and/or add a gathering quality id which increases your odds of obtaining higher tier materials from nodes.
• Add tier 4 crafting materials which can only be obtained from gathering.

Conclusion:
Overall I think tier 3 materials as raid rewards are a positive change which allow crafted items to be available to more of the player base and increase the diversity of crafted items on the market. I am personally fine with tier 3 dernic materials being dropped from the new raid, but do agree that the rewards for gathering should be increased to compensate. Let me know what you guys think.


Edit: I think this thread should have gone in the feedback section, but oh well.

 

if you make the best materials in the game obtainable from not proffing why would anyone want to do gather profs anymore? at least with sky wood it’s fine because there is a higher level still, i just don’t think the best tier of the final level of a profession should just be that easy to get

 

That's a fair point. Although I wouldn't say that the Nameless Anomaly Raid is easy.

 

The raid isn't easy for now, but it's only been out for a week. By the time 2.0 releases we'll probably have the same kinds of strats that we do for other raids. Still challenging, but experienced players won't have too much trouble farming.

As a consumable crafter myself, I see where you are coming from here, but the main issue people take with it is that it pushes gathering profs out of their niche. Doing Nameless Anomaly will reward players with several raw LE per run, high level tomes, corkian amplifiers, T3 dernic materials, and more. It will be objectively more profitable, which would be fine if gathering provided exclusive rewards, but it doesn't. Your idea of adding T4 materials is interesting, but it feels more like a band-aid. If raids instead dropped T2 materials from the start, it would have the same effect as adding a whole new tier. But instead, raids reward T3 materials, which shows an overall lack of consideration for gathering profs. Which is really what people are concerned with.

 

If you party with experienced players, you can complete this raid like in 12 minutes. TNA is confusing but not that time consuming.

 

Hmm... Raids dropping tier II materials would be interesting. I think that could work. I would prefer if the amount of materials you received increased to compensate for this though.

 

a raid run at max combat level (which everyone is basically required to get) is much easier comparatively speaking than getting high enough gathering (an optional side leveling thing) to gather dernic

 

True, but that's kind of my point. Gathering professions are still very grindy even with the addition of gather xp gear, and I like that they have an alternate way to gather materials which is a bit more engaging. So, I think they should keep raid materials or make gathering less boring/grindy.

 

No idea

 

sky materials already make 99% of recipes cheap and easily accessible. theres 0 reason to screw over those who actually bother to grind professions by adding dernic T3 to the new raid. The only reason this is being done is so the CT and devs can continue to ignore the dire state profs themselves are in. (and so salted can continue to make bank off of prof bombs lmfao)

 

except my point is that they should stay grindy- dernic stuff is by no means "necessary"- as ron pointed out already, you can just use slightly lower level stuff for basically all crafting already. they are the final tier of gathering, and as such should stay only accessible via actually doing gathering proffesions

 

there is no defense for t3s in raids
if you want t3 mats you should either pay for them on the tm or grind to get them yourself
adding them as a reward to a system where the only requirement is an endgame build is just a big middle finger to those of us that have put in the hours to grind gathering

 

One thing I haven’t seen being mentioned is the future prices of T1/2 Dernic materials. Prices of these materials have been steadily increasing after 1.20 has been dropped, from average 16e/1eb for each tier to 32-64e/2eb-4eb respectively, at least to my limited knowledge of the market. Supporting this comes from the steadily declining amount of profers profing Dernic materials, lack of players going for higher levels beyond lv 103 in craftings, and lack of prof bombs in general.

With the introduction of T3 Dernic materials to TNA, there is even less of a reason to level up gathering profs, which means less profers, which will cause T1/2 materials to skyrocket of not just Dernic but of also lower level materials in general. It may make it easier to level up past lv 103 craftings though, if one could afford the lowered T3 price.

I am sort of against adding T3 Dernic materials into TNA as a max level profer myself, but I do like having cheaper T3 materials. I have to admit though, I already made a lot of money selling T3 materials way before 1.20, hence why I am almost neutral about this. A lot of profers make money off of Dernic materials and it would be a shame to lose the already dying niche of the community.