A Change To Refineries

In 1.19, a major change was made to professions. Instead of having to refine unprocessed materials, you would instead auto refine them while doing the profession simply by either left or right clicking. To this day, there are still a few refineries in the game so that people with unprocessed materials from pre- 1.19 could transfer them into modern materials, and it's likely that someday they will be removed like the Selchar legacy emerald merchant.

But what if we could find an alternative use for them?

So materials have a little thing called ''tiers''. When you harvest a material from a node, it will have either 1, 2 or 3 stars. When doing this, there is an 89% chance of getting a tier 1, 10% chance for a tier 2, and a 1% chance to get a tier 3. This means that if you want enough tier 3 materials for a full crafted item, you'd need to gather on average 100 materials per 1 needed material. This, as you could understand, is a really annoying grind and honestly just a waste of tool durability.

Refineries in real life are used to process raw materials and in some cases improve the quality of them. So I had a thought on how refineries could be changed.
Since I don't know which is best, I've made 3 different concepts. You can decide which is best in the poll.
All of these would retain the old functionality of refining unprocessed materials from pre-1.19 but would also gain the new functionality of upgrading processed resources

Spoiler: Idea 1: The upgrade system

For this potential variant of the new refinery, you would mostly just throw a few emeralds at the machine and it would guarantee the upgrade of your material. So for instance:

You have 1 Oak Wood tier 1

If you wanted to upgrade it, you would, for instance, need 30 emeralds to make it tier 2. If you wanted to make it tier 3, it would cost you 128 emeralds (and mind you, that's a lot of emeralds for that point in the game.)
If you wanted to upgrade a tier 2 oak log into a tier 3, you would get a 30 emerald discount on the refining
These are example prices so if they are unbalanced it doesn't really matter
Since people could distribute these on the TM at higher levels, it's possible that you could simply scale the refinery cost per level. To prevent people from using low level classes to refine high level materials, there would be a level minimum for refining on all materials. High level prices for things such as dernic materials could be:

1 Dernic Wood: tier 1:

Tier 2: 32EB
Tier 3: 3LE
While 3 LE might seem like a lot, proffers usually make a lot of money by this point from selling LQ gear on the TM so it should be okay for them.

Spoiler: Idea 2: The ''Reroll'' system

Item Identifiers are able to reroll items in the game to give you a chance at getting better stats on them. This system for refining is based around that.

If you took 1 Oak Wood tier 1 to the refinery the game would offer you a measly cost of 2 emeralds for 1 chance on that item to get a better tier (afterwards that item gains a tag that prevents it from being further refined). The chances here are:

70% chance of a tier 1 (nothing good)
25% chance of tier 2 (decent)
5% chance of a tier 3 (really good)

Like the last one, the costs could scale with levels.

Also, this would be pretty good because if I'm not mistaken this would lower the average grind requirement per 1 tier 3 from 100 to 20, which is really good. And yes, materials that are tier 2 or 3 can go down in tiers from this (why would you even refine a tier 3)

I'm not sure if Corkian Amplifiers should work with this system

Once again, these are example answers. I need balancing geniuses and profession tryhards to tell me what would be better for these stats.

Spoiler: Idea 3: The ''Powder'' system

Not only can the Powder Master upgrade your weapons but he can also combine powders for you into better tiers. The same could go for these, although the logic is a little weird since i don't think this would work IRL.

So for instance:

10 Tier 1 Oak Woods = 1 Tier 2
10 Tier 2 Oak Woods = 1 Tier 3

Since this is ultimately 10*10 this is pretty much the same grind as before but it gives a usage for lower tier materials meaning that it may be slightly easier to get better materials on grinds like what you'd usually have. Pretty much it'd still be really good even though it requires the same grind as before.

And once again, these are example amounts.

Again, I don't know which is most balanced so I'd like people who actually know professions to vote on which is the best and to tell me numbers that would be more balanced for the examples.

 

I like ideas two and three.

these numbers need to equal 100%.

 

I like powder system, its good for ppl who get unlucky with rng and rarely ever get t3 mats

 

I had just woken up when I wrote this, I'm sorry. I'll fix them now.

 

bump because somehow this is already on page 2

 

I'll be hammering in the order of which ones I like the best because I hate love numbering

Honestly don't know if this is true, I haven't looked any of the numbers up, but I'll do some math about it before breaking down the post below.

If all math is correct, then this statement is fundamentally false. If you were drawing cards from a deck without replacement, then yes, it would be true.

52/52 51/51 50/50 etc etc Your last card would be the A of diamonds (or in our case the T3) or it would have already been drawn and you'd either clear the deck or refill it.

But we aren't dealing probability but statistics. Considering that these events are independent of each other. Trust me, I killed all the acacia trees many times over and got like 2 T3's for like 7 stacks

Your chances every time you click (again assuming that the above numbers are correct) 89% T1 - 10% T2 - 1% T3
Until 1.20 and profession ID's this is how it is. It's a great suggestion, I just wanted this cleared up since it can be very misleading. Also just wanted to show/explain why instead of saying, "YoU dUmB" because SamSam is a smart SamSam because SamSam CanCan

Might be better to go with 4/8/12/16

To go with stack numbers aka the divisions of the s t a c k

I do get the reason for ten, four would probably be the easiest to port over from the powder guy but meh
Would personally go for 8 (two stacks of T1's equals 2 T3's not even enough to craft with in most cases)-16(Two stacks of T1's equals 1 T3 even less to craft with in most cases.)

Not bad, not bad. But is this basically saying if I throw in a T2, I'll 70% of the time get a T1? Kinda nasty ngl, but fair. If you can only ever reroll once might be better to go with

5% to down grade
60% chance to stay the same
30% Chance to upgrade
5% Chance to max out

So putting T2's in wouldn't be a total waste of time, could also put in cute little messages in chat when you try redoing an item. If the whole limit thing sticks which I think would be good though we'd have to figure out a way to keep them usable with nonrolled goods in the crafting window. Unless the crafting stations only look for the name of the item and not really all the tag data

"You can't shave anymore off that plank!" "You only have a scrap paper left!" "You'll have just bones if I try again!" "You're almost out of ink!" "I can't mill the grains any further!"

I would say there isn't any big issue with this, but that might not be true. While it'd increase the supply of T3's for high lvl crafting, it would also increase the base line cost. Addition to the price of cracp to repear tools and time spent gathering/crafting/ingredient finding (and/or purchasing of materials)

I could see it making things even more expensive in the long run as players want to make profit from their trades, the more they spend, the more of the margin they want to cover. Colleges are a prime example of this, but you're not here for a report.

I can also see it making things cheaper, we'll just have to see what the player base does, honestly. But if it does go up in price, will make it harder for people just getting in to complete unless they just drop the price, which might get the badmin police on them or someone else.


But overall, I think it's pretty good. Thanks for writing <3

 

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