Fixing Professions Megathread (added Suggestion #3.5)

I've had a lot of profession related threads recently. Some have been shitposts that have gotten a lot of attention, some have been thoughtful, potentially helpful suggestions. There's a few now so to make things simple I've had the other ones locked, and am making this the hub for what I want for suggestions. There have been significant changes from the original version of this thread. Please consider how these changes will affect the server, the economy, various types of players and how the changes may reflect the original view for professions. Thank you.

Suggestion #1: Remove Profession Speed Bombs
- This is simple enough. Currently people are discouraged from grinding without both Profession XP and Profession Speed bombs, as it seems pointless. This would be alleviated by removing speed bombs.
- Speed bombs are also dumb because the halve material costs, which means high level profession users will only craft items for people when these bombs are on. Remove these bombs completely.

Suggestion #2: Profession Specialization
- Each player will have two profession specializations.
- You may put one profession specialization into any profession.
- Having a specialization in a profession will be the equivalent of having profession speed bombs activated for that profession only. Gathering speed increased, and halved material cost for professions. This means specializations will still be relevant after hitting max level.
- If you end up not liking the profession you specialized in you can switch the specialization, but the one you removed it from will be reset to the level it was when you added the specialization, OR it will take 1 level away from your maximum if you haven't gained a level since equipping the specialization.
- This encourages people to focus on only 2 professions, which was the intended scope for professions, while still making it possible to level all of them. Simply saying "you're only meant to level 1 or 2" is not enough. Sorry Salted.

Suggestion #3: Change Crafted Levels
- You can craft any item at any level. A level 1 jeweler can make level 105 accessories.
- When you craft, every ingredient will have bonus ingredient effectiveness applied based on its level and your crafting level. The ingredient effectiveness applied is equal to your crafting level minus the ingredients level. Ex: Lvl. 40 Jeweling w/ Lvl 103 ring = -63% Ingredient Effectivness.
- This ingredient effectiveness is calculated and applied for every ingredient. This cannot flip IDs. Also, if the ingredient effectiveness is positive it will still be applied, but if the resultant value is over the ingredient's maximum it will be rounded down to the ingredient's maximum roll.
- This makes crafting more accessible by allowing people to make gear their level if the ingredients they want to use are much lower level. This will increase the demand for high level materials which can help gatherer's, while keeping powerful high level ingredients to those who are dedicated to leveling their crafting.

Also, this idea was created with someone while mining so if you like it vote for suggestion #3.5

Last line is meant to say “100 ingredients on level 1 items”

Suggestion #4: Repeatable Gathering Boards
- Simple suggestion, and not my idea. Make gathering boards repeatable with a 24 hour cooldown. This will help those who can only play casually and help others pace themselves. It will also help alleviate the grind a little bit without truly decreasing the time it takes to reach high level gathering. Some have pointed out that it would be better to only be able to repeat the highest level gathering boards within 10 levels of your gathering profession, which I agree with.
- Regardless, here's the link to the thread who originally proposed it, please vote there before you vote on anything >>here<<

Suggestion #5: More Crafting Customization
- I will not be explaining this suggestion here, because it also is not mine. Check out >>this thread<< by @Dr Zed for his changes to crafting customization. They're really cool and I can see them being a lot of fun without disrupting game balance that much. I'll also be including it in my poll just for the sake of data collection. Note: I'm specifically referencing the crafting customization features he mentions, and do not specifically endorse other parts of the suggestion.

That's it I believe. Vote in the poll for what you like.

 

Ah yes, the person who is known for making long threads compliles them all into one long thread

In all seriousness, the only problem professions have is that grinding them is so slow and boring.

 

#1: yes.
#2: would fuck with engame material prices, eh.
#3: seems interesting
#4: i mean it sounds good in theory, but allowing players to speed through gathering too fast would crash the endgame material economy
#5: sure, making crafting have less variance would be better for selling crafted items, people won't be so opposed to ordering them

 

as far as 4 goes just make it the highest lvl one in that bracket of 10 lvls

then give the normal XP reward for the first completion and then less for subsequent ones (1/3?)

this way you can grind profs while you’re leveling and not want to kill yourself

 

#1 Profession bombs are lucrative for the server and not really an issue aside from when you're trying to craft specific gear, i did all my gathering without bombs and it was fine. You get almost twice as many resources from levelling from X to Y in the 4 gatherers than you need to level from X to Y in the 8 crafters, so you can definitely do everything without bombs without having to overgather by much, as long as you know what you're doing.

#2 encouraging specialization is cool i guess, but not really attractive to people that want to get into every prof, i think this existing would cause more problems than the benefits it might bring.

#3 you may not know this, but every single recipe needs to be coded and tested individually, this would massively increase the amount of recipes needed to make everything, assuming you mean to use low tier resources to make high level items, and if you mean to use the same recipes, what's the point? you'd already have the gather levels to get the resources and unless you're really bad at managing those resources, your crafter skills would have kept up with them. this would also massively devalue late game resources in the case of the former, as there wouldn't be a mandatory need for them to make endgame gear and in the case of the latter, the whole suggestion is irrelevant anyway.

#4 making the gathering miniquests repeatable forces you to gather near them for maximum xp, not to mention just increases the xp gain curve overall because you wouldn't ever not take the quest, this is a bad solution to a system that is admittedly not amazingly designed, but the miniquests being one-time is better than being repeatable. think of them like a kickstart to potentially get one level to make your gathering one tick faster.

#5 i read that thread, i'm inclined to disagree with most of the suggestions as they just complicate things, more specificity is cool i guess, but the simplicity of the profession system is partly what makes it beautiful.

(yes i'm the one vote for none of them, i hope i've justified it)

 

Ironically this is my shortest profession thread yet

1. Neat
2. Alternative is XP, I'd personally prefer speed
3. Indeed. No RNG here, but more accessible.
4. 24 hour cooldown makes it so you'd have to wait. If you're waiting between grinding sessions as opposed to just grinding it out immediately (which makes the lower level ones kinda useless) you're still taking about the same amount of time. Perhaps make it so you can only repeat ones within 5 levels of you?
5. Lovely.

 

I agree with these. However, I also think that Profession Speed should be removed. Professions without bombs above level 80 is completely unreasonable, and nobody is going to do the crafting ones without bombs when you can buy (or just wait) for the bombs to be thrown. My optimal fix is to buff resource gathering and node regeneration by 1.5x, and cut material costs in half, rounding up. Maybe ditch that last part.

 

1. I don't care, it ruins gameplay and literally every relevant player disagrees. Speed bombs need to go.
2. Salted has literally said before that the intention for professions was to focus on 1 or 2. With the current state, people just try to level every profession quite often which just makes leveling a lot more painful than it's intended to be.
3. There is not a unique segment of code for every single recipe. If there is, I'm sorry but whoever made the profession system is an idiot because that's extremely inefficient. Seems much more likely that there's a generic system in place that compiles relationships between ingredients to find your end result. This is effectively just taking all of these initial ingredient values and multiplying them by a fairly static variable. As for testing individually for each I'd say for balance sure, but otherwise I don't think so.
4. There are gathering boards at basically every significant grinding spot so your first comment is irrelevant. This honestly just seems to be your opinion, to which I'll respectfully disagree with.
5. Okay boomer

 

I don't know why this couldn't have stayed at least in the second thread as that already had a bunch of suggestions along with semi-intelligent conversation about them.

1st suggestion:
Speed bombs are fine and very very very likely won't be removed. Only real change that they need is the removal of the effect where it halves crafting prices as it makes no sense to have that be a thing and makes leveling crafting professions super easy. Besides, while there are no bombs on, it gives people an incentive to go do other stuff such as dungeons or loot running (you wanted pacing, right).

2nd suggestion:

This is horribly gameable as a person who's already at let's say level 110 mining can just assign a specialization to mining, gather a bunch of materials with the provided speed and just disable it once they level up This wouldn't take long thanks to hunted + existing bombs + the speed provided from the specialization.

What I posted in >>this<< thread about the same suggestion:

I can see my suggestion also has a similar problem of being gamed, which I addressed in the same reply sent. And like I said the cost of switching can be made more expensive or just made impossible.

3rd suggestion:
From the same thread:

I didn't really elaborate on why the resulting items would be next to usable in the original response, but the reason is because at a high level you can get better normal items than the resulting crafted item if your crafting profession is low level. Besides, if you actually needed to make a high level crafted item without getting your professions up, you can just contact someone who does have higher level crafting profs and that way you won't need to suffer the negative effect from crafting at a low level.

How this suggestion could be made useable: (same thread, same suggestion)

I know this version of your suggestion doesn't include the +% part but if you really want to have some sort of a way for a higher crafting level to affect the resulting items, this might be a good way to go.

4th suggestion:
This could be interesting if it's implemented right. I feel like along the cooldown, it should also have increasing cost for completing the gathering post. Reason for this is that if the price stays the same, people who are lazy and really don't want to do any grinding toward gathering professions can just buy the required materials off of the market and never actually have to touch the system. Increasing the cost of completion every time might deter completely breaking the system this way. Considering that at if you are at the level of the gathering post, it gives you ~33% xp toward your next level and seeing as there are, what?, about 40 or so posts per profession, just doing the posts every day would give insane amounts of xp.

5th profession:
I do kinda like the idea of being able to customize the weapons you are crafting more. I don't really know how to balance this out though, so I'll leave it to others to figure out.

 

1. Disagree
2. Yeah I kind of realized that, do you have an alternative? Resetting people to level 0 seems to drastic, and simply resetting them to the level they were at is even more gameable, especially for people who already have very high level professions.
3. Honestly it's just to make it more accessible. I personally would love to be able to even craft just normal crafted items without ingredients. You'll have to level up crafting to use good ingredients which I think is good, but allowing that little bit more of accessibility has more of an impact than you may think in my eyes.
4. IDK when you did this reply relative to my edit, but you'll see that I edited it so that there's only 1 at a time that you could repeat. If I'm level 98 mining, the only one I could repeat would be the level 96 Molten Ore III board. I think with that it's relatively balance but really I'm just trying to push the idea here, the actual balance aspect will be up to the GMs, devs and admins.
5. It would be lovely. I don't think there's particularly any problems with the balancing that Dr Zed mentioned, but perhaps I'm overlooking things. Either way, you can contend with that on his suggestion page. I'm just promoting customization in general here.

 

Thanks! No one else has really brought up any issues with them, so I’m open to more criticism of the balancing. Especially the attack speed and damage range.

________________________________

Thanks for mentioning my thread btw Theeef! I’m also going to just focus on Item Customization for now on. It’s gotten really complicated, and I think it would be better to leave it to you.

 

I also deleted the old thread because I couldn’t change the poll choices.

 

I added Suggestion 3.5 so check that out if you weren't huge on Suggestion #3 perhaps

 

will edit this comment later with something I want to note about crafting

 

It's bump time. Enjoy the thread spam.

 

i eat bees

 

Bumping these