Craft : Current state
Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2024 7:19 pm
A few thoughts on the current state of Crafting on Ror. I have always crafted for my guilds since the Live server, and there are clearly a few things that feel more and more frustrating. Some of it might be linked to the ability patch and the complete crash of PvE post patch, but some come also from clear choices from the dev team over the years.
* Gathering Skills *
- Scavenging : It's a personal feeling, but it seems it's getting very hard to get a single purple fragment from a full dungeon run. Previously, you would get an average of 4 - 6 on a full GB or city dungeons run, even lvl 200 blue fragments are on the rare side, you could get over 20 from a single run, it's closer to 4 - 6 on average recently. Is it linked to a code change post ability patch ? I know loot tables were affected, so craft gathering drops might have been as well. Scavenging being the only source of Armor fragments, it also makes the Armor Talismans the most expensive talis in-game for no real reason at all (armor is not a stat you would heavily invest in for most of the classes currently).
- Butchering : We need more bats. Previously, the game had a day/night cycle on some of its fauna but nowadays we have a single spawn of a couple of lvl 200 bats that cannot offer a real convenient source of wings. Otherwise, overall, butchering is fine.
- Cultivating : Why was it decided that Liniments should be infinitely more harduous to craft than on live ? On live, you would drop the purple seeds once, get a normal output from it, compared to only one crafting component per cycle on a purple seed. Purple seeds were also infinitely easier to get. Liniments provide powerful buffs BUT alot less powerful than it was on live since the decision was made to disallow stat stacking, nonetheless they were made not only shorter duration but also infinitely harder to craft. At the moment, only a few liniments are indeed useful due to the fact most won't stack with group buffs/ self buffs so why should they remain so hard to craft ? The blue seeds added on RoR are also a mistake for me, you need a reliable source of crafting, not a one-time seed.
Concerning the other seeds, I will talk of them in the crafting skills part bellow.
- Salvaging : currently the easiest way to get fragments since scavenging is so unreliable. It's hard and costy to lvl up, and will ultimately be able to provide only half of the fragments you need, since you will mostly obtain purple frags from purple drops (golden ones having the possibility of yielding blue instead of purple frag), and those that are reiably farmable are those from Gunbad bags, which are class specific. Hence if you are a magic class, you can only get wisdom/int/tough/HP/ init frags but will not get any STR / Ballistics / WS, same for a melee class who won't get INT or WIS frags. You could say that you can hope for your groupmates to pass on their armor drops in Bastion to be able to get other archetypes items to break, but first, it almost never happen outside of a full guild group, secondly it will only be set armor drops which will not give purple fragments on a 100% basis, it feels closer to 50% purple / 50% blue. Given the pain it is to level up this gathering skill compared to butchering or salvaging (cultivation is a very long run, but it is not costy, and can be shortened by buying the soil/water/... reagents), it is still the most profitable one but there should be more ways to get non Archetype specific frags - the solution might be to up the rate of purple fragments on the set armor parts.
* Crafting Skills *
Talisman Making : I adressed most of the issues in the gathering part.
Apothecary : a very flawed version of its O.G counterpart on live. It seems it was made purposedly far more frustrating and limited than the live version.
First, the restriction on multipliers / extenders. Most potions on live would ever require ONE single Stabilizer (namely the Goldweed), opening the opportunity for more combinations of multipliers / extenders. On Ror, you need 2 Stabilizers on the non liniment potions, which means you can only add either an extender OR a multiplier. It results in the fact that most potion craft yields 2 potions at best, the only exception being the Draught of Recovery that can be produced with a multiplier. Most of the other potions require the extender to be even remotely useable (5 minutes vs 60mn for the buffs), which means you will only yield 2 per craft. It results in an endless cultivation or butchering grind, which explains the scarcity or the AH prices of most of the staple food potions (armor,regen,linis, absorb...). It's boring and painful to grind for such meager yields, why would it had to be much harder than live craft? In most guilds, only a few people truely commit to craft and they have to go through this endless grind as soon as they want to mass produce. Solution : Bring the top tier stabilizers back to their live version, allowing the extender + multiplier combination OR if you want to keep it painful, at least shorten the cultivation duration substantially (yes you can buy the top tier soil/water/nutrients to shorten it but that would make the final product even more expensive).
About the Liniments, I already covered the topic quite a bit in the cultivating part. On live, iirc, you would use 2 top tier stabilizer and could then either have a multiplier or an extender for 5x 30 minutes linis or 2x60 mn linis. In the continuation of what I said earlier, linis are not OP considering the stat stacking issue (at least the O.G linis, not the special event ones which can be pretty OP), so allowing a better yield or a longer duration shouldn't be so unbalanced and it would help the crafter greatly.
That coverrs most of it, all in all, craft is in a very frustrating position as it is nowadays, discouraging most to invest time into it. And those who do are faced with an endless grind with very meager yield (except for the salvage/talisman making combination which still comes with its archetype limitations as stated above).
* Gathering Skills *
- Scavenging : It's a personal feeling, but it seems it's getting very hard to get a single purple fragment from a full dungeon run. Previously, you would get an average of 4 - 6 on a full GB or city dungeons run, even lvl 200 blue fragments are on the rare side, you could get over 20 from a single run, it's closer to 4 - 6 on average recently. Is it linked to a code change post ability patch ? I know loot tables were affected, so craft gathering drops might have been as well. Scavenging being the only source of Armor fragments, it also makes the Armor Talismans the most expensive talis in-game for no real reason at all (armor is not a stat you would heavily invest in for most of the classes currently).
- Butchering : We need more bats. Previously, the game had a day/night cycle on some of its fauna but nowadays we have a single spawn of a couple of lvl 200 bats that cannot offer a real convenient source of wings. Otherwise, overall, butchering is fine.
- Cultivating : Why was it decided that Liniments should be infinitely more harduous to craft than on live ? On live, you would drop the purple seeds once, get a normal output from it, compared to only one crafting component per cycle on a purple seed. Purple seeds were also infinitely easier to get. Liniments provide powerful buffs BUT alot less powerful than it was on live since the decision was made to disallow stat stacking, nonetheless they were made not only shorter duration but also infinitely harder to craft. At the moment, only a few liniments are indeed useful due to the fact most won't stack with group buffs/ self buffs so why should they remain so hard to craft ? The blue seeds added on RoR are also a mistake for me, you need a reliable source of crafting, not a one-time seed.
Concerning the other seeds, I will talk of them in the crafting skills part bellow.
- Salvaging : currently the easiest way to get fragments since scavenging is so unreliable. It's hard and costy to lvl up, and will ultimately be able to provide only half of the fragments you need, since you will mostly obtain purple frags from purple drops (golden ones having the possibility of yielding blue instead of purple frag), and those that are reiably farmable are those from Gunbad bags, which are class specific. Hence if you are a magic class, you can only get wisdom/int/tough/HP/ init frags but will not get any STR / Ballistics / WS, same for a melee class who won't get INT or WIS frags. You could say that you can hope for your groupmates to pass on their armor drops in Bastion to be able to get other archetypes items to break, but first, it almost never happen outside of a full guild group, secondly it will only be set armor drops which will not give purple fragments on a 100% basis, it feels closer to 50% purple / 50% blue. Given the pain it is to level up this gathering skill compared to butchering or salvaging (cultivation is a very long run, but it is not costy, and can be shortened by buying the soil/water/... reagents), it is still the most profitable one but there should be more ways to get non Archetype specific frags - the solution might be to up the rate of purple fragments on the set armor parts.
* Crafting Skills *
Talisman Making : I adressed most of the issues in the gathering part.
Apothecary : a very flawed version of its O.G counterpart on live. It seems it was made purposedly far more frustrating and limited than the live version.
First, the restriction on multipliers / extenders. Most potions on live would ever require ONE single Stabilizer (namely the Goldweed), opening the opportunity for more combinations of multipliers / extenders. On Ror, you need 2 Stabilizers on the non liniment potions, which means you can only add either an extender OR a multiplier. It results in the fact that most potion craft yields 2 potions at best, the only exception being the Draught of Recovery that can be produced with a multiplier. Most of the other potions require the extender to be even remotely useable (5 minutes vs 60mn for the buffs), which means you will only yield 2 per craft. It results in an endless cultivation or butchering grind, which explains the scarcity or the AH prices of most of the staple food potions (armor,regen,linis, absorb...). It's boring and painful to grind for such meager yields, why would it had to be much harder than live craft? In most guilds, only a few people truely commit to craft and they have to go through this endless grind as soon as they want to mass produce. Solution : Bring the top tier stabilizers back to their live version, allowing the extender + multiplier combination OR if you want to keep it painful, at least shorten the cultivation duration substantially (yes you can buy the top tier soil/water/nutrients to shorten it but that would make the final product even more expensive).
About the Liniments, I already covered the topic quite a bit in the cultivating part. On live, iirc, you would use 2 top tier stabilizer and could then either have a multiplier or an extender for 5x 30 minutes linis or 2x60 mn linis. In the continuation of what I said earlier, linis are not OP considering the stat stacking issue (at least the O.G linis, not the special event ones which can be pretty OP), so allowing a better yield or a longer duration shouldn't be so unbalanced and it would help the crafter greatly.
That coverrs most of it, all in all, craft is in a very frustrating position as it is nowadays, discouraging most to invest time into it. And those who do are faced with an endless grind with very meager yield (except for the salvage/talisman making combination which still comes with its archetype limitations as stated above).