Profession economy for new Crate Stronghold tasks

alphastream

This is an economy issue, though not a bug.

The various tasks in different professions to create crates providing Stronghold coffer donations are a great idea. However, the economics needs adjustment.

Most are 6 hour tasks, so they compete against whatever other task(s) you could run in that time to create AD and buy coffer donations. For example, I can run Leadership and sell refining stones on the AH and with that money buy equipment to donate to the coffer. I think on timing alone, the economy works out okay. It's convenient to bypass the AH and run tasks.

However, the non-leadership tasks consume a significant amount of profession resources. Even the low-rank tasks consume 30 or more resources at a time. Whether mithral rings and scales, weapon hafts, whatever... those resources all sell for a fair bit of AD, compared to the cost of just buying equipment and turning it into the coffer. It's possible prices will go down, but most of the resources require first gathering one resource, then crafting the final resource to drive these professions. That's even more time or more cost.

It isn't even a convenience, because you have to spend hours on tasks. You can go to the AH faster and just do what we always did - buy equipment or labor to donate directly.

Am I missing something?

darkstarcrash

Personally, I have accumulated tons of profession resources on all my characters. Now I can use them to make something useful for my guild. Artificing and Weaponsmithing in particular I haven't used once since Mod 5, and I had literally thousands of Mithral Weapon Blades, etc.

If you run the numbers and you'll make more from selling the resources and buying gear off the AH, go ahead and do that. For some tasks you might find you come out ahead.

It certainly won't hurt to run the AD task in Leadership: the equivalent of 9k AD per character on your account every day, for a single professions slot.

Edit: I'm not sure why you posted this in Bug Reports, rather than Feedback.

dsn1118

3k worth of AD coffer is not a bad earning for 6 hr task.Old leadership was taking 12-18 hr for 1.6k raw AD.I dont know about creating labor coffer though.

beckylunatic

Labour is inexpensive as long as supply from lockbox profession packs is consistently refreshed.

Profession resources are pretty variable in what they sell for. Some have consistently been so worthless it was more effort to keep posting them and getting them out of the mail again when they didn't sell than to just let them build up. Others are consistently worth selling. And if you loot nodes, get your SCA daily reward, and produce leadership coffers, you've got a fairly steady stream of resources generating without specifically making them. It's up to the player to determine what to do with their resources.

What I am likely to end up doing is running surplus equipment crafting tasks using the low-value materials on characters who don't have their Leadership ranked up, because I have most of their slots unlocked and professions levelled, and can only run 3x training tasks at a time anyway (my personal preference is to keep passive levelling of alts minimal). My characters who can make unified elements or decent refining items can continue doing that.