Overhaul of Professions Crafting

krailov

One of the bigger time wasting components to the game, yet a necessary evil? Not so! I believe crafting evolved with the gateway and to combat botting, and as such has now become a chore if you have 3 or more toons. I like the crafting, and although my Stronghold is not high enough, looking forward to Mastercrafting.. BUT

I am taking the view that a standard, 'real' player only gets into the game for about 1 to 2 hours, once a day and horrors, might even skip days! Yes there are ones who can be on for hours, morning and night, but even THEY probably do not like the current professions setup ( I know I do not)!

My suggestions:

1. All crafting is accessible account wide - if I log in on any toon, it is the same professions, tasks, assets and tools. Do not make me jump from toon to toon, passing items/components/tools!
   
2. Make Green/Blue/Purple tools AND crafters make more/better quality on standard crafting/gathering tasks, and NOT decrease the time - I should be able to reach 100% on tier3 with all purple everything - 60% is an insult to the craftsman and his tools. In the real world, we all have the same time, but better tools and people get better results - just sayin
   
3. Make the tasks either 1-60 minutes, or 20 hours or day(s). An 8 or 12 hour task - do you really want people logging in morning and night, just to craft?
   
4. Make the rewards of the 20+ hour tasks actually worth something
   
5. Allow as many tasks are there are available materials etc. With the above changes we can kill the '3 only' artificial limit
   

I believe that the above changes would enhance the game, combat botters (because they are the ONLY ones who CAN afford to work the current system!) and lessen the managment for playing - because that is what we are here to do - IMHO. I encourage collation of Crafting change proposals on this thread.

uptondarkdiamond

+1

I an one of those people that can play excessively, ;p, i abhor crafting, but i still do it. Even with gateway it took awhile to set my crafting up didn't like it than don't like it now.

Longer tasks would make it nice, you know umm I would actually be able play the game instead of looking at the crafting screen.....

I dislike the the 60% (or 75% if you have hammer of gond), like all RnG in neverwinter this sometimes doesn't seem to be 60 percent. I doubt they will ever change that though.....

Although, you are looking forward to Mastercrafting, be forewarned, they are a pain unless your willing to spend some dough or have friends that have already completed some mastercrafting stuff.

Crafting should be updated every mod and should have obtainable recipes (zen market, trade bar, wondrous bazaar...), or why even bother having such a system???.

An example I have pointed out in other parts of the forum are items like the pants/shirts. Why they are only obtainable from campaign store is beyond me. We can already craft pants and shirts (probably ones still better campaign store) but can not craft them... I mean comon.... keep crafting relevant!!! Adding those recipes would go along way to keeping crafting relevant.

Another spot I think Cryptic missed the mark with is Lanolin. You can wiki Lanolin and see what it is made of. With that said, they should have made available to the Leatherworking profession the ability to make Lanolin. Use Elemental Evils template for making Unified elements (Alchemy) and apply it to making lanolin. Even use the same time requirements, sure there would be some objections, but at least you would have another path to getting that stuff beyond mindlessly running those dead horse HE's (we have seen enough HE's to turn us into zombies and yet somehow they seem to have multiplied since our dungeon selection was eliminated, sorry off topic).

wylonus

they hadnt change leadership since they pull out ADs and still limited at 3 tasks since all others can have choice to do 9 times when needed.
amount of raw resources is a joke and way too small, those wild gathering tasks for +6 hrs are stupidily too low for gathering comparied to 10 mins gathering tasks. we get 1 or 2 for 10 mins vs 4 for 6 hrs? we would had gathered about 36 or 40 units at the end of 6 hours term.
is someone in devs team cant count beyond thier fingers?

Leadership got hit the hardest of all, and left the mess of quest lines incomplete. Why? of course, we got loads of refugees and several stacks of maps that going nowhere, and these "profession chests/bags" are so outdated and destroyed, those need major overhaul format.

re-evaluate whole tiers and need clean up.
for Leadership.

"gather intel", collect maps, then siege the camp, and rescue refugees, and build new outposts or barrack or farmsteads, then collect rewards.
tier 1, 1-7 levels white grade loots, 3-6 hours tasks.
tier 2, 8-14 levels, green grade loots, 6-10 hours tasks
tier 3, 15-21 levels, blue grade loots, 10-18 hours tasks.
tier 4, 22-25 (remaining levels to be add in future as 22-27th levels) for purple grade loots and random chances for dragon eggs and other epic crafting items, and also lucky chance for random access items (any green access), +20 hours task for epic quests.

we all need newer "rare/epic" that are on mixed daily specials, weeklies for elite crafting items.
that current rare/epic are too weak or not worth bothering to do, and often lot of "hidden tasks" get missed when we check professions or other things while in group dungeon runs and no time to chance to find what we need, those "hourly" rare random need to adjust as random dailies with 24 hours timeframe, long enough to select them during each day instead of random checking every hours.

uptondarkdiamond

@wylonus , good points and good suggestions.

Those profession assets (maps/refugees) will probably never see the light of day until they are useful again. I really do like your suggestion about the Tier rewards.

The thing I would caution you on is that if the purple loot can be salvaged than it will probably not see the light of day (the whole reason leadership is in a 1/2 way zone).

However if they awarded SH influence vouchers or campaign vouchers then it might work.. as both types of vouchers can be a pain to get.

Also, the AD vouchers that can be made by leadership are completely useless in alliances because every guild now seems to be maxed out on AD or the guilds leaders have it on lock down.... At least this is the experience I have in my alliance.

wylonus

oh, i mean not for salvagings, just mostly restricted to refine stones and crafting materials.
and thank you.

regenerde

I would suggest to dump companion equipment into the loottable of the Leadership boxes.
The drop rate should be reasonable, not too high but also not something around 0.01%.

wylonus

i believe that companions should be like all new "duty mission" STO version, and that leadership is mostly crafting tasks for upgrades.

loboguild

The system surely needs a rework. I find it intriguing to work account professions rather than character based ones. Profession slots is one area of the game that scales way too well with character slots, contributing to the stupid amount of dummy characters created.

The question would be how you unlock slots in such a system. It should come from gameplay because you don't want a situation where more characters can easily generate more slots in an account based system. And then we're probably talking dailies again, which would add yet another grind to the game. Such a system nonetheless would make sense. Slots would be easy to monetize by offering them for ZEN and you could cap them at some point or make them incredibly harder to farm or unaffordable.​​

krailov

loboguild said:

...The question would be how you unlock slots in such a system. It should come from gameplay because you don't want a situation where more characters can easily generate more slots in an account based system. And then we're probably talking dailies again, which would add yet another grind to the game. Such a system nonetheless would make sense. Slots would be easy to monetize by offering them for ZEN and you could cap them at some point or make them incredibly harder to farm or unaffordable.​​

The current unlocking is fine, so we are still limited to 9 boxes in total initially. I would suggest that extra toons add 1 box (12 total - limited to 3 extra for 'free') plus a 'flavour' for the rare specials - ie TR adds access to the rare special leather crafting professions, so that adding extra characters allows access to that characters rare special professions. This encourages extra toons (zen), with only slightly extra management - not the massive amount now. If you drop that character, you loose access to the rare specials.

I also liked the other suggestions above about rare being on a 24 hour timer, rather than an hour. Currently I think many of the existing 'rare' professions should be available all the time, but only if you have green/blue/purple crafters or tools - I mean, you would not tackle them without them anyways.

@wylonus , I also agree with most of your ideas and suggestions, but not the timings you had selected for the tiers
Remember that the timers should be for players that are in for 1-3 hours max, once a day. I would strongly urge that no tasks are 4, 5, 6...19 hours - they should be 3 hours or less, or 20 hours or more. I would also like to see really long 'duty' style missions for when I take a weekend break or a 2 week holiday, I can set those tasks and not have the nagging feeling that my professions are wasting away, plus come back from holidays and be happy with what they have done/produced in my time 'away' - rewards being equal to time, naturally

For gathering tasks, how about a slider to produce 'x' material, will take 'x' time? For example, 1 wood takes 10 min, slide to 100 wood takes 2.5 days, with each additional item adding to the time - that way I can choose 8 or 12 hour tasks if I want. As we would be limiting the number of available boxes to an account, this means no need to gate resources/crafting - natural selection will do that! Basic gathering tasks would not benefit from green to purple crafters, but raw material to refined would. For those tasks, the slider adjusts number raw used plus time, the quantities produced in the tiers would adjust based on the class of crafter used.