Intentionally killing crafting professions?

adinosii

There used to be two kinds of things you could make a real profit from with the crafting professions.

One was gemmed exquisite pants/shirts. That profit has now dwindled, partly because of the rising prices of eggs, and partly because supply is up (more people have level 20 crafting) and demand is down (fewer people reaching level 60 and needing the shirts/pants).

The other was crafting of reinforced gauntlets (well, for tailoring, leatherworking and mailsmithing - not platesmithing)

However, as of today's patch, that changes - the reinforced versions will be BoP, so you cannot buy the regular versions for 200.000 (or so) and re-sell the reinforced versions for 400.000 (or so).

There might be some really intelligent thinking behind the decision to take away the only thing making the crafting professions profitable, but I cannot imagine what it might be.

All I know is that crafting professions are now even more pointless than before - there is simply no reason to bother raising them to 20 any more.

naturality23

They aren't "Intentionally Killing" Professions. People are tired of having to pay 3-5K AD or More for Pants that takes 10+ Minutes to Farm and create. So be people adapted to doing it themselves or having a friend/relative that plays the game do it for them.

zephryl1

I think the Gauntlet BoP move was to convince more people to grind to 20, so that when they're there they go "Well I might as well buy the Assets for the Shirt/Pants now"

parp12

They could at least let me cancel the 4 gloves being upgraded at the moment so I can try to sell them for more than 1.6g

zephryl1

parp12 wrote: »

They could at least let me cancel the 4 gloves being upgraded at the moment so I can try to sell them for more than 1.6g

Can't you click the little cancel button in the corner? Should let you cancel, getting back all the materials.


Either way, I'm really annoyed. I was levelling Tailoring to 20 in my Cleric, as it has more Craft Slots open, so I could make gloves for my Wizard... now there's no reason to do any of the crafts. GG Cryptic, intentional or not, you've ruined crafting for casual players.

parp12

zephryl1 wrote: »

Can't you click the little cancel button in the corner? Should let you cancel, getting back all the materials.

Little being the operative word. So little I'd never noticed it. Thank you so much, at least I can now get some AD back for those.

zibralis

Ridiculous. This was one of the things that could bind people and result in more cohesive guilds. Namely, by having a guild crafter with level 20 in all professions craft reinforced gauntlets for its members, for free.

Further, you've also removed one of the reasons to train to level 20 in the first place.

adinosii

zibralis wrote: »

Ridiculous. This was one of the things that could bind people and result in more cohesive guilds. Namely, by having a guild crafter with level 20 in all professions craft reinforced gauntlets for its members, for free.

Further, you've also removed one of the reasons to train to level 20 in the first place.

Indeed, but this encourages more people to level their profession to 20, and get green/blue/purple tools, which means more profession asset pack sales, which means more Zen sales, which means more profit, right ?

Never mind that this means more players that get irritated and might end up playing/spending less - that is obviously totally irrelevant.

In my opinion, this is exactly the wrong direction to take - they should be making the crafting professions more viable, not less ... make recipes that require items made by several professions, make recipes that require very rare BoP resource drops, making more recipes that allow people to improve or modify their gear...not take things away like this.

darklock101

naturality23 wrote: »

They aren't "Intentionally Killing" Professions. People are tired of having to pay 3-5K AD or More for Pants that takes 10+ Minutes to Farm and create. So be people adapted to doing it themselves or having a friend/relative that plays the game do it for them.

If people are tired of paying 3-5k AD (lulz) for such easily made items they could have leveled the profession themselves all along. The reinforced gloves were the ONLY thing crafters could make a profit on without investing insane amounts of AD for the purple tools needed to make gemmed pants and shirts.

zephryl1

Being able to sell Gauntlets was a -perfect- incentive for people to level their crafting to 20.

It's a long, long, long process to get to 20, and most people never bothered simply because if you're not going to invest millions of AD/Thousands of Zen into Crafting Assets, you literally can't make anything decent. But then came the gloves! Those wonderful gloves that needed no Assets to craft!

Suddenly being 20 was a wonderful thing! You could craft for your friends, for your guildmates, or even for strangers! And then you could sell them, and even make a little money.

Now, not only do you need to invest days, probably weeks, of effort getting it to 20... you also need to make a HUGE investment to make the only good items, and then you have to sell those for a long time to make back the money you spent on the items you need to make those. The only redeeming feature was that Assets didn't Bind.

So, crafting has now returned to the realms of "Letting the Rich get Richer". It also means raising more than one profession is a massive waste of time, since you can't make gloves for your alt characters anymore.

tl;dr
Now that you can't sell gloves, it's easier and cheaper to just buy a Pants/Shirt off the Auction House and never touch crafting.

kiralyn

Perhaps the reinforced gloves were always meant to be a personal perk for leveling your prof to 20, rather than a source of "easy profit"?


(Then there's the thought I've had in the back of my head since similar every-major-patch threads in WoW..... maybe, just maybe - professions aren't designed/intended to be guaranteed profit, but rather a time sink/gold sink/hobby, something for players to spend more time on to keep them in your game. Especially in this case, where your guaranteed income is in Leadership.)

mconosrep

kiralyn wrote: »

Perhaps the reinforced gloves were always meant to be a personal perk for leveling your prof to 20,

Perhaps they could make such gloves Bound to Account?

I have Platesmithing on one alt at 20, but am not going to bother raising it to 20 on the other just for the gloves.

zibralis

Even if it originally was supposed to be a personal perk, they should have kept it as it is now. Way too much time has passed to 'fix' this and somehow this was overlooked in more than a handful of maintenance windows. By now many considered it to be as intended and perhaps specifically levelled with the intention of supplying their guild or crafting for profit. Bad taste on PW's part.

zephryl1

zibralis wrote: »

Even if it originally was supposed to be a personal perk, they should have kept it as it is now. Way too much time has passed to 'fix' this and somehow this was overlooked in more than a handful of maintenance windows. By now many considered it to be as intended and perhaps specifically levelled with the intention of supplying their guild or crafting for profit. Bad taste on PW's part.

This.

I'd just gotten my Tailoring to level 13, on my Cleric. Why my Cleric and not my Wizard? Because my Cleric has 7 crafting slots unlocked, my Wizard has 4. The time and resources I spent levelling this have literally been wasted, because Cryptic decided they didn't like people making money without spending Zen on Assets.

tang56

Platesmithing reinforced gauntlets were always BoP. They're just bringing the rest of the professions in line. What I'd like to see is the ability to reinforce all T1 and T2 armor with the addition that some pieces may require extra materials and time(2 days for the gauntlets, maybe 4 days for the chest + 20 residium, etc).

This would make L20 professions more enticing to achieve.

chudovishye

parp12 wrote: »

They could at least let me cancel the 4 gloves being upgraded at the moment so I can try to sell them for more than 1.6g

There's a cancel button in the upper right of every task, you can use it, to my knowledge, at any point, even right before it ends.

chudovishye

tang56 wrote: »

Platesmithing reinforced gauntlets were always BoP. They're just bringing the rest of the professions in line. What I'd like to see is the ability to reinforce all T1 and T2 armor with the addition that some pieces may require extra materials and time(2 days for the gauntlets, maybe 4 days for the chest + 20 residium, etc).

This would make L20 professions more enticing to achieve.

This is what I was hoping for eventually.

rhymfaxe

While I think its a stupid decision, I can see the rationale of having to level a craft to 20 to gain access to the very best gear. HOWEVER if you're going down this path for gods sake make them account bound, not char bound. Noone is gonna bother levelling Mailsmithing again on their GWF alt or whatever, and they shouldn't have to.

griz024

Once again i am happy i stopped lvling crafting and just went straight leadership.

Crafting professions have waaaay too much overhead to even bother. You have to sell several gemmed shirts/pants to even break even after getting the purple tools and such.

Plus you are not even guaranteed to even get gemmed versions when you try to craft epic shirts/pants (from what i understand). That makes even more overhead- well waste really.

Players crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, after so much investment, is a terrible way to implement endgame crafting.

dirtyhook

Yeah back to nothing but leadership in professions now, maybe a little alchemy.
No point in doing all the others.

armenua

I started to level crafting because it is simply a function that I usually do when I start playing a game. So far in this game, I have discovered that it is just a busy exercise because it really produces nothing to justify the money and time needed to be invested. Very few of the crafted products are useful in that selling them on the AH does not come close to providing a profit after you are reimbursed for your time, effort, and cost of mats.

Alchemy was added later, and I jumped on it because I wanted to make my own pots, but the way it is set up is that I have to spent literally hours and lots of mats to make ONE potion... unless a rare craft comes up for the potion I want, which is a rare occasion as well. Obviously none of this was thought through to make it a viable part of this game but a sinkhole until the players discover for themselves that it has no real value.

My biggest question is why on earth did they include this in the game? What is the vision the developers had for the crafting professions?

beckylunatic

From talking to other players, it seems a whole lot of high-end GF items are BoP when their equivalents are BoE for all other classes (see a thread in bug reports forum about Unicorn Seal items, for example).

It was therefore not unreasonable to presume that the BoP reinforced gloves were bugged for GFs (or platesmiths, to be precise, but you're making GF gear, so same difference), and BoE was normal, rather than vice versa.

pelomixa

adinosii wrote: »

Indeed, but this encourages more people to level their profession to 20, and get green/blue/purple tools, which means more profession asset pack sales, which means more Zen sales, which means more profit, right ?

Never mind that this means more players that get irritated and might end up playing/spending less - that is obviously totally irrelevant.

In my opinion, this is exactly the wrong direction to take - they should be making the crafting professions more viable, not less ... make recipes that require items made by several professions, make recipes that require very rare BoP resource drops, making more recipes that allow people to improve or modify their gear...not take things away like this.

I agree and I'm not at all surprised. Its all about money and greed. They are not only designing the game to be P2W they are forcing us to buy Zen with every step they take. Calling it Zen is such an insult to the word Zen. The greed is just disgusting.


Zen
Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in China during the 6th century as Ch

alaerick

I think crafting in tis game is a total waste of time. What you get is totally useless. Alchemy is so poorly designed it's insulting and the only thing worth it is Leadership.

diogene0

If you're targeting only the highest level crafts, then you're doing it wrong and you're missing some very profitable niches.