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Professions Overhaul:
thefabricant
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 5,248 Arc User
Earlier today I was having a chat with @greyjay1 about professions and we brainstormed a bit about how they could be improved. Whilst the Masterwork professions in Neverwinter are very well designed, I feel the base profession system could do with some work. Currently, the way professions work is they are simply a means to an end, a way to unlock masterworks and that is it. While this is fine, I think the system could be much better and here are my thoughts as to how:
Base professions should focus more on gathering and less on crafting.
You know those tasks, "deep wilderness gathering?" Well, what if instead of them being completely useless, they were actually tied heavily into the crafting process. This is the unique part of base professions which does not exist in masterwork and thus it does not devalue anything in masterwork and nothing in masterwork devalues it. The immediate issue with this is that they give the result immediately, so its easy to automate. However, there is a solution. Instead of the task rewarding the material, it works as follows (example task):
Charting the Wilderness (Alchemy):
Send your specialists out to chart the wilderness and locate rare reagents.
Design philosophy for MW tasks:
Every MW task should be designed with the following philosophy, in order to drain materials out of the game. They should all contain at least 1 of the following (1 item, not necessarily used in quantity 1):
New Professions:
In order for a new, non masterwork profession to be a success without devaluing masterwork, it needs to offer something that masterwork does not offer. Here are some ideas:
Advanced forms of masterwork recipes:
These could be advanced versions of masterwork recipes that already exist in the game. They have a chance to drop in dungeons as a scroll item and can be sold on the AH. They cannot be consumed if you do not already have the base recipe unlocked. They do not improve the item crafted in any way (or if they do, it is in a very minor way) but they give it the legendary background (orange) instead of the epic background. Items crafted in this manner also have a small string of text added to their description stating who crafted them, so inspecting someone wearing such an item would show who was the crafter.
Base professions should focus more on gathering and less on crafting.
You know those tasks, "deep wilderness gathering?" Well, what if instead of them being completely useless, they were actually tied heavily into the crafting process. This is the unique part of base professions which does not exist in masterwork and thus it does not devalue anything in masterwork and nothing in masterwork devalues it. The immediate issue with this is that they give the result immediately, so its easy to automate. However, there is a solution. Instead of the task rewarding the material, it works as follows (example task):
Charting the Wilderness (Alchemy):
Send your specialists out to chart the wilderness and locate rare reagents.
- Provides a map which allows you to interact with nodes inside of a dungeon.
- These nodes are modified by explorers boon, 2x proffs, etc.
- The number of materials awarded as well as the rarity depends on the level of the profession. For example, a level 5 profession would reward 5 items per node and not allow the rarer items. The level 25 professions would reward 25 items per node and allow the rarer items.
- The tasks for the low level professions would provide maps in leveling dungeons. From level 15 onwards, the profession nodes would be set in end game dungeons, at level 15, in your easy dungeons like temple of the spider, at level 20, in dungeons like fangbreaker island and at level 25, in dungeons like Castle Ravenloft.
- These tasks should take a very long period of time (example, 16 days) and only have 1 tier of success, giving the items produced some value and incentivizing players to use speed assets on them, which gives speed assets some purpose. The experience awarded from these tasks should be based on the long task time.
Design philosophy for MW tasks:
Every MW task should be designed with the following philosophy, in order to drain materials out of the game. They should all contain at least 1 of the following (1 item, not necessarily used in quantity 1):
- An item which comes from non masterwork specific charts (to give these items value).
- An item which comes from masterwork specific charts (to incentivize players to spend guild marks).
- An item which comes from temporary vendors (same reason as the previous).
- An item which is purchased from a new SH vendor, which costs AD (prices not modified by wb/vip discount). This is to act as an AD sink.
- The final step in any recipe (crafting of a useable item) should use an item which drops from an end game dungeon (example Castle Ravenloft) and is bound to account. Alternatively, it should cost something like chultan treasures to buy. This is to force players to actually play the game to benefit from mw and not benefit without doing anything.
New Professions:
In order for a new, non masterwork profession to be a success without devaluing masterwork, it needs to offer something that masterwork does not offer. Here are some ideas:
- Arcane Reforging - Allows you to recraft items, moving a percentage of 1 statistic into another. The higher the level of the profession, the more of a statistic it can move from 1 stat to another, as well as allowing more stats to be moved. Failure would cause the stats that were being moved to be lost, which is how quality is tied into the process. Works on enchantments and unbound gear without binding it.
- Enchanting - Allows you to craft Overload enchantments and new armour or weapon kits. Overloads are a hugely underutilized feature in the game!
- Cartography - A way to enhance the maps you already have, before running them. Cartographers further inspect the zone charted out by the specialists, causing them to award more materials. Low rank cartography only works on low level maps, high level cartography works on higher level maps. Quality increases the number of bonus materials awarded.
Advanced forms of masterwork recipes:
These could be advanced versions of masterwork recipes that already exist in the game. They have a chance to drop in dungeons as a scroll item and can be sold on the AH. They cannot be consumed if you do not already have the base recipe unlocked. They do not improve the item crafted in any way (or if they do, it is in a very minor way) but they give it the legendary background (orange) instead of the epic background. Items crafted in this manner also have a small string of text added to their description stating who crafted them, so inspecting someone wearing such an item would show who was the crafter.
Post edited by thefabricant on
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Comments
And by creating nodes in dungeons we can revive some of the old content. Also ading this mechanic would give some of us something to do between modules
Great ideas on the Professions front up there
I mean what's the point of giving players the option to craft something usefull, but then lock it behind guild walls and make it only available to players, that can get better items with their guild?
Crafting any product should only require "raw" materials, and we shouldn't have to craft/buy item B only for using it to craft item S. Just increase the time to manufacture higher ranking items accordingly in return.
AD costs for crafting some items have to be either adjusted a lot or have to go completly too, only speeding up the crafting process should cost AD.
There should be either new equipment recipes for all regular professions with every new module, or at least some kind of "token" we can craft with resources from the latest areas and then exchange for usefull (not asking for "endgame" stuff, only something to help everyone to "catch up") equipment.
In short, crafting should become more open and relevant for all players.
Profession nodes loot tables should be improved based on their location and if there're any NPCs "guarding" them.
Nodes, that are placed in areas with highlevel enemies should give better rewards.
Nodes in dungeons/skirmishes should also get better content, so that they're worth taking the time to open, and the loot will then be handled like any other loot drop.
Last but not least, mount insignias should be moved into the regular mobs loot tables, and they should lose the "bind on pickup" tag too.
As for rest:
"In short, crafting should become more open and relevant for all players"
I fully agree. With current proffessions you pretty much need to be well established player to profit from it. We need revelant masterwork (for richest, end game) and 1 - 25 lvl proffession task that actually matters.
Leveling professions is already a pain in the HAMSTER and can be a long slog (or a somewhat shorter, highly annoying slog). Making this change would make that worse, not better. I'm not planning on doing MW on any character EVER. I'm leveling professions so that my and my wife's characters can make crates for donation to the guild coffer. There's only one other person in our guild working on professions and he's nowhere close to where we are. There is absolutely no reason why the non-masterwork tasks should be tied into masterwork at all.
Besides, there would still be resources and then finished products that can be traded over the market. Unless masterwork professions are changed as mentioned above, i don't see any reason for adding even more content to it.
The gab between those that start the game, those that are somewhere in the middle and those that are in the "endgame" is allready big enough, and professions should be used to close that gab instead of increasing it even more.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for improving the game... especially when it comes to professions, since i like to craft items in MMOs... but those improvements should reach every player, and not just a selected few.
I think there is some misconception. I think that with new system even starting players could farm professions and profit from it since new tasks would cost a lot of low tier stuff, bit of middle tier stuff, and some end game stuff. Right now MW solely depends on end game stuff. So with old system there exist huge gap and pretty much everything in low tier professions is useless. New system would actually make professions profitable for starting people (with nodes in low epic dungeons). It would be active across every player (and with better gear/char/prof level the better rewards obviously).
Explorer's boons is 2x and you need only SH14 for that.
" i'm rather tired of having to go through several steps of middle items to finish one product in the end."
Actually there should be system where you could auto craft item if you met all requirments (other professions lvl up, resources in inventory). So save multi step process but allow to skip it if you want.
All being said it's your opinion and I respect it. Just wanted to support the whole idea :P
Personally, the idea of having to gather items is a complete turnoff to me. It's one of the main reasons I never pursued mastercrafting. A few hours of mindlessly seeking out resources with maps and I'll never do that again, no thank you.
I'm more in favor of an interface rework than anything and maybe a system like what you're describing would be "the next level of professions".
I only use professions for RP so I'm sure you might say that I'm being selfish though. But I can say that I know a large group of players that only use professions for leadership. If you're not mastercrafting then you're making leadership bags or crates and to shaft a larger group of players I think is just another mistake.
Adding onto the system though would make it an unobtrusive way to introduce a new way to do professions (but yeah how about the interface...).
Professions will never be worth anything unless you actually have to put in some work to get something. This proposal won't suck up too much of your time unless you are literally running maps on 8+ characters and if you are incentivized to do that, that means it is obviously worth doing. The way I had structured it, was so that the tasks deliberately take long (so that you won't have to run maps too often), they give reasonable volumes of items and the items they give have some value. They are also inside of dungeons, so you won't be forced to go too far outside of whatever you are usually doing to run them. In my opinion, professions should not just be something that can basically be automated by a bot. As it currently states, if they ever give something good it will still be worthless because anyone can write a script in autohotkey that can do professions for them without them doing anything. With my proposal, there is at least some player interaction and professions could, maybe, be something that players are incentivized to do. So what if it takes you slightly longer to level them up, at least maybe they will be useful for something (and no, what you are doing is very inefficient and is imo a waste).
You really can't claim that everyone who is against your idea is not engaging with professions. Sure, I'm not engaging with the MW part of it, but that's because of the expense of doing it and because I'd rather spend my time improving other aspects of my characters ... and also because of the time I've already spent leveling professions. Honestly, after working on leveling professions for three or four months already and facing another two (probably and at least), I'm not exactly excited about the idea of doing MW stuff. I have guild members who would like to make crates for the guild, but they don't have the AD available to buy grandmaster crafters for professions the way I did. When you couple having to use lower quality crafters with not being able to collect on tasks every 4 or 5 hours the way that I can right now, then you end up with something that looks like it's going to take 45 years to reach the end of. And that makes people just not want to even bother with it, which is chatter I see in the alliance channel very often. This is why I had made the suggestion to just sell a profession XP booster like they do for epic XP and whatever else. Yeah, that's really a band-aid of sorts over the larger problem, especially since it would be a Zen store item. However, I really don't understand why Cryptic didn't realize that as a sale opportunity a long time ago and offer it up without players having to suggest it.
So if they were to change professions to make it easy to make the crates for the people who are interested in that, then I don't really care what they do with professions otherwise. That way, for the people who just want to help their guilds, those people can do that quickly and easily. (It shouldn't take months of daily engaging in collecting and starting these tasks to get to the point where eight characters on an account can make crates of guild stuff from each of the professions.) Then, for the people who really enjoy professions and want to do that and want to work on MW, then they get the joy from that they (and you) are looking for. Whatever the devs do, they need to make this system fun because it is certainly not fun for anyone who engages with it.
You are basically saying, "lets leave professions worthless because I don't want them to take a little longer for me to level, even if it makes them more engaging and more rewarding." Just because you don't like gathering resources doesn't mean that there aren't people who do like it who would engage with it willingly, who would then be rewarded for doing so.
My Corellon - they could at least increase Mastercraft (Common) tools to providing 8%-10% Quality not the 0% they do currently. My goodness all common -warn- tools provide 8%.
Still I think 25 Professions could or should be enhanced -a little- if not -a lot- from were they are today!
I know they extend some recipes with Chult! Just didn't quite go far enough! Most of that gear is 420 (Rare) or at best 430 (Rare) and still much lower than most Dungeon gear that drops at 450-460 Epic. Still Dungeon gear is bind to account while professions is unbound for anyone that crafts it. I mean they don't definitely don't want unbound high level gear making it too easy to obtain for people doing low level capaigns either...
But it's very clear regular professions do need something to add a little more Spark back into them for sure!
So I'd like to congratulate the thread author for at least bringing attention on that subject again!
Honestly I don't think leveling a normal profession takes a terribly long period of time; sure it takes some as your character is growing. But there is nothing preventing you from possibly having 1-2 professions mastered in a few months or less.
Something clearly needs to improve normal professions a little bit more! Chult recipes was Nice but didn't quite go far enough... Still maybe we'll see something similar the next few Mod's.
* Let's face facts: They're more likely to bind the map to the character because we can't have someone using their alts to generate maps to help the one character level a profession.
Personally, I would love it if they split off all those crate tasks into their own profession and made that profession either easy to level or just "Get the assets and resources you need, and you too can make crates!" I don't want people like me to stand in the way of people like you having more fun with professions. I just don't want people like me to get shafted in order for people like you to have more fun with professions, either. If the devs do decide to split the crate tasks into their own profession and they require that profession to be leveled, then I would want people like me who have taken the time to level these other professions to already be max level in the new one.