Friday, July 24, 2009

Crafting: my 2 Cents

Most everybody else has weighed in on one side or the other of the crafting debate, so I figure it's my turn.
Starting off: I fall heavily on the side of "It's a good start but it needs a lot of work."
When I was doing the WC and Krok crafting quests, I didn't have a problem with the system but when I hit Marleybone I realized how messed up the system is. The first MB crafting quest alone required 80 pieces of scrap metal (I currently have a grand total of 10 pieces). As Tipa has pointed out, that requires hours spent running around the roofs in vain hope of finding a scrap metal node. Even after you've collected all the reagents, you have to make the rings and daggers. Since you only have two crafting slots at this point, it'l probably take you somewhere in the area of 15 hours to craft all 10 of the daggers and rings you need. And once you've spent the equivilant of a full day crafting, you get to turn in all your items to the quest giver who will give you another quest that will probably require just as much work.

There are things that need to be done, to make Crafting work.
Problem: A lot of the items you can make, particularly the housing items but not limited to them, require a large number of reagents to make.
EX.

This Housing item (stone Brazier) requires 18 Ore and 28 Bronze Gears (among others) to make. Ore is not too hard to come by but Bronze Gears only come from the Golems running around MB, so unless you're really lucky or you buy on the bazarr you're going to be spending a lot of time fighting golems for their gears.
Solution: for each reagent in a recipe that requires more then, say, 5 of an item cut the required number by half. Maybe 75% for large numbers of reagents.
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Problem: The quests are just way too time consumming and force us to buy recipes for items we're probably not going to make again once the quest is done.
Solution: One way is to do away with the quests entirely and just award the titles (and crating slots) the way the do with monster kill titles, except a bit different: to get the novice title and your second slot (everybody should start with one slot), you have to craft 5 rank-1 items then you get your title and slot and you can start on the next title track except you have to craft rank-2 items and so-on.

2 comments:

  1. Crafting, is driving me mad. :/ I want to do it so bad, but I just can't seem to find enough reagants, and that's with me running around for hours in the wee hours of the night at that, on multiple realms.

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  2. I'm with you, I've got plenty of the common stuff (mist wood, cattails, stone blocks, etc.). But the less common reagents, geez, I've seen a grand total of 1 (one) Frost Flower since crafting went live.

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