Fletching

M

Mikiael

Dalayan Adventurer
Ok so I know this is a bit of a lost cause, but after going through it (and blowing an absolutely insane amount of plat) I feel I must state a case in regards to fletching in it's current incarnation.

1.) Lets face it, the biggest problem anyone has with fletching is that it's for all intents and purposes absolutely useless to anyone but a ranger. While I understand that obviously the class to receive the most benefit from this tradeskill would (and likely should) be the ranger, it severely limits the number of people pursuing said tradeskill.

2.) The second big "kicker" to this tradeskill is the completely insane cost. Without a doubt, fletching is currently the most expensive tradeskill out there. This is for several reasons, but there are a couple of big ones. The first being the fact that the materials are in no way farmable (Which is the method by which most tradeskills allow for advancement along with your level). There is simply no way to counter-act the massive amount of money this tradeskill requires. The second problem inherent to this skill (as currently done), is that even at the max skill level, the product still has little to no value. Making fletching utterly useless for anything but personal use. (Top of the line arrows don't sell for that much more then construction costs).

To my knowledge, the only reason to actually pursue this tradeskill is to be able to craft Swiftshot, which while granted, is a very good low-tier bow, is not worth the money you doubtless will have to shell out to get it.


In my opinion, there are two solutions to the problems with this tradeskill. The first being the addition of content that broadens the usefulness of the skill. (Possibly the ability to craft bows that don't suck). These could take the form of proccing arrows, ect, that could serve some purpose outside of ranger bow DPS.

The second solution I can think of is to lower costs of materials across the board, thus making the tradeskill more accessible for those wishing to boost their bow DPS. (as it currently stands, you could purchase about 800 stacks of the best arrows craftable for less then the cost of training the skill, and with ranger AAs, that is a LOT of arrows.)


I'd appreciate feedback, I'm curious as to other people's opinions on this matter.
 
I agree with your first suggesion, giving the arrows some other utility besides just pure dmg, maybe even situationally usable +Ele Dmg Arrows or other effects sound very interesting, theres a bunch of different themes that come to mind. However i am completely clueless if this is actually possible with this client version.

Unfortunately, being able to craft better bows and arrows won't really make the target market much bigger than it is now. Making money will always be pretty much impossible with this skill, as long as the results are basically limited to Ranger only. The only way to broaden the market is to be able to craft bows with nice stats or useful passives, that people would actually put in their range slot for the stats/effects
 
really is it that expensive? I got the skill pretty far on my alt a long time ago and it didnt cost me much. Always liked that skill
 
This has been posted on many times in the past. If there is a change in the works (as it's rumored) it's on the back burner due to iksith.

Your best bet, if you're a ranger, is to get the vah clicky to summon 3 damage arrows. Then level up a mage alt that can summon heartseekers, or beg people to summon them for you since 3dmg arrows really suck (yet are convenient and best of all free.) Quiver of the Mind from PoNight summons 10dmg arrows, but only 1 stack per hour - hence why I said mage alt.
 
I get that there are ways to work around the current terribility of the tradeskill, my point is that you shouldn't have to. There are several ways that it can be fixed to be either A) Useful or B) Less expensive for what it currently gives. I'd like to see it modified one way or the other so that it is actually worthwhile to pursue it.

To wolfwalker: The skill really isn't that expensive till around 145 ish, it's kind of costly, but not that bad. Post 150 or so the price sky-rockets to ridiculous heights. prices around 10p per stack of arrows (higher at the 180-200 area) with a required of over 60 combinations per point, so yeah, rather costly.
 
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The fact that bow damage is balanced around Archery Mastery makes this a de facto single-class tradeskill. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Fletching to become a major part of the player economy so it might be a good idea to fundamentally alter the tradeskill.

Fletching would probably find a more comfortable place in the game as a relatively easy niche skill that rangers build in the course of normal play. It's not too outlandish to imagine rangers finding stiff branches while foraging, or crafting bone arrow-heads from the remains of the undead, horns, or tusks. The time and financial investment could be in the same ball-park as Make Poison, with a brief introductory quest from Ranger guild masters (to let new players know they should be working on the skill).

If the bow making aspect of the skill was retained at all it could probably be limited to 2 or 3 quest bows that rangers could acquire to use while leveling (sort of a pre-cursor to the Swiftshot quest) and possibly a few items to insert into bow aug slots (sights, siyahs, or string bridges could be used to augment bows for an added archery skill boost). It might even be best if the entire bow making aspect were discarded because it would be hard to implement in a way that players found useful and admins believed to be balanced.
 
Ok wesell, but the primary problem I can see with your proposal is that is basically requires them to rewrite the entire tradeskill, ergo, never going to happen. I'm more interested in ways that the skill can be balanced in a cost/benefit ratio. To make it how you propose would require quite a bit of working, and I'm not sure the devs are interested in making that kind of time investment for it.
 
Man, the entire tradeskill has needed a revamp for a while. Like I said before, one has been drawn up but it's on the back burner.

I like Wesell's idea.
 
Straight up, we HAD the whole thing revamped, but the dev heading up the changes left suddenly, without passing the work to anyone else. As such it is probably more back burned than poor City of Mercy. Sadly I don't see its state changing any time soon because of that.
 
I'm trying to suggest ways for workable changes to be implemented, ones that require (relatively) little work, so that they have a chance of getting done in my childrens lifetime.

I figure if we can suggest enough changes that aren't that difficult to implement, there is at least a chance of them being done. A full revamp, while needed, is widely acknowledged as absolutely never going to happen. The dev's are too busy with iksith/ect, and aren't going to work on it. I'd just like to see enough small changes made to make the skill servicable, and useful for something other then getting Swiftshot.

Now I figured this thread would end up going the way that the rest of the requests for a fix on the tradeskill went, I just wanted to throw out a few ideas on how the problem could be fixed with a minimum of effort.
 
Mikiael said:
[...]the primary problem I can see with your proposal is that is basically requires them to rewrite the entire tradeskill[...]
Click to expand...

The main point that I was trying to get across is that Fletching currently has a much larger library of recipes than necessary. Reworking the tradeskill could probably be made easier by simply removing many of the components from the game and reducing the number of arrow types drastically.

Currently there are a large number of fletching components:
  • Arrowheads – 3
  • Shafts – 3
  • Fletchings – 6
  • Nocks – 3
Most combinations of these 4 types of components yield a result, which gives us arrows of most damage values with range values from 0 to 150 in 25 range increments. This is way more than needed for a niche tradeskill like Fletching. It might be easier for a developer to tackle if they simply discarded all of the bow recipes and all of the fletching recipes except for 2 of each damage value and then redistributed the difficulty levels and cost well among the remaining 16 recipes.

I think that trimming down the tradeskill is more workable than trying to figure out how to achieve better balance within the current framework.
 
I was thinking for fletching since no revamps will occur any time soon how about adding a feature to it? You buy a Quiver from a fletcher that summons no drop arrows that scale in dmg with your current fletching.

Dmg1 = 1-60
Dmg2 = 61-120
Dmg3 = 121-160
Dmg4 = 161-200
Dmg5 = 201-215
Dmg6 = 216-230
Dmg7 = 231-240
Dmg8 = 241-250
Dmg9 = 250+Charm of the Eagle Eye
Dmg10 = 250+Trueshot Charm
 
ieatrice said:
I was thinking for fletching since no revamps will occur any time soon how about adding a feature to it? You buy a Quiver from a fletcher that summons no drop arrows that scale in dmg with your current fletching.

Dmg1 = 1-60
Dmg2 = 61-120
Dmg3 = 121-160
Dmg4 = 161-200
Dmg5 = 201-215
Dmg6 = 216-230
Dmg7 = 231-240
Dmg8 = 241-250
Dmg9 = 250+Charm of the Eagle Eye
Dmg10 = 250+Trueshot Charm
Click to expand...

Currently, at skill 205 I can make dmg 8 arrows. This seems to me to be a nerf for the sake of saving money.
 
I just made it that way because I thought at 205 skill it was too early for dmg8 arrows to be unlimited.
 
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