Tradeskill & Misc. Feedback - Featuring Emzur & Enderi (Ongoing)

iBluNT

Dalayan Elder
This thread will be a compilation of Enderi and I's findings throughout the season on every trade kill in the game. This will cover the trade skill as an entirety, specific materials that may have been hard to obtain, balancing, and suggestions to keep trade skills less of a chore. I'd like to invite anyone to chime in and give their opinions, add any items or topics I may have missed, etc.

I also understand historically, Trade Skills haven't been something that development wants to touch a lot. I'd be very happy and willing to give input and suggestions in any capacity to the Dev team. I've got a decent amount of Dev experience that I'd be willing to help chime in on where applicable.

Anything written in Red is an edit made after my original post.

Overview
Trade skilling as a whole has always been viewed as a grind that people generally want to stay away from. Part of this is due to the effort you need to put into them, the lack of reward for your effort, general lack of economy relating to items being unnecessary in general. The rebalancing of crafted armor did help a lot to make the trade skills feel more rewarding, especially leveling up as fresh characters.
  • First & foremost, not having listsend capabilities was a massive downside to trade skilling in Season. Having to work out logistics of meeting people at specific times, finding bag space, juggling materials from 8 trade skills, etc. was all a very troubling task. It would've been amazing to set up vendors with different armor, etc. as well, and not have to load different mules just to get folks the items they wanted and interrupt anything you're doing. I understand why it wasn't included in Season, but next time it's likely a must.
  • Piggy backing off the first bullet; not being able to buy-back your vendored items sucked. This is partly user error, obviously, but it strayed from the norm of being able to buy back your materials in case you vendored them by accident. Again, I understand why it wasn't included, but next time it'd be a great plus.
  • One thing I'd like to see in the future is being able to auto-combine any item that you can no longer skill-up from. It was a good step in the right direction to introduce it at 250, however it feels really bad having to go back and revisit a specific painful combine that you now need as a sub-combine for another item.
    • Realizing this is especially helpful for trade skills that do not reach 250 skill cap such as Pottery, Baking, Tinkering, Poison Making.
  • On macro-check skills like Fishing and Mining, I'm led to believe that successful passcolors do not grant any type of benefit from passing. It'd be nice to get some validation if these even work.
    • Furthermore, are passcolors still needed? Does anyone monitor this? Seems to just be a clunky way of getting new players in trouble for not watching their screens like hawks.
  • There are a few trade skills without modifiers that, in my opinion, should have one:
    • Alchemy, Brewing, Fletching and Jewelcrafting.
Notable Items
  • Crystalline Blood can only come from Crystal Caverns (yes there is maybe ONE exception from Sorcs, but it's so uncommon it didn't really deserve a mention), and the mobs it does come from have a relatively abysmal drop rate. Seeing a boost from CC mobs, and/or allowing Sorcs Labyrinth mobs to drop this would help greatly.
  • Giant Blood can only come from a few packs of mobs in small quantities (GSM, OSM, Everfrost, Cycgorge) and is needed in massive quantities (hundreds to thousands) for Brewing and Tailoring. It'd provide a big benefit to add this to Stormkeep / Storm's Eye despite the faction restriction, or give alternatives to Brewing and Tailoring. There are a lot of other unused Bloods in the game.
  • Silver Dawnfish can come from fishing in Cauldron of Dawn or Athica. Most zones with large fish pools have a relatively fair and equal fish-rate between the different types. Silver Dawnfish seem to be a very unique outlier, and drop about 5% of the time compared to the other fish in these zone's possible fish pools. Hundreds of these are needed in Brewing, and can take dozens of hours to farm.
  • Blackbane can only come from Vulfweres in Warpstone Caverns Sundered Mountains, or Ratmen in Mistwoods. Both of these locations have a very depressing drop rate, for example about 3-4 Blackbane in a clear of 90 or so Vulfweres. If taking the route of making Pantherskin and other similar items, you're looking at a huge amount of time spent invested in this one item.
  • Tangleweed is another rough one, coming primarily from Siren's Grotto. I believe there's a drop chance in Plane of Water and Kedge Keep but not high enough worth considering a farm location. Seeing another zone added to this loot table, or an alternative in Blue Ointment combines would help this out tremendously.
Alchemy
  • Pretty straight forward, vendor based, trade skill. The rate at which people level seems to out-pace the skill-ups in this category, and most low level potions get outdated very quickly. It'd be nice to have some kind of increased vendor value on potions for situations like this.
  • Biggest gripe towards the end of Alchemy, is the rarity and exclusivity of Crystalline Blood.
    • Vendor-bought materials end at 230 trivial skill, where you're already in the 100 combines per skill-up range. Crystalline Blood is used for 240 and 245 trivial combines, which acts as a link to the 250 and 255 combines which would otherwise have a huge fail rate starting at 230.
    • Crystalline Blood can only come from Crystal Caverns (yes there is maybe ONE exception from Sorcs, but it's so uncommon it didn't really deserve a mention), and the mobs it does come from have a relatively abysmal drop rate. Seeing a boost from CC mobs, and/or allowing Sorcs Labyrinth mobs to drop this would help greatly.
  • I'd love to see an Alchemy mod somewhere down the road.
Baking
  • Not a ton to say about Baking other than the fact that it stops at 85 (to my knowledge), and the stats on the food are nothing to get excited about for the amount of clicks it takes.
  • Confident that if this skill went up to 250, there'd be a great opportunity to introduce some neat consumable items with different stats and effects.
Blacksmithing
  • Blacksmithing, in my opinion, was a very fair trade skill. It's a relatively inexpensive skill to pick up due to most of the materials coming from Mining, and a lot of the crafted items vendor back for a fair amount of Plat so you can make a little profit, or at least make up for your time invested in Mining if you don't consider that as an overhead cost.
  • Most, if not all of the gripe from Blacksmithing plays more into Mining, mentioned below.
  • One area for improvement is reducing the amount of Rock Chunks needed for a Mineral Dust. It takes 60 Rock Chunks to make 1 Mineral Dust, which is just purchasable by a vendor for 13 Plat anyway. It's not even worth doing the current method, which is the most click-heavy combine in the game:
    • 10 Rock Chunks -> 1 Mineral.
    • 6 Minerals -> 1 Mineral Dust.
  • It'd be great to see it reduced down to somewhere like:
    • 4 Rock Chunks -> 1 Mineral.
    • 2 Minerals -> 1 Mineral Dust.
  • This change would give you 7.5 Mineral Dusts per 60 Rock Chunks, as opposed to 1, in many less clicks required.
  • Both Blacksmithing and Tailoring had their lower level crafted armor stats bumped, but not the final combines (Deepmetal, Imp Hide, Shadowsilk). The final products are now worse than their predecessors.
Brewing

  • I believe around 140 is where vendor-bought items stop and farming components begins. This isn't much of a problem as there's a lot of different routes to get higher.
  • Brewing from 230-250 is arguably the worst experience of all trade skills. It definitely starts off great, and gets progressively worse as it goes.
  • There's really only 2 avenues to get to 250, one of which requires a material (Giant Blood) that's both a very grindy farm, and also used in mass quantities in another trade skill (Tailoring). This really leaves you stuck with one main avenue which is to fish 5 different types of fish, in quantities of about 300 fish each.
    • Suggestion for making the fishing portion better can be found below, but feels like a band-aid type remedy.
  • 7 stacks of rum per 1 stack of skillables seems hefty. Maybe reduce Roar rum down to 1 or 2 per combine instead of 3.
  • On this same note, any Brewing recipe from 205+ shouldn't require double of any combination. Almost every possible item requires double the materials which are already extremely difficult to gather for the first combine.
  • I'll elaborate more on this at a later time, as I'm still finishing up.
  • I'd love to see a Brewing modifier or two somewhere down the road to help alleviate some of the issues I've mentioned.
Fishing
  • Fishing wasn't too much of a task. 140-165 is a pretty big grind, mainly due to the only fish you can skill off of are in zones with a large fish pool. For example, in Cauldron of Dawn if you're at 150 skill with modifiers, you're able to catch 6 different fish but can only skill-up on one type of those. Compare this to a zone with only 2 different types of fish, your chances of getting a fish you can skill-up on are exponentially higher.
    • I can respect this for leveling to 250, but afterword it seems like a chore when you're trying to farm specific materials for other things like Brewing.
  • I don't have a clear-cut solution for this yet, but being able to select what type of fish you can catch would be a massive help to Brewing.
    • If even considered viable, this would have to be exclusive to 250+ fishers and would have to exclude maps and any high value fish like Sunfish, Torment Razorfangs, etc.
  • It'd be great if replenishing times could be looked at. Mining nodes take about 30 minutes to replenish, but fishing takes several hours to replenish.
  • Tower of Agony is a good example of the replenishing times being poor. Currently this is just about the only place to skill up on Fishing from 160-230 unless you're pledged Shiritri. If more than one person is occupying that zone it runs out absurdly fast.
    • There needs to be a high-skill fish pool added to at least 2 other zones to accommodate for this.
  • Map drop rate still seems a bit low, but I can understand this and won't touch on it too much.
Fletching
  • I won't get into the nonsense of how Fletching is required to be a Ranger, but just focus on the trade skill in general.
  • Fletching process summarized:
    • Combine a specific combination of a shaft, arrowhead, and feather to create a Bundle.
      • For low level arrows, one Bundle can be clicked and will create a stack of arrows. For higher level arrows, they are not clickable and you must advance to the next steps.
    • Combine ten bundles to create one Large Bundle.
    • Combine five Large Bundles to create a Quiver.
      • For higher level arrows, you must also combine an agent with the five Large Bundles to create a usable Quiver.
  • As of now, the Bundles and Large Bundles do not stack, taking up a massive amount of inventory space with no real reasoning.
  • If Bundles and Large Bundles were stackable, this trade skill would cut headaches in half without changing anything about the trade skill at all. Same amount of clicks, same everything, but takes up a fraction of the inventory space required.
  • The amount of combines per skill-up seem unnecessarily high. I understand it's a mostly vendor-bought skill, but also very expensive for not much reason.
  • Some of the materials required to make Superb Quivers later on are a bit rare, but in general not a massive downside as they're very specific to bane type, which in itself is an issue also.
  • I'd love to see a Fletching modifier or two somewhere down the road.
Jewelcrafting
  • I don't have a lot to say about JC, as it's pretty straight forward. It's a plat-heavy skill, as expected, but has an alternative route to also be able to farm the gems as well.
  • It'd be nice to see the type 3 augments have a vendor value, similar to both Blacksmithing and Tailoring.
    • Both of the skills just mentioned have a vendor value of at LEAST the cost of the vendor-bought material, giving you a nice pay back for your effort. Jewelcrafting augs have zero value to vendor.
  • I'd love to see a Jewelcrafting modifier or two somewhere down the road.
Mining
  • Mining is a chore.
  • Leveling up on Mining is not the issue, as it's made very easy to level up with. The issue really comes down to:
    • Having to be focused on Mining and only Mining to be efficient. With Fishing you can at least create a hotkey and have it run a few times, only to check back to hit it again or hit a passcolor check. With Mining, you're hitting a button every ~4 seconds, repeating thousands of times to get the adequate ore needed for Blacksmithing.
      • Roughly ~15+ stacks of Rock Chunks to 1 stack of Obsidian, Ghostmetal, Warpmetal.
      • Suggestions to fix this could be to automate Mining somehow in a hotkey by not making it a clickable skill but rather an actual /doability, perhaps increasing Mining harvesting time but also adding the possibility of maybe mining a "cluster of ore" which nets you 2-3 ores instead of 1.
    • Node capacity, location, and availability in different zones. I understand there's quite a few zones that haven't been touched in their lifetime, but seeing more zones and more ore deposits would make this enjoyable.
Pottery
  • Straight forward and to the point. Mostly vendor-bought, reasonable prices, and reasonable combine to skill up ratio.
  • It's a shame this ends at 80 (for the most part), but I don't really see much else down the tunnel for Pottery unless it gets deeper into Tinkering.
Tailoring
  • Probably the most farm-intensive trade skill there is. It'd be nice to see some of these items come from a vendor early-on, but I understand why that'd be a touchy subject. In Thurgadin there's a vendor for various meats, it'd be neat to see one for minor Furs/Hides.
  • I'm not sure why, but there are two types of Leather and Cloth/Silk armor. One crafted with double aug slots, and one with a single aug slot dropped by various mobs. It'd be awesome to see the single aug slot versions canned, so that we're able to skill up off the dropped armor as well.
  • There's a few items in Tailoring that are very uncommon and relatively harder to obtain than most other skills.
 
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  • Tangleweed drops in Kedge Keep as well.
  • Originally, there was only one type of leather armor, the one with single aug slot. Then double aug slot was introduced to crafted armor, and all leather armor including dropped one had double aug slots. Then staff at that time (I think ut was still Wiz) did not like mobs dropping double aug things and changed mob drops to single aug things. Tailors all over Dalaya moaned the fact that they couldnot use dropped armor to skill up any more. Now season happened, and here we are.
 
On fishing I remember Towers of Agony being a horrible grind because there was a very limited number of fishing spots meaning it was very easy to fish out the entire zone well before they repopulated. And at the skill range there were no other options of zones to go to. unless maybe you were sworn to Shiritri so you could use plane of air.
 
  • Tangleweed drops in Kedge Keep as well.
  • Originally, there was only one type of leather armor, the one with single aug slot. Then double aug slot was introduced to crafted armor, and all leather armor including dropped one had double aug slots. Then staff at that time (I think ut was still Wiz) did not like mobs dropping double aug things and changed mob drops to single aug things. Tailors all over Dalaya moaned the fact that they couldnot use dropped armor to skill up any more. Now season happened, and here we are.

You're right, Kedge was an oversight. I guess this does help my point a bit, but still an unusually bad farm in general.

There's still one case where you can use a vendor bought silk shoe from the Cobbler in NFreeport to skill up on. He sells the double-augged Silk Shoe but not the Leather Boot.
All in all, feels like there's not a huge reason to not go to double augged droppable gear too.

On fishing I remember Towers of Agony being a horrible grind because there was a very limited number of fishing spots meaning it was very easy to fish out the entire zone well before they repopulated. And at the skill range there were no other options of zones to go to. unless maybe you were sworn to Shiritri so you could use plane of air.

ToA is definitely a tough one. Below is my fishing plot I mapped out, with 15 separate locations. Anywhere else in that circle contains no fishing nodes.
You can get through all 15 in about 60-80 minutes, and then they don't refill for 5+ hours.

If there's any more than one fisher in that zone, it's just a net loss. Definitely needs to be faster replenishment in that zone so you don't lose your shot if someone else is in there.


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My commentary in Green.

Overview
  • First & foremost, not having listsend capabilities was a massive downside to trade skilling in Season. Having to work out logistics of meeting people at specific times, finding bag space, juggling materials from 8 trade skills, etc. was all a very troubling task. It would've been amazing to set up vendors with different armor, etc. as well, and not have to load different mules just to get folks the items they wanted and interrupt anything you're doing. I understand why it wasn't included in Season, but next time it's likely a must. -Yeah that sounds terrible, bag space is always tough for tradeskills.
  • One thing I'd like to see in the future is being able to auto-combine any item that you can no longer skill-up from. It was a good step in the right direction to introduce it at 250, however it feels really bad having to go back and revisit a specific painful combine that you now need as a sub-combine for another item.
    • Realizing this is especially helpful for trade skills that do not reach 250 skill cap such as Pottery, Baking, Tinkering, Poison Making. -This feature works for Pottery, Baking, and Poison Making at their current respective level caps already. My finger's certainly agree with you on having to do less precombines, but unfortunately click heaviness is one of the design factors that trades get balanced against each other with, so it would be a pretty large systemic fix to tackle this issue.
  • On macro-check skills like Fishing and Mining, I'm led to believe that successful passcolors do not grant any type of benefit from passing. It'd be nice to get some validation if these even work.
    • Furthermore, are passcolors still needed? Does anyone monitor this? Seems to just be a clunky way of getting new players in trouble for not watching their screens like hawks. -I think I saw Grinkles say that these do in fact work and give a benefit, but even if it works it's not noticeable and that feels shitty.
  • There are a few trade skills without modifiers that, in my opinion, should have one:
    • Alchemy, Brewing, Fletching and Jewelcrafting. -Alchemy has a skill modifier item in game currently. It would be nice to see all trades having modifier items.
Notable Items
  • Crystalline Blood can only come from Crystal Caverns (yes there is maybe ONE exception from Sorcs, but it's so uncommon it didn't really deserve a mention), and the mobs it does come from have a relatively abysmal drop rate. Seeing a boost from CC mobs, and/or allowing Sorcs Labyrinth mobs to drop this would help greatly. -Yeah this is a pain, and most single-zone grinds are bad as a rule in tradeskills, would like to see this added to golems somewhere perhaps.
  • Giant Blood can only come from a few packs of mobs in small quantities (GSM, OSM, Everfrost, Cycgorge) and is needed in massive quantities (hundreds to thousands) for Brewing and Tailoring. It'd provide a big benefit to add this to Stormkeep / Storm's Eye despite the faction restriction, or give alternatives to Brewing and Tailoring. There are a lot of other unused Bloods in the game. -I don't see a reason not to add it to more giants as it's tradeable. That being said, cyc gorge can definitely cover your needs for this one and I found the farm for tailoring and brewing to gather this material pretty in-line with the the general item grind. Which is to say it still sucks but I don't feel that it's an outlier.
  • Silver Dawnfish can come from fishing in Cauldron of Dawn or Athica. Most zones with large fish pools have a relatively fair and equal fish-rate between the different types. Silver Dawnfish seem to be a very unique outlier, and drop about 5% of the time compared to the other fish in these zone's possible fish pools. Hundreds of these are needed in Brewing, and can take dozens of hours to farm. -I imagine this has never been a huge issue as there are alternates to this material. In general there are dertianly a few places with fishing nodes that could use some cleanup though.
  • Blackbane can only come from Vulfweres in Warpstone Caverns Sundered Mountains, or Ratmen in Mistwoods. Both of these locations have a very depressing drop rate, for example about 3-4 Blackbane in a clear of 90 or so Vulfweres. If taking the route of making Pantherskin and other similar items, you're looking at a huge amount of time spent invested in this one item. -Blackbane sucks, I've never heard of anyone using it to skill up because it's not worth the time. Luckily theres the alternate skill up route, but that's still no excuse to pigeon hole panther skin so badly. Panther skin itself could probably use a drop rate bump as well.
  • Tangleweed is another rough one, coming primarily from Siren's Grotto. I believe there's a drop chance in Plane of Water and Kedge Keep but not high enough worth considering a farm location. Seeing another zone added to this loot table, or an alternative in Blue Ointment combines would help this out tremendously. -Agreed that this one sucks, but as with giant's blood I don't think it's an outlier.
Alchemy
  • Pretty straight forward, vendor based, trade skill. The rate at which people level seems to out-pace the skill-ups in this category, and most low level potions get outdated very quickly. It'd be nice to have some kind of increased vendor value on potions for situations like this. -Vendor resell would be very nice indeed
  • I'd love to see an Alchemy mod somewhere down the road. -You can find one for Alchemy in Hmal A, Presumably off a named there. It's only a plus 2 bonus though so it's not worth a lot compared to the +5's and greater found in the other skills.
Baking
  • Confident that if this skill went up to 250, there'd be a great opportunity to introduce some neat consumable items with different stats and effects. -Agreed, would love to see this one finished out.
Blacksmithing
  • Both Blacksmithing and Tailoring had their lower level crafted armor stats bumped, but not the final combines (Deepmetal, Imp Hide, Shadowsilk). The final products are now worse than their predecessors. -This definitely needs to be addressed eventually.
Brewing
  • Brewing from 230-250 is arguably the worst experience of all trade skills. It definitely starts off great, and gets progressively worse as it goes.
  • There's really only 2 avenues to get to 250, one of which requires a material (Giant Blood) that's both a very grindy farm, and also used in mass quantities in another trade skill (Tailoring). This really leaves you stuck with one main avenue which is to fish 5 different types of fish, in quantities of about 300 fish each.
    • Suggestion for making the fishing portion better can be found below, but feels like a band-aid type remedy. -This feels like you should just farm giant blood, but I don't disagree that the in general fishing drops for tradeskills suck because of their strange RNG.
  • 7 stacks of rum per 1 stack of skillables seems hefty. Maybe reduce Roar rum down to 1 or 2 per combine instead of 3. -I recall that the level of precombines needed for brewing was immense and scarring. I'm not sure what a good fix is though or if that it needs fixing, it is pretty daunting though.
Fishing
  • Tower of Agony is a good example of the replenishing times being poor. Currently this is just about the only place to skill up on Fishing from 160-230 unless you're pledged Shiritri. If more than one person is occupying that zone it runs out absurdly fast. -You don't need to be pledged to fish there, just need to fish when the trash is down. You can sneak through most of the zone to get to atleast one of the pools with little to no fighting.
    • There needs to be a high-skill fish pool added to at least 2 other zones to accommodate for this. -There are a few bodies of water in Ikkisith that might be a good place to add some more dangerous and rewarding fishing nodes in.
Fletching
  • Fletching process summarized:
    • Combine a specific combination of a shaft, arrowhead, and feather to create a Bundle.
      • For low level arrows, one Bundle can be clicked and will create a stack of arrows. For higher level arrows, they are not clickable and you must advance to the next steps.
    • Combine ten bundles to create one Large Bundle.
    • Combine five Large Bundles to create a Quiver.
      • For higher level arrows, you must also combine an agent with the five Large Bundles to create a usable Quiver. -You don't have to make quivers to skill up. But I agree very strongly that bundles being unstackable is just a tedious inventory game and if alchemy pots can get stacked then so can bundles in fletching. Also you can't sell the results to vendors, which would be nice so it wasn't just easier to delete items as you go.
  • As of now, the Bundles and Large Bundles do not stack, taking up a massive amount of inventory space with no real reasoning.
  • If Bundles and Large Bundles were stackable, this trade skill would cut headaches in half without changing anything about the trade skill at all. Same amount of clicks, same everything, but takes up a fraction of the inventory space required.
  • The amount of combines per skill-up seem unnecessarily high. I understand it's a mostly vendor-bought skill, but also very expensive for not much reason. -Agreed, but it only needs slight tuning. Tao is/was a masochist.
Jewelcrafting
  • It'd be nice to see the type 3 augments have a vendor value, similar to both Blacksmithing and Tailoring.
    • Both of the skills just mentioned have a vendor value of at LEAST the cost of the vendor-bought material, giving you a nice pay back for your effort. Jewelcrafting augs have zero value to vendor. -Agreed
Mining
  • Mining is a chore.
  • Leveling up on Mining is not the issue, as it's made very easy to level up with. The issue really comes down to:
    • Having to be focused on Mining and only Mining to be efficient. With Fishing you can at least create a hotkey and have it run a few times, only to check back to hit it again or hit a passcolor check. With Mining, you're hitting a button every ~4 seconds, repeating thousands of times to get the adequate ore needed for Blacksmithing.
      • Roughly ~15+ stacks of Rock Chunks to 1 stack of Obsidian, Ghostmetal, Warpmetal.
      • Suggestions to fix this could be to automate Mining somehow in a hotkey by not making it a clickable skill but rather an actual /doability, perhaps increasing Mining harvesting time but also adding the possibility of maybe mining a "cluster of ore" which nets you 2-3 ores instead of 1.
    • Node capacity, location, and availability in different zones. I understand there's quite a few zones that haven't been touched in their lifetime, but seeing more zones and more ore deposits would make this enjoyable
-Agreed that mining is a chore. With what I think happens with mining in the back-end of the game I'm not sure there's a convenient way to implement hotkey fixes. Should add some veins to Ikkisith.

Tailoring
  • Probably the most farm-intensive trade skill there is. It'd be nice to see some of these items come from a vendor early-on, but I understand why that'd be a touchy subject. In Thurgadin there's a vendor for various meats, it'd be neat to see one for minor Furs/Hides. -I think this would kind of defeat the difficulty theme (ie clicking, farming, precombines) of the tradeskill.
  • I'm not sure why, but there are two types of Leather and Cloth/Silk armor. One crafted with double aug slots, and one with a single aug slot dropped by various mobs. It'd be awesome to see the single aug slot versions canned, so that we're able to skill up off the dropped armor as well. -I don't think using farmed armor is a big deal either way, but if this gets changed it's important to note that there are a handful of quests that require specifically the 2 slotted tradeskilled versions and those may need to get altered at the same time.
 
The amount of combines per skill-up seem unnecessarily high.
I will biggy back here for player feedback.

We want to reduce the total number of combines for a quiver from 56 to 6. We are discussing this change:
  • Combination of a shaft, arrowhead, and feather to create a Large Bundle.
  • Combine five Large Bundles to create a Quiver.
  • Material costs are increased proportionally.
The only issue we can think of is the loss of individual bundles that produce one stack of arrows.

Thoughts?
 
I will biggy back here for player feedback.

We want to reduce the total number of combines for a quiver from 56 to 6. We are discussing this change:
  • Combination of a shaft, arrowhead, and feather to create a Large Bundle.
  • Combine five Large Bundles to create a Quiver.
  • Material costs are increased proportionally.
The only issue we can think of is the loss of individual bundles that produce one stack of arrows.

Thoughts?

This is a good thing but the only thing I would still be concerned about is the number of combines per skill-up. It’s already relatively cost intensive because of this I think, so this would not help that. If anything make the results have a decent vendor value.
 
Fletching would ultimately become much more expensive to level up as you go because you rarely if ever make and sell quivers until you get to 225 skill, so the extra cost of making quivers expanding downwards would ramp up the cost to advance by a lot. This would basically just make fletching into a less expensive and farm heavy (at the top end) version of jewelcrafting. It doesn't change the amount of clicks needed to skill up either, as you dont need to actually make quivers for skilling up, just to make to sell. So while this change would help quiver sellers, it wouldn't help leveling the skill up. If you are worried about losing out on non-quiver clicky arrow, just add the feature to large bundles, keep it exactly the same, it's at a big loss mathematically, but it would still be a player option/choice. I agree with adding vendor prices to the bundles, it would be better than deleting them. To address the clicks per skill up you will need to lower the amount of attempts per level.
 
Ok, update on our discussions:
  • Combination of a shaft, arrowhead, and feather to create a small bundle
  • Combine ten small bundles to create a large bundle
  • A new quiver item is made and added to the vendor to replace the current quiver container. This new item is stackable and not a container.
  • Combine one large bundle, one stackable quiver, and one imbuing agent to create a full quiver.
  • Material costs are increased by a multiplier of five.
  • Skill up rate is increased by a multiplier of five.
 
Skill up experience is increased by a multiplier of five.
Do you mean the actual exp a chracter would gain, ie towards levels, AAs, etc, or is this how much exp you get towards getting a skillup in fletching? If it's the former it doesn't address the clicks to level up problem and also skews its exp gain a lot compared to other trades. If it's the latter that's probably too much of a click reduction, maybe 2 or 3 times would be better.
 
If that route is being taken, it'd be nice to see a few things:
  • Skill-up experience from combining ten small bundles to create a large bundle. Right now it's trivial and if you aren't actively trying to make a large bundle to make quivers, there's no reason to do this. I was thinking maybe the same experience as creating five (5) small bundles?
  • Vendor value for small and large bundles. I personally dislike the fact that any combined tradeskill items (aside from quest) holds zero vendor value. I'd love to see a small bundle turn out to sell for maybe 25-50% of the cost to create it.
  • Whatever changes are done to Fletching should, in theory, translate over to Alchemy as they're both the only 250 skills that are (almost) entirely vendor bought.
    • I wish I had kept better track of the cost of Alchemy skilling up, but Fletching already seems like it surpasses Alchemy in cost to skill.
 
I think the original reasoning for the non-vendorability was that they had reduced the price of the materials by what they would have sold for.

On another note with the changes of mithril and dalium to rec level 20 there isn't any magic user 0 level rec armor from blacksmithing. maybe copper could be repurposed?

I also noted that the drop rates for liodreth/feline fur for +4 tailoring augs felt pretty low. but maybe that is intentional. Lair of the paw is pretty much the only efficient place to farm them because everywhere else the mobs are very sparesely distrubted and/or share spawns with other things that don't drop. could really use an additional good farm zone for these since those on Blackscale faction would probably want to avoid these since they need ally with liodreths.
 
I want to use this unique opportunity to evaluate the first seasons event and see to what extent the experience for the seasonal tradeskillers differed to that of a non-seasonal one. I will also refrain from repeating what has already been mentioned – I am in agreement with most of it. It took me slightly over one year to max all the tradeskills (excluding Tinkering). When I was hit with the tradeskill bug the population was well below 100 and the lower end population was non-existent. This meant that I had to farm almost everything myself. I would like to know which tradeskill items have been helped by the influx of new blood to the server and which have been unaffected. Perhaps this will help provide feedback to devs to incentivize going to unpopular areas. One idea that comes to mind is that the longer a mob stays alive (those mobs that drop tradeskilll items) the better the chance will be for it to drop the item and/or drop more of them. This could be done overall or to specific mobs that hardly get killed.

The second thing I want to discuss is the profitability of tradeskills. This is tricky because the auto-combine for max tradeskills was recently implemented and now it is available for any trivial combine. (Largely affects alchemy). Furthermore, profitability discussed is relative to other tradeskills. The overall consensus is that tradeskills are a massive plat and time sink with little reward in return. They are generally not worth doing.

Alchemy – Descent – It was one of the better options to earn plat from prior to auto-combine and even before the newer buff change potions were added. Arguably the best potions requiring mystic ash and robot oil are never available because these two components are hard to come by and people save what little they acquire.

Baking – Nonexistent – Nothing special comes to mind.

Blacksmithing – Good – The recent armor improvements have brought some life back to this tradeskill but I imagine the enthusiasm and supply of armor will fall after tradeskill is maxed. The Yclistinite augs are a good money maker but only because the supply is short and the farming is nothing short of torture.

Brewing – Nonexistent – It is required for making pre-combines for other tradeskills. Tedious tradeskill with components spread out across roads less traveled (farmed).

Fishing – Descent – This one feels more balanced than most, especially compared to its counterpart, mining. I would disagree that potorment fishing nodes need changing, perhaps different zones or fish should be added for that level range. Unless population surges and there are many (dozens) fishers, it has not been a problem for years. It provides quick leveling from 160ish to 200 and going to 230 adds difficulty while giving better plat. I really can’t think of any other tradeskill that is as well balanced as fishing is so live with some of its challenges. Successful macro checks should give fish of your choosing via # command for the zone you are in.

Fletching – Terrible – A lot of clicking, can’t recoup costs, end-product primarily used by one class. Bow aug sentiment is also eh. Unless you are a ranger, the only reason to max this tradeskill is for the sake of maxing it.

Jewelcrafting – Okay – The only thing of value these days is aug making and that would be the diamond engraved ones. It’s worse than alchemy profit wise.

Make Poison – Nonexistent – Restricted to rogues and even they won’t level it for reasons, it’s not that useful right now. I request removing the class restriction on this tradeskill for fun times.

Mining – Nonexistent – For years only those who have wanted to work on blacksmithing have leveled mining. Successful macro checks should give extra ore of your choosing via # command for the zone you are in and mining should give a random chance of getting gems instead of rock lumps.

Pottery – Bad – Easy to get to 80 with just a few hundred plat. Going from 81 to 100 however is an entirely different story. Expect to recoup costs from rez urns that you have to create mules to hold. No real profit.

Tailoring – Okay – Hides are annoying to get unlike mining where less movement/effort is involved. Demand for gear remains to be seen after armor improvements. The fur for augs is in short supply and for highest tier aug it is harder to get.

Tinkering – Worst Offender – All the negatives from the above can be put here.



The amount of effort involved just isn’t rewarded. Even after maxing you must actively farm materials to try and turn a profit. If the population was higher perhaps there would be more supply in the market but that isn’t the case. The tedium of tradeskilling may not be as bad if whatever we /auction for actually gets delivered in the mail. Perhaps the traveling merchant can sell tradeskill resources at not absurd prices? Each player/tradeskiller could buy a certain amount in a set period of time? Accessibility would be at the staff’s discretion.

I do like the fact that QOL improvements are being made. I hope the effort vs reward of tradeskills can be looked in to as well.
 
yeah most tradeskills only really make sense if you had a number of people looking to buy that is close to our entire server pop or have a insane number of alts or three willing to wait until you are max skill to recoup costs over a long period of time. mostly because of the sheer number of items you need to make per skill up
 
Some things to add:
  • I've got to admit now that I'm getting towards the end, 100 combines per skill up is an outrageous number. I know it's been that way forever, but for Alchemy this requires 2,000 total materials to be farmed for the final 20 skill ups. Crystalline Blood and Robot Oil are NOT very common***, leaving Mystic Ash as the only reasonable farm to get this done.
  • Going off the first point, experience per skill-up is actually terrible now that I think about it. Going from 237 to 238 in Alchemy netted me 9,545 experience. I never really thought much of this since I've been 65 for a while, but it's really an insulting amount. Farming and combining 100 items nets you less experience than soloing any single blue con in the game.
    • Hitting milestones in any combined trade skill (everything but Fishing and Mining) should give you a bonus amount as well. I'm thinking a good number is (Skill*1000) / 2. For example, hitting 250 SHOULD be a bonus 125,000 experience.
    • There's got to be some other incentive to leveling trade skills, since there aren't many to begin with in today's economy (piggy backing off Yusuke's post).
 
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just thought of something else currently there is an arrow head combine for cuprosil arrowheads but for some reason none for any of the lower ones.

on a different note still related to fletching a friend of mine mentioned something about it currently being more efficient to make a bunch of small bundles than to make quivers for the non-varnished arrows due to cost savings and the fact you can stack 60 of them. though I am not saying this was positive or negative couldn't get a good read on the sentiment.
 
just thought of something else currently there is an arrow head combine for cuprosil arrowheads but for some reason none for any of the lower ones.

on a different note still related to fletching a friend of mine mentioned something about it currently being more efficient to make a bunch of small bundles than to make quivers for the non-varnished arrows due to cost savings and the fact you can stack 60 of them. though I am not saying this was positive or negative couldn't get a good read on the sentiment.
This is correct. Turning a stack of 60 small bundles, which could equate to 60 stacks of arrows, gets you one quiver with 50 stacks of arrows. This is a bi-product of making bundles stackable, but I don’t think it’s a huge issue since it’s only non-varnished arrows.
 
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