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.
 
Last edited:
I thought it would be kinda neat to have each tradeskill capable of creating a single lore / no drop aug of their respective type.

The aug would be superior to the tradeable versions and limited to 1 per type. Give a little extra character progression for folks that did wanted to max skills.
 
I thought it would be kinda neat to have each tradeskill capable of creating a single lore / no drop aug of their respective type.

The aug would be superior to the tradeable versions and limited to 1 per type. Give a little extra character progression for folks that did wanted to max skills.
I suggested that years ago and was turned down on the basis of "Then minmaxers would feel mandated to do any and all tradeskill!"
 
I suggested that years ago and was turned down on the basis of "Then minmaxers would feel mandated to do any and all tradeskill!"
There are so many of these timesinks in the game I don't think it even matters at this point. Since this is a game about ringers, at least in a few years it would give everyone access to every tradeskiller and devalue the tradeskills as a whole. Works for me.
 
Not a seasonal toon, but I'm piggybacking off of these ideas because I like tradeskilling, but this game has made it exceptionally annoying in certain areas. This is a good thread to start an overall review of what's working and what's not. Will respond individually to OP where I can.

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.

I generally agree with this. Issues with economy aside (many being driven by low population), I think most tradeskills could benefit from a better reward for the player – think quests to make some no-drop version of an armor to turn into an NPC for plat or a unique reward while leveling. Or perhaps a few no-drop pieces at the high end with decent stats or a unique utility. I also think a refresh of the Murk as a tradeskill hub with some unique (hunter / gatherer themed) tradeskill items could be a lot of fun. This might need to be limited to baking, brewing, pottery, and maybe tailoring for lore’s sake, but it could be a nice avenue for Expansion in an underutilized zone.

Comments on individual points below.

Modifier items for skills that don’t have them (Alchemy, Brewing, Fletching and Jewelcrafting) would be helpful. In addition to drops, these potentially could be added as quest rewards or even be crafted from other tradeskills (tinkering / blacksmithing perhaps) – maybe make some able to be traded and others no drop. Plenty of relevant mobs to choose from.

On Gem Loot, Ore, and Elementals

  • In my opinion, all high level earth elementals / amberites / gemathians / some golems / other mobs of this nature should have a limited chance to drop rare ore. Taken from the example of windstone: We could make deepmetal ore a rareish (15%) drop from Amberite Tors, and add good ores (starting at obsidian) at a moderate (35%?) droprate to all amberites. The same could be done for similar monsters around the game.
  • Gem loot at high levels (including ruby crowns, rings, etc) should not include lower value gems like malachite, cat’s eye agate, etc. I would also be in favor of reducing the number of monsters dropping gems to things like elementals and known treasure hoarding types. Reduce the drops for poor looters, but increase the value

Annoying Items

  • Crystalline Blood – 2nd this being annoying. Just add it to loot tables of more monsters within Sorcerer’s Labyrinth. Seems a simple fix to me.
  • Giant Blood – 100% add this to Stormkeep and Storm’s Eye Giants. It is needed by both brewers and tailors in mass quantities, and this would give a bit more incentive to visit these old zones.
  • Silver Dawnfish – I think these should be added as a small percent chance to drop in Kedge Keep. For that matter, I feel like rare fish in general should be a small percent drop from aquatic monsters in relevant zones (like Siren’s Grotto for instance). This takes some of the burden off of dedicated fishers.
  • Blackbane – Annoying and terrible. Been a long time since I’ve used it, but bump the drops or add it somewhere else that’s on this level. Maybe deep part of the warrens?
  • Tangleweed – Can we slightly increase the droprate and maybe add this to Sunken Cathedral?

Baking

  • Baking and Brewing would both be nice places to add some niche stat food / drink items. Baking especially has room to grow because of the low number of recipes.

Blacksmithing

  • 100% in favor of reducing Mineral Dust combines as said in OP.
    • 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.

Tailoring

  • Fur / Hide vendors – especially for low level armors.
    • Can we add vendors with a limited inventory or perhaps a quest fur trader that will buy / sell low level furs and occasionally appears around some of the starting cities? That way we could avoid flooding the market, potentially offer a chance for lowbies to sell some wolf pelts for extra plat, and provide a less frustrating materials grind for new tailors.
  • On the two 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. Either remove the dropped single slot versions or...
    • Alternatively, we could just allow either version to be used to make Cured Silk / Studded Leather? Simply make either component make the current version and add the extra aug slot as a perk (why not let a lowbie tailor upgrade non-stat gear) or you could make a version of the Cured / Studded with 1 aug slot for items using a dropped base instead of a crafted one.
  • Increase either drop rates or mob availability for the following items: Panther Skin, Giant Asp Skin, Ancient Treeant Leaves, Enchanted Pearls
  • 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.
    • If this is true, it needs to be fixed. I rarely ever would make Imp Hide or Shadow Silk when the server used to have 250+ ppl on at peak hours. Now it really seems like a waste.

Brewing

  • Add Giant Blood to Stormkeep / Storms Eye.
  • Add Rare Fish as a drop to aquatic monsters in adjacent zones (SG, KK, etc.)
  • Remove excessive requirements for double combines.

Fishing

  • On Fish Selection:
    • Maybe don’t let the player select a fish, but add crafted (Tinkering) lures that provide a buff that increases chances of a certain fish to be caught. I don’t think it should be 100%, but give it a substantial boost for certain types of fish per zone (this might be tricky to code).

Jewelcrafting

  • I agree that T3 augs should have a vendor value.
  • I think potentially there should be a means for a jeweler to upgrade existing drops like Ruby Crown, Emerald Ring, and other dropped Jewelry either for some stats or for a minor increase in profit when selling to a vendor.
  • I also think it would be cool if Jewelcrafters could make no-drop face only augs that provide a small utility effect like ultravision or see invis. Nothing game breaking, but cool flavor to be able to add a lens or glasses to your visor.

Mining

  • Rich nodes with 2 or 3 drops “you find a rich vein of ore” would be a good idea
  • Diversity of zones could be a nice solution.
  • See points above about dropped ore.

Pottery

  • Pottery is OK, but boring. Not a lot to it.
  • Maybe expand on Pottery in the Murk as the start of a tradeskill hub. The frogs don’t have much, but they do have a lot of mud and time on their hands.
 
In my opinion, all high level earth elementals / amberites / gemathians / some golems / other mobs of this nature should have a limited chance to drop rare ore. Taken from the example of windstone: We could make deepmetal ore a rareish (15%) drop from Amberite Tors, and add good ores (starting at obsidian) at a moderate (35%?) droprate to all amberites. The same could be done for similar monsters around the game.
Why? If ore acquisition is a problem, you adjust mining/add more nodes.

If you (we) want to make a zone have a niche, you can do it without crossfire to other systems. ie. make new blacksmithing recipes, and a reagent for them are drops from elementals. No need to make miners angry or create a scenario where it is easier to farm elementals than mine
 
Why? If ore acquisition is a problem, you adjust mining/add more nodes.

If you (we) want to make a zone have a niche, you can do it without crossfire to other systems. ie. make new blacksmithing recipes, and a reagent for them are drops from elementals. No need to make miners angry or create a scenario where it is easier to farm elementals than mine
@Dev-Cole Obviously you would not want to tune it so that it's easier to farm elementals than mine, but for the example of deepmetal above, Tors are a low-in-number, difficult level 65 mob in an underutilized six-man zone. In my mind adding the ore drops serves a dual purpose to:
  1. To add a market pressure relief valve for an item that feels punitively rare in light of its requirements in Top End T2 Augs and
  2. To provide an incentive to go to a zone that has always been relatively difficult on-tier, low cash, and very underutilized (despite having unique mechanics).
The first part of the zone is especially loot poor. This provides a minor incentive to come here that is desirable by players and not just an increase to cash drops. The low spacing and small number of Tors makes this highly unlikely that it would ever be competitively farmed at a low drop rate compared to mining, but it could help a lot of people out in the business. If there is any question that deepmetal is exceedingly rare, see the see price difference for the top end T2 vs top end T5 augs.
 
I agree with Cole on not bypassing mining with farming. It's a tricky road to go down. However, I dont think it would hurt to add ores to certain difficult zones as a reward if done correctly. For example, for the current best Type 2 Augments you need two deepemetal ore. Deepemetal is notoriously laborious to farm and supplying an entire servers desire for those BiS augs is a big chore. So lets take windstone, a zone that is often low reward versus effort and say in a big run of windstone a group got one or two deepmetal ores, these ores could be sold to players OR traded to a blacksmith in return for an augment. At a rate of 'one aug per clear' it wouldn't be totally unbalanced and could be a nice sort of side reward. To level up a tradeskill like blacksmithing you need piles and piles of ores, so it would actually take quite a high drop-rate to really make farming surpass mining to level up blacksmithing. Taking deepmetal as an example again, in order to make a skill up with it at the level of blacksmithing that deepmetal is at; you would need 60 per level up, and that's just making laregely useless small armor pieces, that number jumps to 120 for augments and then to 300 if you want breastplates, and none of this is including that to smelt ores into ingots you need a pile of other materials, deepemetal takes twice as many lavadusts as ores in order to combine them. So I think it's viable to implement, but carefully and only with like deepemetal because you would never skill up with deepmetal.

I don't see a point in adding fish drops to zones.

If you want to add ore deposits, there's a lot of room there. Particularly adding veins to ikkisith or to new dungeon zones. Also since the top tier type two augement was made arbitrarily difficult and expensive to make, a long needed look at deepemtal droprates would be appreciated.

Adding giant blood to giants feels like it makes sense. I also think you can get hides for tailoring in NDHK so it's not without symmetry.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom