eighnuss wrote on May 6
th, 2016 at 10:50am:
the above previous post is good but i feel it doesnt take into account the leveling system of cannith crafting. ignoring the fact that many people reached max levels due to shenagans, isnt it a rather large time and material sink just to get current crafting levels up to a point its worth using? i feel you are making cannith crafted items sound as if they were readily available to everyone who logs in, when realistically you would need to commit strongly to building those levels to be able to craft, and during that time frame all you have is random gen or whatever. You use the weaker tier (rlg) until the better tier (cc) becomes available. is that not progression?
i understand that you dont want to repeat the cycle of invalidating the previous update's loots (whether its the last adventure pack, the last system or the last meta). if the benefit of crafting is less valuable than the time/material spent to get to that point, its not worth investing in at all as a player.
if you created a toon right now with the soul purpose of maxing out crafting levels to craft some +6 flex str shards or whatever is the top tier crafting items these days, how long would that take, shenagans-free? would it be more efficient to farm chests or level crafting? the answer is always farm chests, since you need the essences or the plat regardless, and in that time you will either out level your needs or find something sufficient.
i would bet that regardless of any other factors, the crafting system will feature a grind that takes ages, and takes into account the fact that the current system's materials are heavily saturated in the games economy due to shitty coders. that means you are all starting at 0. theyll call em legendary essences and epic essences to seperate them from the greater and lessers. I dont believe that being able to craft shit you other wise wont find would hurt any other loot system, as long as they keep named/raid loots on their pedestal, cannith crafting is concealed behind a massive time sink, and random gen effects/strength are comparable to craftable items.
your argument is that we are giving everyone the ability to pump out crafted versions of perfect rlg which will invalidate 2 tiers of loot, perfect rlg and rlg. i hope to express that is simply a flawed opinion, as those without the massive investment to crafting will be exempt from these benefits, and require both PRLG and RLG, while also allowing those who have invested the time to create items that otherwise might be unattainable while simultaneously reducing the demand slightly for PRLG in end game die hard players, which will help newer players chances of acquiring decent PRLG as an unintended effect of the still limited but increased availability.
Fair points. There is the initial crafting grind as well as the ongoing grind for whatever ingredients you need to make the items. They don't get created out of thin air. And both of those need to be considered in the formula of what kind of power to give.
Crafting will always have these advantages over RLG:
Ability to select the slot
Ability to get the highest density (3 effects)
Ability to include augment slots and innate properties (silver/metalline/etc)
Ability to select complimentary effects to each other and your build.
Those all add obvious value and "power" to the crafting system.
The costs will always be:
The effort to level crafting in the first place. And the opportunity cost this has on questing.
The effort to collect the ingredients you need to craft the things you want. This is somewhat complimentary with questing, but can conflict with other questing goals.
The above has always been the trade off.
The new X factor with the new crafting system is the actual value of each of the 3 effects. Realistically, getting 3 complimentary effects that are at the mid line for values (+14 on a stat on an ML 30 item, +6 on an Insightful Stat, thus a +14, +14, +6 item of two stats you desire) is a 1 in 100,000 RLG proposition. Meaning you might pull 1 a year, if you are lucky. You could go years and never get one. And that's not even close to the top possible.
So how long should it take gather ingredients to craft that? To level to a point where you can craft that? What about the "perfect" item? That's a tough thing to answer. Place the bar too low and crafting becomes mandatory and loot gen becomes nothing but meh fodder for the deconstruction engine. Place the bar to high (or specifically rule out the high end entirely) and people say "fuck it".
The problem is, where ever you place the bar someone will bitch. Dumbasses like Uurlock want crafting to be all powerful and unlimited and easy. (once you have gotten the crafting levels ground out). Others want serious limits on crafting. Mainly, I think, because they don't want to do it.
A middle ground needs to be found. They will know they have it in the right range if the Uurlock morons hate it AND the crafting haters hate it. That is the key to compromise. Everybody leaves a little pissed off.