Bowyering

[sidereal]

Anyone know what professions are involved in the making of archery supplies?

My searching has thus far revealed that there was at one time a Lumberjack profession, but that went away, so yeah.

[Morfiend]

As of right now, I dont think there is one.

There was a dev post on this and he said, there are plenty of good shops to buy bows at.

[Big Gulp]

All I know is that I think it sucks that in order to do tailoring I had to take skinning as my second profession.  Why in the hell isn't it tied into leatherworking wholesale?  I feel like I've been screwed out of an actual, useful profession.

[schild]

There was a dev post on this and he said, there are plenty of good shops to buy bows at.

What he really said was, "FUCK, I knew we forgot something. Put up some shops peons." Meh.

[sidereal]

The problem with picking tradeskills is that their utility is going to depend on things outside your control and that you probably can't predict.

The safe route is to take a vertical pair, like skinning and leatherworking.  Then you're guaranteed to be able to provide finished goods.

A more fun option would be to go straight gatherer, probably mining and skinning, and sell your stuff at the Auction Houses.  Apparently miners have been making bank throughout the beta, and skinners aren't far behind.  Another option would be to just craft and take something like Engineering and Leatherworking, then buy your raw materials at the AH.  But if you do the first and nobody is buying raw materials, you're dicked.  And the same with the last if no one is selling.  Probably only safe if you're in a biggish guild to make sure buyers and sellers are available.

BG, I've read a bunch of suggestions that Enchanting is a better pair with Tailoring.  It's expensive early, but later you can make items with tailoring and then disenchant them to get Enchantment juice for better stuff.

[MrHat]

All I know is that I think it sucks that in order to do tailoring I had to take skinning as my second profession.  Why in the hell isn't it tied into leatherworking wholesale?  I feel like I've been screwed out of an actual, useful profession.

I don't understand.  Tailoring uses mostly (until late late levels) cloth drops from humanoids.

[Big Gulp]

I don't understand.  Tailoring uses mostly (until late late levels) cloth drops from humanoids.

I didn't mean tailoring, I meant leatherworking.  In EQ they didn't differentiate between the two, and tailoring is the term I'm used to.

[Phred]

You can mail stuff to your alts, so there's no reason not to make a forager/skinner alt, only need to be 10 or so to gather tons of hides. You can drop professions too.

[Riggswolfe]

Making a forager/skinner alt will only work for the low-level stuff. All gathering skills require you to go into tougher and tougher areas. It'd probably work best the other way around. Make the alt the end-product guy, and have your main gather materials.

[Kageru]

Some items can only be crafted in dangerous areas, are no drop on creation or require construction skills to use. So there are limitations on that too, which is rather clever.

[Riggswolfe]

True but you can create alot more things with the alt as the maker character than the other way around. You can't make any of the truly god awesome topend things but you can probably make enough so it's a good income.

[Phred]

I actually like the skinning and mining part of the trades. I like the excuse to take a break from questing or killing mobs and kick back and skin corpses. Even fishing is sort of amusing, and my rogue is wearing boots he fished up which are better than the ones he can tailor at the moment. I even made a bit of silver selling the embossed tunics he can make on the actioneer. I'm a bit disappointed leathercrafters can't make backpacks though.

[HaemishM]

I discovered last night that I'd read the WoW pages on crafting skills wrong. I took herbalism, expecting to take mining so I could do both Alchemy and Blacksmithing. Nope. Herbalism is a primary profession. It seems they really only want characters to do one real tradeskill (as herbalism, mining and other "gathering professions" I don't consider real tradeskills) instead of jack-of-all-trades stuff. Way to force character "interdepence."

They do have some nice tweaks to the crafting interface (the "Craft all" option which crafts as many products as you have materials for), but it's still a pretty boring exercise.

[Dren]

They do have some nice tweaks to the crafting interface (the "Craft all" option which crafts as many products as you have materials for), but it's still a pretty boring exercise.

That will probably always be true to some point, but I like how WoW has done it so far.  You never fail if you have the resources and the recipe and the skill, plus the highlighting shows you which recipes will actually gain you skill. (grey, yellow, orange, etc.)

The craft all is awesome.  It is really just a macro built in, but damn haven't we all been asking for this to be put INTO the game rather than relying on a second party solution?  Other than lag, this gets done rather quickly and I can use the time to stretch a bit and change the cat litter.

True, not the absolute best solution, but the best one I've seen so far.  I'm enjoying it.

[Alkiera]

They do have some nice tweaks to the crafting interface (the "Craft all" option which crafts as many products as you have materials for), but it's still a pretty boring exercise.

That will probably always be true to some point, but I like how WoW has done it so far.  You never fail if you have the resources and the recipe and the skill (snip)
True, not the absolute best solution, but the best one I've seen so far.  I'm enjoying it.

Whereas, I far prefer EQ2's crafting for being involving during the process, and giving good experience for the result, so you don't have to do a major grind.  WoW's system is like a no-fail version of EQLive's current system, IMO.  EQ2, on the other hand, allows you to fail, but also allows your actions during the crafting process to effect the outcome(a pristine weapon is better than a normal one, is better than shaped, is better than crude).  Your character's skill levels matter more than your button mashing, but the button mashing has a significant effect on the outcome.

As far as being a better EQ1, it's fine... but it's still a grind-o-matic crafting system.

Alkiera

[Kageru]

... and exactly how many crafting combines will it take a moderately intelligent person before they are bored to death of the crafting mini-game in EQ2? I'm willing to bet that the answer comes out as pretty low number because once again they seem to have confused "activity" with "fun activity" or "challenging activity". Exactly as they've done with the insane number of sub-combines and recipes.

I fully expect EQ2 crafting to be even less popular than EQ1 crafting, which is quite an achievement. Of course i'll continue to watch the dominant EQ trade skills site. They've had a lot to do with the current EQ2 system. The problem is they're obsessive compulsives who want trade-skills to be so tedious that masters are rare.

Crafting just isn't varied enough to be a game by itself. It has to be integrated into the adventuring gameplay (which can be made challenging because it has risk). This is ideally in harvesting, crafting and the products produced.

[Phred]

If crafting in EQ2 is any more involved than fishing in WoW I want no part of it. Wow's fishing was amusing at first but it gets really old staring at the little bobber waiting for it to dip. And you can't go by sound if anyone is fishing beside you. On the plus side, I did fish up some nice boots for my rogue.

[Dren]

I don't want a mini-game to my crafting.  It gets old (said many times above.)  As also stated above, I want my game to be in the collecting of resources, which is what WoW has (at the higher levels.)  You eventually HAVE to go to other locations to get resources and many times they are dangerous.  That is where the adventure is, not the actual crafting.

WoW gives you the item at full strength if you get all the required resources and the recipe/skill.  I like that the actual crafting portion is just the finishing action to the act.

It is a grind at the beginning because resources are abundant so you can grind right up to near 100 in most anything right away.  It isn't like that later on.  The resources are too hard to find and it then becomes tied more to quests and adventures you take on yourself.

I view WoW crafting as just another quest system that is more voluntary and provides for a little extra cash on the side.  So far that view hasn't disappointed me, but I haven't leveled very high yet either.  So, we'll see.

[Alkiera]

I don't want a mini-game to my crafting.  It gets old (said many times above.)  As also stated above, I want my game to be in the collecting of resources, which is what WoW has (at the higher levels.)  You eventually HAVE to go to other locations to get resources and many times they are dangerous.  That is where the adventure is, not the actual crafting.

EQ2 has the resource collection thing as well.  Tier-1 resources spawn in easy-to-reach low level zones.  Once you get past 9th Artisan, recipies start to require tier-2 ingredients, which are in higher level zones.  After 20, again, more difficult ingredients to find, in more dangerous areas.  All of which is based on your crafter level, not your adventuring level.

EQ2 also has harvesting skill reqs on what you can harvest... if your mining isn't 40, don't bother trying to harvest iron in Antonica, you can't do it.  I hear the next cap is 90.  It's a bit of a grind getting your skills up, mostly due to having to vie with 1500 other people for the same resource nodes.  Once it spreads out a little bit, and the server matures some, it'll help.

Alkiera

[Der Helm]

After 20, again, more difficult ingredients to find, in more dangerous areas.  All of which is based on your crafter level, not your adventuring level.

Which means you have to grind two different levels to become a decent crafter in this game ? Why do make it sound as if that is something good ?


Edit: nah, too lazy to fix grammar ...

[Rasix]

Why not just have the ingredients magically appear in your backpack at the push of a button?  Or we coud have happy resource gardens where everyone can skip and whistle while plucking everything they'll ever need out of ground.

You have to make tradeskilling somewhat difficult in order to not uber-fuck your economy.   You have two routes you can go here: make the combination process itself difficult or make the resource acquistion difficult.   Most opt for the second, because no one yet has made being virtual blacksmith interesting yet.  And mostly, outside of UO and SWG tend to limit this by content restrictions. Hopefully someday we'll get more convergence on this area (but not in the EQ2 way, PLEASE GOD NO).  ATITD handles this a bit better (as it should, it's a damn tradeskill game) but their implementation still skews the balance of power a bit too much toward the catass.  

SWG or UO where creating an item was more than just combining resources would probably be optimal.  But, if you've followed either game, both had hyper inflation occur on a level that would make WW2 era Italy cringe.   So... I guess the answer is... there's no easy answer.  We'll continue to get uninspired crafting designs until someone stumbles across the formula for an easily accessible yet challenging system that doesn't have the potential to allow anyone to completely destroy the ingame economy.

[Paelos]

Resource collection is much better than simply tying the crafting game to how many foozles you can whack for gold. That has been the entire point of the crafting models like DAOC's, which now stands as the gold standard for sucking in my book after making a Legendary Weaponcrafter. I find the hunt of finding materials much more invigorating than simply buying and grinding them off of merchants. In addition, the "create all" button is the function that should have been introduced years ago. Simply letting people use that macro proves that the inhibitor to many masters isn't boring time spent grinding, its hunting down necessary parts through mining or auctioneering. That's a much more realistic (in terms of time spent) way to keep numbers lower than the normal "grind until you hate staring at the forge" model.

[sidereal]

We'll continue to get uninspired crafting designs until someone stumbles across the formula for an easily accessible yet challenging system that doesn't have the potential to allow anyone to completely destroy the ingame economy.

WoW is the best I've seen yet, which isn't really saying much.  ATITD has the potential to be the best, in that the technology tree is actually interesting and fun to climb, but anyone who can hand collect three thousand wood for charcoal and not burn out of the game isn't someone I want to meet.

The biggest danger to the economy, even in WoW, is that the crafting raw materials are collected essentially automatically in the process of playing the rest of the game.  I've played a skinner, a miner, and an herbalist, and in no case did I feel like I had to go out of my normal quest runs or take particular time away from leveling in order to gather materials.  Sources are effectively infinite, and they're exploited as a natural consequence of running around.  So raw materials enter the economy at a steady rate proportional to the number of players and their catassery.  Materials are consumed at a rate proportional to the number of players, but not their catassery.  So if you have a large number of very active players, you get too many resources.  If you have a large number of casual players, you don't have enough.  And there's no player adjustment to the economy here.

One way to solve this, and make crafters a little more interesting to play, would be to make resource gathering a more isolated activity from questing and leveling, so that people choose whether they want to finish up quests or go get raw materials.  This allows players to adjust their activity to a dynamic economy.  If prices go up because nobody is going to get materials, people will start to go get materials, and vice versa, until it stabilizes again.

The easiest way to do that would be to make gathering take a lot of time.  For example, after you kill a raptor, to skin it you have to hit the skin button and hang around the body for 5 minutes.  You can do other stuff, like fight or craft or whatever.  But you have to stay close to the body for that long, then you get 10 light leather.  Now people are making the choice whether to gather or advance.

[Aslan]

BG, I've read a bunch of suggestions that Enchanting is a better pair with Tailoring.  It's expensive early, but later you can make items with tailoring and then disenchant them to get Enchantment juice for better stuff.

I haven't tried this yet myself, but as a mage, this is my plan.  Even if I have to buy skins in the AH, I will still be better off in the long run being able to MAKE magic items to use for enchanting...

[MrHat]

The easiest way to do that would be to make gathering take a lot of time.  For example, after you kill a raptor, to skin it you have to hit the skin button and hang around the body for 5 minutes.  You can do other stuff, like fight or craft or whatever.  But you have to stay close to the body for that long, then you get 10 light leather.  Now people are making the choice whether to gather or advance.

Oh sweet Jesus no.

Oh, and you do have to take time out of your schedule if you are planning to make something w/ that copper.  Lets say you want to make a copper vest, and that vest takes 8 bars to make.  Well, the person that requested it only gave you monies, not resources.  Your options are to go to the Auction House and wait around because that bullshit isn't proxied, or go out and get some copper.  Personally, I like it.

One thing I would add to it though, would be the whole "low quality/superior quality" aspect.  That is, you create and item and it comes out w/ high durability or extremely low durability.  All they would have to do is insert a little striking bar while you make the item ala Donkey Konga.  A bar w/ scrolling letters requires you to hit the letter when in the right spot.  If you don't get any, your item is still a good item, but it has 25% maximum durability it could have had.

[sidereal]

Your options are to go to the Auction House and wait around because that bullshit isn't proxied, or go out and get some copper.  Personally, I like it.

Maybe I'm doing it differently, but I don't see how you wouldn't already have some copper.  You gather that stuff as a natural consequence of adventuring.  So unless you're hardcoring crafting and not going out to quest or level, you should be gathering materials for free.  Like I said, I've never gone out of my way, but I never run out of raw materials unless I'm just on the edge of the required level to get it (in which case the drops are rare) or I just made 20 of something to jack up my crafting skill.  I'm drowning in medium leather and mageroyal.

Of course, this is from the perspective of a ~20th level character.  Maybe at the high levels there's some material you have to cross some misty mountaintop to gather, and that's nice and would introduce the flexible scarcity, but any solution like that should also apply to the medium/low levels.

[Paelos]

I can see where you are coming from on the idea that things are gathered through the normal span of questing and whatnot, but I don't think that kind of halfway gathering will sustain a higher level economy. At the higher levels, those materials for better items are not going to be easy to find due to the fact that they will be in hard to reach places. I would imagine some of the top tier mineral veins are in dungeons that aren't soloable at all. Obviously I can't speak on this for sure, but I've found that as I move up the mining ladder, copper still is abundant, but tin is not. That's an indicator to me of where I'm headed.

[MrHat]

I can see where you are coming from on the idea that things are gathered through the normal span of questing and whatnot, but I don't think that kind of halfway gathering will sustain a higher level economy. At the higher levels, those materials for better items are not going to be easy to find due to the fact that they will be in hard to reach places. I would imagine some of the top tier mineral veins are in dungeons that aren't soloable at all. Obviously I can't speak on this for sure, but I've found that as I move up the mining ladder, copper still is abundant, but tin is not. That's an indicator to me of where I'm headed.

This is true.  And unless you've been hoarding all the trusilver since you've been able to mine it, you'll never be able to make that armor piece.

Skinning/Leatherworking is different.  There is a lot of leather you can get from skinning.  And there are alot of mobs you can skin.  But waiting 10 mins in the same area just so you can skin something?

[Paelos]

You are correct, wait times should never be the inhibitor of market saturation for the MMOG economy. That's not a good way to keep people from reach goals, it only annoys the casuals and rewards the people with no lives. Mining in and of itself is a skill, outside of the numbers for your "skill" in the gathering craft. Minerals respawn in the same place after a matter of time, so exploration for the miner is key. Once you can find a good node, its going to be there for you later, so mapping it out is helpful. That's an important part of the WoW system that keeps me happy, it rewards the explorer talent in a meaningful way. The main problem I had with resources in SWG was that there were too many and they switched way to often. I wouldn't mind seeing a node switch every month or so, but doing it once a week is too much.

[Kageru]

I noticed WoW has another interesting mechanic. There are some player abilities that transform a found component (which I assume is rare) into a high level crafting component. The trick being that at least some of these abilities are on a 4 *day* timer. So while they can't restrict the input of raw materials they can control the inflow of craftables, without making the collection itself tedious.

Incidentally I don't expect the gathering to be restricted to the same level in EQ2. The designers originally aimed for crafting as a parallel path of progression (although they didn't come that close) and much of the XP grinding will be on open plains. Thus while the zones might be dangerous much of that dangerous can possibly be avoided while collecting... which was basically the SWG model unless I'm mistaken.

[Paelos]

I've noticed that occasionally I've had to go on a few copper runs to get the lower level components I need to skill up my Blacksmithing, but since copper is in the newb areas, its not tedious. I don't have to worry about aggro, and I just follow the mountain lines. However, the theme seems to be that the gathering skill always eclipses the crafting skill in numbers, so that definetely leads me to believe that the gathering was the inhibitor WoW devs designed the system around.

[Jayce]

We'll continue to get uninspired crafting designs until someone stumbles across the formula for an easily accessible yet challenging system that doesn't have the potential to allow anyone to completely destroy the ingame economy.

And everyone else in the universe copies it.

Materials are consumed at a rate proportional to the number of players, but not their catassery.

One thing I would have liked to see is (permanent) item degradation ala SWG or UO.  As painful as it probably would be for me personally right now, nothing drives a crafting economy like people whose equipment has either broken entirely or degraded to a shadow of its former stats.

[Fabricated]

From what I can tell mining resources in WoW may get a lot easier at higher levels. I've taken so many fucking flights over the Burning Steppes and the 3-4 other "OMG FIREY DANGER HELL" zones I can remember the resource nodes by heart.

Thorium, TrueSilver, Mythril, etc. seem to be all over the place in the high level zones, and while the monsters there are undoubtably impossible to solo, they seem to be loosely placed enough to allow for one to "MGS" around without much difficulty.

Resources only become a problem when you try to make stuff that's 5+ levels above you. Then you're at the mercy of the AH, or you have to go on mining expeditions with higher level characters protecting your ass.

[SurfD]

Indeed, I think that blizz should have coded it so that if somethin crafted breaks, it should cost sooo much to repair it that people would simply seek out a crafter to make a new item, rather then fix the broken one.

[Viin]

Making a forager/skinner alt will only work for the low-level stuff. All gathering skills require you to go into tougher and tougher areas. It'd probably work best the other way around. Make the alt the end-product guy, and have your main gather materials.

This doesn't work real well either, since they now require a minium level to increase your crafting skill. I think you have to be level 20 to get Journeyman crafting level. (I had tried this with a gnome engineer with my main mining - didn't last long).

I will say, First Aid kicks ass.