Craft : Current state

[Kylashandra]

A few thoughts on the current state of Crafting on Ror. I have always crafted for my guilds since the Live server, and there are clearly a few things that feel more and more frustrating. Some of it might be linked to the ability patch and the complete crash of PvE post patch, but some come also from clear choices from the dev team over the years.

* Gathering Skills *

- Scavenging : It's a personal feeling, but it seems it's getting very hard to get a single purple fragment from a full dungeon run. Previously, you would get an average of 4 - 6 on a full GB or city dungeons run, even lvl 200 blue fragments are on the rare side, you could get over 20 from a single run, it's closer to 4 - 6 on average recently. Is it linked to a code change post ability patch ? I know loot tables were affected, so craft gathering drops might have been as well. Scavenging being the only source of Armor fragments, it also makes the Armor Talismans the most expensive talis in-game for no real reason at all (armor is not a stat you would heavily invest in for most of the classes currently).

- Butchering : We need more bats. Previously, the game had a day/night cycle on some of its fauna but nowadays we have a single spawn of a couple of lvl 200 bats that cannot offer a real convenient source of wings. Otherwise, overall, butchering is fine.

- Cultivating : Why was it decided that Liniments should be infinitely more harduous to craft than on live ? On live, you would drop the purple seeds once, get a normal output from it, compared to only one crafting component per cycle on a purple seed. Purple seeds were also infinitely easier to get. Liniments provide powerful buffs BUT alot less powerful than it was on live since the decision was made to disallow stat stacking, nonetheless they were made not only shorter duration but also infinitely harder to craft. At the moment, only a few liniments are indeed useful due to the fact most won't stack with group buffs/ self buffs so why should they remain so hard to craft ? The blue seeds added on RoR are also a mistake for me, you need a reliable source of crafting, not a one-time seed.
Concerning the other seeds, I will talk of them in the crafting skills part bellow.

- Salvaging : currently the easiest way to get fragments since scavenging is so unreliable. It's hard and costy to lvl up, and will ultimately be able to provide only half of the fragments you need, since you will mostly obtain purple frags from purple drops (golden ones having the possibility of yielding blue instead of purple frag), and those that are reiably farmable are those from Gunbad bags, which are class specific. Hence if you are a magic class, you can only get wisdom/int/tough/HP/ init frags but will not get any STR / Ballistics / WS, same for a melee class who won't get INT or WIS frags. You could say that you can hope for your groupmates to pass on their armor drops in Bastion to be able to get other archetypes items to break, but first, it almost never happen outside of a full guild group, secondly it will only be set armor drops which will not give purple fragments on a 100% basis, it feels closer to 50% purple / 50% blue. Given the pain it is to level up this gathering skill compared to butchering or salvaging (cultivation is a very long run, but it is not costy, and can be shortened by buying the soil/water/... reagents), it is still the most profitable one but there should be more ways to get non Archetype specific frags - the solution might be to up the rate of purple fragments on the set armor parts.

* Crafting Skills *

Talisman Making : I adressed most of the issues in the gathering part.

Apothecary : a very flawed version of its O.G counterpart on live. It seems it was made purposedly far more frustrating and limited than the live version.
First, the restriction on multipliers / extenders. Most potions on live would ever require ONE single Stabilizer (namely the Goldweed), opening the opportunity for more combinations of multipliers / extenders. On Ror, you need 2 Stabilizers on the non liniment potions, which means you can only add either an extender OR a multiplier. It results in the fact that most potion craft yields 2 potions at best, the only exception being the Draught of Recovery that can be produced with a multiplier. Most of the other potions require the extender to be even remotely useable (5 minutes vs 60mn for the buffs), which means you will only yield 2 per craft. It results in an endless cultivation or butchering grind, which explains the scarcity or the AH prices of most of the staple food potions (armor,regen,linis, absorb...). It's boring and painful to grind for such meager yields, why would it had to be much harder than live craft? In most guilds, only a few people truely commit to craft and they have to go through this endless grind as soon as they want to mass produce. Solution : Bring the top tier stabilizers back to their live version, allowing the extender + multiplier combination OR if you want to keep it painful, at least shorten the cultivation duration substantially (yes you can buy the top tier soil/water/nutrients to shorten it but that would make the final product even more expensive).
About the Liniments, I already covered the topic quite a bit in the cultivating part. On live, iirc, you would use 2 top tier stabilizer and could then either have a multiplier or an extender for 5x 30 minutes linis or 2x60 mn linis. In the continuation of what I said earlier, linis are not OP considering the stat stacking issue (at least the O.G linis, not the special event ones which can be pretty OP), so allowing a better yield or a longer duration shouldn't be so unbalanced and it would help the crafter greatly.

That coverrs most of it, all in all, craft is in a very frustrating position as it is nowadays, discouraging most to invest time into it. And those who do are faced with an endless grind with very meager yield (except for the salvage/talisman making combination which still comes with its archetype limitations as stated above).

[Endari]

I mostly agree with all this but you are being way to kind to cultivation and butchering. LoTD pulled major weight in live by being a massive source of high level butchering mats that simply don't exist now, butchering drop rates need to be up dramatically and either more mobs or just make the current mobs drop more than one type of mat. Cultivation just plain sucks, way to many failures even if you add the extras. It just takes FOREVER to build up stacks of anything.

There is not enough population for the current system to work. Personally I think you should put all green pots on merchants for cheap, level the playing field so everyone can be running the bare minimum pots required to compete.

[trh382]

A few points

1. Cultivation - I think the major problem here is that it can cause some players frames issues so a lot of people dont do it while pvping. Nonetheless cultivating mats are very cheap (5-7g per stack usually). If this situation changes, I think folks would start finding it very frustrating to acquire potions.

2. Scavenging - I have not had the experience of lower frag drop rates but its hard to say for sure. Do you think you might be skipping more trash? That being said, checking the drop rates is a good idea. I think the problem with scavenging is that it will be low value once chap 22 and talisman box spam is back. I think you could consider increasing blue/purple frag drop rates and removing talisman boxes from chap 22 to be replaced with large war token amounts. This way the war tokens convert into lots of cheap blue talismans and the purples have to come from scavengers and salvagers. This would need to combine with an increase in mats from salvaging to ensure there are enough wounds, weapon skill, initiative, and toughness talismans. Alternatively, wounds/weapon skill/initiative/toughness could be added to scavenging and salvaging rebalanced to focus more on providing essences.

3. Apothecary - I like apothecary in its current state - although I think it is only viable because of the very large and cheap supply of goldweed/gobswort/fusk that seems to constantly end up on the AH. If cultivating products actually cost what their time input is, I think it would be a different story.

4. Butchering. I disagree that you want more bats. Instead what I would suggest is adjusting the usefulness of other mobs. Currently at level 40 there are 6 useful mobs to farm: Scorpions, Wyverns, Spiders, Cold Ones, Lizards, and Bats. While 13 of the mob types: Boars, Bears, Cats, Manticores, Dogs, Horrors / Flamers, Nurglings, Mountain Lions, Squigs, Vines, Vultures, and Wolves are not really worth farming. By adding more relevant mats to some of these mobs - such as an absorb mat to one of them or increased primal drop rates to the ones that drop willpower mats, you could add butchering options in a more fluid way.

Are consumables too hard to get?

Currently you should be able to farm 50 scales in an hour. 50 scales = 100 hours of armor pots (the extra stuff you get more than covers the vials/goldweed etc costs). so the average player need only spend 1% of their time farming armor pots to have full armor pot coverage. When combined with other passive sources of income that most players have, it doesnt seem to me that acquiring armor pots is prohibitive.

The 1500 green HP pots are free and you can farm war tokens incredibly quickly to acquire the blue HP pots. War crests trade in for the pvp pots, as do scarabs - both at efficient rates.

AP pots are very cheap due to their massive supply from cultivating. Meanwhile purple seed spam has suppressed the price of most liniments to 50-75s.

Another way of thinking about it is:
Green HP pot: free
Green Armor pot: 1g
Decent liniment: 50 silver
Green AP pots: 20 silver each

Supposing you use 5 AP pots an hour - thats 3g per hour of play. If you can farm 150 gold per hour butchering or gunbad farming (which basically everyone can do) you are talking about 1 hour of farming per 50 hours of warband play situation and thats assuming you craft nothing yourself and pay all the AH markups and dont do any events / other content to supplement your consumable or gold supply.

Literally from RvR kills alone, you should be getting a couple of gold of greens per hour.

I think the consumable situation in this game is very manageable.

[Kylashandra]

- The only reason why there is such an input of goldweed/gobswort/fusk on the AH is because some people don't put the timesink of actively cultivating on their playtime but have automated the task by other means... However i don't like borderline automation in AFK mode as a legit way to get those.

- Concerning your calculations on armor pots, 50 scales an hour is a very low drop rate when you could get hundreds in an hour of LoTD scarabs farming on live. If everyone was farming its own scales it would be fine I guess, 1 hour for 100 hours of playtime, but in most guild you have one or two people crafting for everyone and being able to farm in batch is very precious time gain for crafters.

[trh382]

- The only reason why there is such an input of goldweed/gobswort/fusk on the AH is because some people don't put the timesink of actively cultivating on their playtime but have automated the task by other means... However i don't like borderline automation in AFK mode as a legit way to get those.

- Concerning your calculations on armor pots, 50 scales an hour is a very low drop rate when you could get hundreds in an hour of LoTD scarabs farming on live. If everyone was farming its own scales it would be fine I guess, 1 hour for 100 hours of playtime, but in most guild you have one or two people crafting for everyone and being able to farm in batch is very precious time gain for crafters.

100% agreed on the automation happening - not sure how its done, but the numbers produced show that it must be happening

I think they should remake cultivating to be a set of plots that take 20 hours to grow so that you harvest once a day. Give x100 or x25 production (or something substantial). This also solves the issue of lagging with replanting in orvr.

Agreed that its low compared to the situation you describe in LOTD, but I think the current rate produces an adequate supply for folks' needs. Nonetheless, if more efficient farming opportunities were added I dont think it would be the worst thing.

[Nameless]

Talisman making got the problem that devs introduce too often ways to gain free talismans, so everything beside armor issuper cheap