Crafted items have had stat-mismatch problems since...well...launch. Every time jewelery has been adjusted master crafted has been just barely compeditive with the treasured drops. Except you can find treasured drops with the right stats for your class and those are clearly better for your character. Then another change comes along and suddenly the treasured drops are clearly better than crafted jewelery. Crafted armor has much larger base stats, gives mittigation that is on par with its itemization level, and has blue abilities that may not match what players desire but at a given level they don't make treasured gear look better. The disparity between jewelery and armor is huge. Itemization wise...shouldn't they be equal? Apparently they arn't. The base stats...if you put all five stats on the same item why is it considered more powerful than an item that has only two stats? Each class only uses two stats, so other than saying that the item can be equipped by any class what does it matter? I think making all crafted jewelery have equal amounts of all stats will simplify things without overballancing crafted gear. Now to get to the custom part of this thread. Have crafted jewelery come in a crate that opens a UI box when you unpack it. In the box you get a menu of the possible blue stats the item could have. Choose 2 or 3 different stats (I'd suggest check boxes) and the item with those stats goes into your inventory. Offer a final confermation box that shows the item with the end stats and offers to cancle the entire process or continue. This way instead of making a set of fighter gear for "straight" fighters vs "crusaders", another set for "melee" priests vs "caster" priests, and whatever other requests other players might have you instead have a flexable system where the end user gets to make some simple choices. The experimentation system points out that this sort of thing could be done. Basically create an item with all of the blue stats...at zero. Check box flags the ones that should be improved. Further experimentation could be allowed or disallowed depending on if modifying the already modified fields is going to be an issue or not. If they can't be further modified I'd suggest setting the claimed jewelery to "attuned" when unpacked. If they can be experimented on, leaving them tradeable seems the most reasonable thing to do since most customers won't be experimentors. A final thought: since crafting is no longer about who has the most recipes receives an XP benifit, there really is no reason to encourage multiple sets of crafted gear when a broader single set could cover the entire range. I believe the current tools used in game could be retasked to make this idea work. If additional code is needed, it should be able to build on similar systems used in experimentation.
I see no reason to change how crafted stuff is made. other then basically stripping a huge amount of recipes out of the books and giving nothing back. heaven forbid someone actually have to look and see what jewelry or armor would work best for their toon.
I'll ask: who cares about the number of recipes? What benefit do you get from having a lot of them? The idea behind this is to make jewelry easier for the designers (not the customers) actually. Anytime you tweak the stats on anything there will be a certain population that doesn't react well to it. A lot of times crafted equipment is accused of missing certain play styles. If jewelry was broken up into fighter/scout and mage/priest but given a very similar set of choices for blue stats that wouldn't really subtract from the number of recipes in the books now. Add in a second set for resistance jewelry with choices between which resists are featured and your talking about the basic spread of jewelry now.
because I see it becoming this: Armorers now only have 2 recipes a tier. weaponsmiths like maybe what? 6? becuase it's start out with 7 peices of scout/fighter, and 7 peices of mage/priest....then someone will say 'why should I have to make 7 pieces...just let me make an armor crate like they have on the marketplace, since there's only 2 sets anyway. and lets face it. there's only 2 playstyles for MC gear. solo, and group. if your raiding, you ain't going to survive at all in MC gear. and a solo setup is pretty much identical to a group one. I think most this is from the fact that a priest gets higher stats in certain things because priests don't get ranged spell weapon stats on a lot of thier stuff. why don't you ask instead that they just remove that worthless ranged spell crap that doesn't do jack and adjust from there.
Not to ignore your argument, but the thread is focused on jewelry. It just isn't properly stated to compete with even treasured drops. MC Armor on the other hand is stated well enough to stand up to even legendary drops. Even fabled drops in the low tiers where the raid drops haven't been reitemized since launch. I'm not sure where you get this "group vs. solo" idea for crafted gear. As it is now there isn't any choice between what you can wear for one situation to the other. Even when there is some stat difference...isn't your most successful solo build going to also be your most successful group build? Well, unless your talking about experimenting up your leveling gear and the choice between heal and damage procs. Even with that kind of argument I think your only focused on the 90 range. I'm more concerned with the 1-90 usefulness of HC and MC gear. Honestly by the time your looking at doing end-game instances you should of replaced all of the MC gear with rewards from the last set of solo quests. I can't really in good faith say that MC gear should carry you into end-game group content. I've always felt that crafted gear is mostly intended to get you to the end game, not be your end-game.
The entire sub 90 itemization needs to be redone anyway, before anyone points out that it would be a lot of work, I'd be happy to do it for free. Anyway, problem is also because combat is very easy, Tanks still see a benefit from upgrading their Armour, but for jewellery as well as all Scout, Priest and Mage gear you can very easily get by with just using what you come across by chance while grinding solo.
