not everyone gets into crafting to sell. some of us get into it so we can make things for our alts and ourselves. to deny us the right to have all of the recipes defeats the purpose of crafting to be self-sufficient. if eq were to go to such a system, i would definitely find another game to play because that would be the last straw for me. i pay for the game and i expect to access ALL of it, not just parts of it. tradeskilling is my forte. it is why i play the game. i would never play a game that denied me access to recipes. even faction recipes have a path to earning them. for me, it is not about the money or the economy - it is about being self sufficient.
No one's trying to deny anyone anything, but I think you're asking for a bit too much. Sadly, the devs have continued to cave on this kind of thing. Crafting (and the game in general) was meant to be a cooperative experience, not an engine for self-sufficiency. Crafting used to be a forte, now it's just another character trait. Self-sufficiency is actually a bad thing, when it goes to the extent that it does in an MMO. Pardon us for sticking around longer and favoring the old days where certain things are concerned. Back in the day, we didn't complain about drowning in harvests. We complained about a distinct lack of materials like ashen root. I used to have people come to me with big furniture orders. Now I'm lucky to see any single item leave my broker box over the course of a month.
no i am not asking a bit much. they advertise that you can play the game your way. they also accommodate solo play. how would you feel if your class were divided up they way you are suggesting that my crafting class should be? you as a warrior would only get a certain amount of disciplines and another warrior would get a different set so you would be forced to play together to get the benefit of your total disciplines- if you can find your counter part that is. it would be just your luck that every warrior in your guild had your half of the set. or worse yet, you followed the a, b, c route and would have to find all of those warriors to make just one warrior. then you would need four mages to make one complete mage. don't you see how stupid that would be? crafting classes are exactly that - classes. there is as set of recipes for each class. we shouldn't need 4 alts to create one carpenter class because someone decided it would be a good idea to divide our classes up and force us to group- and those how solo hate being forced into anything. the reason i play this game is because i can solo. i don't need anyone else to enjoy it. you can't force me to group- not even in crafting. i don't want to be dependent on other people to do my crafting any more than i want to depend on any other person to help me adventure. you might want to be dependent on other people, but this goes back to the "you can't force me to group with you" thing. you also can't force me to buy from you. i simply won't do it. the day eq2 decide it needs to force people to group and buy from each other is the day you will see people dropping this game by the thousands. there are a lot of solo players in this game and we won't be bullied by you or anyone else.
You've got it backwards. We've seen people drop out because things have become too easy. Most of my original guild left years ago because of this. People who group and raid continue to complain about things like being forced through solo questlines to get to the gear they need to advance. Stop taking my responses so personally. Everything is so subjective with you and you're missing the big picture. When MMOs get too many people running around doing their own thing only playing for themselves, things get boring and the game dies.
there have been plenty of threads about forced grouping and enough people voiced their objections that by now you should know it is not something we want. no one wants to feel FORCED to do anything. no one wants to have to group. i certainly don't and there have been plenty of others who have said the same thing. it is not just about me. there are a lot of people who want to solo and enjoy the game. again, why don't we take whatever class you are and give you only 1 third of your class spells and see how effectively you work in a group or alone? you are talking about dividing up my recipes for my class. not a good idea at all.
besides, there are quests where different CLASSES of tradeskillers have to work together- like the tradeskill epic and coldain shawl quest. to ask different CLASSES to work together is a totally different thing from splitting a class into several parts. if you try to do that, you will find mass confusion and a demand that they do the same thing to adventure classes- and you would quickly find that wouldn't work so well for you.
care to quote me (or whoever) on this? I don't know where this class splitting business is coming from, but I don't remember seeing anyone say anything about this.
i quote: senarios a - c equals a class split. if only a percentage of the recipes were available to each crafter per class, that would be like giving only a percentage of spells to each wizard. each tradeskill is a class. each class needs all of their recipes to be effective, just as each wizard needs all of their spells to be effective. when you start taking away the recipes from a class, you have divided it as effectively as if you divided any other class. i don't want my class divided. my carpenter needs all of her recipes and to take part of them away would not be right.
also i don't understand the assertion that "everyone has the same recipes". every carpenter has all of the carpenter recipes. every tailor has all of the tailoring recipes. etc. that is as it should be. however, there are divisions of classes. an alchemist can't make carpenter recipes. a sage can't make provisioner recipes. so i don't get why anyone would say that everyone gets the same recipes. and no- 100% of players cant make say a "High Keep Wash Stand". only high ranking carpenters can. Carpenters who took the time and made the effort to get to 95. Sages can't make it. Artisans can't make it. so no. 100% of the players can't make everything.
looks to me like you agreed with him. if you didn't you should have said so. and the posts you made after that one seemed to support him.
In the past, I've actually made quite a lot of plat from crafting. You won't make money selling stuff that you're grinding on, but you could make quite a bit by researching the market for needs. I made plat even buying harvestables from the broker, especially rares, which is my way of judging whether crafting is useful in a game (else, you're better off just harvesting). Almost all games fail that test except for EQ2 and Anarchy Online (perhaps Eve, but it has other issues that prevent newbs from competing with old timers). Until level 90+, mastercrafted gear is actually better than most quested gear and reactant gear is better than gear in old raid zones. Upon one of my returns to EQ2, I even up-graded one of my level 90 toons, who had done all the solo content prior to COE, with hand-crafted gear until she had received quest rewards from COE. I say "in the past" deliberately. Before, mastercrafted gear was deliberately designed, even amazingly fine-tuned, to be better than gear an adventurer could obtain by soloing, but not as good as gear that could be obtained by grouping or raiding (as it should be). That is no longer the case with new content (level 95 master-crafted fabled isn't even close to what you can get as rewards from solo questing), and there is little market now for low level gear. :/ But I've just returned after several months, so don't for sure if that's still the case.
Well, for common quested stuff vs Mastercrafted, yes, with one exception. It breaks down a bit in the 70s due to drops, not quests. Legendary loot drops in Kunark like candy, and it is good stuff. Pretty much the only reason I used crafted stuff in that range for my bruiser was for the healing proc experimentation could add. My fury though didn't bother. Then you hit Odus, which is garbage solo. Pretty much upgraded nothing on my Fury, just kept using the Kunark stuff, due to how crappy the loot in that range is. Did upgrade my bruiser there, but she was in crafted stuff and I skipped from T6 leather to T8 with her, so she was due for an upgrade. Fabled is still good, of course, but that's dependent on getting reactants, as well as doing the research. Not exactly reliable. If you're doing it yourself, either you'll have a high level toon so you can twink (and that opens up things like the level 85 gear from ToS) or you most likely won't be able to acquire much. Overall, the crafted stuff is worth using, and even if it isn't as good as dropped stuff for certain classes in Kunark, it is still relatively easy to get, especially if you have a character with the +rare harvest crafting prestige AA. Also,on the fabled 95 stuff: the base versions are pretty much equal to what you get from the solo quest line, provided you use a refined rare (given how easy rares are to get now, no clue why people use regular ones for that 95 fabled stuff) and experiment on the stuff. The advanced versions are superior. Of course, then you get stuff from the daily/weekly dungeons, and that outclasses them.
In the 90 range the mastercrafted can be out done by quested gear in waking lands. If you experiment the 92 MC you can do better than the quested 92, and in the range of the 92 dropped legendary. It still gets out performed by the 95 quested solo gear in Vespyr. The really surprising bit is that handcrafted 90 armor is the way to go for twinking. The stats blow away everything you'll find in Odus and Velious content. So you buy handcrafted as soon as you hit 90 and ride that until you get better from doing quests. You might even experiment it up because you will use it long enough to make it worth the extra effort. You also might consider getting a chest, wrist and belt made from colossal reactants as those are some excellent pieces that are worth the extra cost. If you do, definitely get the experimented up. Maybe do only 4 experiments so you can use a 5th experiment to unattune those pieces...
I've running a toon that's now 78 in Kunark, and I've found that the class specific gear from the Cloud Mount Timeline supplemented with gear from researched recipes means that nothing I've found in Kunark is an upgrade. But that's not really relevant to the point of my post, which was that I've made a lot of plat from crafting, the vast majority of which is from making armor (both tailoring and armorer) and jewelry. There are niches where things sell well, and niches where they don't - you have to research it. Or it used to be that way - when there was a healthy leveling population and prior to recent expansions, where the previous "Vision" for crafted gear appears to have been lost.
That's what I meant when I said: I really didn't find experimented gear or colossal reactant gear worthwhile at the level 92+ range, primarily because that was my second toon to get to 95, so I had a lot of Heirloom gear my main adventure toon couldn't use from the Advanced Solo rewards (I've even been working on leveling a mage just to get some use of all that int/wis junk I found, heh). And most importantly, at that time, when I did bother to craft, the items were more valuable to other players than it was to me, so I sold them.
no- it can't. When i did wakened lands i was very disappointed. my experimented crafted gear was far better than anything i got questing. I kept my crafted gear until i began to get the gear in Vesspyr. And now i am getting even better gear with loyalty tokens.
It disappoints me when solo questing rewards are better than crafted gear. It means the crafted gear is useless, except for people who don't do quests.
i did all of the quests and my crafted gear was still way better. If you experiment on them to bring them up to at least visionary you will have better gear than when questing until you get to the vesspyr line.
Didn't really find the Cloud set worth using myself. Just look at the stats on the helms, for example. Just blech. And then compare that to things like Sathaz's Dou Li... Of course, I still went crafted for proc reasons with my brawler. Didn't bother with a single piece of the Cloud gear other than for looks. I don't know if the crafting gear "vision" has been lost though. Rather, it just seems the result of the rapid gear inflation over a short span of levels. If you compare T6 vs T7 gear, for example, there really isn't that much difference. Heck, use a refined mat for the T6 gear and you pretty much have the T7 gear... except for the mitigation degradation. That's a 10 level difference. But with the Velious expansions, stats just start to skyrocket upwards, within a very limited number of levels. The standard stuff we make is 90-92, on the low end of that. And once you do hit 95, you get the upgradable stuff from the advanced solo VI dungeons, as well as the quest line, so pretty much screwed there regardless. Of course, you do have the researched stuff, but why bother to pay big plat for something you'll quickly grow out of? With only 5 levels in the next expansion, it'll most likely be more of the same. Too fast to level. Too easy to a certain degree, at least with access to mercs. And then right into the grind for better gear, where crafters will most likely not be allowed to compete. Anyway, crafting definitely does have its value. The stats are good enough, and if nothing else, you can easily appeal to the twink crowd. I do feel for any new crafters though... seems like now it is "have access to a 95 crafter or get out"... The prestige tradeskill AAs just warp everything... harvest way more rares, make the rares even better, and drop a proc on every item you make. And then there's the research assistant stuff, which take way too bloody long to get the recipes for when it comes to the higher level things, and good luck getting the components in volume for the lower level ones.
