i found the research assistant stuff fine for lower levels, although i outgrew the quickly, but for higher levels i was very disappointed.
There's a big difference though between making an item or two for yourself and trying to be a craftsman who provides said item for others. For the former, you'll get a reactant or two along the way and be fine. For the latter, you won't get the volume of components you need. If I look at my server, for example, the cheapest non-95 reactant is the one for the level 70 stuff, with 4p being the current low. The next cheapest type is around 30p. If someone were buying those up and using them in quantity, the prices would go higher (though the 4p ones does make me want to research some level 70 stuff). Of course, there's the work for hire stuff, but I don't see anyone asking for the fabled stuff made at all on my server. Obviously stuff gets made, but I'm guessing it gets done by guildies or friends for the most part... so not really for profit work. And even if you could get a constant supply of reactants at say 20p a pop, you're pretty much only going to be selling to twinks. Your typical character at the appropriate level won't be able to afford it themselves. Many players won't know how to pull in enough cash. Even those that can, well, that's 20p, plus fuel, other mats, and mark-up, for a single slot. So how many pieces could they really afford to buy? For the cost of a few slots, they could almost just pay to get powered past that tier.
lol - and the op was complaining that everything was too plentiful and should be cut back. Of course, I don't try to make my money off tradeskilling. for me, the money is in lore and legend stuff, shinies, crafted items needed for quests, that sort of thing.
Funny, I make my money like most people in the game, Home invasion robbery and paid assassination Adventuring and Questing. While you can make plat through crafting, it takes time and effort. Even if all you do is look for people looking for commission work it means you can't do anything you won't abandon to go serve a customer. Considering that if you grouped up and did the ToV dungeons you should make about 20p a run, and most runs are around 30-45 min its really hard to get excited about the slim profits most crafting makes.
The original context was crafted gear vs. solo questing rewards, not drops from Sebilis. While it's true that Sebilis can be done solo now, it wasn't true when I first encountered Kunark. The balance that the crafting devs achieved between crafted, solo questing rewards, and dungeon rewards was very nicely done for the conditions at that time, although we can solo dungeons today that we didn't used to be able too. I'm not following your argument with 5 levels vs. 10. It makes me think about the Spinal Tap 11 argument, except in this case, it's 5.
Good movie. Basically, it used to work by providing a small amount of gain over ten levels. Because stats increased so slowly, that made it easy for the devs to give us recipes spread out over 10 levels, and have said recipes produce items that were fine for players to use for 10 levels. A Mahogany Longbow provides 34 to stats, while the next tier up, Eucalyptus, is 38. That 4 per stat between tiers is pretty standard. There's a bit of jump between T1 and T2, but generally, 4 per. Other stats, like potency and such, also slowly increased. Though you could gain some nice new power when the item gained an additional stat... the first time it got Crit Chance, for example. And that matches pretty well with your generic drops as well. And then you hit 90. A Bubinga Long Bow provides 138 agility, wisdom, and stamina. That's one tier up from Eucalyptus, yet the stats have increased by 100 over the previous tier. And that's reasonable against level 92 drops. The couple of 93 legendary items I have lying around, for example, have 152 and 166 respectively, while a level 90 has 97, and some older level 90 stuff I see on the broker has 60-70. By 95, we're looking at 187 as what your typical base-line legendary item has. That's just agil/wis/str, etc of course, but other stats jump up quite a bit as well. What used to take ten levels to gain in stats, we now do in two (slightly less even). And since most recipes are X0 or X2 in terms of the levels, it puts the devs in a bit of a pickle. If they give us 90 stats, it is quickly outdated. If they give us 95 stats, then we outdate all drops. And so they sort of drop us in the middle, even the level 90 handcrafted stuff. The only other option they really have is to essentially cram a tier of gear into 2 or 3 levels, with multiple "tiers" of gear in what used to be a single tier. And they're most likely going to have to do that in the next expansion, since it'll tack on another 5 levels, and crafted gear will have to catch up to the crazy gear inflation again.
actually, you got a huge stat increase with heroic armor at 85 and other armor which dropped was increased, for the most part, to match it. You still get ridiculously low armor from some level 90 areas in comparison to even those heroic stats. but at 86 in Velious you can find nice armor that is higher than your heroic armor.
Yeah, that's what I meant by it being a Spinal Tap 11 argument, except that I was thinking it was 5, but you might be right about 2. My point was that since they crammed 10 adventure levels into 5 (or 2), they should have done the same with crafting recipes, or at the very least, added crafting recipes that were worthwhile to make. So far, I haven't found any. The recipes I have obtained didn't make any sense: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/dust-of-the-progenitor.542325/#post-6078029
In some cases, they did cram recipes in. Where they normally followed a level pattern for when certain armor pieces show up in any given tier, they crammed things in to fit in the 90-95 range. Aside from spells, there aren't many items missing from the x5-x9 range. I'm curious to see where they go with this. Do we see another set of handcrafted / mastercrafted or will things be spread out and re-tuned a bit? I'm hoping for the latter, just to keep down the recipe count, but given the change in stats at 95, it'll probably be the former.
They've still got some recipes waiting out there. I'm still waiting anxiously for the bubinga salesman's crate. (Yes, I realize that the eucalyptus ones have plenty of slots, but that doesn't mean that I can't look forward to even more slots.)
It wouldn't make sense to introduce another set of handcrafted/MC armor for 95. The target for crafts has always been the leveling player and to get them into decent shape to get to the next tier. The 90 handcrafted does a very good job of this. From there the solo quests take you from 91-95. Unless the next expansion is too difficult for people in ToV quested gear to take on its solo content there isn't any need for a new set of crafted gear. Now there is a way to introduce a new set of crafted gear without it being handcrafted or MC quality. If new recipes were added that used dropped components it gives a distinct reason for there to be a higher quality crafted equipment. Lets say that dev is interested in creating two sets of crafted gear aimed at non-raiders. The first set is a twinking set for people with 100 characters that are bringing up a new toon to 95. It uses a ton of DI as well as assorted other rares (or green gems instead of DI, but lets face it that is the same as using DI) and creates a non-upgradeable fabled piece equal to drops from ToV:Mutation or Betrayal. The dropped gear is still better because it can be upgraded, but the crafted gear is a huge time saver. The second set would be aimed at non-raiders that want something nicer than what gets dropped in group instances. A set of fabled gear is generated that is stated as low end raid gear. The typical body part/rare drop mechanic gets used. Instead of needing 6 rare drops from boss mobs, make it to where you need 100 drops that come from any trash mob in the zone. Typical run would generate 4-12 drops per zone. This means on average each player would get 0-2 drops per run. This would encourage people to keep running group content as it would set long term goals. Also it would encourage more broker traffic since you need a lot of little pieces to make big items instead of people trading a small number of parts. More broker traffic means more plat consumed by broker fees. Lastly it encourages people to clear entire zones instead of skipping all the trash mobs. And what this does for crafting is it involves us in the beginning and end of this expansion. While making the end gear will be an uncommon event, it will happen often enough that most crafters will be incentivized to get the recipes. Hopefully this would be a reward for some crafting quest series.
i don't know, we are always headed up 5 more levels. there have only been a few expansions that didn't add levels. like now we are headed for 100. so wouldn't it make sense that if you were aiming at levelers, you would continue to make handcrafted armor better? it seems to me that mastercrafted- not simply handcrafted - is for giving a level playing field for non-raiders who simply want to play normal zones. certainly not for raiding or even heroic zones. but for regular solo or contested group zones. that said though, it would make sense to do it the way you are suggesting, provided soe wanted to make sense.
That Velious stuff is a bit off though. It comes from the expansion after the one that added 90, being there more to bridge the gap, to make it easier for people to start on the new expansion. They've done that same sort of thing with some previous expansions as well. The crafting recipes though come from before that. But yeah, that overlap is why you get that variance between the older stuff (the 60-70 stats) vs the newer ones (the 90ish stats) for the same level. I expect we'll see a new "tier" of crafted stuff for 95-100. Handcrafted usable at 95 or 96, with Mastercrafted a level or two above that. There's not much point in tossing it in now though. The VI quest line gear stats will most likely be considered outdated, and I'd expect stats on new crafted gear to be close to 4 yellow gemmed stuff (225ish, with stamina being over 50% more than that? Don't quite recall exactly, but a step up from VI stuff). A lot depends on how they handle the gear though. If they make gear relatively flat from 96-100, then the stuff we craft should be fine. If, on the other hand, they decide to scale it up over those 5 levels, we'll probably see a repeat of what we have here, with crafted gear not covering the later two-three levels (other than fabled researched stuff), and a quest line to insure people can get geared easily. Cramming two full tiers of gear (level 96 and 100 handcrafted) into a small space isn't something I think they'll do. That said, they could potentially put handcrafted at 96 and make the mastercrafted 99-100.
Every expansion pre-velious added 10 levels at a time, or no levels. AoD added 2 levels. CoE added 3 more. I have no idea how you get this "we are always headed up 5 more levels" idea from. Certainly not from the history of the game. By the by, there have been a lot of expansions that didn't add levels. Most of those expansions featured an expansion on the AA system. There have been more no-level-increase expansions than 2 and 3 level expansions combined. We're in uncharted waters here. I expected a 2 or 3 level increase but maybe the dev team is giving up the leveling mechanic after this expansion. Who knows? But if your going to play the history card...expect someone else to call you on it when you get it wrong. I certainly get called on it when I'm wrong.
I agree with with most of the post. Except the part about AoD adding levels. AoD didn't add any levels. The two levels were added with The Withered Lands / Skyshrine. Those zones were part of DoV part 2 (as was Cobalt Scar, which was added after CoE was released, but didn't feature any level jumps). ___________________________________ Edit: So that some of my post is actually on topic, the T10 fish is by far the worst offender. I have over 280,000 of both plump haddock and cutthroat trout. During the same time period, I've amassed less than 75,000 of the harvests from bushes. I've got so much fish that my costume at SOE will likely be regular clothes with one 10-inch by 10-inch picture of the icon stapled on the clothes for each 1,000 of fish (so 280-ish pictures of plump haddock and 280-ish of cutthroat trout). Maybe then they'll get the point that the ratios are skewed.
That's always been an issue with fish, really. Lots of supply, little demand. TheNPC harvesters are what drive it to insane levels though. Would be nice if they spent a bit less time "fishing" and a bit more gathering. And, for that matter, if fish got used a bit more, say by including it in alchemy recipes (they could use fish oil).
WL/Skyshrine and Cobalt Scar were all "free" content. AoD was a "features only" expansion. I'm not sure if the 2 level increase was directly connected to AoD but I have serious doubts that SoE gave everybody a 2 level increase without connecting it to an expansion. You know, one of those things you pay for. --------- 280k x 2 = 560k fish. 75k x 6 = 450k bushes. (560k - 450k) / 560k = 0.19 x 100% = 19% variance. Statistically meaningful but honestly within an acceptable mean. I think this could be due to the way the tables are weighted on the bushes. I am assuming that your only including harvests from the pony and goblin? Correct?
Until CoE was released Withered Lands and Skyshrine were only available to those who had purchased Destiny of Velious. When Chains of Eternity was released they, like the rest of Destiny of Velious became part of the F2P content. The level cap was raised to 92 with WL/SS. Ironically, most of the level 90 harvests which we are all drowning in were introduced to the game at the same time, although I'm pretty sure there were no fish in WL/SS and they came later with CoE.
The reason there was a slight level cap raise not associated with an expansion was AoD was planned to be the new norm (an optional feature pack with free content offered the rest of the year). Since they're always a few steps ahead on content, they already had WL ready to go at the new level cap. AoD's failure brought us back on track for expansions adding to the cap.
