Tradeskill instances have a lot of defiencies. If you decide to solo them, it is a lot of effort for a moderate reward. If you get a group to do them you finish quickly, but the reward isn't good for the time invested. It usually takes longer to find 3 people interested in doing a crafting instance than it does to complete the instance! This wouldn't be bad if you could do more than one since it goes quickly with a group, but your only able to take one quest per day. Also certain quests require you visit the Palace of the Ancient One instance and you can only enter it once every 4 days. Adventuring instances had their timers shortened to 90 minuites. One easy fix would be to make all of the tradeskill instances (and quests) available on either a 90 min or 18 hour persistant timer. That would effectively quadruple the content available for very little time invested. With 4 instances available people would be more encouraged to group so they could get the token reward as well as the drops. -------------------------------------------------------- Speaking of the drops, I'd suggest altering the drop tables a bit. Add a few new appearance weapons/hats (mundane equippable items like brooms, mops, buckets, candle sticks, saws, spoons, forks, ect). The don't need to have tradeskill effects, most people would just be happy with something unusual. No cloaks please! Also add reactants to the "Far Seas Innovations". It doesn't have to be a large chance, but they should be there. And up the amount of gold given for doing each quest. Have each turn in payout 10g. That is adding 360g in rewards to each instance if people bother to turn in after 3 combines instead of all 12 rewarding people for doing the instances the way it was intended instead of most expedient. Also up the big quest to give 90g so your minimum reward would be 1p per person. I'm thinking the token rewards should be redone too. Add tradeskill items to a new vendor and charge 10-20 tokens per item. I'm honestly not sure what kind of items should be available but they should be either unique to tradeskills, used in tradeskills, or a big ticket item. Recipes come to mind as an example of things unique to tradeskills. Various components (such as seeds from Emerald Halls, or parts from Skyshrine) for items used in tradeskills. An example of a big ticket item could be a house. The crafting instance from the Isle of Refuge would be a good template for a crafting house. Another idea would be an exchange merchant. If a bunch of appearance weapons were added to the tradeskill instances put in a vendor like Shaddy Swashbuckler that buys them in exchange for a special token. He also sells the various appearance weapons for 2 special tokens plus 10 far seas tokens. Maybe he sells a few items that don't drop in instances for 5 special tokens + 50 far seas tokens? ------------------------------------ Anyways if the top idea is all that is followed it would make the crafting instances more worthwhile for groups of crafters. If all the ideas were followed it might revive the crafing instances completely.
I would be happy if they just made solo versions of these with the same loot tables and boosted the otkens on both. The solo ones would be based on wether you were a craftsman, outfitter, scholar and would require you to make 3 sets of items that each use one of the three skills in that trade (i.e metalworking, metalshaping etc).
