Ideas on Designing Crafting Recipes

[Eladiun]

Now that the controversy has died down I would like to give some unbiased and unvarnished thoughts on crafting and recipes. I appreciate the development team holding this patch and reviewing these changes. This are thought that arose from heated discussions in numerous chat sources. Not all these thoughts are mine but I will pass them on.

1) Shroud ingredients in crafting makes sense since in someways as crafted weapons will be replacing greensteel in some instances however please try and remember that there are ingredients other than Large Devils Scales. Large Devils Scales(LDS) already have an over inflated value as they are the lynchpin in most greensteel crafting requiring LDS's for such a large number of Cannith recipes would just further bloat their value. Don't forget there are a large number of other ingredients, for example 3 Large Bones for Greater Undead Bane or a Large Horn for Monstrous Humanoid, this would have the effect of making somewhat useless materials have a purpose which would increase their value and help to balance the overall economy as opposed to just further inflating LDS value.

2) Holy Burst - there is a whole thread on this so I'll be short. Crafting already requires a significant grind adding another grind seem grossly unfair. Also, please remember many of us dedicate a single character to crafting. That character may not be 20 and may never be 20 to force artificial requirements like this on the character we make our crafter is unfair.

3) Everything used in crafting recipes must be bound to account or unbound.

4) The value of the items required to create the shard should not grossly outweigh the value of the shard. Simple Math.

5) Mystical Ingredients should probably be rarer and should be the limiting factor in crafting with rare collectibles. This also fuels the secondary market for no crafters to sell not only ingredients but collectibles.

6) Superior Shards, if I need all sorts of other special ingredients Superior Shards are massive overkill. If you want top effcets to cost a couple of tokens make them cost a couple tokens.

7) This pay to win Astral Diamond stuff has got to go. BTW, when the machine only eats stack sizes of 4 and the only denomination of AD that you sell that is divisible by 4 is 100...well it's sort of obvious.

Thanks for listening.

[grimbot]

Agreed on every point. Especially on point seven. It sickens me to think this game would stoop that low, and make such an obvious cash grab. Moves like that tarnish game's reputations. Pay to win is a concept despised in the MMO community as a whole. If players see that "p2w" is where this game is heading, I predict revenue losses. I personally allow myself $20 a month to spend on DDO. I will not be spending that money at this point if top level crafting requires purchases from the DDO store beyond the content packs.

I strongly agree that rare collectibles, found in various adventure packs, are the best route to go for crafting. This adds an element to the game that anyone can participate in, crafter or not. It will help with sales of less popular packs, I am sure. I don't have a problem with Turbine using crafting to sell more content. More people with more packs is better for everyone, and there is the bonus of actually enjoying the content purchased, instead of watching it go crunch.

Surely, there has to be a way for Turbine to sell Astral Diamonds in a way that enhances crafting in a desirable way. In this current implementation, they seem to be a requirement to craft desirable items, instead of a paid option to improve your crafting experience. I think Astral Diamonds should be able to be crunched into various Mystical Ingredients, or items that can already be rarely found in game as collectibles.

[Tenchi]

For me I think the following should be considered in the crafting recipes:

1. Shroud Ingredients (as you and many others have mentioned)
2. Mystical Ingredients - why not make this more viable by making one for each pack that they feel is being unplayed. Or maybe expand (not increase) the drop rate of the Mystical Urn to include Necro 1-4 (since I feel devs want to increase people who play these packs). They have been there, and most people have deemed it fair, so why not expand on it?
3. Astral Diamonds - ONLY if they would make it a more common drop so that it wouldn't be a Pay2Win system.
4. Epic Tokens - I think it can be played with wherein tougher recipes would require some amount of Epic tokens.
5. Other in-game collectibles that currently have a one-time use. (Antique Bronze Tokens, Shards of Tapestry, Stealer of Souls Flagging gems)
6. Collectables - we have so many of them! How about using those larvae and beetles? Or specific Collectibles that only drop, or commonly drop in P2P (if again, Turbine is thinking about revenue) wilderness areas.
7. Eberron Fragments; Siberys Dragonshards and Khyber Dragonshards (why not make Average Khyber Dragonshards actually part of the game?)

[SHOCK_and_AWE]

I have a couple suggestions for using already in-game, unbound, relatively abundant, and currently inexpensive items.

-Small and Medium Shroud Ingredients
The bottleneck for any green steel crafting is the Tier 3 altar and, by the time a player is done running the Shroud for ingredients, they are bound to have many, many small and medium ingredients left over. Giving these ingredients a new use (but not going overboard on quantity) is a good idea.

-Soul Gems
From the Trap the Soul spell and weapon/armor effect, these gems are already used sparsely in trap making and Eldritch crafting. Why not use them for Cannith crafting? It would further strengthen the economy of the game and it would strengthen class interdependency within each server (as high-level arcane classes would be the most able to farm Soul Gems of any type).

[Qzipoun]

3) Everything used in crafting recipes must be bound to account or unbound.

You can't even use BTA ingredients because then if you want to craft an item to SELL you have to do the grinding yourself. Being able to sell your crafting services and be supplied rare ingredients would be a huge plus to the system

-Soul Gems
From the Trap the Soul spell and weapon/armor effect, these gems are already used sparsely in trap making and Eldritch crafting. Why not use them for Cannith crafting? It would further strengthen the economy of the game and it would strengthen class interdependency within each server (as high-level arcane classes would be the most able to farm Soul Gems of any type).

I'm really liking thing idea. Use soul gems for bane weapons, it makes sense that using the essense of a type of mob will help you make weapons against the same type, no?

[TheDjinnFor]

Just use the existing 'mystical' ingredients, collectables, and soul gems as a check and balance for powerful shards.

Either make the mystical items super rare, or the recipes cost like 10-20 of them. And make them unbound, for the love of all that is holy burst! Or just let us get these 'mystical' ingredients from more than just a single pack.

[brian14]

1. Large Shroud ingredients -- no. I would say not even bones. Would really screw things up for people who are still doing greensteel.

2. Small/medium Shroud ingredients -- yes. Sooner or later everyone ends up with excess of those.

3. Sould gems -- yes. They have no use now.

4. Rare collectibles, including Eberron Dragonshards -- very much yes. Would give new incentives to low to mid-level players, and encourage sale of less-used packs such as Sorrowdusk. And if you are going to have something called "Purified Eberron Dragonshards", at least use some logic and make regular Eberron Dragonshards an initial ingredient!

5. Astral Diamonds -- absolutely not! I cannot express just how bad idea this is. Not while staying in forum guidelines, anyway.

6. Mystical urn, broccoli, et. -- either make them unbound, or allow their use in much lower recipies than now. With possible exception of Mystical Bottle (Resist +5), shards they make are absurdly weak for crafting level 99-100 -- if you can get millions of plat to get to that level, you already have Heavy Fort and Greater False Life. OTOH, if some useful level 50 recipe required 8 Mystical Plants, I might run "Running With Devils" eight times. (It's an end reward for Vale quests, in case you do not know.)

7. Tomes -- here I will go against the tide, and say make +1 Tome a universal ingredient. Do not make Tome +1 required for anything, but allow it to substitute for ANY single ingredient. So if a recipe calls for 10 greater essences, 30 lesser essences, 8 chipped bone talismans and 8 oceanic spheres, you should be able to take any Tome +1 and substitute it for either spheres or talismans -- or even for essences if you feel so inclined. Tome +2 could substitute for any two ingredients. Nobody will ever use a Tome +3, so there is no point even discussing it. I would go so far as allow use of DDO Store Tomes in this manner -- that's the only direct use of DDO Store items I consider acceptable.

8. I know some people will hate me for this: Spectral Scales from Mabar Festival should be allowed in recipes. But make them BtA, if they are not already.

[sweez]

7) This pay to win Astral Diamond stuff has got to go. BTW, when the machine only eats stack sizes of 4 and the only denomination of AD that you sell that is divisible by 4 is 100...well it's sort of obvious.

This.

Allowing usage (or even worse, requiring usage) of DDO store items in a system clearly classified as 'beta' is, to say the least, highly unprofessional.

[brian14]

I know whoever suggested it was joking, but now I think it is actually a good idea -- when deconstructing level 5 items (like Greater Halfling Bane), have a very small chance of getting something very unusual. Like... Chattering Ring? Or more realistically, one of Mystical ingredients?

[dubyprime]

I agree with most of what was said.
I am personally against shroud ingredients, but if you are going to use them, PLEASE use something other than large devil scales. It would at least lead to people who get bones/chains/horns being able to trade up and actually finish that greensteel. Hardcore players already have dozens of LDS stockpiled(35 for me), newer/casual players need them give people a reason to trade them for something other than epic scrolls.

Boot Mats: This is a horrible idea. Boot mats are only useful for ToD at the moment. Once a player has their toons flagged, they are happy to trade/sell boot mats to people who NEED them to run one of the most important high end raids. Making any of these a crafting requirement hurts new and casual players who are trying to experience more of the game. Just really think about it for a moment, you are making a flagging component a crafting material!!!

That being said, Shroud mats, boot mats, tomes, epic tokens, or silver flame pots will cause me little hindrance in crafting. I may have to take an extra week to farm up some items or favor, but in the end I'll still have the best crafted everything.

I have nine RL friends who play this game, all casual players, a few are p2p. Not one of them would be able to make the best crafted gear if any of the above were required. They are my friends, I love them, but only one is shroud flagged. They would probably botch asteroids if I managed to drag them through flagging.

I have guild mates who play 5 nights a week for a few hours who would be in the same boat.
As it stands now, I give away small and medium shroud ingredients to guildies/friends, or will take the short end of the stick on trades just to help them out. If even small shroud mats are required, I'll be less inclined to do so. Yeah, I have 100+ small bones, but if they are a crafting mat I have to hang onto them so that I can craft rather than helping someone with his first greensteel.

I have been trying to bring even more friends over. I've often told people there is plenty of room for a casual player and even reference the current crafting system as an example of how it makes it easier for casual play. For the love of Kol Korran please remember that when you adjust shards to make them rare.

[Eladiun]

-Soul Gems
From the Trap the Soul spell and weapon/armor effect, these gems are already used sparsely in trap making and Eldritch crafting. Why not use them for Cannith crafting? It would further strengthen the economy of the game and it would strengthen class interdependency within each server (as high-level arcane classes would be the most able to farm Soul Gems of any type).

Good Idea... I'm disappointed in myself for missing it.

[muffinlad]

Shroud Ingreeds....fine. If super powerful, one Large is not going to break anyone.

Soul Gems. Good idea.

How about Reaver/Dragon Runes?

Other already existing collectibles?

How about GEMS (of a value or type?)

I have three or four "extra" raid loot items that I would love to get rid of for a magical plus...but the fact that OTHER people would suffer because of that makes me glad they reversed their course on this. It really would have been bad for the game as a whole.

muffinsocial

[Cyr]

Agreed on all points, but the shroud ingredients.

It is not good game design to keep putting emphasis on items from what is now an underlevel quest.

[Auran82]

To be totally honest, I don't really understand why they did not lend more from the crafting system used in a game like LOTRO.

Having things like percentage chances to craft stuff (unless you craft everything at your current crafting level, which I would imagine would make levelling take about 10 times as long as it does now) and having diminishing returns on xp from crafting make it much more difficult to add rare ingredients to recipes that you are going to need to make 10 of in order to level. The fact that recipes of the same level often have completely different costs probably doesn't help.

Honestly I would have preferred to have seen something where there was a standard cost across crafting levels, and the more sought after recipes, the top end ones, either had to be found as loot (that is unbound, something else to add into the economy) or could possibly be 'discovered' when making other shards.

Hell, you could have it so that you make say a 'Lawful Outsider Bane' shard and you have a chance to crit for extra xp/double shard return/get some ingredients back/get a Gtr Lawful Outsider Bane shard instead.

What we have at the moment doesn't feel like its in beta, it feels more like they still have no idea what they actually want to do, what Fernando presented when he was asked was telling then and even more so now.

[BoolZ]

I am against Epic Tokens in all regards unless it lets us craft truely epic weapons. Add a second prefix/suffix, +6 enhancement, bump up the crit multiplier. Otherwise you're forcing people to run epics to make random loot.

On the other end, who can't run Epic Big Top to get a token? So there's really no significant effort required by needing a token. Needing more than one just takes longer, but no real challenge.

It's just a bad idea all the way around.

Honestly, I really don't like any idea of ingredients that arn't expressly for Cannith Crafting being used. Save for dragonshards and collectibles. But even then they mostly get a pass because except for a few of the more rare collectibles they're everywhere.

But if they're going to use collectables that are already in the game at least use the ones with no other purpose than turn ins.

[Hakushi]

Here's some ideas I came up with
:

Epic Tokens: I would much prefer leaving those for epic crafting.

Shroud ingredients: The Shroud is a raid, and in some ways, these ingredients are part of a raid and shouldn't be part of the crafting. If these ingredients are considered, I think only small and mediums should be included, not larges but even there, I disagree with the use of Shroud Ingredients.

ToD Boot materials: I disagree using these because those items are already very highly valued and highly sought after.

Soul Gems: A very good idea, most of these gems are completely useless right now, and why not seeking the soul gems of a powerful undead creature to craft greater undead bane, weaker soul stones for weaker bane versions. We have soul gems for every kind of creatures, which means enough for every kind of banes we would like to craft shards for.

More collectables: yes because a lot of collectables are still unused and useless.

Gems: Another good idea, Gems are regularly left in chests and if looted, immediately sold to a vendor, finally having a use for these would be great.

Astral Diamonds, Raid Items, Rare Items, Any Bound to Character items, Tomes, Event items: No, no, no, no, no and NO.

Another idea that could be used:

Bane/Slayer Arrows/Bolts: A lot of these are left in chests and could be considered as an option for crafting, a stack of greater Reptilian Bane Arrows/Bolts to craft a Greater Reptilian Bane Shard could be an option. Good, Bad, I'll let other people judge.

[Qezuzu]

At some time, please implement soul gems.

kthxbai

[ushram]

-Soul Gems
From the Trap the Soul spell and weapon/armor effect, these gems are already used sparsely in trap making and Eldritch crafting. Why not use them for Cannith crafting? It would further strengthen the economy of the game and it would strengthen class interdependency within each server (as high-level arcane classes would be the most able to farm Soul Gems of any type).

^ This 100%

[redspecter23]

I think creating new ingredients is a waste when you have perfectly good potential ingredients rotting away in collectable bags. The "rare" collectibles are a fine bottleneck method if you need one. Purified Eberron shards just feel like a weak cashgrab. Astral Diamonds are universally hated, Epic tokens should be for epic crafting only and the tomes are the least wretched of the concepts there, but at least drop the +3 from the list. If I ever knew someone looted a +3 just to crunch it, I'd autoblacklist them and never look back. I shouldn't feel so turned off by an ingame feature that it makes me want to blacklist someone. It shouldn't even be an option.

I'm ok with adding shroud ingredients on one condition. That they become a more mainstream ingredient that drops from higher level quests frequently. I see there was a move to do this a bit by adding them to Amrath, ToD and Devil Assault. Take it a step further and add them as potential drops in any high level quest (drop rates can be variable) and then I wouldn't mind them in Cannith crafting. I'll also echo what was said above and say there are more than just devil scales to use. We've been bugging for extra uses for pretty much every ingredient BUT LDS for quite some time, so that again just feels like a slap in the face by requiring LDS in a recipe.

[Aelonwy]

On pg 37 of the main thread Crafting Update 10 patch1, a couple of ppl point out that the soulgems would work quite well for the bane recipes, weak for lesser, regular for regular, and strong for greater... Oradafu pointed out there are no dragon soul gems... I propose the flagging gems for Stealer of Souls, the Essence of a Dragon gems would work well in this respect. Unfortuneately, they are BTC. If only they were BTA this would work better. After all once you are flagged any further ones you pick up are useless for anything but pocket change.