Cannith Crafting Discussion

[LT218]

140 in about 8 hours. Half an hour for 10-20 levels in each school using the free experience pot you get for completing the crafting tutorial each life (lasts for half an hour).
3-4 shards per level.

Hundreds of hours huh? That should be an interesting story...

Pretty sure the quoted statement is a classic example of the saying that 90% of statistics on the internet are made up and biased towards the point the submitter of the statistic is trying to prove.

As someone who maxed out their crafting levels within the last 18 months, it takes 10s of thousands of lesser and many thousands of greater essences to craft enough shards to cap out. To level in 2-4 shards per level, you have to craft shards that you have a fairly low success rate on which means you fail and waste essences somewhat frequently. If you craft recipes that have better success rates, you get less XP. No way around burning tons of essences.

Wait... You are not counting the excessively rare bonus weeks that give a boost to crafting experience combined with a Pay2Win crafting XP potion from the store are you? That would be pretty disingenuous of you to claim that as the "standard" for leveling crafting. Beyond the Pay2Win xp potion + bonus week, the only way to shortcut the massive essence requirements to go from 1 to 150 in all three schools was to abuse an exploit with vials or some such thing that was available for a bit and that was fixed a good while ago. Additionally, unless you use the Pay2Win potions from the store, you run out of xp giving recipes before you can cap out in a single life which means you have to spend time leveling to at least 20 and then TR to reset the diminishing XP returns on the recipes.

So with that in mind, there is no legitimate way you could possibly have acquired enough lesser and greater essences as rewards from chests in quests to cap all three crafting schools in 8 hours total time. It's not possible even if you did deconstruct every RNG item you got while questing in 8 hours. If, as you claim, you didn't deconstruct RNG items for essences and instead just purchased them in bulk from the AH and ASAH, it still took you more than 8 hours to acquire the platinum required to buy that many essences. Any way you look at it, your claim of 8 hours total time spent to cap crafting is completely bogus.

If you took the actual average amount of time most people spend capping crafting skill in DDO farming missions and raids for named items instead, you could have a full set of better than RNG and better than crafted gear for every 4-6 levels. That's why crafted gear should be just as good as RNG gear. Personally, I think the best compromise is to include the Masterful shards and make any Masterful crafted stuff BTA. Leave the non-masterful crafted items tradable and keep their quality on par with RNG.


The TL;DR version of crafting in DDO is that it is a laggy, boring grind that requires 10s of thousands of essences, many hours of time and/or in-game resources where you repeatedly make things that have little or no practical use use in the game simply for the sake of leveling crafting. Any sort of grind that is as unentertaining and resource and time intensive as crafting is in DDO better have a pretty damned nice payout at the end.

[Faltout]

Pretty sure the quoted statement is a classic example of the saying that 90% of statistics on the internet are made up and biased towards the point the submitter of the statistic is trying to prove.

As someone who maxed out their crafting levels within the last 18 months, it takes 10s of thousands of lesser and many thousands of greater essences to craft enough shards to cap out. To level in 2-4 shards per level, you have to craft shards that you have a fairly low success rate on which means you fail and waste essences somewhat frequently. If you craft recipes that have better success rates, you get less XP. No way around burning tons of essences.

I agree. I usually made shards that had 50%-60% chance of success (usually 54, unless the 60 was really cheap). I had success boosters though (from cannith favor...) and when you fail you don't lose all your ingredients but rather a small part. So it's better to try 2 times for double xp than making 2 shards for half the xp.
I don't disagree with the thousands of greater essences. Not sure how many thousand because I never had more than 500 greater in my bags and not head to the crafting hall.

Wait... You are not counting the excessively rare bonus weeks that give a boost to crafting experience combined with a Pay2Win crafting XP potion from the store are you? That would be pretty disingenuous of you to claim that as the "standard" for leveling crafting. Beyond the Pay2Win xp potion + bonus week, the only way to shortcut the massive essence requirements to go from 1 to 150 in all three schools was to abuse an exploit with vials or some such thing that was available for a bit and that was fixed a good while ago. Additionally, unless you use the Pay2Win potions from the store, you run out of xp giving recipes before you can cap out in a single life which means you have to spend time leveling to at least 20 and then TR to reset the diminishing XP returns on the recipes.

Nope. Even though I'd like to craft during bonus weeks, usually when I had enough essences to go on a crafting spree, there was no bonus week. As I said, I used the xp potion from the crafting tutorial that you get every life... Is it pay2win? I dunno. I know that I didn't pay...

So with that in mind, there is no legitimate way you could possibly have acquired enough lesser and greater essences as rewards from chests in quests to cap all three crafting schools in 8 hours total time. It's not possible even if you did deconstruct every RNG item you got while questing in 8 hours. If, as you claim, you didn't deconstruct RNG items for essences and instead just purchased them in bulk from the AH and ASAH, it still took you more than 8 hours to acquire the platinum required to buy that many essences. Any way you look at it, your claim of 8 hours total time spent to cap crafting is completely bogus.

LOL, I play 4 years. I have gathered enough essences to level to 140 from chests alone. The 8 hours are the hours I spent doing crafting and only crafting. Half an hour each life (and each life took some months). So, 8 hours over the span of 4 years. But 8 hours nonetheless devoted to crafting. The rest of the time I was playing the game.

P.S. Here is the guide I wrote for crafting leveling... https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...=1#post5703032

[glmfw1]

I want crafting to work (i.e. no more "it's a prefix, but the system will think it's a suffix if there is already a suffix there").

I would be happy to just have "essences" rather than "greater/lesser", but I like the current divisions within each school... If I deconstruct a weapon with fire powers, I shouldn't be able to create one with ice powers from the materials I get. So, I say keep Mind/Body/Arcane, Good/Evil/Law/Chaos/Divine, Fire/Water/Earth/Air, so that crafting has an internal logic to it. Otherwise you might as well overhaul the spell system and Monster Manual too {i.e. it's not Fireball or Lightning Bolt... it's Elemental Ball and Elemental Bolt; It's not a Fire Elemental or an Earth Elemental... they are both Elemental Elementals} and remove any alignment from the game.

Power of Cannith Crafting should be equal to that of Random Lootgen... after all, where does Random Lootgen come from, apart from NPCs doing Cannith Crafting behind the scenes. Of course New Random Loot seems to be made by spellcasters who are mainly insane, given some of the power combinations that drop. The grind of creating shards for experience should have a payoff of being able to create meaningful effects of items. I'm happy that Unbound might not be as powerful as Bound... e.g. If Unbound correspond to middle of lootgen table power levels, while Bound correspond to top end power levels.

If a power can be on New Random Loot or in a regular Augment, it should be able to be on Cannith Crafted items. Shards should be either prefix shards, suffix shards or prefix/suffix shards, and have this shown in the name. Flexible shards should be able to go on any item, and should be a high level benefit. Higher level crafting could also allow a power normally available as a suffix or prefix to be available as a prefix/suffix shard. New random loot has done away with grammar in names (e.g. "of Deadly" rather than "of Deadliness"), so a Suffix Item of Prefix which would have had an odd sounding name using old conventions would now sound no worse than items that drop every day. A possible alternative to flexibility is that if crafting levels are high enough, a prefix or suffix shard can be put in either slot and item-type-specific shards can be put on other items by default - no need for specific flexible shards, but your ML3 cloak prefix shard can now be used as an ML3 ring suffix, because your crafting lvl is high enough.

Keep varying levels of shards (str +1, str +2 etc). If you are a low lvl crafter or you don't have the essences needed to make a stronger item, you should still be able to craft something. Each Shard can have a Minimum Level, and if the shard is put on a base item with a lower ML, the item's ML gets used and if the shard is put on a base item with a higher ML, the shard's ML gets used. The interface could give a warning when shard lvl is higher. Shards of Potential should still exist, but as items are now tied to Minimum level, SoPs should relate to ML rather than overall power. I don't mind needing to step up the power level a shard at a time, but it would be simpler to just say "I want power lvl X on this item, so I will craft a single SoP that gives me that power level".

I personally don't mind having to go to the ship/crafting hall to break items down. I think being able to break down direct from inventory invalidates the logic of crafting. Why should crafters be able to effectively ignore inventory size restrictions by deconstructing from inventory, while people who sell for PP can't? Personally, I would leave all the Cannith Crafting stations as they are namewise... just improve the lists in the shard stations.

[LrdSlvrhnd]

Inventory space, stack sizes, and how bags are used are important decisions that we will have to look deeper into before we can comment on what might happen there. Since the exchange from old to new essences will be done manual, there won't be any risk of the bags exploding on login.

So much for "only inconvenienced by exchanging once" *g*

No, seriously, just put the new essences at 10K stacks like Lessers instead of 1K stacks like Greaters, and IMHO everything here would be cool. I don't know why you need to "look deeper into" this. You clearly have the technology to stack at 10K so IMHO there's no good reason *not* to. (I'd also like this applied to collectibles, Cannith ings, ammo, spell components, scrolls, and potions... but I won't be greedy, I'll accept it just happening for new stuff... like the new essences *g* ) (...Though maybe someday for the collectibles? *g* )

[zehnvhex]

I really like how 40% of the posts in this thread are people worried about the stack size of the new ingredient. Really goes to show that despite our differences...everyone can agree that inventory management is the biggest PITA this game has to offer. "I don't care if it's one essence or 15, just so long as I don't have to spend a 20 minutes every gaming session playing SIM CLOSET SPACE because you guys haven't consolidated all your mini-crafting systems in over 9 years."

[LT218]

LOL, I play 4 years. I have gathered enough essences to level to 140 from chests alone. The 8 hours are the hours I spent doing crafting and only crafting. Half an hour each life (and each life took some months). So, 8 hours over the span of 4 years. But 8 hours nonetheless devoted to crafting. The rest of the time I was playing the game.https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...=1#post5703032

So technically, it took you 4 years of play time to gather enough essences to *almost* cap crafting in 8 hours. Doesn't sound like you maxed crafting in 8 hours to me. Your definition of "can be done in 8 hours" and my definition are very, very different. Additionally, you acquired thousands and thousands of RNG items during that same 4 year period which further dilutes the value of crafting and the incentive to max it as you likely found some really good, if not perfect, RNG items.

Ponder the following scenarios before deciding to stick with the claim that it's easy and can be done in 8 hours.

1) If a level 1 player new to DDO were to decide to start crafting right after character creation, could they cap it in 8 hours? No. They couldn't even cap it in 20 hours because they have to spend more time than that acquiring the essences in some manner.
2) Let's assume said new player leveled to 20 as a first-lifer and stockpiled all the essences from chests and deconstructed all of the RNG items they looted while leveling. Once they hit level 20, if they went to the Cannith Crafting Hall, could they cap out all three crafting schools in 8 hours? No.

A) Even after 20 levels of missions, they wouldn't have enough essences at that point to max crafting no matter how many hours they want to spend clicking Combine.

B) Without buying P2W crafting XP potions from the store using TP that would be sorely needed for other things and/or waiting for one of those rare +30% CC XP weekends, even if they had managed to acquire enough essences to max crafting, they would zero out the xp gained from all possible shards before capping and have to TR to be able to further progress.

In summary, the only way to literally max crafting in 8 hours from start to finish, *including* the time require to acquire enough essences to do so would be to exploit and dupe essences.

Additionally, the only way to cap crafting in one life without TRing to reset the xp per recipe limitation is P2W or wait an indeterminate amount of time for that rare CC XP bonus weekend. Thus, you need to also include the time it takes to level from 1-20 or 15-30 and TR to the total time required to max crafting without P2W.

You shouldn't cherrypick the convenient parts of something when trying to prove or disprove the whole thing.

[Stoner81]

<snip>
In summary, the only way to literally max crafting in 8 hours from start to finish, *including* the time require to acquire enough essences to do so would be to exploit and dupe essences.
<snip>

Well said +1

Even assuming that somebody did exploit essences or whatever they would still need multiple lives due to the reduction in XP per shard you make, it took myself many lives before I could max out crafting due to needing the XP reset every life.

Stoner81.

[dunklezhan]

Well said +1

Even assuming that somebody did exploit essences or whatever they would still need multiple lives due to the reduction in XP per shard you make, it took myself many lives before I could max out crafting due to needing the XP reset every life.

Stoner81.

I didn't know until reading your post that crafting XP reset on TR. I have had my crafting toon banked for years so that I can continue to exploit his extra Arti levels. No wonder I think its so much harder than Faltout does!


To continue your point - OK, let's say you can cap your crafting very very fast if you have a very very large number of resources and can TR very very fast. Exactly how many people are going to acheive or even bother to try for this theoretical minimum time? Probably a lot fewer than will loot triple lucky max power items just today, I'd say. I mean, has anyone ever heard anyone say 'Gotta get to 20! I need to TR and reset my crafting XP!'

Anyone?

I feel no compulsion for example to TR now, even though I literally just found out that a reset might make those last five levels I've not been bothering to get easily achievable...

So who cares? What matters are not the edge cases when it comes to CC. Its the bulk cases - and I just don't see it being a 'cap in a single first life make infinite items' kind of a system.



Cannith Crafting was the one thing I was actually motivated to work towards being 'one of the best' at - not to be uber, just for the massive flexibility and being able to help out others. I stopped pushing because the power level got out of whack and those last 5 levels don't really get me much now that I really need. But at least it had the flexibility.

I don't understand why CC has to now lose both flexibility relative to its old self and power relative to current lootgen yet people are talking about lootgen being invalidated.

[DYWYPI]

Yes, I mentioned that I needed to Reincarnate (it was an eTR) in [#149] to get the last few levels from the [remaining] Crafting XP Pool... :-/

[...] 'twas also basically the only reason I couldn't get the last few Levels from the Crafting XP pool, for my current: 150/150/150 without having to do a reincarnation first.

I believe it was in 2 schools; I was originally a few levels short from 150. I might even try to dig-up my screenshot (prior to eTR). But it did take me years of grind, collecting purple bags, in every quest, etc., and scouring the Platinum AH for Crafting: Essences, Ingredients and Collectables.

Though not being able to get XP for the last few levels was (before the eTR) mostly due to me being genuine F2P and not having access to the required BtA [Mystical] Ingredients (only available via Adventure packs I believe) so I could NOT even try to make those shards even though I had the Crafting skills. Yes, I did make very good use of the Crafting Bonus weekends (and Crude Vials!).

Still it took an insane amount of; Essences, Collectables/Ingredients needed (and duration amassing those). I think; I used well-over 40 Purified Eberron Dragonshard Fragments levelling. Luckily I came across several huge stacks selling at few thousand Platinum pieces each (I had my suspicion though if those were legitimate due to drop rarity).

Crafting keeps me poor in platinum; I'd hate to think, now with the overinflated AH prices, how hard it would actually be for a newbie Cannith Crafter; I certainly wouldn't like to be in their shoes (investment needed to level). That's even before the "New Improved NoWorries Cannith Crafting system" in the DDO Dev pipeline that will include Epic items sees the light of day... That is why the Developers shouldn't rush it, and be reminded of the term "TDTTOE" before they precede, I wish them luck. :-)

[Cantor]

It seems to me the obvious way to fix this... Have crafting shards role for the magnitude of varying effects just like random gen. You can control effects but still need to get lucky to max stat. And you can make top lvl 30 gear only available on crafting weekends with a pot just like rgl is. Just make the lucky roll check modified by how high crafting level is. Scenario... Oh I got max Str rolls on this... Do I gamble a stat or add a static effect now... Oops low roll now its mediocre item. Crafting has same potential; is not given away; and max 30 gear only during bonus weekend.

[ZhenBuYaoShi]

So technically, it took you 4 years of play time to gather enough essences to *almost* cap crafting in 8 hours. Doesn't sound like you maxed crafting in 8 hours to me. Your definition of "can be done in 8 hours" and my definition are very, very different. Additionally, you acquired thousands and thousands of RNG items during that same 4 year period which further dilutes the value of crafting and the incentive to max it as you likely found some really good, if not perfect, RNG items.

Ponder the following scenarios before deciding to stick with the claim that it's easy and can be done in 8 hours.

1) If a level 1 player new to DDO were to decide to start crafting right after character creation, could they cap it in 8 hours? No. They couldn't even cap it in 20 hours because they have to spend more time than that acquiring the essences in some manner.
2) Let's assume said new player leveled to 20 as a first-lifer and stockpiled all the essences from chests and deconstructed all of the RNG items they looted while leveling. Once they hit level 20, if they went to the Cannith Crafting Hall, could they cap out all three crafting schools in 8 hours? No.

A) Even after 20 levels of missions, they wouldn't have enough essences at that point to max crafting no matter how many hours they want to spend clicking Combine.

B) Without buying P2W crafting XP potions from the store using TP that would be sorely needed for other things and/or waiting for one of those rare +30% CC XP weekends, even if they had managed to acquire enough essences to max crafting, they would zero out the xp gained from all possible shards before capping and have to TR to be able to further progress.

In summary, the only way to literally max crafting in 8 hours from start to finish, *including* the time require to acquire enough essences to do so would be to exploit and dupe essences.

Additionally, the only way to cap crafting in one life without TRing to reset the xp per recipe limitation is P2W or wait an indeterminate amount of time for that rare CC XP bonus weekend. Thus, you need to also include the time it takes to level from 1-20 or 15-30 and TR to the total time required to max crafting without P2W.

You shouldn't cherrypick the convenient parts of something when trying to prove or disprove the whole thing.

You're my hero :-D