Cannith Crafting More Info + Recap

[AnEvenNewerNoob]

You are really KILLING one of the FUNDAMENTAL BEST THINGS about Cannith Crafting........FLEXIBILITY.

If the new random loot was coded in a way that doesn't allow you to make CC have flexible shards.......that is ANOTHER HUGE FAIL of the new loot.

If the coding for the new random loot does allow flexible shards, it is a HUGE FAIL for the design of cannith crafting.

Either way......fail.

[searcher15]

1. Will the crafted shard still be bound to account and possible to pass to via crafting storage?

2. Will the effects in group have differing crafting levels?
E.g. Strenght is lv 101, Resistance is lv 102 and so on. Or everything in group 3 is lv 100?

3. Can we please get a Lammania preview at least a week before, to decide if to use our essences before or after update? How will levelling look like in the new system?


I'm worried about the current state of loot system - we have crazy powerfull random loot items with +15 and more to ability, but no slots to put them in, because they are taken by shiny named items. Whats worse, there's zero named items with +ability on them that can beat or even come close to current random loot. (LGS doesn't count because it's a "mere" +15 and takes a weapon slot, when you can find a genloot accessory with +15 or more on it.)
We used to be able to fit any ability/skill onto rings - please bring that back. As a wizard wearing the new named items in 2 usual "int" slots, I'm down to replacing my Dragon cloak with "mundane" genloot cloak with +14 int on it (provided I can even find one first).


The planned crating levels look kinda insane to casual crafter like me. If you're at xp cap right now, you will be able to craft a whooping lv 26 item. Then even more grind to reach lv 30 items. I'm afraid that with my mere 90/80/80 in craft, I won't be able to craft anything of use and have to spend months gathering materials to level up. In old system I could at least make some normal power items. What about players that are totally new to the system? Do they have to burn through ton of essences before being able to make anything useful at all?
It seems the "crafting system" is actually an item levelling system.

On other side, it seems that most of the stuff will be possible to craft unbound, so we just need one friendly high level crafter that we can buy our items from. It raises the question of "why bother crating" - it will be all available in ah and pretty much indistinguishable from genloot..

[Meriadeuc]

I notice that protection/ricocheting doesn't appear on any of the lists. Are there any plans for it to be available through the new Cannith crafting?

[ComicRelief]

1) I don't see "bane" damage anywhere. Does that mean it's gone (not listed as an exclusive 'random loot' effect) or only drops on random loot? Or maybe listed under a different name that I don't recognize? (Seeing as how "ghost touch" was specifically mentioned as an exclusive Cannith crafting effect and "ghostbane" specifically mentioned as an exclusive random loot effect I'm assuming no "bane" in Cannith crafting at all...which is a bit disappointing.)

2) It's a little disheartening (to me) that we won't be able to craft banishing, disrupting, or smiting weapons. Was really hoping might be able to craft (for example) a metalline-smiting or aligned-smiting weapon. (And w/o bane, there'll be no 'smiting of construct bane', etc.)

3) Not part of Cannith crafting, but I'm curious if any of the (lower level) named weapons, specifically, might be getting an update pass? Some of them fall woefully behind random loot, even with the addition of augment slots. Other (lower level) named items (armors, shields, etc) are not nearly as 'obsolete' as some (low-ish level) named weapons.

Overall, I am looking forward to seeing the new crafting in action (so to speak). And at least we get blueshine and everbright.

[Aerinsma]

I'm very disappointed with the decision not to allow flexible shards. Flexibility and the ability to make the item you want is the reason why I've sent so much time and money leveling crafting. Maybe if you allowed the mark of making to give flexibility or the third slot to an item you wouldn't feel so bad about letting it in.

If that won't work at least allow all stats to appear on rings, and make sure they can all appear in at least two other places. I, like many others, was very disappointed by the lack of flexibility in the new loot tables, but I thought I could just use crafting to cover the deficiencies.

Oddly enough your excuse of keeping named loot's ability special, is rather ironic. The main reason that I want flexible shards is because I have some well loved named items that take up certain spaces on my character. If these spaces are the only ones for the effects I want, then the named items will have to go, making them less valuable to me, not more.

[zehnvhex]

Any chance we could just get rid of % chances to fail and lose components? This may have made sense back in 2008 or whatever when games still had terrible mechanics like that but these days it's just a pointless frustration. There's no skill involved, no interesting gameplay mechanic, no strategy. It's just an arbitrary Nelson moment "HAW HAW". If it's about removing resources from the economy then just up the requirement for manufacturing by a little bit and call it a day.

I mean does anyone find that kind of 'risk' enjoyable? There's no challenge involved. You just go out and farm 10 widgets instead of 7 in case it fails and if it fails 3 times in a row for some reason and you blow all your widgets you say screw this game and go play something else. In the -entire- history of crafting in games where failure was something that could occur it only gave me pants pooing terror once, and that was my Coldain Shawl back in EverQuest and even back then most people agreed it was dumb and would just spam customer service until Sony gave in and restored the items for them if the combine failed.

How about instead of a chance to fail, you add a chance for the combine to not consume resources? A critical success let's say. You keep the chance low enough (3% or so) that when it happens it's a nice surprise and nobody banks on it.

That to me sounds like fun rewarding gameplay instead of a stomp on ye olde gonads.

in before "lol entitled everybody gets a trophy back in my day go back to WoW blah blah blah"

[SirShen]

Power of Cannith Crafting

Random Loot has a normal range of effect powers that can drop at a given minimum level. Then there is an extra lucky range of slightly more power. This is marked by having Masterful Craftsmanship on the item which indicates at least one of your effects is at the maximum of the normal range or slightly higher.


The plan is to have Cannith Crafting be the top of the normal random loot range. It is important to us to have a system where Cannith Crafted, Random, and Named Loot is all usable by players. We do not want a system where Cannith overshadows Random loot making it not a true consideration to be used. By holding onto the Masterful Craftsmanship lucky power ranges on Random Loot, it should help Random Loot continue to have a use.


Random Loot chests can go as high as level 40. Cannith Crafting is currently planned to top out at Level 34 Loot. There will be increasingly better Minimum Level 30 shards to be crafted (the recipe an item will state what loot level it represents).


Although Cannith will follow the slot restrictions of effects that Random Loot has, a player does get to choose which effects go on the slots of the item. This is a big advantage of random loot where you have to luck out in the RNG to get all of the effects you want at the powers you want. The system will still have a Prefix and Suffix. If a Mark of House Cannith is used, it will have a 3rd extra effect just like Random Loot.


Finally, there is a chance that some of the clickies that no longer drop in Random Loot could be added to Cannith in some form.

HA HA you are going to base cannith crafting on random loot. O well then it going to be useless just like most of the random loot is. The only random loot items i use are those with states, all weapons are next to useless because it has caster stuff on it. All this hard work you are doing to make a system even more useless then it was before. Very very disappointed.

[Pipboy2K]

i dont see the problem of multiple item deconstruction...
you already reduce the number of essences to 1, so why not just add another attribute (as in database attribute) to any random drop or crafted items which reflects the "scrap-worth" of the item.
then, reuse the trader interface you already use for general/scroll/potion/hireling traders, and instead of coins (silver/gold/plat) we get cannith essences in the form of a currency derived from the scrap-worth(and make people skill repair skill for it instead of haggle )
no inventory problem for us players because of big fat stacks, no duping maybe?, and we can use the (in my opinion) superfast, multiple item selling interface....
now, if you respond with: "how are we supposed to sell them on the auction house?".... make the traders sell scrap-items of different sizes (like xp stones) which are auctionable, payed with cannith-essence currency.
lots of reusing old, but well functioning code, thats how we pros do it :P

edit: add the same attribute to all the old essence types, so we can fast sell them too! (5 for greater, 1 for lesser)

[NoWorries]

As far as collectibles go... I would very much like an answer to how changes in collectibles dropping might affect the small/medium/large Eberron Dragonshard Fragments - these and NOT tomes are my go to source for Purified Eberron Dragonshards because tome drops are next to nonexistent for me.

They will drop as they do now, but only in Eberron content.

Edit: I also still think its a mistake that we can't make unbound insightful group threes by virtue of it not being a level that's possible to reach. There are already unique effects between the systems and you've limited the max ML effects - Cannith already therefore suffers in comparative power level despite the resource and time commitment, there's simply no need to also limit the effects common to both.

You can make those, just not at 100% success.

1. Will the crafted shard still be bound to account and possible to pass to via crafting storage?

2. Will the effects in group have differing crafting levels?
E.g. Strenght is lv 101, Resistance is lv 102 and so on. Or everything in group 3 is lv 100?

3. Can we please get a Lammania preview at least a week before, to decide if to use our essences before or after update? How will levelling look like in the new system?



The planned crating levels look kinda insane to casual crafter like me. If you're at xp cap right now, you will be able to craft a whooping lv 26 item. Then even more grind to reach lv 30 items. I'm afraid that with my mere 90/80/80 in craft, I won't be able to craft anything of use and have to spend months gathering materials to level up. In old system I could at least make some normal power items. What about players that are totally new to the system? Do they have to burn through ton of essences before being able to make anything useful at all?
It seems the "crafting system" is actually an item levelling system.

On other side, it seems that most of the stuff will be possible to craft unbound, so we just need one friendly high level crafter that we can buy our items from. It raises the question of "why bother crating" - it will be all available in ah and pretty much indistinguishable from genloot..

1. Yes
2. All the same level
3. I'm sure as soon as it is in good enough shape to be used, we will setup a Lammania for players to get their hands on it.

Old Cannith Crafting went to level 20, only had 2 effects, and didn't have insightful.

If you are maxed, you switch over on day 1 to crafting ML 26, being able to put 3 effects on, and to have Insightful effects. Players gain power just from the change. Also, with this system, any effect you can craft is useful, as it autoscales with ML (or for non-scaling effects, it is the max it can be). So yes, you will be crafting useful things.

1) I don't see "bane" damage anywhere. Does that mean it's gone (not listed as an exclusive 'random loot' effect) or only drops on random loot? Or maybe listed under a different name that I don't recognize? (Seeing as how "ghost touch" was specifically mentioned as an exclusive Cannith crafting effect and "ghostbane" specifically mentioned as an exclusive random loot effect I'm assuming no "bane" in Cannith crafting at all...which is a bit disappointing.)

Listed at the bottom of Group 2

[Cantor]

It seems the biggest point of contention is loss of flexible shards. I love using them, but I totally understand why they are not bringing them back. With flexible shards every slot is the same. It removes thinking about your gearing, which is bad.

[Gratch]

Deconstructing is very time consuming and clunky at this point in time. We know this. The problem is what the crafting system is capable of doing. We don't know to what amount we can alleviate this pain, but it is something we will be looking into as we move forward with updating Cannith Crafting.

I had assumed going to one essence level and one school was so you could change deconstruction to be at the minimum a trade window sized set of boxes and we could mulch junk 10+ at a time into essences. In that case feel free to put whatever animation you want on the smasher/deconstructor.

Though you'd need a different button for disjuncting and deconstruction as opposed to the current popup menu asking. Or two different stations.

I'm fine relinquishing all control over what essence types we get from an item as long as I can CRUSH'EM'ALL (at once).

Or a hybrid approach. Leave the current lag deconstructor of grindiness for those who need to disjunct or pick specific essence types one item at a time. Add a separate mass-deconstructor that gives half the total essences for both suffix and prefix attribute of all items flagged as junk in ones inventory.

[Nuclear_Elvis]

It seems the biggest point of contention is loss of flexible shards. I love using them, but I totally understand why they are not bringing them back. With flexible shards every slot is the same. It removes thinking about your gearing, which is bad.

It is not just Flexible Shards, it is the fundamental way the Design of the New Loot System was implemented in the first place, to remove flexibility of more variety in the way Abilities and Skills could be found across the wider range of random loots. Cart vs horse issue, and the horse is New Loot System, and many of us find that horse to be "broken" regardless the semantics on whether it's WAI or not. The New Loot System is not agreed upon by the Player Community, and - arguments like yours are a bit skewed because many of us are "thinking about our gear" more than you realize (which in your test, would make it "good" instead). In fact, we're thinking so much about our gear that we come in here to see yet another post by a Dev without acknowledging this issue (while fielding softball questions otherwise), and that is something players like you should actually categorize as "bad." I highly suggest you stop worrying about the "thinking level" of the Player Community, as there's no XP for you in that.

[SilkofDrasnia]

No flexible shards limiting what you can put where is BLEH!

[Astoroth]

Random Loot has a normal range of effect powers that can drop at a given minimum level. Then there is an extra lucky range of slightly more power. This is marked by having Masterful Craftsmanship on the item which indicates at least one of your effects is at the maximum of the normal range or slightly higher.

The plan is to have Cannith Crafting be the top of the normal random loot range. It is important to us to have a system where Cannith Crafted, Random, and Named Loot is all usable by players. We do not want a system where Cannith overshadows Random loot making it not a true consideration to be used. By holding onto the Masterful Craftsmanship lucky power ranges on Random Loot, it should help Random Loot continue to have a use.

You just seem oblivious to the fact that lucky loot is about all people keep from your new random loot, 99.99% of random loot is sold deconstructed or not even taken out the chest. Making cannith crafting worse than random loot will always make cannith crafting less desirable in the long run. Maybe not immediately but in the long run if you can find better items in random loot that's what you'll end up with.

Although Cannith will follow the slot restrictions of effects that Random Loot has, a player does get to choose which effects go on the slots of the item. This is a big advantage of random loot where you have to luck out in the RNG to get all of the effects you want at the powers you want. The system will still have a Prefix and Suffix. If a Mark of House Cannith is used, it will have a 3rd extra effect just like Random Loot.

Why not allow Cannith to put effects in any slot? In the new loot system, Named Items main advantages are that they don't have to follow the slot restriction for effects and get the Quality bonus type for effects. If Cannith also ignores the slot restrictions it takes a way a big aspect of what makes Named Loot special and goes a long way to making Random Loot useless.

You just seem oblivious to the fact that if people can get lucky loot that is a higher value, people will always keep the random loot especially if you cant get stats that aren't normally in those locations. If you aren't making it as good as random loot you need to make it so it's at least flexible. Making cannith crafting worse than random will always make cannith crafting less desirable.

[ComicRelief]

*snip*
Listed at the bottom of Group 2

Ah - so it is. Thanks!

Guess I need to wash my glasses...wait - I don't wear glasses (anymore).

[LrdSlvrhnd]

Ah - so it is. Thanks!

Guess I need to wash my glasses...wait - I don't wear glasses (anymore).

Then maybe you should start again *g*

[Gremmlynn]

Any chance we could just get rid of % chances to fail and lose components? This may have made sense back in 2008 or whatever when games still had terrible mechanics like that but these days it's just a pointless frustration. There's no skill involved, no interesting gameplay mechanic, no strategy. It's just an arbitrary Nelson moment "HAW HAW". If it's about removing resources from the economy then just up the requirement for manufacturing by a little bit and call it a day.

I mean does anyone find that kind of 'risk' enjoyable? There's no challenge involved. You just go out and farm 10 widgets instead of 7 in case it fails and if it fails 3 times in a row for some reason and you blow all your widgets you say screw this game and go play something else. In the -entire- history of crafting in games where failure was something that could occur it only gave me pants pooing terror once, and that was my Coldain Shawl back in EverQuest and even back then most people agreed it was dumb and would just spam customer service until Sony gave in and restored the items for them if the combine failed.

How about instead of a chance to fail, you add a chance for the combine to not consume resources? A critical success let's say. You keep the chance low enough (3% or so) that when it happens it's a nice surprise and nobody banks on it.

That to me sounds like fun rewarding gameplay instead of a stomp on ye olde gonads.

in before "lol entitled everybody gets a trophy back in my day go back to WoW blah blah blah"

It actually makes sense, as the only time there is a chance to fail is when crafting above one's crafting level. Really the only logical way to take failure out would be to cap what one could make to their crafting level. Don't like failure, don't try to make shards above your listed ability. The chance to fail is a player choice.

As for taking components out, well that would remove much of the time sink that makes taking the time to code a crafting system worthwhile for Turbine.

[EllisDee37]

Losing flexible shards is fine. I mean, it hurts, but I totally understand the reasoning. I wouldn't go so far as to say I agree with the reasoning, but pretty close, actually.

However, not being able to craft SPEED is a very poor design decision.

Leaving SPEED uncraftable will noticeably hurt my interest in and anticipation of the new crafting system. I haven't actually logged into the game in months, but cannith crafting was going to pull me back in. Without speed items, I won't be able to craft up "perfect" BTA gearsets for TR leveling. And doing that exact thing (crafting perfect, complete gearsets) is what I was getting excited to do. Without speed, my gearsets will have a big ol' hole in them. So they won't be perfect. So what's the point, y'know? I could log in right now and craft perfect gearsets minus deadly and speed. But incomplete gearsets that must be filled in with lootgen don't just not interest me, they actively discourage me from bothering. Just getting deadly but not getting speed, the new system won't end up being all that much different. I'll still be actively discouraged by needing to win lootgen lotteries. So I may not even bother at all.

It is not just Flexible Shards, it is the fundamental way the Design of the New Loot System was implemented in the first place, to remove flexibility of more variety in the way Abilities and Skills could be found across the wider range of random loots.

The flexibility and variety of lootgen was a problem that needed fixing, IMO. When I started playing in 2011, and for years after that, lootgen had limited slots for stats and skills. Strength only came on bracers, gloves, belts and rings, for example. And Jumping only came on boots, belts and rings.

Lootgen was then changed, and all of a sudden slotting went out the window. Seemingly anything went anywhere. For my money, this was much less interesting and engaging. Then lootgen was changed again, to what we have now, where we're back to limited slotting. To me this is a welcome correction.

You seem to prefer the "anything anywhere" school of thought. That was a very short-lived feature of lootgen. For most of DDO's history, lootgen slotting has been very limited.

[Faltout]

2. All the same level

You're serious now? So for 50 crafting levels all you will have to craft will be the same level of shards?

You must be aware that with the previous system leveling was a breeze because you made 3 shards of a level 9 higher than yours and you gained a level. Then you made 3 shards of 1 level higher and so on. Now you'll make shards 0 to 20 levels less than yours with declining xp? Meaning that when you're between levels 50 and 100 (around 70), it'll take hundreds of level 50 shards to level? How are you planning to ease the leveling process and not make it a painful grind?

[Faltout]

Flex Shards

The plan is to not launch with flex shards. We think there is a good balance that can be found between Random, Named, Crafted loot and flex shards will knock some of that out of the way. The Cannith system will be a bit different from before and some of the power and versatility is tough to see without getting your hands on the system.

So you haven't considered the option to make flexible shards but using a lower power range than the max non-lucky. Because that would make cannith flexible with the drawback that you lose power for flexibility.