Update 32 on Lamannia: Cannith Crafting Preview

[PsychoBlonde]

I understand the old ones not being deconstructed with the new system. I already deconstructed most of my old ones back when they announced they were going to update the system, and old shards wouldn't be compatible.

Deconstructing NEW shards is the issue for me. Not being able to deconstruct new shards is a horrible idea, and generally a waste of materials for players. The reason for adding deconstruction of shards to the old system, is the same reason to add it to the new system.

Oh, oh, I misunderstood, I'm sorry. Yeah, hopefully this is still on the list to be implemented.

[PsychoBlonde]

You can get collectibles on the DDO store on Lamma by buying Random Collectibles Crates, btw. They're random, but they're also only 1 point on Lamma currently.

[PsychoBlonde]

I do like how the new shards distinguish in the shard name between bound and unbound, though.

[PsychoBlonde]

All righty, so here we are, I used up all my existing essences leveling with a Major pot and this is how far I got:



The new Crafting Success Boosters go up to 35% and they're not very expensive (on lamma anyway, don't know if this is the final price), so I could probably get some better numbers by using those consistently--as you can see I didn't actually make very many shards (95)

My crafter's been maxxed out for a couple of years now, and I just stashed ALL the essences I got from running quests, I didn't deconstruct as I went. So that's a couple of years of pulled-only essences to give you an idea of what the leveling grind is going to look like.

[Stoner81]

Currently downloading the Lamma client now so hopefully this remains up for a while yet to let folks test it all out.

Stoner81.

[Stoner81]

All righty, so here we are, I used up all my existing essences leveling with a Major pot and this is how far I got:

You used a lot of mats and got what about 30 levels? That's seems pretty **** low to me?

Stoner81.

[PsychoBlonde]

One of the devs just showed up and ****ed about a billion essences all over the crafting hall, so if you wanna test there you go.

[PsychoBlonde]

You used a lot of mats and got what about 30 levels? That's seems pretty **** low to me?

Stoner81.

Well, I could probably have been more efficient xp-wise, but not everyone is going to want to spend cash for XP pots and success boosters.

[PsychoBlonde]

Okay, here's the rundown:

1. With an xp pot (which I HIGHLY recommend) you can get to level 380ish just by making ML shards.
2. There's really no point in going above level 380 (even though max level is like 400) because there's just nothing to make above that point--I hit 100% success on all possible shards before then.
3. The most efficient way to level seems to be to get a 35% crafting booster or four (and an xp pot!!!!!) and make the highest-level ML shard you can. Ideally you want it to be only a 3% base success chance in order to maximize your xp. If you do it right, you can get 20k+ xp just from the one shard. With that xp return it doesn't matter if you lose several stacks of essences due to failed crafting attempts. After you get that BIG xp hit you want to make slightly lower level shards so you're not losing tons of essences to failed crafting until you get access to another 3% success chance shard. Use your success boosters for the BIG xp hits on 3% shards and spend the majority of your essences on reasonably high chance/return shards.
4. Once you put an ML shard on an item you can't upgrade it, it is the ML it is. Derka derp, you CAN change it by deconstructing the item again.
5. I didn't have any random items with augment slots on me (oversight) so I wasn't able to see how those interact with the disjunction.
6. Expect it to take you in the range of 170,000 essences to get from level 240 to 380--that's about what I used. You may be able to be more efficient than that, but that's what I'd expect if I were you.
7. The toon I used is an artificer so that may skew the numbers a bit.

[Cleanincubus]

Old Random Gen items won't deconstruct for essences. You can only turn them into blanks for crafting.

[QuantumFX]

All righty, so here we are, I used up all my existing essences leveling with a Major pot and this is how far I got:

Was this just from the essences that you had in the previous screenshot?

[Edwinge]

Weapons do not appear to be getting enhancement bonuses when crafted right now.

The character I copied is currently level 16 so I added a ML 16 shard to a weapon I disjuncted. I then added a prefix, suffix, and extra shard to it. It did get the 1.5W for being paragon tier, but it has no enhancement bonus (showing +0 on the Damage line of the tooltip, doesn't show magic dr bypass). The previous info posts indicated that the enhancement bonus would be tied to the min level.

[PsychoBlonde]

Was this just from the essences that you had in the previous screenshot?

Yes, that first one was just with the essences I had from the previous screen shot, so around 43k

[PsychoBlonde]

Some items I made for comparison:

These are level 30 flat bound gloves vs the same gloves with level 30(+4) bound:



Here are some unbound level 30(+4) items--there's no practical difference between bound and unbound items now, just the crafting level and mats you need to make them. Also insightful stats are in the recipes you can apply to items but the actual recipes to make the insightful stat shards have not yet been implemented.

[PsychoBlonde]

Here's a level 10 bound item (which seems really strong to me):



Although I will note that the insightful strength shard on there is level 275. The other two are 100.

[PsychoBlonde]

Okay, so after all those informative posts, here is my actual FEEDBACK:

1. Devs did a REALLY good job with labeling and so forth so that it's REALLY easy to tell suffix/prefix/extra slot/whatever. REALLY good--I found it all basically self-explanatory with no real effort.

2. To me, the leveling RATE seems . . . okay, but my preferences as to how grindy it "should" be are pretty open, so I'll leave that to other people to argue about. Yes, it's going to take a LOT (as in, more than I've pulled since the original crafting was implemented, but I'm also lazy when it comes to grinding essences so it's really hard to give an exact picture there) of essences to reach the top-end stuff, but there's a lot of useful low/mid tier stuff, too. Plus I think that since unbound items are basically identical to bound ones, now, those who don't want to craft will be able to hand their essences off to crafters and get GOOD stuff out of it fairly easily. So I don't think it's going to be a devastating amount of grind compared to the benefit you can get out of it. Those who don't want to grind crafting may want to find somebody who is more crafting ambitious than they are and latch onto them, though.

3. The items are strong across the levels even up into max epics--maybe a bit too strong at low/mid heroic levels depending on your personal preferences--but keep in mind that the top-end bonuses are HIGH LEVEL--the crafting level of the type of bonus isn't tied to the item level any more, so you need to be HIGH up there to be able to put insightful bonuses on LOW LEVEL heroic gear. To me, this isn't an excessive reward considering the work involved. Also, the unbound items DON'T say "bind on equip" any more, so getting items crafted for you shouldn't be a headache any more.

Things I'm still curious about (and I hope others will make an effort to answer if possible, because I'm kinda out of time for now):

1. How does this system interact with items that have augment slots on them?

2. How exactly do the arti bonus levels work? Is it better to level up crafting then TR into an arti for maximum leveling cheapness, or is it better to level AS an arti so you get access to the higher level shards faster for max xp?

3. Does crafting XP gain reset on TR? (I should check this one myself later.)

4. Where do the new collectibles drop?

5. Are the random collectibles boxes going to go into the live DDO store? If so, how much are they going to cost? (I'm assuming it's going to be more than 1 point.)

Suggestions:

1. Make the "add an extra slot" line go away when you have already added an extra slot to an item, that's just confusing. Also, I'm not sure why there are TWO recipes for this (and you can put them both on the same item although it does nothing.)

2. Also, you might want to consider some kind of Otto's Crafting Box--maybe with a Crafting XP Stone and some mats/collectibles/crafting xp pots/success boosters/purified dragonshards. If the price is reasonableish and the XP stone is of decent size (as in, around 5K points and around 150K on the crafting XP) I'd probably buy one.

3. You don't get enough purified dragonshards for Eberron Dragonshards, which aren't exactly common. I'd make it 3/6/9 instead of 1/2/3

4. ABSOLUTELY MUST add a way to deconstruct shards into essences.

[lostgunman]

It thinks my longsword is armor or something...

[lostgunman]

Melee Alacrity/Striding broken?



Colorless Slots prevent Cannith Extra Slots? Or is it just that L1 cannot have the extra abilities?

[Cocomajobo]

Melee Alacrity/Striding broken?

Ah, nice catch. Do you know if it's just a tooltip error? Are they increasing attack/movement speed when worn?

Those are actually new scaling versions of the effects made for this update. I hadn't had time to take a look at it before we prepped this Lammania push. I'll be sure to put a report in our database when I get to work tomorrow.

[Cocomajobo]

It thinks my longsword is armor or something...

It thinks it's both a weapon and a shield, actually! Weapons currently (and I believe this is true of the current Cannith system on live as well) pull from both the intended weapon lost as well as the shield list. We know about it and will hopefully have it allowing only the intended things by launch.