Prrasha
02-16-2006, 06:11 AM
Thus spake Dymus: "When an item can be gained with little risk by digging something out of the ground (if you're patient enough)"OK, the thread that came from has been stewing away for a week now. I posted in it earlier <a target="_blank" href="http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=testfeed&message.id=47050#M47050">here</a> about the limited usefulness of imbued rings as 1-3% proc items. I'm posting another thought, in a new thread because it's much more general (and since it probably wouldn't've been read under the 10 pages of flames and gimme-back-my-plats and can-I-have-your-stuffs in the other thread. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />Reading between the lines of Dymus' post <a href="http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=testfeed&message.id=46873#M46873" target="_blank">here</a>, and looking at posts from the beta testers showing their 'treasured' T7 rare tradeskilled items that are weaker than my T6 gear, I feel I need to address the general positioning of tradeskilled items in the continuum of "corpse loot" to "Djinn Master Drops"... I think it's being set too low based on what I've seen and read.Up front, I'd like to address the idea of "risk". This game contains little real risk. Death gets you a small XP penalty and item damage. This means you need to kill a few more creatures, which only requires time, not additional risk... my level 41 illusionist alt recently solo'ed off a death's worth of XP penalty in 4 green-con kills, and she can buy off 3 or 4 deaths' worth of item damage to her non-Fabled gear by vendoring one chest-dropped item from her tier. The greatest risk in the game, death, means five minutes of catch-up killing. (OK, maybe 15-30 for a fabled plate wearer with their greater repair costs.)Beyond top-tier raid mobs, all the "difficulty" in the game is really in the timesinks (and even then, refighting the same raid over and over until you figure it out is a timesink, just a more exciting one)... killing placeholders to spawn the named you need to advance a heritage quest or have a chance at a unique dropped item is a timesink. Farming easy mobs for Lore And Legend updates or book pages or vendorable corpse loot or guild XP from writs: timesink. Waiting out the reentry timer on a good zone, XPing your character to a level where you can walk freely through a zone, and, yes, pounding on rocks until you get enough rubies or pearls to adept3 all the spells you want... all timesinks. There is no "risk" that does not equate directly to "time spent". Thus the phrase "with little risk, if you're patient enough" is meaningless.So, we need to consider effort, and not risk. Risk is an illusion; it's directly convertible to more effort (and a pretty small amount of effort, at that.)What goes into that non-risky Legendary imbued tradeskilled item (that's becoming a Treasured item in KoS)?First, you need a tradeskiller. I have a level 60 jeweler who I've been running since well back into the days of interdependency. A standard jewelry combine currently takes 5 refine steps (temper, resin, 3 bars), 3 interim steps, and 1 final step, and 3, 1, and 1 of those need to be pristine. Assuming good use of buffs and no bad random-number-generator runs, that's, say, (6x3)+(2x2)+(9x1)+(2x2)+(13x1) tradeskill ticks, at 4 seconds each. Every 9 items takes 192 seconds, running between tradeskill devices and finding recipes and buying fuel takes time, so lets say 25 seconds per combine, average. The assumption of no bad ticks makes this a severe underestimate, but oh well. I'm being my own devil's advocate, here.I've crafted 15,789 items by my current "achievements" page count. That's about 110 hours of time at 25 seconds per. Granted, some of that was made after I got to 60th, some was no-XP grey-combine stuff for alts and guildies, and some was the ubiquitous (but still grey-combine) Palladium Torques, so it doesn't really represent what it takes to get to 59th and make those nifty imbued items.So, lets go to my Armorer alt, made post-interdependency, and powerleveled as much as possible (5 grey combines done in her lifetime, very few combines done without vitality, two one-year-reward tradeskill XP potions consumed, rare cross-class books bought so she could make Cerulean Ink and Ebon Hammerheads and such for my other crafters, just to get the first-time-pristine bonus XP...)She's made 7597 items, and is still in the first half of level 59. So, a reasonable minimum amount of time spent to get to the point of even trying to make one of these tier 6 imbued items is (7500x25/3600) = 52 hours. 7 normal USA'an working days, just to get the ability to make imaginary items in a game.Now, you need recipe books. Ignoring the cheap bottom tiers, you need about 10 + 3x10 + 5x10 gp to buy your standard books. Plus another 20 or 40 to buy your imbuing books for those tiers. Call it 120 gp. Getting 120 gp out of mobs or quests takes time. If you could do it all at 59th level, it would only take a few hours of lucky adventuring. But those 5 sp drops in the Thundering Steppes don't add up that fast. More time has been spent, just to get the ability to make imaginary items in a game.Then you need an equal-level adventurer to go kill things until you get all the advanced tradeskill books, since nobody wants Handcrafted when they could have Treasured for very little effort (mob-drops, right?). For T6, you could be that adventurer yourself, and do a bunch of quests to be able to buy the books from your Maj'Dul faction merchant. I'm not sure what the real drop rate is, but I've never found a full set of books for any of my tradeskillers as I've gone through a tier with my adventurers, even in the book-heavy Splitpaw zones. So there's several hours of work here, divided amongst the adventurers in the tier. (from the crafter's perspective, this is translated into another couple plat as they buy them off the broker from an adventurer.) Whether killing-time or money-making time, there's more time spent, just to get the ability to make imaginary items in a game.Now you need gathered items. Getting any-random-rare plus any-random-imbuing-item probably takes 1-2 hours of dedicated harvesting. If you need a specific rare, i.e. vanadium for a melee-stat ring, or need to fight while you harvest because the zone isn't grey, it takes more time. Or, vanadium sells for 120-150 gold on the broker, you could kill stuff and do quests to earn that plat. We're looking at about 2-4 hours to get the cash or items you need, per tradeskilled item.The quickest way to "gather" might be instance farming... I've gotten an opal or feysteel or something off of Octogorgon every time he's died. I've gotten rubies and figwart roots off the mini-named (Devout Thule Sattar, Swamp Creep) in the Feerrott over half the times I've killed them. But this kind of flies in the face of the logic that Rare Tradeskilled items should be Treasured while named-mob drops should be the better Legendary class of item... will Names quit dropping tradeskill components because they're too weak? Maybe drop newly-added Adept IV's instead, so the scholars won't be able to make anything adventurers want, to go along with all the gear the equipment-making classes will be making that adventurers don't want?But I digress... We've now got a tradeskiller who's spent a minimum of 2 full work weeks to be able to do what she's doing, plus an adventurer who's spent about a third of a work day for each item he wants.Between a few adept3's for taunts and stances and Ancient Teachings, 7 armor pieces, a couple-three jewelry bits, a weapon, and a shield, a good XP-group/instance-running main tank might want 15-20 rares in tier 6. Another 1-to-2 full work weeks spent gathering. Even if that particular tank isn't doing all the gathering himself, that gathering time was spent by someone, and traded to the tank for platinum that he spent time earning.Then, six months later when the next expansion comes out and adds a tier, that 1-to-2 full work weeks is spent all over again.I know there are hardcore raiders who can treat this game as a full-time job, and I believe they deserve all their uber Fabled stuff for the time spent... and apparently Sony believes this as well. But I'd like to know why the "casual" players who just spent an honest-to-$DEITY working month outfitting a great XP tank aren't at least considered Legendary? Their effort is worth no more than the person who steps into the new zone, kills one gnoll, and gets a lcky chest drop? There's no Heritage Quest that I've done that takes even a full 40-hour work-week to do, unless there's four-and-a-half work days of waiting for named mobs (coughLightstonecough) or 4 days waiting for a decent 24 man raid (ahemGhoulbane) involved. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Yet those rewards are all tagged as Legendary...Common should be weaker than Handcrafted, Handcrafted should be weaker than Treasured, than Legendary, than Fabled, than Mythical. I accept that. But please don't assume that the "low risk" of gaining a Rare tradeskilled item means it should be sorted in with the Treasured mob-dropped gear, or treasured "kill 10 orcs and come back to me" quested gear. If items like the Bone Bladed Claymore and Stein of Moggok are Legendary, so too are Rare tradeskilled items; the time and effort involved is the same. In most cases, it's greater for the tradeskilled item... there's just no one-per-character limit on tradeskilling.Start from there, and balance within the tier. Handcrafted weaker than mob drops, mob drops weaker than simple quests, simple quests weaker than rare tradeskilled, rare tradeskilled weaker than Heritage quested, Heritage weaker than Fabled.Please, let the rewards to our characters match the actual EFFORT, not the supposed risk. Thank you.