Tiered Crafting or: How I Learned to Stop Being Bored and Love the Forge

[Shadowclaimer]

This suggestion is an attempt to spice up crafting without completely overhauling and redoing the entire crafting system. Its a subtle change that I think adds a lot of depth and allows crafters to work and specialize themselves.

The suggestion is the implementation of tiered recipes. The first of these tiers is what you receive from a trainer or a scroll (for the rest of this suggestion I'll use the Tin Longsword as an example). Now this Tin Longsword recipe is cool and such, but what if it got BETTER as you crafted more of them? What if there was an experience meter on the recipe itself in your book that filled as you made more!

So lets say you crafted so many of them and filled that bar, then bam! you'll get a notification and a new recipe in your book called Well-Made Tin Longsword! (Your old recipe would stay in there as well) This new recipe has a little higher stats, and a slightly higher mat cost (Maybe a Moonstone, since most armor/weaponsmiths have tons of them lying around from mining). If you craft so many of those you'll get the next tier, so on and so forth.

If you kept working hard, eventually you could make a Mastercraft Tin Longsword, which would be Epic Quality, have high level mats for that level and result in a really nice weapon for that level of player.

What this does is gives crafters an incentive to continue gathering/working past max skill level, as it stands outside of your dailies and spamming trade chat looking for work for money. You really have zero reason to gather mats for yourself, and your profession goes basically un-needed. This system would mean you could go out and work and advance your crafting to enhance your abilities and unlock new recipes. Maybe you want to specialize and get all the axe recipes, someone else gets all the sword ones, and some other guy the daggers, eventually you're all specialized and crafting is fun again!

At lower levels I'd assume it'd take less to level up a recipe so to speak, however higher level recipes (and by extension, epic recipes) would require a lot more to unlock the advanced versions. So even the best crafters won't be running around with T7 recipes for more than a recipe or two. However some players may wish to specialize in lower level epics, whereas some players would want higher level recipes for them, the joys of crafting and general economics roll in!

Tier List Breakdown:

T1 <Name> (Trainer Recipes and Scroll Recipes)
T2 Well-Made <Name>
T3 Superior <Name>
T4 Ornate <Name>
T5 Pristine <Name>
T6 Exceptional <Name>
T7 Masterwork <Name>

This system was designed with Armorsmithing, Weaponsmithing, Artificer, and Outfitting in mind, I'm sure this could somehow be applied to Apothecary and Runecrafting as well.

[sandpaper3]

man excellent idea!

I also don't really think it sounds overly complicated either.

I think there is so much they could do with crafting, I think this would work, I also think maybe mixing more mats to make more unique items could work (so like different hilts and different blades for differing types of swords) I also think they could add some more ascended power stuff to crafting also.

I wandered off a little there, but I think this should be the first step!

[Shadowclaimer]

man excellent idea!

I also don't really think it sounds overly complicated either.

I think there is so much they could do with crafting, I think this would work, I also think maybe mixing more mats to make more unique items could work (so like different hilts and different blades for differing types of swords) I also think they could add some more ascended power stuff to crafting also.

I wandered off a little there, but I think this should be the first step!

The hilts, blades, crossguards, pommels, and minigames things were things I comtemplated across the board but realized those kinds of things would work, but would require such a sizeable overhaul of the game's systems that its best left to the devs to just come up with on their own.

[Mazatron]

A similar sort of crafting system is already implemented in Lord of the Rings online. From a practical point of view, it's a very very annoying way to craft because epic items or good quality items ''proc'' so the ***** that is RNG screws a lot of crafters over.

Having said that, the crafting system is a little bit lackluster and the fact you can't craft past T1 stuff feels pointless to have crafting skills at all!

[Shadowclaimer]

Yea this would not be RNG for sure, just because its not meant to be. Its meant to be a work intensive way to get your crafting up and unlock new, better, recipes.

I'd imagine T7 versions of epics would be at least T1 quality truthfully.