The Grand Crafting Adjustment Thread

[Limecat]

Cooking 101+ needs ridiculous amounts of HELM, which is only slightly better than the randomness of vw drops lol

I ran around Fort Alphabet for a while trying to get dragon fruit until I started feeling part of my soul wither away and die.

[Economizer]

HELM is actually another topic I'd like to address. It has a bunch of problems that pop up, although it can still be decent from time to time.

HELM areas tend to be lots of running interrupted by lots of messages about Sickles, Hatchets, but most of all Pickaxes breaking. The best areas for HELM tend to be areas that don't have a wide spread, and especially areas where the items are stackable. The worst areas make you run a convoluted maze between opposite sides of the zone, hoping to not get a "Your Hatchet breaks." message before being forced to run all the way back.

Then you have your non-stackables, such as logs and ores, and having to decide between dumping a Chestnut Log or Copper Ore because you didn't have enough skill to craft it (let alone HQ it) or didn't have the right amount of ore.

I ran around Fort Alphabet for a while trying to get dragon fruit until I started feeling part of my soul wither away and die.

This is another issue I'm suspecting, but I don't really have any solid proof on, and I think part of it is on the demand end.

Harvesting, especially when it comes to ingredients, tends to be sporadically bought on the AH on many servers. The ingredients might be worth 300k a stack (and this isn't just because they're rarely sold, but because the opportunity cost of gathering the ingredients, even if it is a more casual method, still is often vastly outpaced by even the most casual farming), but you can list them on the AH and never see them sell.

I don't know if this is from stingy crafters who don't understand that HELM can take effort too, feeling stiffed because some listings from two to five years ago are a tenth or so of the actual worth, or a more likely seeming scenario of people just expecting the ingredients to not be listed on the AH ever and skipping it. But the end result is someone does HELM once in a blue moon then gets stuck with clogged AH slots (or inventory if they use Bazaar) that never sell anything and just NPCing the ingredients in frustration.

Making the ingredients gardenable seems like a decent solution, but ultimately it could just drive the price down on the last profitable HELM drops, or lower the potential haul for an area, much like Voidwatch did to many logs (which in turn hurt cooks who also get ingredients from Logging).

And as a personal bit to add to your Cooking leveling woes, I've noticed that Karakul Leather tends to sell in singles, but rarely in stacks... perhaps Cooks can skill up from 105~109 using just a stack worth of singles making Dragon Tanks, but I find this hard to believe. Listing Karakul Leather in stacks on my server is an exercise in throwing away money most of the time... I'm guessing many cooks must farm the Karakul themselves to "save" money by spending their time.