1.20+ HQ - Request to keep "Touch Up"

[Frein]

I never understood what the point of Touch Up is. You already sacrifice durability when you try to maximize quality, so how does Touch Up fit into this picture? It completely overlaps with careful synthesis as far as its function goes. It's messy design and Touch Up probably shouldn't be included as long as careful synthesis is in the game.

[Amineri]

I never understood what the point of Touch Up is. You already sacrifice durability when you try to maximize quality, so how does Touch Up fit into this picture? It completely overlaps with careful synthesis as far as its function goes. It's messy design and Touch Up probably shouldn't be included as long as careful synthesis is in the game.

From one point of view, the Touch Up mechanic does seem redundant. After all, increasing quality also increases the probability of obtaining an HQ result.

However, the chance to increase HQ from simply increasing Quality is a relatively small increase, as well as a (in my opinion) overly simplified HQ mechanic. I'll give an example, using the mooglebox HQ data:

Quality of 300 yields a 1% chance to +3
Quality of 400 yields a 2% chance to +3
However, each Touch Up gives a new independent chance to +3
Quality of 300 with 3 Touch Ups yields a ~3% chance to +3 (1 - 0.99^3)

This mechanic makes the synthesis process more a balancing act, attempting to achieve high quality without sacrificing too much durability. To my mind, this brings an element of skill (consideration of balancing opposing needs in an uncertain, probabilistic environment) into the synthesis process. With the current material / part HQ process, it is much more repetitive, simply a process of using careful synthesis as much as possible, and repeating the synthesis many times.

Additionally, the Touch Up mechanic for ingredients would add more value to the use of HQ dropped / gathered materials. Whether this is a good thing or not -- I couldn't say.

If the Touch Up mechanic were retained, but used for making ingredients, the current probabilities for +3 result could be retained to achieve HQ result.

[Xenor]

This mechanic makes the synthesis process more a balancing act, attempting to achieve high quality without sacrificing too much durability. To my mind, this brings an element of skill (consideration of balancing opposing needs in an uncertain, probabilistic environment) into the synthesis process. With the current material / part HQ process, it is much more repetitive, simply a process of using careful synthesis as much as possible, and repeating the synthesis many times.

This is why I prefer the current HQ system. I don't know anyone who can pop out +3s like I do. I mean I've made 3 Crab Bow +3s so far and some people try and try and never get one. It's definitely skill more than luck. The new system will be neither, just a dumbed down system to please the want want want crowd.

There will be more time spent farming and less time spent crafting. I'll have to farm mats for 50 hours for 2 synths vs farming mats for 20 hours for 20 synths and popping out multiple HQs. People don't appreciate this kind of effort so high value items sell slow. They'll sell even slower when people know it's guaranteed HQ. They may not even sell at all when you could just buy the mats and give them to a friend knowing you're guaranteed a result. So this means the only people farming HQ mats will be people who don't craft and the only people buying them people who don't craft.

[Amineri]

This is why I prefer the current HQ system. I don't know anyone who can pop out +3s like I do. I mean I've made 3 Crab Bow +3s so far and some people try and try and never get one. It's definitely skill more than luck. The new system will be neither, just a dumbed down system to please the want want want crowd.

There will be more time spent farming and less time spent crafting. I'll have to farm mats for 50 hours for 2 synths vs farming mats for 20 hours for 20 synths and popping out multiple HQs. People don't appreciate this kind of effort so high value items sell slow. They'll sell even slower when people know it's guaranteed HQ. They may not even sell at all when you could just buy the mats and give them to a friend knowing you're guaranteed a result. So this means the only people farming HQ mats will be people who don't craft and the only people buying them people who don't craft.

You seem to be presupposing that making HQ ingredients given HQ materials will also be 100% guaranteed. My careful reading of the posts suggests that this mechanic will only be for the finished item synthesis, and I hope that this is true.

You also seem to be supposing that the existing recipes that use a large number of dropped / gathered materials will be remaining. The three recipe examples given so far don't use ANY dropped / gathered materials directly, although they are not the greatest examples, because weaving/armorer recipes traditionally have used very few.

Your example of a crab bow is a fair example. It uses two dropped materials (red coral and green megalocrab shell. Further, the iron spikes are a very low rank synthesis, and generate four +3 results when HQ is achieved. I'd imagine that you don't spend a lot of time trying to get +3 Oak Composite Bows -- the extra time spent trying to make +3 there is not worth the increase in HQ rate on the the final bow.

I would argue that the current synthesis process of making an HQ crab bow already consists of a large amount of time spent farming mats. The crab shell and red coral are straight up farmed items. Iron spikes are 'farmed' by Careful Synth spamming using NQ iron nuggets to get large quantities of +2/+3 iron spikes. Oak Composite bows are then used as +1 primarily.

My hope is that the system going forward, something like the crab bow would be changed so that the crab shell and red coral are no longer directly used. Instead, a manufactured ingredient made from these items would be used, and the synthesis rank to make these should be inline with final result. A r48 bow should require ingredient synths that are r41 to r45. Further, the iron spikes should be changed to something more rank appropriate then a rank 23 synthesis. Perhaps the cobalt ingots that were referenced for the cobalt sabaton recipe (the cobalt ingot synth presumably only generates a single ingot, contrasted with four spikes). Finally, the new HQ system will require an actual HQ Oak Composite Bow to make an HQ Crab Bow. Making the HQ Oak Composite Bow will in turn require all HQ ingredients to make.

It with these assumptions in mind that I proposed keeping the Touch Up mechanic.

• Nearly all ingredients used in a final item synth will be created by crafting
• Creating HQ manufactured ingredients from HQ materials is not 100%
• Ingredients synthesis ranks will be close to the rank of the final item that they are creating
• Ingredient syntheses will produce only 1 or 2 manufactured ingredients (generally 1)

If these are true, I think that retaining the Touch Up mechanic for creating these HQ manufactured ingredients makes a lot of sense.