Problem: Items are Worthless

[moatcarp]

...As posted, the jist I get is "I shouldn't have to sit there for hours making an HQ item, someone else should have to spend their time so I can do it faster." - not sure trading off effort in that way is a good thing...

I understand how you would get that from what I posted but that isn't really my intention. I did say:

...On the down side it means that DoL need to spam harvesting to gather HQ mats and DoW need to spam NMs to obtain HQ mats. So, it's clearly not a perfect solution...

Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.

On the other hand my proposal balances the distribution of power at least a little bit. DoW/DoL can obtain HQ mats but can't do anything with them - they need the DoH. On the other hand DoH can't HQ without goods from DoW/DoL.

Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.

EDIT: a couple more thoughts - maybe crafting leves could reward HQ mats sometimes. This prevents crafters from being entirely beholden to DoL/DoW (and I *only* think this is appropriate because SE has already added non-DoH methods of obtaining gear; which I think was wrong of them).

Also, I'd have to spend a lot of time getting HQ mats farming because there is no DoL that can harvest what I need for my primary craft - leather. I already spend hours farming mats.