5.1 Crafting/Gathering Changes Feedback

[PangTong]

In general I think the changes are good and bring a much needed culling of the bloat and unnecessary complexity that had accumulated in crafting and gathering over the course of several expansions. I also think the recipe tree and raw material list features are excellent additions, as well as getting rid of out-of-reach items on unspoiled nodes. But I have a few issues with some of the changes, starting with some more minor ones.

The visual effect on Sneak is annoying
It's too big and flashy for something you want to have activated 100% of the time. On top of that, it's annoying that Sneak disables itself if you enter a city zone, or switch to a crafter while in a city, but doesn't automatically re-enable itself if you leave. The Auto-Sneak trait only works if you switch to a gatherer job while outside a city. Why not just make Sneak itself a trait with an invisible effect?

If you activate a Truth skill that allows you to see unspoiled/legendary nodes on a different gatherer (e.g. Truth of Forests while you're a Miner), and a node appears, and you switch to the right gatherer, the Truth skill auto-activates but the minimap icon for the gathering node disappears.
I'll just assume this is a bug.

Quick Gathering is cumbersome to turn on and off on a controller.
I'd prefer it if there was simply a dedicated context button to switch it on/off instead of having to click down to the checkbox every time. It's also annoying how if you switch it off but then don't gather anything from the node, it comes back on again when you visit the next node.

Some of the crafting skill descriptions are still too vague
Ingenuity works the same way it used to, only now if you are a new player looking at the skill description, you don't even know what the "effectiveness" increase is based on. It makes it harder to predict the effect of the skill which makes choosing to use it harder. Same thing for Name/Brand of the Elements. Does the efficiency bonus get higher at low progress or high progress? Where does it cap out? How do I see what the increase is? Crafting something without a predetermined rotation is inherently risky so little uncertainties in the way skills work makes me reluctant to try them.

Removal of the Reclaim skill
With no good way to increase the chances of getting your materials back on a failure, people are reluctant to experiment with their crafting skills, which means they're still more likely to just ask other people for working macros or pre-designed rotations, and those who work out rotations on their own are still just going to use crafting simulators. I'd like to see the skill added back somehow even if it has some caveat to make it balanced.

As for some of the bigger issues I have with the changes:

Crafting skills with sub-100% success rates are no longer worth using.
Hasty Touch was only worth using because you could get its success rate to 80% with Steady Hand II, and even at 80% you were still taking a pretty big risk. At 60%, Hasty Touch isn't even worth having on your bars. The payoff for success is nowhere near worth the risk of failure. This has had a heavy impact on low-level crafting because now low-level crafters cannot mitigate their cripplingly low CP by using Hasty Touch, which has made it MUCH harder to reliably craft HQ items at low level. It really needs to be at least 80% to be worth the risk of failing, even if the efficiency has to be lowered or a slight CP cost added to compensate.

Same story for Rapid Synth. 500% efficiency still isn't really worth the risk unless you've got durability to spare, in which case you're probably not crafting anything difficult anyway. Same thing with Patient Touch. The effect is good, but the risk isn't worth it unless you could still HQ even if the skill fails.

I would personally like to see Hasty Touch increased to 80% success rate, or otherwise increase it to 100% success rate but lower its efficiency to 50%. With regards to Rapid Synthesis and Patient Touch, either their success rate should be improved at the cost of the strength of their effects, or I would like to see a new change where a Good condition proc increases action success rates by +20%, and +30% for Excellent condition.

EXP gains for crafting and gathering have been WAY overtuned
I can agree that crafter and gatherer exp gains should have been increased, but by something modest like +50-100%. With the new changes I was able to level Miner from 70 to 80 in just 3 hours. Not days, hours.

The increase to exp gain borders on insanity. You level so quickly that gear is outdated minutes after you put it on. Getting the gear takes more time than you spend using it. Before you can even figure out what your skills do, you've learned 5 more. It's crazy. If they were planning on trivializing leveling this much, they may as well have just had us start at level 80.

I get that it took too long to level up all the crafting and gathering jobs if you were starting at 1, but I feel like this exp increase was overzealous. A large part of the point of crafting and gathering is just to give you something to do. It seems like short-circuiting the whole system to make it this easy to get to the level cap. Now that the cat is out of the bag however, I don't see the devs dialing back this change as it would upset too many people.

[ravenmoonstorm]

so of us are liking it don't ruin it for us!!!

[KageTokage]

I'm slightly afraid for how many more DoL/H bots are going to be showing up with how laughably easy the leveling is now.

I've personally witnessed some of them go from 1-80 on all of the DoL classes within the span of a week, so I imagine it could potentially only take a few days now.

[OlafQuintessa]

Have to agree that the exp for GC and leve turn ins is ludicrous now. I was in the middle of levelling DoH from 50-60 when the patch hit. It was a bit of a grind but to be honest I was enjoying the challenge. I think it was a mistake to make the exp rewards so high.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

As someone that has every crafter and gatherer to get to 80. I'm thankful it's so much less grindy. Could've seen them keeping the 70-80 a grind and leaving lower lvl stuff speedy though.
I've managed to speed a couple classes up to 60 now, I still have to do all the class quests for each class which takes time etc. As someone working from the ground up the old grind made me feel so done with it all. I have only so much time for these things.

[Niwashi]

Could've seen them keeping the 70-80 a grind and leaving lower lvl stuff speedy though.

The low levels were already crazy fast even before this change. I hate not being able to make a set of crafting gear without that crafting itself taking me out of the level range where I could use it. It makes it basically impossible to ever have good gear for weaver, and sometimes the others as well.

Maybe the middle levels around 50-70 could have used a speed up (making them closer to the speed during the pre-change 45-50). There it's just that they overdid it by a pretty huge margin.

[aesteval]

I'm slightly afraid for how many more DoL/H bots are going to be showing up with how laughably easy the leveling is now.

I've personally witnessed some of them go from 1-80 on all of the DoL classes within the span of a week, so I imagine it could potentially only take a few days now.

Would there be more? Grinds don't stop bots because they don't have the same valuation of time that a players has. Easing up the grind seems like it wouldn't make any differences to bots.

[QT_Melon]

Would there be more? Grinds don't stop bots because they don't have the same valuation of time that a players has. Easing up the grind seems like it wouldn't make any differences to bots.

The only concern with bots is as long as they don't really interfere with gameplay. I mean I hate bots, don't want them around, but nothing is worse than those teleport bots that actively make it difficult for players to complete quests and can't report because the programmer has them below ground or somewhere untargetable

[Tlamila]

I fully agree on Sneak that should auto activate everywhere, and yeah I also liked the old graphic effect better.

And I hugely agree on the xp. I'm happy it got faster, but this is just ridicolous. Not only the gear, but also the job quests are impossible to keep up with now. And 60+ for the quests you absolutely need to craft/gather the item/s yourself (you can't even cheat it by buying it on mb) and for that indeed you need the right gear. I got to the point with GSM where I need 1030 craftmanship to craft the quest item, and with my current gear I only had 500. I spent all the money I had to buy the best gear for that level and still it's only 600 or something. I assume the quests want your gear always up to date with melds and all at that level, and scrips gear, but with this levelling speed it's impossible. The only thing I can think of is to leave all the job skills behind and just get to 80 and seriously gear up there, but that would be so annoying...

[Maxsdad]

Is there anything you don't complain about?