Crafting Grind

[Kelvana]

Id probably add quality chains, and more bonus exp per synth for quality,
-bonus exp for quality = 10% for over 100 30 for over 200, 50 for 300+ (over base quality, so wont include HQ materials starting quality)
-Quality chains, continue as long as you go over 100 quality, giving a bonus 20% exp as long as the chain is alive.

Id make group exp company leves where in that party,
-your bonuses effect every one in the party, and can stack between each other (multiple makers muse for example as long as they were from different sources)
-youd be graded on your speed and quality achieved.

Id also add some more visual cues
-risk needs to be measured by more than sparking, because risk is effecting you even when it isnt sparking
-make elemental instability look like mini primals or elementals trying to break your item,
-more direct feedback for what abilities do, success chance +20% in corner when you use makers muse for example.
-and make it obvious whether mcraft or craft is the key stat for a craft, could have differing animations for when you are using mcrafting or crafting.

Id add a recipe book that tracks every item you ve made
-you d get bonus exp the first time you made any thing, and the first time you HQ it,
-you could also get bonus exp for completing every craft in a teir, say all the things a blacksmith can craft from 11-20 gives an sp bonus


some recipes that you have to obtain via quests.
quests would be more complex, and involve,
-doing tough synths, some with certain tendencies, (like one that tends to go unstable with fire)
-speed competitions, do X synths in X time, or before npc competitor does it,
-quality competitions, get X quality on items
-and some that are just lore/adventure related, (journey to X to learn the secret of kobold iron production)

I feel these things would solve the boringness of crafting, the loneliness, and the monotonousness, as well as speed up the curve a bit, and promote crafting everything you can at least once, and trying to get hq.

just the changing of having HQ effect sp gains would make the minigame that much more complex, and entertaining.

I totally agree. I would like to add suggestions to your very interesting ideas.

I like the idea of chains in crafting, I think it would be a bit cooler imo to give a chain bonus for recipes different than any of the last 4-5 recipes crafted, in addition to giving us a large bonus for crafting an item for the first time only. This would both break up the monotony as well as speed up the curve and make it closer match DoM,DoW,DoL classes. Also, It'd be cool to have an achievement that gave say 10-20k exp bonus for completing ALL recipes in your level range (i.e. 11-20, 21-30). These ideas encourage people to try to make everything and help to make the leveling experience more varied and fun.

I also really like the idea of more visual cues... I think i'd like to see a timing based cue though. This would definately make it more entertaining, especially if the closer you are to a timing mark, the higher the success rate, in addition to the reverse.

For now, at least until something better comes along, give us at least 4 leves per level group per craft.

This would definitely help make things more bearable, and I would be all for it. It however would only be a stop gap measure and would only make things a little less leg intensive. In addition to this, I'd say without increasing the experience per leve, make all leves in town. alternatively I'd say at least make the experience rewards for remote camps worth the extra run/anima, especially to camps like Blue fog.

[IXSigmaXI]

I like the ideas that have been presented in this thread. I want voice my support of these and add my own thoughts. i'm not sure if it was mentioned but an option of repeating a certain synth, exactly like the message box that appears at the end of a leve-synth would be nice. Anything that reduces the amount of time waiting for menus to load is a good thing.

I was having a conversation with my linkshell the other day and the idea of a 100% HQ chance with no extra work besides obtaining HQ materials makes us very uneasy. On the other hand, yes it is upsetting when you do go to the trouble to get all HQ mats and still the synth yields NQ. Now i have heard that the developers are considering the idea of separating synthesis into 2 options, one for NQ and one for HQ desired result. In the interest of continuing to reward players who have invested all the time and effort to learn the crafting system and level multiple crafts to achieve useful cross-class abilities, i propose that in the hq version a minimum quality must be achieved to guarantee an HQ result, and failure to do so would result in a failure of the synthesis.

I hope whatever the devs choose to do they will consider the effort some players put into synthesis already and not render all of that work for nothing.

[JTSpender]

On the one hand, I agree that some parts of crafting can be a bit grindy. On the other hand, I also don't want it to be too easy, because I enjoy spending time gathering ingredients, and like that those people who are willing to devote more time to crafting are "better" than others.

I realize they're probably way past the point of doing basic crafting system design, but since we're brainstorming I'll throw this out here anyway. I think the fundamental problem with crafting in a lot of MMOs is that crafting level is directly related to the combat class level of items you can make. This means that unless you always keep your crafting level the same level as your combat class' level, you can't really use the items you create. I would be much happier if the system were such where, say, someone who was, say, CNJ level 80 could with a moderate amount of effort (say, Weaver 30 or 40?) get to the point where they could make basic level 80 NQ gear they could use which would be adequate for their level (the kind of stuff you might buy from an NPC), and maybe occasionally +1s to keep it interesting. But only someone who put a lot of time into crafting and was, like, Weaver 80 or so could make HQ versions of that gear, or some of the more specialized/customized gear that a more advanced (skillwise, not levelwise) or wealthy player might use.

As alternative is to have two parallel sorts of skill levels, one of NQ/basic gear which goes up really fast, and one for HQ/specialized gear which goes up more slowly. I'm hoping that's what they actually meant by separate systems for NQ and HQ, because that would be super rad.

The idea here is that someone who is really into combat but only wants to dabble in crafting can make things that are useful for them, while the player who is really into crafting can make the best things. Otherwise, you either have to dumb down crafting so that everyone can feel successful (and disappoint the hardcore crafters) or make things so complex that those who want to dabble never craft at all because they get bored by level 20 or so.

[Ethir]

@Kelvana
Yesterday i ran to bluefog; and i found a completely sage passage. You guys should really venture more