Quote Originally Posted by Jinko View Post
Perhaps if the devs actually told us how they effected crafting it would be different, although still stupid.
So far the information that has been released on other topics (those which I have figured out) has been accurate, yet a little vague and incomplete.

The two examples I know of so far :

1) The Mind Stat affects Cure amounts.

This is true, but a small-ish effect, 1 point of cure amount per 2 points of Mind, with no cap that I've been able to find. However, what hadn't been said was that magical potency ALSO affects Cure amount, with every 3 points of magical potency adding 1 point of cure amount (slightly less impact than Mind, and part of the reason DoW cures are smaller).

2) The output stat affect number of gathering extraction.

True, it take between 22 and 30 more output to get another extraction attempt, depending on some particulars. However (and this may be obvious), your gather rank is a strong influence on how many times you can extract -- each rank you gain gives the equivalent of 4 points of output. At end-game, about 60% of the "output" potential of a gatherer is from rank, and 40% from gear. Naturally, this "rank effect" is not displayed in the attribute panel.

************************************************

The upshot is that the developers seem to be providing enough information to "get along", and do not provide complete information or formulae.

Given that a crafting class is supposed to be a complete class unto itself, I would expect a level of complexity commensurate with the combat classes. If the complete formula to consistently HQ items were laid bare, crafting classes would (in my opinion only perhaps) become even more of an empty shell than they are now.

Ideally, the process of HQing an item would depend upon skill, but since SE has not appeared to come up with such a mechanism, they have instead resorted to obscuring the mechanisms that lead to HQ results. Hopefully one day it will be replaced.

Perhaps as the game evolves this will become more true. Currently the cap is rank 50, but clearly there is/was an envisioned rank cap of 100 (NPCs mention gather grades to 10, implying gather rank 90 to 100 to gather from them). I can easily envision far more crafting skills being made available from ranks 51 through 100, and perhaps this will enable more skill to come into play, in a similar way that selecting your skills in Guild Wars did.

One can only hope ...