Some further thoughts on crafting in EQ2

OK, so I guess I had some thoughts about crafting in EQ2, and I guess I’ll share some of them.

Once upon a time there was no real way for someone to make a finished product unless they had “help” or purchased the components that someone else made from the broker. I guess at some point the developers realized that it wasn’t very realistic or functional to keep things that way so they added the extra recipies that everyone could get for the build components. That was all fine and dandy, but it still took a REALLY long time to get anything accomplished this way. I spent so much time, like 70% of my time making subcombines, that I wasn’t going out and having any fun with the rest of the game. Then about a year later they decided to revamp all of that and make it strictly based on harvestable components. It was a really great change really. Unfortunately they also nerfed all of the items crafters could make to be rather useless.

As time went on, the stats on amror and weapons kept getting nerfed to the point where the items were just not desireable at all. I do recall at some point that most of the trash drops of treasured gear were better than mastercrafted. Somewhere along the line though they fixed the discrepancy in stats and made mastercrafted gear slightly, and I mean slightly better than treasured trash. In the balancing act of trying to get all that straightened out the drop rate for rare components from harvesting was increased significantly. Pretty much all of the people that relied on crafting to make money got pretty screwed since “rares” were no long rare. And of course, once you make a change like that, you can’t simply go back without pissing off the majority of the population, because now it was easier to get stuff, and much cheaper too.

Anyways, during that reitemization and revamp of crafting, a lot of the old mastercrafted items simply disapeared. Some of those items were actually big sellers for me as well. One in particular was the Imbued Bone Fighting Baton. I sold TONS of those. One day they all went “poof”. I had people sending me tells for a few months afterwords asking if I had any left. Granted, it’s a tier 2 weapon, but it was very popular in it’s day.

Once upon a time, you could make money off mastercrafted armor. People actually went out and bought the stuff. Now a days, the price on it is so low, or the stats are so bad compared to what you can get from quests or instances, no one bothers. So that basically leaves armorers without a real means of income. There was once a good market for wands and bows and the like as well, but now woodworkers are relegated to making totems and ammo. Ammo doesn’t even sell all that well, and the totem market just gets stupid constantly. So, there’s a bunch of woodworkers out there making jack compared to what we used to make in terms of income. Once upon a time mastercrafted jewelry used to be pretty good. Then they changed how the imbues work on it and made it pretty useless. I used to keep a set of all of the rings so that I could swap them around and cast the imbues on them. Now I don’t even bother with them because you have to actually take damage for the imbues to proc, and most treasured jewelry past tier 5 has better stats on it. So now there’s a bunch of jewelers sitting around feeling pretty useless aside from making scout adept 3s.

The only real money makers for crafters at the moment are alchemists and provisioners. Alchemists get all the nifty consumable potions and poisons (which are essential to scouts) and fighter adept 3s. There’s a huge potential right there to make money since all of those items have a pretty high demand. Provisioners have it the best though in terms of making money. Everyone needs food and drink, and well, there’s never going to be a shortage of demand for that stuff. The only thing provisioners are lacking is some sort of “rare” recipie. But we don’t need to feed them anymore of our money than we already do now do we?

Now comes Kunark. It seems some of the mastercrafted stuff is actually desireable. I’m quite impressed with the balancing act they did trying to make the armor and such desireable. While I’m not high enough with my armorer to make any of it, I almost replaced some of my Kyle Bayle armor on my Paladin with some mastercrafted stuff. I lucked out and got lots of legendary armor from hitting instances enough to not have to spend the money on it. My woodworker, well, there’s a few wooden shields he can make that are decent, and of course the new runspeed totems, but he’s still pretty much screwed for making money. Especially now that everyone and their mother has made a woodworker to compete on the totem market

I’m interested in seeing where my carpenter will go once she’s over tier 6. I really didn’t like much of the Desert of Flames furniture, but all the furniture from teir 7 on looks really nice. Not to mention repair kits are a good seller, at least for raiders.

I’ve heard that there’s some special recipies you can get from various factions in Kunark that are also worth having. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to getting any of them though. I’m usually tanking something for someone or raiding now a days or trying to level my brigand to 80 (which is kinda hard for me being busy all the time). It would be nice to do whatever it is you need to do to get to that point, but I just don’t have the time, and honestly, I find crafting to be one of the most boring aspects of the game I do it anyways, but I really do hate it. It’s not because the system sucks or whatever, it’s because I hate sitting there pressing the same 3 buttons over and over watching little bars grow. It is the most mind numbing grind about the game in my opinion. There’s really nothing you can do to make it exciting for someone like me, but I do it out of necessity.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to grinding out all the faction, but I seriously doubt it.

~ by g0thicicecream on March 4, 2008.