Thorough Crafting Suggestions after using the system in Mal'ganis and beyond

[Rubis]

Hello!

I have been experimenting and playing around with the High Risk during Mal'ganis. As Season 3 is about to wrap up I have some feedback I'd love for the Dev's to consider for Season 4, Area 52, or other similar projects in the future. I want to stress that I loved this part of the game, it was so much fun for me and all of this comes from a good place of wanting it to be better!

High Risk Materials:

Overall I think this system is so cool! I am very impressed by how much content it adds to the game, how rich the choices are, and how relevant all the professions feel in the economy and in creating BiS gear for each tier set.

Over the course of Mal'ganis I made and played with all of the professions and experimented with what they had to offer for the various High Risk Crafting systems. Before I go into each of the professions however I want to speak to an overall friction point in the crafting system and suggest a couple ways to help alleviate that. My hope is that with these suggestions these systems feel better to get into for more causal players and to help level out the economy in better ways for the various resources, allowing more folks to achieve their BIS dreams for each tier.

The #1 Friction point I felt was how many green and blue resources I got and my inability to make it feel like I could use them effectively. Please don't misinterpret that as a whine, but more pointing out an opportunity for them to be relevant for more than their 50% strength versions of similar gear upgrades. My suggestion is a less than ideal way to convert these into the higher version of them. Letting them gain more value overall while keeping their value as well. You can still use them to craft the green version of the consumable, but with this suggestion at a steep rate you could also convert those into a blue version of the resource. With this funnel I think you can create a better economy regarding the epic versions and let more people get BIS, which is a great goal especially considering how fast Season 3 was.

Important Notes: For this to be viable, I think it is very important that what you combine is the high risk reward for turning those resources in, not the resources themselves. (So you have to go into High Risk, find the points to shatter, forge, feed the plant, etc.). This makes combining those resources for the reward more valuable, and encourages people to do so because with the rewards they can work towards earning a purple of that type.

My suggested conversion rate:

25 Green Resources (5 Green Reward)= 1 Blue Reward.
25 Blue Resources (5 Blue Reward) = 1 Purple Reward

The second version of this suggestion remains the same, but adds another step to this which I think would help keep traditional end game resources valuable, which is to include a number of the like type to combine. This would look something like:

25 Tainted Wyrmkin Trinket+20 Thorium Ore=1 Impure Wyrmkin Trinket

And so on.

I would have to see numbers on the different resources, my gut would be to do the following for this version of the suggestion:

Cooking: Any Raw Meat 275+
Enchanting: Illusion Dust
First Aid: Runecloth
Fishing: Any Raw Fish 275+
Herbalism: Any Herb 275+
Skinning: Thick/Rugged Leather
Smelting: Thorium
Tailoring: Runecloth

To sum up the previous ideas: Allowing players to combine resources at a steep rate to eventually get purple high risk items keeps them in high risk longer, allows for a better economy around them, and let's more player's reach BIS (A great thing!).

Elemental Essences:

One of the coolest parts of this whole system is that farming the various high level elementals in High Risk gives you Twisted Essences of that elemental type, and these are required for many of the different max level crafts!

This suggestion, unlike the other ones in this post is more a plea than a "Good" idea. To turn off my trying to be constructive hat for a second. They require too damn many of these fucking things! lol.

To put the hat back on, I would simply change this from 1->5->10 to 1->3->5. I would make any of the green versions of these items drop only from high risk and then allow them to be combined like the previous system suggestion, adding elemental altars where they could be combined by anyone as long as they had enough and took the time to do so. The altars would be located near the elemental spawns in the various zones.

High Risk Crafting:

Now to move onto some thoughts revolving each of the professions, some suggestions on what I would do to help them all out and requests to implement more systems like it for the missing professions!

Cooking:

Overall this was fun, it was the first one I dipped myself into and hooked me to do the rest of them afterwards. My big feedback here is just echo'ing the previous section, less elemental essences are a good thing for consumables in particular, If you keep the 1/5/10 for item upgrades that would make sense, but for things that last 1-2hours I think 10 is too many even for the purple food. Add Cooking Pots/Tables to allow cooks to combine food into higher colored ones.

Enchanting:

All the different enchants you guys added are so fucking rad lol. I love how many different playstyles and types of things you can try to go for by targeting the different enchants. My one suggestion here is to make it so crusader 1 is a high risk enchant and not a normal item enchant anymore, so that it fits in line with the rest of them. Make it so righteous orbs aren't needed for it and you need the green high risk versions instead. (As well as changing the dust type).

First Aid:

I like when systems are a complete set. I'd love to see this for completionism sake, but I think there are some cool things that could be done here like making high risk first aid not interrupted on being damaged but rather needing to be kicked/stunned instead. As an added bonus I would think about making the various cloth types give a resistance bonus to the user while they are actively using it. For example:

Interlaced Dragonweave Bandage: Heals the user for X over 8 seconds, while they are bandaging themselves they gain X Fire Resistance.

Fishing:

This one is simple! Similar to First aid, I want to see high risk fishing school's. These would give high risk fish that could be turned into meat or oil's for Cooking/Herbalism.

Herbalism:

I think this one is fine as is

Skinning:

Add High Risk Tanning Racks and change leather to hides. Using a tanning rack allows the skinner to turn it into leather. This would also fall into combining leather into high colored leather.

Smelting:

Fine as is

Tailoring:

Add Quilting/Sewing Tables (or whatever you want to call them lol) That allows players to turn cloth into high colored cloth. This would work for Tailors and First aid people.

High Risk Zones:

Finally, not all High Risk zones are created equal. The final suggestion is to create areas in each end zone where players can collect the items pertinent to that zone for each profession. Of note I would remove Deadwind pass and move it's items to the blasted lands.

Each zone should have a unique material for all of the professions, so that players are encouraged to go into all of them regardless of their professions.

Thank you for anyone who read that comprehensive report!

[Rubis]

@Kaladin @Dutch

You guys are very busy, but I hope this is helpful when things calm down post transition <3.