My experience has been that is is rather difficult to get gear in the first few levels through adventuring alone. More so for gear dependent classes. Then again, I've so far prefered soloing to around lvl 7-8 before starting to group, so experiences may vary of course.
Crafting can help to fill the gaps. Even if the common crafted gear is statless, it should always be slightly better than dropped common gear. Right now, there are no upgraded sets of common gear (for tier 2 and up), but from what I heard it is planned to (re-)introduce these soon. Being able to craft (or buying) will allow you to always have an up-to-date set of equipment (even if only common).
Crafted uncommon gear is quite good, and I heard that there are (or will be) schematics for rare gear too, but these will be one-use only or have difficult component requirements. I think it's not a great solution currently that such schematics are found in chests. If they were drop items from named mobs too, that would be better IMO.
Another big problem I see is that most gear is totally unknown yet (and you cannot link items in chat). So many people don't even know what nice items are out there...
Also, money may be very limited. If you solo a lot, you will have enough money at first but around lvl 15ish, spells and abilities get expensive very quickly which will dry up your bank account. So people may further be reluctant to buy crafted stuff.
There's definitely still a lot of balancing to be done there!
Well, the newbie area has skeletons. The crumbling skellies can drop weapons that are basic weapons and cloth armor. Not that uncommon. The Shambling skellies in that same area at night can drop "Worn" weapons, which are a decent upgrade and Leather armor that is slightly worse than regular leather. If you are in a group and fighting the group skellies or bandits, they can drop weapons and armor with stat bonuses. The only classes that miss out are heavy armor wearers. The heaviest armor drops are leather, at least until you get high enough to start getting chain drops.
All of this and the amount of time and effort AND money it takes to craft, all for gear that is slightly better on armor is just not worth it. Save the time crafting and just gather more. Sell all of the mats and use that to buy the gear you're missing and to boot you gained levels while they're crafting and spending money on recipes. The only real reason I see to craft right now is if you're playing a heavy armor class, want a 2-handed weapon because they are a little harder to get as drop, or you can't gain exp because you find a group and can't solo.
All of this to say that crafting is extremely lackluster and the gear needs to be better than anything dropped except the occasional rare drop from boss-like mobs or chests they guard. All other dropped gear should be a last resort for those who aren't crafting or buying crafted gear. Just look back at EQ. Dropped gear wasn't as good as crafted stuff unless it was a magic item.
The most useless part of the current crafting system, IMO, is how limiting it is. We shouldnt be limited on vocations just have a cap on the skill progression after you hit a point. Using EQ since this is heavily influenced by it, you could get and gain skill in any vocation up to master, then you were limited to only two vocations to progress beyond. Crafting required other vocations to make items, I.E. you needed cloth, leather, and blacksmithing to make heavy armor. There were no "schematics" just trial and error and a player made website with information.
The only crafting that somewhat makes and sense is cooking and alchemy, the rest seems like an after thought.
For the purposes of testing there should not be any limitations for the crafting vocations. Going to be pretty hard to collect any coherent data when 95% will choose outfitting or armorcrafting and weaponsmithing only to find out they're stuck with two vocations that become useless after you craft the initial gear.
For anyone just starting, use the tokens for cooking and alchemy, because food and potions remain useful.
Yeah, looks like the more changes they make, they are going in to wrong direction. Either make it so much like EQ with better graphics that EQ fans will love it(which is already out because of the graphics downgrade), or make it different. I agree about scematics for crafting not being NEEDED for crafting. Expirimenting should ALWAYS be an option. But it would have to be account randomized. Basically, no formulas are set. They are all trial and error expiriments until you get it right or you get a recipe to unlock it for you. But I would make the recipes rare drop, chest drop, or group mob drop, or even craftable by one of the craft trades at higher skill levels and with limitations so they can't be mass produced. Like WoW would put really long cooldwon timers on stuff like that so you could only make one once per day or two.
But there would be no website with formulas figured out because everyone's recipes will be different since they are random per account/character.
What is going on in this thread?
Yes less stuff should drop than has been; Yes (I'm 100% positive, anyway) they're working on it.
Free Form Recipes are probably not going to be a thing for a long time, (if Ever,) and that's coool by me. You make stuff, you add stuff yadda yadda - you guys wanna be masters of the craft before you learned to tie the shoelaces, much less make the shoes from scratch.
But that's not what's being said here.
I see you.
Well, with the boring crafting style used here being like every other boring mmo, then they are right on track to having people not enjoying crafting. Do you enjoy hunting and killing monsters? Well, if you just sit there at a camp and wait for a team member to pull some mobs to you for you to kill, I would say no. It's very boring and tedious with the only end goals being exp and loot. Why do we want exp? To level. Why do we want to level? Character development, which is also very boring here. Every warrior will be the same except for the armor and weapons they use. Even EQ put in AA's so you could customize your character. Then we move to a new camp, rinse repeat. Most of the gear that drops is basic and not very good or exciting. If you were just going for a newer version of a low rent EQ, you have succeeded. EQ is still better than this game and it's 25 years old. That's pretty sad. Hell, even EQ2 is better so far, and that game wasn't nearly as good as EQ.
I know that is highly critical. But I was hoping for a lot more when I learned of this game over 10 years ago and so far I am extremely disappointed. People will hate on WoW, but they have steadily held the top mmo slot for a very long time. So that tells me they're doing something right. I'm not saying do everything they're doing. But maybe do some research or feedback questionaires on every aspect of mmos that are very successful and let the people tell you what they want. If most people want a shared bank slots area, then it's not a bad idea. If they don't want mail, because I see the downsides of that. Like scammers, gold sellers, and a shared bank would solve the reason most of the people that want mail.
Make crafing more interesting. I played EQ and EQ2 for years. Wasn't big on EQ crafing. EQ2 on the other hand was nice. As well as Vanguard. They had a lot potential and f'd it up by being forced to rush their game out. And even then it didn't take them anywhere near 13 years. SWG was one of the better crafting systems i've seen. There was another from a game a friend played. It was a space mmo. You could reverse engineer loot to figure out how to make it. Scavenge a piece of loot to gain the scematic for it. Well, this game already has scavenging, crafting, loot and schematics. So basic crafting should be learned from the crafter. The rest should be from trial and error or by reverse engineering dropped loot. Yeah, you lose the loot by scavenging, but you gain a schematic.
I trully hope that your character models, gear textures and look, and general graphics are going to be getting an upgrade. Because there is no way you are going to put out what you have now, with low end graphics(that still give me a black screen bug during day), with boring gameplay and have this be successful. Sorry, just being honest. I've seen a LOT of mmos over the last 26+ years and have played a lot of them to know that what i'm playing right now will not survive unless a bunch of stuff changes. I'm not saying it won't. But after 11 years, i'm not all that hopeful anymore.
You realize what you are able to play right now is just for testing, right? The purpose of this pre-alpha build is to get the core of the game working and stable before moving to the next phase. The current build is about a year old, for whatever reason VR trash canned the previous build and started over, something to do with the artwork wasnt going the direction they were after so they made changes.
The game is in the same pre-alpha test build its been in for months, after they're happy with the core/root systems performance they will likely wipe the servers and upload the next build (alpha) for testing, once the milestones are met for that build they will wipe the servers and upload the next build (beta). Once the beta test build milestones are met they will wipe the servers and upload the release build. If VR stuck with the original build the game would be in late beta or released. Also keep in mind VR is based in California, they lost 2+ years of real progress due to the insane lock downs.
VR is developing this game using the Unity engine, being this build is just for testing purposes its running on bare minimum. I have tested quite a few games, they all start out looking like this or worse. Need stuff to work right before making it look pretty.
For some reason people think it doesnt require much to make an MMO, which is laughable. Lets use Bethesda as the example, more specifically Starfield, that game was in development for over 8 years. Thats with well over 250 devs working and around $400 million they tossed into the project. VR has maybe 20 devs on a good day and nowhere near the budget of a major studio, just sayin you should probably look into stuff before you speak. The game will get done when it gets done man.
I mean it IS early access. I just spent two days gathering materials and getting my skill up to 30 just to find out that a Simple Blade schematic makes a Might-Infused Blade and I can't do the final combine for the tier 2 Ashen Bronze Broadsword. But then I remembered, it's EA. I'm sure it will get fixed.
