Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Crafter's Roundtable: Level Tiers

    • 1785 posts
    October 16, 2018 7:30 AM PDT

    For this week's Crafter's Roundtable, let's talk about how itemization will work when character levels are taken into account, and what that means for crafting.

    Should Pantheon have a system of "tiers" of item power, that map to level ranges? (ie, 1-8, 9-16, 17-24, etc)
    If yes, how many tiers should there be? And how should the requirements to make items change from one tier to the next?

    This is an important topic that affects a lot of aspects of the game, both crafting related and not. So make sure to voice your opinion!

    Each week, Pantheon Crafters posts a discussion topic for the crafting community to talk about.  We call these Crafter's Roundtables and we post them both on our site's forums as well as here on the Pantheon forums, so feel free to join the discussion in both places if you'd like.  Also, for an easy directory to all of them, click here.

    • 239 posts
    October 16, 2018 11:44 AM PDT
    I like the tier harvest base items. EQ2 was ok, the part I didn’t like so much was the tier seemed to follow your adventure lvl progression. I would like to see a lvl 5 tier stone in the “ newbie “ zone. Mix and match the zones with crafting items.
    • 1479 posts
    October 16, 2018 11:55 AM PDT

    I think it's hard not to "tier" things while doing sets of armor, like leather, raw leather, banded, etc...

     

    They all end up beeing tiers of some sort, because that would make little sense to have a banded boots lvl 15 and chestmail lvl 25. Or at least it wouldn't if it is the required level to equip. Since pantheon is going for a "you can equip everything" style, tiers and such are harder to classify.

    However, it would do sense if it was the required level to craft only, as some pieces of armor would naturally be harder to build (joints as an example, small parts, etc... ).

    • 1315 posts
    October 17, 2018 9:01 AM PDT

    First I would split the concepts of tiers into two categories, crafting tier and combat tier.  Crafting tier refers to the relative difficulty of the recipe to learn, the time it takes to craft the item, and the relative number of maximum enhancements that can be on the item.  Combat tier refers to the combat skill levels required to use the item at maximum power.  High tier crafting recipes will have higher default combat tiers when made as a basic item.  Additionally high combat tier secondary ingredients can be added to a low tier crafting recipe to create a high tier combat item (but not a min/maxed one).  The best results are from both top tier crafting recipes with top combat tier secondary ingredients. 

    An example could be chainmail armor.  Basic chainmail (4 in 1 European chain mail) is a tier 1 armor smith recipe.  It can only take one enhancement which will usually be the level magnitude of the armor class that the item is made for.  The tier 2 chainmail armor is kings mail / double mail (8 in 2 mail). Kings mail takes twice as much iron, weights twice as much and can accept 2 enhancements, commonly this will be the level magnitude and a weight reducer though if you are strong enough you could use a strength or constitution enhancement. Tier 3 would be riveted 4 in 1 and Tier 4 is riveted Kings mail.  Each tier of armor takes roughly twice the amount of time to craft as the previous tier and requires 10 levels higher in crafting to learn.

    I think I would like to see the basic raw materials to be localized to the cultural crafting of the area and not tiered, i.e. each area has its own iron equivalent based on lore. There is also room for other sources of special base material but it should be optional material and not required for leveling crafting. The basic raw materials will affect the look and some very minor property differences of the final object. The optional secondary ingredients that set the combat tier of the final product should be tiered for game balance reasons.

    • 1479 posts
    October 17, 2018 12:04 PM PDT

    I do feel this is overly complicated for results not as much as the trouble it brings. I prefer static recipes over "enhancement chosen" items, especially as Pantheon is a multi-stats game and you should not happen to focus on BiS statistics as much as you will. Sometimes you should have some wisdom even as a tank, or strength as a magician and it shouldn't feel like a pain but offer you some diverging benefits, like weight capability and such.

     

    We all know that if you choose the enhancement you put on an item, or if you can recraft them untill you get what you want, everyone will focus on main stat and constitution with little attention to anything else.

    • 1315 posts
    October 17, 2018 2:19 PM PDT

    @MauvaisOeil

    My opinion is completely the opposite, hence my previous post. I think crafting should not have any recipes that create “named” items. Everything that a player creates is by definition new and it has no lore attached to it and there for should be pretty generic.

    Where crafting has a chance to shine is in making custom items that fit a characters needs perfectly. Like you said Pantheon is intended to be a multi stat game. If as a fighter you have only had strength items drop and you know you really need some more wisdom for x reason you can make a helmt that increases your wisdom. Its up to VR to make us need more than one or two stats per class.

    Making items customize-able is complicated but that's a good thing in a crafting system not a bad one. We don't need crafting systems that just provide another pool of named items to equip ourselves with, we need a crafting system to fill the holes in the gear we have found.

    I would actually love to see fewer base recipes with lots of material options. Each material has both positive and negative stats. You choose to combine different sets of base materials, rare ingredients and enchantments to end up with a final piece of equipment that has a total stat balance. The final items level is relative to the net stat gain from all materials added to the recipe. Final piece of that being using an item that is too powerful for your character level is worse than using an item that is your character level.

    Leveling crafting would be about mastering all the different material skills and optional pre processing sub combines not about getting to make 100 of the next named item to then be able to make 100 of the one after and so on.

     

     

    • 416 posts
    October 19, 2018 8:01 AM PDT

    @Trasak I like your idea, being able to customize pieces for players and having to find the right balance of indgredients to get the proper results would be interesting.

    • 2419 posts
    October 22, 2018 11:30 AM PDT

    Nephele said:

    Should Pantheon have a system of "tiers" of item power, that map to level ranges? (ie, 1-8, 9-16, 17-24, etc)
    If yes, how many tiers should there be? And how should the requirements to make items change from one tier to the next?

    I'm not a fan of tiers but more a fan of just complexity and difficulty in the creation itself.  A basic chainmail shirt would have a skill difficulty of X while a better version of a chainmail shirt, like the double chainmail mentioned above, would have a difficulty of X+Y.  The items needed would be different either in just pure raw materials or in sub-components.  So you might need just 1000 Steel Rings for the basic chainmail shirt but the double chainmail shirt could need 2000 Steel Rings plus 1 Gambeson.  The combine for the 2 sub-components would require a higher skill than the single combine.

    I've just felt that 'recipe difficulty' is enough of a differentiator between the level of gear available for crafting.