The Real Problem With Crafting & Costs

tmbrinks

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

I can't craft a single purple ring. They may drop at times, but not enough for me to craft them, especially for my alts. Thus they are "not available", at least in a significant manner.

So, because you won't (or can't) do the content that drops the gear. It should be nerfed into the ground? Got it.

Give it a rest! You are definitely smarter than this. I am talking about CRAFTED jewelry, not a specific variety that is dropped in a specific area. I have no problem with having to farm Rivenspire for my Pet Sorc stuff, for example. But I would definitely complain if I could only get purple or better pants by running Trials.

Exactly. Run content. Get Purple jewelry, decon. Materials to upgrade. How do you not understand this?

tmbrinks

idk wrote: »

Mithrazielle wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Mithrazielle wrote: »

IMHO-- There is a fundamental problem with crafting, and the cost of materials .v. the cost of armor. And I'd like to take a moment and bring that to light in a more informative way.

In the game, people get introduced to purchasing armor items for a few hundred, to a few thousand gold pieces from NPC merchents as they progress through the levels. Relying mostly on drops for anything 'exciting' or 'special', and occasionally finding something interesting for sale or as a boss-reward. Final options for CP160 characters is making their own, or buying pieces from someone else who can (in case they don't have resources, skill, motifs (knowledge), or access to the appropriate forges for special sets).

In this statement of what OP thinks is a problem with crafting they ignore that gear drops as well and most of that gear can be obtained via content that is very easy to clear.

As for the rest it really just seems that things are just to much work for OP and while I feel for them it really is just to bad. It has worked well for most for almost 5 years now so it is clear there is no real problem. Just a personal or manufactured problem.

And I am speaking as someone who started the game when no one could craft everything that was in the game at the time and no one had a stockpile of drop gear at any level. Everyone had to work to get geared out.

You would be wrong. It's not the amount of work, but rather the time. The most expensive aspect is refining to get tempers and plating- it is the costs of the tempers and plating that drive the cost of making armor & weapon sets for others in the game to such ridiculous prices.

How can you justify 100K for a single chromium plate, when ESO only prices the worth of a plate to be < 20 gold. Just for 3 pieces of jewelry at Legendary you can have 2.4M in gold expense if you buy it from guild traders, and I've seen it going for even more. And zircon plating is at about 30K per... that is ridiculous.

Cost of Tempers has actually dropped significantly over the years. It is a result of them being much more plentiful. Further, all armor and weapon upgrade materials below gold are fairly cheap and gold is far from required for armor as it offers such a small upgrade to stats. Only weapons see a big bump from the base WD/SD when upgrading to gold.

So being the costs is for weapon and armor upgrade matts have been coming down in price over the years, and more plentiful it seems I am not wrong.

Further, Zos specifically stated they wanted the upgrading of jewelry to be much rarer than the rest of what we can upgrade/craft. In other words they specifically intended for it to be more costly in either gold or time. It is intentional by design.

They wanted it this way and if you had paid attention to them over the years you might actually get an idea why. They stated awhile back a concern they had about adding jewelry crafting and that had to do concerns of how jewelry crafting would affect power in the game.

Thank you for another logical explanation for the way jewelry crafting is, and why it's okay how it is.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

tmbrinks wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

I can't craft a single purple ring. They may drop at times, but not enough for me to craft them, especially for my alts. Thus they are "not available", at least in a significant manner.

So, because you won't (or can't) do the content that drops the gear. It should be nerfed into the ground? Got it.

Give it a rest! You are definitely smarter than this. I am talking about CRAFTED jewelry, not a specific variety that is dropped in a specific area. I have no problem with having to farm Rivenspire for my Pet Sorc stuff, for example. But I would definitely complain if I could only get purple or better pants by running Trials.

Exactly. Run content. Get Purple jewelry, decon. Materials to upgrade. How do you not understand this?

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content. There are also some items, such as Necropotence, where BiS is picked up in the open world content and delves. There is also crafted gear that while maybe not 100% BiS is considered roughly equal for some builds. With jewelry in its current state, much like master writs, it doesn't make sense to make crafted set jewelry because it takes too long or costs too much to upgrade.

You could use the same arguments against transmute. Why not run content after all getting the stats you want should be hard to get? Yet ZOS provided a transmute function that is easier to obtain than jewel crafting upgrades.

At times I feel ZOS didn't really think the whole thing out and just threw some things together and called it jewelry crafting. I wouldn't be surprised in the design meeting someone didn't mention that there is a crafting object that turns 10 items into 1 so look into using that to get some code reuse. The final sentence of that meeting had to be, "Now go forth and see what you can cobble together and we'll call it jewelry crafting."

What I see as the real cause however is the way ZOS implemented their gear levels across instanced content. By having the same sets but having the dungeon determine quality level they created a situation where the higher level players do not feel unique when piece of lower level dungeon gear can be upgraded by the typical player. While ZOS could have decided to make the upgrade path via harder content only I think they would have been better off creating unique gear sets for each dungeon's hardness level. This would allow for players to upgrade their gear's quality level for the content they play and provide some exclusivity to the higher level players.

In in any event we are stuck with what we have and telling people to run harder content or make more alts is not an answer. I and I believe most players can understand ZOS wants jewelry crafting upgrading to be more work but the current rates are way off base. I know you have discussed some adjustments which I think would help and are very much a step in the right direction. They might even be enough to fix the jewelry crafting problems. However the only way to get this resolved is for ZOS to improve the drop rates for Zircon and Chromium so the typical casual has a chance of upgrading jewelry in a reasonable time frame. Their silence on the subject doesn't help matters. If they have a rationale for keeping things the way they are then they should lay it out for people to see. If they are looking into improving things then they should state what they think the problem is for the player so we can be sure they got it right. Regardless from what I can tell jewelry is not working for a large part of the player base which is not good.

Taleof2Cities

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

idk

tmbrinks wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Mithrazielle wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Mithrazielle wrote: »

IMHO-- There is a fundamental problem with crafting, and the cost of materials .v. the cost of armor. And I'd like to take a moment and bring that to light in a more informative way.

In the game, people get introduced to purchasing armor items for a few hundred, to a few thousand gold pieces from NPC merchents as they progress through the levels. Relying mostly on drops for anything 'exciting' or 'special', and occasionally finding something interesting for sale or as a boss-reward. Final options for CP160 characters is making their own, or buying pieces from someone else who can (in case they don't have resources, skill, motifs (knowledge), or access to the appropriate forges for special sets).

In this statement of what OP thinks is a problem with crafting they ignore that gear drops as well and most of that gear can be obtained via content that is very easy to clear.

As for the rest it really just seems that things are just to much work for OP and while I feel for them it really is just to bad. It has worked well for most for almost 5 years now so it is clear there is no real problem. Just a personal or manufactured problem.

And I am speaking as someone who started the game when no one could craft everything that was in the game at the time and no one had a stockpile of drop gear at any level. Everyone had to work to get geared out.

You would be wrong. It's not the amount of work, but rather the time. The most expensive aspect is refining to get tempers and plating- it is the costs of the tempers and plating that drive the cost of making armor & weapon sets for others in the game to such ridiculous prices.

How can you justify 100K for a single chromium plate, when ESO only prices the worth of a plate to be < 20 gold. Just for 3 pieces of jewelry at Legendary you can have 2.4M in gold expense if you buy it from guild traders, and I've seen it going for even more. And zircon plating is at about 30K per... that is ridiculous.

Cost of Tempers has actually dropped significantly over the years. It is a result of them being much more plentiful. Further, all armor and weapon upgrade materials below gold are fairly cheap and gold is far from required for armor as it offers such a small upgrade to stats. Only weapons see a big bump from the base WD/SD when upgrading to gold.

So being the costs is for weapon and armor upgrade matts have been coming down in price over the years, and more plentiful it seems I am not wrong.

Further, Zos specifically stated they wanted the upgrading of jewelry to be much rarer than the rest of what we can upgrade/craft. In other words they specifically intended for it to be more costly in either gold or time. It is intentional by design.

They wanted it this way and if you had paid attention to them over the years you might actually get an idea why. They stated awhile back a concern they had about adding jewelry crafting and that had to do concerns of how jewelry crafting would affect power in the game.

Thank you for another logical explanation for the way jewelry crafting is, and why it's okay how it is.

You are welcome. Just presenting the fact. It is great that people express their opinions on the mater, but a proposal, a thread, that I smore likely to get Zos' attention is one that actually approaches the facts and Zos' perspective rather than just complain about it. The forum is full of threads that just complain but leave out the constructive part.

tmbrinks

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

FrancisCrawford

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

I can't craft a single purple ring. They may drop at times, but not enough for me to craft them, especially for my alts. Thus they are "not available", at least in a significant manner.

So, because you won't (or can't) do the content that drops the gear. It should be nerfed into the ground? Got it.

Give it a rest! You are definitely smarter than this. I am talking about CRAFTED jewelry, not a specific variety that is dropped in a specific area. I have no problem with having to farm Rivenspire for my Pet Sorc stuff, for example. But I would definitely complain if I could only get purple or better pants by running Trials.

For most of the history of the game, there was NO WAY AT ALL to craft jewelry. All builds included at least one dropped set, and the jewelry in the build came from a dropped set. So the fact that there's still NO REASONABLE WAY to craft jewelry isn't of great interest to most of us who have been around for a long time. It's annoying/disappointing/bad design, but it's not all that noteworthy.

FrancisCrawford

And by the way, I made half a million gold or so the first week of jewelry crafting, when prices were even crazier than they are now.

Starlock

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs.

Yup. This certainly describes my experience. For all other crafts, doing my usual overland/questing/story stuff is more than enough to get all the materials I need to upgrade my characters' gear to purple. Jewelry crafting is the exception to this rule, and that's quite the bother. I would have to drop everything I do and spend months sandpapering my face off to make the system useable at the same level as every other craft in the game. This would defeat the entire point of playing the game for me, so I do a hard pass on anything that requires ridiculous levels of grind (and jewelry crafting is definitely in that category). I don't understand why the developers didn't put jewelry crafting in line with the other professions when it comes to green to blue to purple. It was unexpected, and perhaps this is part of why it bothers me as much as it does. I don't see the logic in it.

tmbrinks

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

What do you pair Necropotence with? Alcast says Siroria (just the easiest I could find searching "Pet Sorc Build"). Guess what drops in gold? Siroria!!! So.. you run Necro BODY pieces, which are cheap to upgrade and then pair it with the set that drops gold jewelry. I know that's out of the box thinking... Unless you are a tank, I literally cannot think of a "meta" or "near-meta" (end game PVE, I don't really PVP) build that REQUIRES you to run 2 sets that drop in only purple gear in the game, or 2 crafted sets. That is my point. Now, if you can't get gold Siroria (because you're not clearing vCR +3), there is a question that was asked earlier... do you really need the gold jewelry?

They have already "nerfed" the grind in half with a previous update.

Drop rates for Zircon grains and Chromium grains are IDENTICAL to those for the respective purple and gold materials for BS/WW/Cloth when you are refining. At least they are with my tens of thousands of refined raw materials (yes, I keep track!). It's a 5% chance per "refine" of 10 materials for gold. It's 7.5% for purple, 12.5% for blue, 15% for green). This is the same for all refinements!!!

The deconstruction drop rates are the same as well. I might agree that deconning returning a plating might be reasonable.

Yes, the master writs are a problem. It'd also be a major problem if there suddenly was a flood of writ vouchers on the market because we suddenly reduce the cost of them by a factor of 10 (getting rid of grains, which seems to be the consensus on how to "fix" JC) They'd become, BY FAR, the most cost-effective (crafting) master writs to do, they'd be unfair in the opposite direction. What's the solution? I don't know. All I do know, is that many suggestions offered They are 8x better than they were at launch however.

I've stated on numerous occasions that the addition of a jewelry hireling would be a good thing.

ZoS has started doing that with their introduction of "perfected" gear. Maybe that is them making a transition. Maybe they started doing that because the other changes (such as daily crafting writs) they added made it too easy (in their mind) to get legendary gear, and they wanted to differentiate gear again, have something special. For the first year, year and a half, it was extremely expensive to upgrade gear to gold quality, that market collapsed with time and introduction of more sources of materials. Jewelry crafting today is not too far off from where those crafts upgrading were in the beginning of the game.

The single largest improvement Jewelry Crafting did was the new traits. It revolutionized DPS builds, along with major changes to some tanking builds (didn't do much for healers). That requires almost zero grind. It's easy to get and research the traits, and takes no more time (less in fact) than the other crafts.

So, ZoS decided they didn't want to trivialize gear from end game trials, the golden vendor, and the weekly rewards from trials and arenas, so they made the "upgrade" portion of Jewelry Crafting to be really expensive and time consuming. But, they gave you new traits to transmute your gear AND the ability to actually upgrade those items, IF AND ONLY IF you were willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish those things, either by doing jewelry crafting itself, or earning gold elsewhere to be able to purchase it from those that have done it.

I'm good with that. If they eventually "differentiate" gear by making perfected versions only drop in that end-game content, that is without a doubt better than the gear that drops overland, or in normal versions of the content, then yes, I can accept the fact that they should make jewelry upgrading be cheaper. But we aren't there yet... we're nowhere close.

Taleof2Cities

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

I don’t think this comment adresses my concern at all.

Sure, players will want to increase the quality of gear ... that’s a given.

But, players actually have no need to increase the gear quality if they’re not running challenging content.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

What do you pair Necropotence with? Alcast says Siroria (just the easiest I could find searching "Pet Sorc Build"). Guess what drops in gold? Siroria!!! So.. you run Necro BODY pieces, which are cheap to upgrade and then pair it with the set that drops gold jewelry. I know that's out of the box thinking... Unless you are a tank, I literally cannot think of a "meta" or "near-meta" (end game PVE, I don't really PVP) build that REQUIRES you to run 2 sets that drop in only purple gear in the game, or 2 crafted sets. That is my point. Now, if you can't get gold Siroria (because you're not clearing vCR +3), there is a question that was asked earlier... do you really need the gold jewelry?

They have already "nerfed" the grind in half with a previous update.

Drop rates for Zircon grains and Chromium grains are IDENTICAL to those for the respective purple and gold materials for BS/WW/Cloth when you are refining. At least they are with my tens of thousands of refined raw materials (yes, I keep track!). It's a 5% chance per "refine" of 10 materials for gold. It's 7.5% for purple, 12.5% for blue, 15% for green). This is the same for all refinements!!!

The deconstruction drop rates are the same as well. I might agree that deconning returning a plating might be reasonable.

Yes, the master writs are a problem. It'd also be a major problem if there suddenly was a flood of writ vouchers on the market because we suddenly reduce the cost of them by a factor of 10 (getting rid of grains, which seems to be the consensus on how to "fix" JC) They'd become, BY FAR, the most cost-effective (crafting) master writs to do, they'd be unfair in the opposite direction. What's the solution? I don't know. All I do know, is that many suggestions offered They are 8x better than they were at launch however.

I've stated on numerous occasions that the addition of a jewelry hireling would be a good thing.

ZoS has started doing that with their introduction of "perfected" gear. Maybe that is them making a transition. Maybe they started doing that because the other changes (such as daily crafting writs) they added made it too easy (in their mind) to get legendary gear, and they wanted to differentiate gear again, have something special. For the first year, year and a half, it was extremely expensive to upgrade gear to gold quality, that market collapsed with time and introduction of more sources of materials. Jewelry crafting today is not too far off from where those crafts upgrading were in the beginning of the game.

The single largest improvement Jewelry Crafting did was the new traits. It revolutionized DPS builds, along with major changes to some tanking builds (didn't do much for healers). That requires almost zero grind. It's easy to get and research the traits, and takes no more time (less in fact) than the other crafts.

So, ZoS decided they didn't want to trivialize gear from end game trials, the golden vendor, and the weekly rewards from trials and arenas, so they made the "upgrade" portion of Jewelry Crafting to be really expensive and time consuming. But, they gave you new traits to transmute your gear AND the ability to actually upgrade those items, IF AND ONLY IF you were willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish those things, either by doing jewelry crafting itself, or earning gold elsewhere to be able to purchase it from those that have done it.

I'm good with that. If they eventually "differentiate" gear by making perfected versions only drop in that end-game content, that is without a doubt better than the gear that drops overland, or in normal versions of the content, then yes, I can accept the fact that they should make jewelry upgrading be cheaper. But we aren't there yet... we're nowhere close.

Or if your not going to cherry pick Alcast's pages you run Necro with Julianos and use Necropotence jewelry. As to need in reality no player needs more than purple jewelry in even the highest level content but upgrading to Epic is worse than gold. Regardless the fact is ZOS has allowed people to upgrade whether there is a true need or not so should be balanced enough to be usable. Also as in all MMO's it doesn't matter your level that extra boost is stats is an extra boost in stats. In fact one could make the argument that the lower level players need it more than the higher level players. After all a boost in stats can compensate for those players that don't have a flawless rotation or whose reflexes aren't as fast as someone half their age and never will. Unlike high level play, which I use to do when younger, the boost can make a much larger difference for a lower level player completing content than a higher level one.

As I said the Gold Vendor isn't a valid concern. Jewelry crafting does not compete with it in many areas so it really becomes a fairness issue. Combine that with the unreliable RNG of the gold vendor and it ceases to *** a gold sink and becomes a penalty for gear unrelated to its purpose. Another questions is why should a crafted piece be penalized because of someone's ego being bruised because they think their gear is being trivialized? While on the subject of trivializing items transmute does that is spades. About the easiest thing to do is to get transmute crystals and change the traits on a piece of gear. That trivializes every piece of gear other players farmed to get the needed traits on. If player sensitivity to potential trivialization is truly the problem you perceive it is then the only fix in the current implementation is to stop allowing quality upgrades for anything other than crafted gear. This will allow those that farm their gear to still feel special and likely make more crafted sets usable by the population at large. It would also allow jewelry crafting to be brought into line with the other crafts and make master writs useful. As I know none of this will occur ZOS can take steps that allow jewelry material acquisition to be improved and still keep it from being a slam dunk. I've said in another post I'm not sure if making it full plates with adjustments or keeping grains with adjustments is the best answer. I think grains is the easiest since the code is already written and it is just a matter of changing a constant here or there. If it were changed to plates I think it would require too many code changes to get a good drop rate that requires more time than the other crafts yet isn't so long as to put jewelry in the state it currently is in.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

I don’t think this comment adresses my concern at all.

Sure, players will want to increase the quality of gear ... that’s a given.

But, players actually have no need to increase the gear quality if they’re not running challenging content.

If you had read the rest of what I wrote rather than take a jab and saying "I stopped at ..." you might have seen some of it was laid out. It isn't just material to upgrade to gold that is a problem but purple as well. In fact it is not uncommon for players to have more Chromium than Zircon.

If you had gone on you also would have seen that my belief of the real problem is the way ZOS has implemented gear. Instead of having unique sets in progressively harder content they used quality and they allowed for the quality to be improved outside of running content. This means given crafting's history any player has the reasonable expectation they will be able to upgrade their gear within a reasonable time frame. It doesn't matter whether there is a "need" or not.

I will also argue many lower level players need better gear, maybe even more so, for the same reason higher level players claim to. That is to complete challenging content. Normal, veteran, etc are all challenging to different sets of players. Better gear can be the difference between completing it or not.

tmbrinks

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

What do you pair Necropotence with? Alcast says Siroria (just the easiest I could find searching "Pet Sorc Build"). Guess what drops in gold? Siroria!!! So.. you run Necro BODY pieces, which are cheap to upgrade and then pair it with the set that drops gold jewelry. I know that's out of the box thinking... Unless you are a tank, I literally cannot think of a "meta" or "near-meta" (end game PVE, I don't really PVP) build that REQUIRES you to run 2 sets that drop in only purple gear in the game, or 2 crafted sets. That is my point. Now, if you can't get gold Siroria (because you're not clearing vCR +3), there is a question that was asked earlier... do you really need the gold jewelry?

They have already "nerfed" the grind in half with a previous update.

Drop rates for Zircon grains and Chromium grains are IDENTICAL to those for the respective purple and gold materials for BS/WW/Cloth when you are refining. At least they are with my tens of thousands of refined raw materials (yes, I keep track!). It's a 5% chance per "refine" of 10 materials for gold. It's 7.5% for purple, 12.5% for blue, 15% for green). This is the same for all refinements!!!

The deconstruction drop rates are the same as well. I might agree that deconning returning a plating might be reasonable.

Yes, the master writs are a problem. It'd also be a major problem if there suddenly was a flood of writ vouchers on the market because we suddenly reduce the cost of them by a factor of 10 (getting rid of grains, which seems to be the consensus on how to "fix" JC) They'd become, BY FAR, the most cost-effective (crafting) master writs to do, they'd be unfair in the opposite direction. What's the solution? I don't know. All I do know, is that many suggestions offered They are 8x better than they were at launch however.

I've stated on numerous occasions that the addition of a jewelry hireling would be a good thing.

ZoS has started doing that with their introduction of "perfected" gear. Maybe that is them making a transition. Maybe they started doing that because the other changes (such as daily crafting writs) they added made it too easy (in their mind) to get legendary gear, and they wanted to differentiate gear again, have something special. For the first year, year and a half, it was extremely expensive to upgrade gear to gold quality, that market collapsed with time and introduction of more sources of materials. Jewelry crafting today is not too far off from where those crafts upgrading were in the beginning of the game.

The single largest improvement Jewelry Crafting did was the new traits. It revolutionized DPS builds, along with major changes to some tanking builds (didn't do much for healers). That requires almost zero grind. It's easy to get and research the traits, and takes no more time (less in fact) than the other crafts.

So, ZoS decided they didn't want to trivialize gear from end game trials, the golden vendor, and the weekly rewards from trials and arenas, so they made the "upgrade" portion of Jewelry Crafting to be really expensive and time consuming. But, they gave you new traits to transmute your gear AND the ability to actually upgrade those items, IF AND ONLY IF you were willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish those things, either by doing jewelry crafting itself, or earning gold elsewhere to be able to purchase it from those that have done it.

I'm good with that. If they eventually "differentiate" gear by making perfected versions only drop in that end-game content, that is without a doubt better than the gear that drops overland, or in normal versions of the content, then yes, I can accept the fact that they should make jewelry upgrading be cheaper. But we aren't there yet... we're nowhere close.

Or if your not going to cherry pick Alcast's pages you run Necro with Julianos and use Necropotence jewelry. As to need in reality no player needs more than purple jewelry in even the highest level content but upgrading to Epic is worse than gold. Regardless the fact is ZOS has allowed people to upgrade whether there is a true need or not so should be balanced enough to be usable. Also as in all MMO's it doesn't matter your level that extra boost is stats is an extra boost in stats. In fact one could make the argument that the lower level players need it more than the higher level players. After all a boost in stats can compensate for those players that don't have a flawless rotation or whose reflexes aren't as fast as someone half their age and never will. Unlike high level play, which I use to do when younger, the boost can make a much larger difference for a lower level player completing content than a higher level one.

As I said the Gold Vendor isn't a valid concern. Jewelry crafting does not compete with it in many areas so it really becomes a fairness issue. Combine that with the unreliable RNG of the gold vendor and it ceases to *** a gold sink and becomes a penalty for gear unrelated to its purpose. Another questions is why should a crafted piece be penalized because of someone's ego being bruised because they think their gear is being trivialized? While on the subject of trivializing items transmute does that is spades. About the easiest thing to do is to get transmute crystals and change the traits on a piece of gear. That trivializes every piece of gear other players farmed to get the needed traits on. If player sensitivity to potential trivialization is truly the problem you perceive it is then the only fix in the current implementation is to stop allowing quality upgrades for anything other than crafted gear. This will allow those that farm their gear to still feel special and likely make more crafted sets usable by the population at large. It would also allow jewelry crafting to be brought into line with the other crafts and make master writs useful. As I know none of this will occur ZOS can take steps that allow jewelry material acquisition to be improved and still keep it from being a slam dunk. I've said in another post I'm not sure if making it full plates with adjustments or keeping grains with adjustments is the best answer. I think grains is the easiest since the code is already written and it is just a matter of changing a constant here or there. If it were changed to plates I think it would require too many code changes to get a good drop rate that requires more time than the other crafts yet isn't so long as to put jewelry in the state it currently is in.

The golden vendor is a problem. Lower the cost below that and it becomes worthless. That is a fact. But facts don't count much here, do they.

Just admit that you want it to be easy, because you don't want to work for it. That's all I hear. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thank god ZoS pretty much agrees with the status quo, hence why they've never said a word about this... I'm out. I'll keep doing my writs, and actually EARN IT, instead of being given it.

Alinhbo_Tyaka

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

What do you pair Necropotence with? Alcast says Siroria (just the easiest I could find searching "Pet Sorc Build"). Guess what drops in gold? Siroria!!! So.. you run Necro BODY pieces, which are cheap to upgrade and then pair it with the set that drops gold jewelry. I know that's out of the box thinking... Unless you are a tank, I literally cannot think of a "meta" or "near-meta" (end game PVE, I don't really PVP) build that REQUIRES you to run 2 sets that drop in only purple gear in the game, or 2 crafted sets. That is my point. Now, if you can't get gold Siroria (because you're not clearing vCR +3), there is a question that was asked earlier... do you really need the gold jewelry?

They have already "nerfed" the grind in half with a previous update.

Drop rates for Zircon grains and Chromium grains are IDENTICAL to those for the respective purple and gold materials for BS/WW/Cloth when you are refining. At least they are with my tens of thousands of refined raw materials (yes, I keep track!). It's a 5% chance per "refine" of 10 materials for gold. It's 7.5% for purple, 12.5% for blue, 15% for green). This is the same for all refinements!!!

The deconstruction drop rates are the same as well. I might agree that deconning returning a plating might be reasonable.

Yes, the master writs are a problem. It'd also be a major problem if there suddenly was a flood of writ vouchers on the market because we suddenly reduce the cost of them by a factor of 10 (getting rid of grains, which seems to be the consensus on how to "fix" JC) They'd become, BY FAR, the most cost-effective (crafting) master writs to do, they'd be unfair in the opposite direction. What's the solution? I don't know. All I do know, is that many suggestions offered They are 8x better than they were at launch however.

I've stated on numerous occasions that the addition of a jewelry hireling would be a good thing.

ZoS has started doing that with their introduction of "perfected" gear. Maybe that is them making a transition. Maybe they started doing that because the other changes (such as daily crafting writs) they added made it too easy (in their mind) to get legendary gear, and they wanted to differentiate gear again, have something special. For the first year, year and a half, it was extremely expensive to upgrade gear to gold quality, that market collapsed with time and introduction of more sources of materials. Jewelry crafting today is not too far off from where those crafts upgrading were in the beginning of the game.

The single largest improvement Jewelry Crafting did was the new traits. It revolutionized DPS builds, along with major changes to some tanking builds (didn't do much for healers). That requires almost zero grind. It's easy to get and research the traits, and takes no more time (less in fact) than the other crafts.

So, ZoS decided they didn't want to trivialize gear from end game trials, the golden vendor, and the weekly rewards from trials and arenas, so they made the "upgrade" portion of Jewelry Crafting to be really expensive and time consuming. But, they gave you new traits to transmute your gear AND the ability to actually upgrade those items, IF AND ONLY IF you were willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish those things, either by doing jewelry crafting itself, or earning gold elsewhere to be able to purchase it from those that have done it.

I'm good with that. If they eventually "differentiate" gear by making perfected versions only drop in that end-game content, that is without a doubt better than the gear that drops overland, or in normal versions of the content, then yes, I can accept the fact that they should make jewelry upgrading be cheaper. But we aren't there yet... we're nowhere close.

Or if your not going to cherry pick Alcast's pages you run Necro with Julianos and use Necropotence jewelry. As to need in reality no player needs more than purple jewelry in even the highest level content but upgrading to Epic is worse than gold. Regardless the fact is ZOS has allowed people to upgrade whether there is a true need or not so should be balanced enough to be usable. Also as in all MMO's it doesn't matter your level that extra boost is stats is an extra boost in stats. In fact one could make the argument that the lower level players need it more than the higher level players. After all a boost in stats can compensate for those players that don't have a flawless rotation or whose reflexes aren't as fast as someone half their age and never will. Unlike high level play, which I use to do when younger, the boost can make a much larger difference for a lower level player completing content than a higher level one.

As I said the Gold Vendor isn't a valid concern. Jewelry crafting does not compete with it in many areas so it really becomes a fairness issue. Combine that with the unreliable RNG of the gold vendor and it ceases to *** a gold sink and becomes a penalty for gear unrelated to its purpose. Another questions is why should a crafted piece be penalized because of someone's ego being bruised because they think their gear is being trivialized? While on the subject of trivializing items transmute does that is spades. About the easiest thing to do is to get transmute crystals and change the traits on a piece of gear. That trivializes every piece of gear other players farmed to get the needed traits on. If player sensitivity to potential trivialization is truly the problem you perceive it is then the only fix in the current implementation is to stop allowing quality upgrades for anything other than crafted gear. This will allow those that farm their gear to still feel special and likely make more crafted sets usable by the population at large. It would also allow jewelry crafting to be brought into line with the other crafts and make master writs useful. As I know none of this will occur ZOS can take steps that allow jewelry material acquisition to be improved and still keep it from being a slam dunk. I've said in another post I'm not sure if making it full plates with adjustments or keeping grains with adjustments is the best answer. I think grains is the easiest since the code is already written and it is just a matter of changing a constant here or there. If it were changed to plates I think it would require too many code changes to get a good drop rate that requires more time than the other crafts yet isn't so long as to put jewelry in the state it currently is in.

The golden vendor is a problem. Lower the cost below that and it becomes worthless. That is a fact. But facts don't count much here, do they.

Just admit that you want it to be easy, because you don't want to work for it. That's all I hear. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thank god ZoS pretty much agrees with the status quo, hence why they've never said a word about this... I'm out. I'll keep doing my writs, and actually EARN IT, instead of being given it.

Any time you come up on the wrong side you always revert to ad hominem and the gimme argument. If you read what I've said I've never said jewelry crafting needs to be easy but believe whatever you want. I'll admit I've never understood the in game effort equals accomplishment mindset but then again I have had plenty of RL accomplishments to satisfy my needs.

Yes the Gold Vendor is a problem. It doesn't compete with a number of jewelry items yet forces a premium on them. Even for items where there is overlap the unpredictability of gold vendor availability puts a premium on items that might not ever show up there again. There is also a problem with the premium itself being 80% - 100% over gold vendor prices.

One other thing that hasn't come up is jewelry materials sharing nodes which reduces their availability. I haven't kept hard numbers but as I try to refine materials when the stacks are around a 1K I've noticed Platinum ore is about 2/3 the rate of Rubidite ore. This also affects the amount of time required to gather enough materials to upgrade jewelry.

We don't really know what ZOS thinks as they are essentially a black hole where stuff falls in but never gets out. I will reiterate. I think it would be good if ZOS would put together a statement as to why they consider jewelry is working and the rationale backing that up or say they understand there is an issue, state what they think the player base believes is broken and then decide how they intend to resolve it. My personal opinion is ZOS is more likely to have an opinion of it being a mistake to have ever put out jewelry crafting and just wished it would go away.

tmbrinks

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Alinhbo_Tyaka wrote: »

Purple doesn't drop in normal and finding it in the open world is rare. The thing is not everyone one aspires to or can run harder content.

Do players even need purple gear if they don't aspire to or can run harder content?

That's where I stopped reading ...

My comment is not a judgment against casuals. There's just no point of having purple gear if they don't need it for gameplay.

You don't need gold for a lot of the content including that run by many of the higher level players yet you see them scramble for gold as well. As long as there is a means for players to increase the quality of their gear they are going to want to do that regardless of their playing level. The fact is the current system isn't useful for any of the players if you wish to upgrade jewelry.

JC was designed to be the alternative way to get there, for those who can't get the jewelry from the multitude of other sources. So, if it were easy to upgrade, it would devalue the hard work, effort, and practice that all these people put in to be able to do the content to get the best gear, which coincidentally is really the only place you need the upgraded gear.

The only way to get a gold vMA staff is to be on the weekly leaderboards. There is NO way to get gold overland body pieces. Thus those have limited supply, you can't (really) farm them. Gold jewelry... farm the trial that drops them. Gold overland jewelry, wait for golden. Yes, that sucks, but it's there. And while waiting, you can farm gold to buy as many as you want.

That's why I personally agree with ZoS' sentiment that it should be unique, it should be different.

Yes, people are always going to scramble for better gear, but there needs to be separation between "want" and "need" the gear. Gold jewelry, in most cases is a "want". I don't know about you, but in real life, you have to work hard to achieve your wants, what's wrong with it being the same in the game. The opportunity is there to get the gear, it'll just take hard work, effort, practice, or lots of time. Earn it.

You keep ignoring that fact that there is jewelry that is only available in the open world or via crafting and that gear for some classes is either BiS or equivalent. You cannot get Necropotence in any content other than in Rivenspire. The majority will be blue. With the drop rates for Zircon and Chromiun it will have taken me close to a year to have upgraded the three pieces. I was able to pickup the BiS Miremonwe's Magicka necklace lightly farming the delve in less time than it took to upgrade it. As to the Gold Vendor the last time any Necropotence was on sale was Oct, 2017 and it was for console only. Prior to that is was June, 2017 for rings across all platforms. It also doesn't sell craftable items. No matter how you cut it the Gold Vendor is not a viable alternative.

You keep going back to everything has to be harder as if it is some type of accomplishment and equating a game to real life. This is a game and done for entertainment. That is how it is played by 99% of the player base assuming ZOS has similar numbers to the industry which my bet is they do. Creating an excessive grind for the majority does nothing more than turn them off to that content to the point most will decide it isn't worth the effort and won't do it. That wastes the development money and time spent on implementing the feature. In the case of jewelry for the average player they have created an excessive grind and pretty much negated any advantage for them to learn and use jewelry crafting or do master writs. Even for high level players it doesn't make much sense due to the time and resources it takes to upgrade an item. ZOS could change the drop rate for raw material processing grains to be the same percentage as the other crafting tempers, add an assistant and improve deconstruction drop rates which will still make jewelry "unique" but also make it viable to the average user. I'm sure there are other ways to improve the experience as well but it would likely involve more restructuring than is practical.

There is a difference between your vMA example and the other gear and that is the weapons are only available in vMA. That is not the same as offering the same item of different quality levels as a reward and providing the player with a means to upgrade those rewards. I have no issue with saying if you want a unique item you have to run the content. However quality levels do not make an item unique. As I said in a previous post. The real problem is ZOS using quality level to differentiate the different hardness levels of instanced content. They would be better off creating different sets for each level of a dungeon or trial and leave quality levels to RNG, player performance, crafting and/or some other mechanism. If ZOS really believes quality level should be the differentiator then remove the ability to upgrade any set that cannot be crafted. I personally don't care which way they go but if they decide to keep the current system then it needs to be usable by the larger player base that supports the game.

What do you pair Necropotence with? Alcast says Siroria (just the easiest I could find searching "Pet Sorc Build"). Guess what drops in gold? Siroria!!! So.. you run Necro BODY pieces, which are cheap to upgrade and then pair it with the set that drops gold jewelry. I know that's out of the box thinking... Unless you are a tank, I literally cannot think of a "meta" or "near-meta" (end game PVE, I don't really PVP) build that REQUIRES you to run 2 sets that drop in only purple gear in the game, or 2 crafted sets. That is my point. Now, if you can't get gold Siroria (because you're not clearing vCR +3), there is a question that was asked earlier... do you really need the gold jewelry?

They have already "nerfed" the grind in half with a previous update.

Drop rates for Zircon grains and Chromium grains are IDENTICAL to those for the respective purple and gold materials for BS/WW/Cloth when you are refining. At least they are with my tens of thousands of refined raw materials (yes, I keep track!). It's a 5% chance per "refine" of 10 materials for gold. It's 7.5% for purple, 12.5% for blue, 15% for green). This is the same for all refinements!!!

The deconstruction drop rates are the same as well. I might agree that deconning returning a plating might be reasonable.

Yes, the master writs are a problem. It'd also be a major problem if there suddenly was a flood of writ vouchers on the market because we suddenly reduce the cost of them by a factor of 10 (getting rid of grains, which seems to be the consensus on how to "fix" JC) They'd become, BY FAR, the most cost-effective (crafting) master writs to do, they'd be unfair in the opposite direction. What's the solution? I don't know. All I do know, is that many suggestions offered They are 8x better than they were at launch however.

I've stated on numerous occasions that the addition of a jewelry hireling would be a good thing.

ZoS has started doing that with their introduction of "perfected" gear. Maybe that is them making a transition. Maybe they started doing that because the other changes (such as daily crafting writs) they added made it too easy (in their mind) to get legendary gear, and they wanted to differentiate gear again, have something special. For the first year, year and a half, it was extremely expensive to upgrade gear to gold quality, that market collapsed with time and introduction of more sources of materials. Jewelry crafting today is not too far off from where those crafts upgrading were in the beginning of the game.

The single largest improvement Jewelry Crafting did was the new traits. It revolutionized DPS builds, along with major changes to some tanking builds (didn't do much for healers). That requires almost zero grind. It's easy to get and research the traits, and takes no more time (less in fact) than the other crafts.

So, ZoS decided they didn't want to trivialize gear from end game trials, the golden vendor, and the weekly rewards from trials and arenas, so they made the "upgrade" portion of Jewelry Crafting to be really expensive and time consuming. But, they gave you new traits to transmute your gear AND the ability to actually upgrade those items, IF AND ONLY IF you were willing to put in the time and effort to accomplish those things, either by doing jewelry crafting itself, or earning gold elsewhere to be able to purchase it from those that have done it.

I'm good with that. If they eventually "differentiate" gear by making perfected versions only drop in that end-game content, that is without a doubt better than the gear that drops overland, or in normal versions of the content, then yes, I can accept the fact that they should make jewelry upgrading be cheaper. But we aren't there yet... we're nowhere close.

Or if your not going to cherry pick Alcast's pages you run Necro with Julianos and use Necropotence jewelry. As to need in reality no player needs more than purple jewelry in even the highest level content but upgrading to Epic is worse than gold. Regardless the fact is ZOS has allowed people to upgrade whether there is a true need or not so should be balanced enough to be usable. Also as in all MMO's it doesn't matter your level that extra boost is stats is an extra boost in stats. In fact one could make the argument that the lower level players need it more than the higher level players. After all a boost in stats can compensate for those players that don't have a flawless rotation or whose reflexes aren't as fast as someone half their age and never will. Unlike high level play, which I use to do when younger, the boost can make a much larger difference for a lower level player completing content than a higher level one.

As I said the Gold Vendor isn't a valid concern. Jewelry crafting does not compete with it in many areas so it really becomes a fairness issue. Combine that with the unreliable RNG of the gold vendor and it ceases to *** a gold sink and becomes a penalty for gear unrelated to its purpose. Another questions is why should a crafted piece be penalized because of someone's ego being bruised because they think their gear is being trivialized? While on the subject of trivializing items transmute does that is spades. About the easiest thing to do is to get transmute crystals and change the traits on a piece of gear. That trivializes every piece of gear other players farmed to get the needed traits on. If player sensitivity to potential trivialization is truly the problem you perceive it is then the only fix in the current implementation is to stop allowing quality upgrades for anything other than crafted gear. This will allow those that farm their gear to still feel special and likely make more crafted sets usable by the population at large. It would also allow jewelry crafting to be brought into line with the other crafts and make master writs useful. As I know none of this will occur ZOS can take steps that allow jewelry material acquisition to be improved and still keep it from being a slam dunk. I've said in another post I'm not sure if making it full plates with adjustments or keeping grains with adjustments is the best answer. I think grains is the easiest since the code is already written and it is just a matter of changing a constant here or there. If it were changed to plates I think it would require too many code changes to get a good drop rate that requires more time than the other crafts yet isn't so long as to put jewelry in the state it currently is in.

The golden vendor is a problem. Lower the cost below that and it becomes worthless. That is a fact. But facts don't count much here, do they.

Just admit that you want it to be easy, because you don't want to work for it. That's all I hear. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thank god ZoS pretty much agrees with the status quo, hence why they've never said a word about this... I'm out. I'll keep doing my writs, and actually EARN IT, instead of being given it.

Any time you come up on the wrong side you always revert to ad hominem and the gimme argument. If you read what I've said I've never said jewelry crafting needs to be easy but believe whatever you want. I'll admit I've never understood the in game effort equals accomplishment mindset but then again I have had plenty of RL accomplishments to satisfy my needs.

Yes the Gold Vendor is a problem. It doesn't compete with a number of jewelry items yet forces a premium on them. Even for items where there is overlap the unpredictability of gold vendor availability puts a premium on items that might not ever show up there again. There is also a problem with the premium itself being 80% - 100% over gold vendor prices.

One other thing that hasn't come up is jewelry materials sharing nodes which reduces their availability. I haven't kept hard numbers but as I try to refine materials when the stacks are around a 1K I've noticed Platinum ore is about 2/3 the rate of Rubidite ore. This also affects the amount of time required to gather enough materials to upgrade jewelry.

We don't really know what ZOS thinks as they are essentially a black hole where stuff falls in but never gets out. I will reiterate. I think it would be good if ZOS would put together a statement as to why they consider jewelry is working and the rationale backing that up or say they understand there is an issue, state what they think the player base believes is broken and then decide how they intend to resolve it. My personal opinion is ZOS is more likely to have an opinion of it being a mistake to have ever put out jewelry crafting and just wished it would go away.

I apologize for the "ad hominem" fallacies... I'm sorry for lumping you in with the other people who've commented and have either done the same, or have admitted that they want it to be easy.

Also, thanks for the backhanded insult insinuating that I have no "RL" accomplishments, and that your reasoning for me being okay with things the way they are is that this game is all I have.

ZOS_Ragnar

We have removed some posts that were combative and not constructive.

Mithrazielle

I think a lot of people have gone way off in left field from my original post on this.

Without all the hyperbole, it boils down to this: I simply think that purple and gold tempers and platings need to drop more frequently from refining.

Honestly, if anyone argues against that, it means you're part of the problem, not the solution.