Nebthet78 wrote: »

Crafted armor was never meant to be the best of the best armor in this game.

I thought it was supposed to be better in general. Not necessarily the sets, but the general values.

Ourorboros wrote: »

Nebthet78 wrote: »
Crafted armor was never meant to be the best of the best armor in this game.

I don't know when you started playing, but before the game launched, ZOS advertised that crafted armor would be as good as dropped sets. That was a selling point to me.

I wouldn't mind the mat grind near as much if the crafted sets were as good as anything dropped.

I've been playing since early beta.

They advertised that Crafting would be the better armor then, .. but now the crafted sets lost what ever bonus was given to them since IC was released. Which means the better, more sought out armor are the dropped sets that you have to farm.

I have tested out one of the crafting scales: light armour material. My character had no additional passive skills in clothing and so the item was a jute. When I added a point the visual of the jute did not change to flax but the looting of the jute changed to raw flax. I have decided to go and test it further by adding one more point. The loot did not change to raw cotton. It was still raw flax.

Suggestions to fix the craft gathering visuals: Cloth Armour Material as Wrothgar Silk and Ores as Wrothgar Ore.

I personally like the fact that V15~16 mats are harder to get. It helps to provide a better sense of accomplishment when something's harder to achieve. People complain that it makes crafting more worthless, when really it puts it up more in league with the difficulty of getting dropped sets, which in turn will allow ZOS to add more interesting crafted sets. People complain that it makes it harder to try out new builds. They can just use V14 gear til they figure out what they want. Its not much of a difference in terms of power and its a lot cheaper to make. Then once you figure out what you want, you can go craft that V16 gear.

All the complaints about stuff taking too long from people that only play very little each week reminds of the downward slide MMOs have been suffering from in recent years as game developers casualize the game to death to appease those that don't want to spend much time on achieving things. Its like how WoW decided that everyone should have a legendary weapon. Its not so legendary when everyone has one, now is it? People need to accept that if you want the best that's out there, you're gonna have to put time into it. Can't use the excuse of needing it to stay competitive because those that put more time into things are still gonna beat you out anyways simply because of their skill level. Gear only takes you so far and you don't need the absolute best to do well either.

As for the people refering to things that ZOS has said in the past, well things change. Ideas that seemed great at first may not seem so great later on and thus changes will be made. Its like getting a nice new car with black leather seats because you thought it was awesome. Then the middle of summer rolls around and suddenly its not so awesome anymore.

Marrtha wrote: »

As for the people refering to things that ZOS has said in the past, well things change. Ideas that seemed great at first may not seem so great later on and thus changes will be made. Its like getting a nice new car with black leather seats because you thought it was awesome. Then the middle of summer rolls around and suddenly its not so awesome anymore.

The thing is, what do you get to experiment with? How do you get to find what suits you best? What if you decide to reroll because it is needed? What if you want more sets? Or help some noobie have a decent set? Best sets need to be farmed, not crafted, and therefore making the end game craft a grind is not a good idea whatsoever. Only thing I can agree with is crafters with max skill points getting access to these materials over people who haven't invested anything into it. Same works with sets that take research time to be crafted. This runs economy then too.[/quote]

The problem I see here is what market pays for the game to keep running? Where will ZoS get money from long term? Are game-addicted gamers really spending so much that it makes sense to focus only on them?

Do players who are more casual (like me - I do play many hours a week, but I don't grind, don't min/max and am usually broke in-game) but subbed get valued by the company?

If marketing "to me", then these new nodes/rarity are ludicrus. I've only ever seen about 4 dwemer pages, I got imperial a total of once, bought primal, don't have daedric, ancient elf or barbarian (never saw any in-game) as of last night I have 13 shards of malachite, 1 perfect roe, 2 psijic recipie shards, nothing to do with glass or xivkyn other than 4 charcoal of remorse gotten from deconning in IC.

I don't buy motifs in crown store, though I do have one I bought in-game (someone mentioned it in chat, had the money at the time and went for it).

BalticBlues wrote: »

Sounomi wrote: »

All the complaints about stuff taking too long from people that only play very little each week reminds of the downward slide MMOs have been suffering from in recent years as game developers casualize the game to death.

How can there be more "casualization" than stupid grinding in the IC?

The IC It is meant for the most casual players who cannot understand objectives and strategic gameplay as in Cyrodiil PVP (which is a great PVP place). Because the IC desigerns did not care about giving IC objectives at all (for example "capture the flag" or "domination" modes), the only IC "objective" is to grind for mats/gear. What can be more casual than that?

Only because the IC designers failed to design real objectives and just used tedious grinding, they had to make mats extremely rare. Without being forced to grind, most people probably would not play the IC at all. However, without sufficient mats, the IC designers also killed the crafting in the game. This way, the overall effects of the IC are even more devastating.

Crafters can only hope that Orsinium will restore the damage the IC did to the game.

That is ***. Casual is doing game content at your own pace, be it questing, crafting, PvPing, PvEing. I do all of this casually, except for PvP. I don't have time to dedicate to any specific thing as I don't have a lot of time to play, because I have to work to be able to spend crowns (lol) I do not find grinding enjoyable at all, it is boring and brainless. But unfortunately that is what I have to do if I want to get a rank 16 set. Not fun, not enjoyable and absolutely cancerous. I have only bought like 4 xivkyn pieces, the rest I get I sell, and I don't even get that much because I do not play to gather gold, and that is how I cannot afford buying mats from grinders who spend hours on top of hours GRINDING. This is why I started hating IC, it looks cool, but it doesn't work.. And I was hoping Orsinium would fix it by introducing nodes, but jk, you only have a chance to get the raw material you need. I would love to quest through IC, I want to explore the sewers and kill bosses, but everyone either wants to gank or grind!

BalticBlues wrote: »

Marrtha wrote: »

Casual is doing game content at your own pace

Hardcore gamers also do things "at their own pace".
The word "pace" is more individual; the word "casual" is more general. Wikipedia says,

"A casual game is a video game targeted at or used by a mass audience of casual gamers.
Casual games [...] are typically distinguished by their simple rules"
[...]
The word "casual" indicates that the games are produced for the casual consumer,
who comes across the game and can get into gameplay almost immediately."

This is exactly what the IC is. Where Cyrodiil requires a thorough understanding of complex PvP rules, the IC simply says "kill all enemies". I have no problem with a simplistic DLC like that, but the IC also is killing crafting by creating an artificial deficiency of mats to make the tedious grinding worthwhile. It is this game damaging approach I cannot forgive.

Thankfully, Orisinium looks much more like the quality we know from ESO.
That crafters will find exactly the material required for their level is just great.
I hope that there also will be enough material to reduce tedious grinding.
The way mats are distributed in all other zones (except of the IC) I find perfectly balanced.

With such a balanced distribution, Orisinium could fix the serious damage the IC did to crafting.

Apart from emperorship and making to the weekly boards, and maybe collecting millions of gold, I do not see how ESO could ever be hardcore. That is why the changes to mats and crafting were ridiculous in the first place. I am still bewildered as I do not understand what was wrong with the old crafting system. And I still fully stand behind the thought of letting maxed crafters get only vet15-16 mats from Orsinium.

That is the bottom line, there is a lot of things that need fixing, but this thread addresses only the nodes. Before we go even further

I Did a test run of collecting all gear crafting mats in western Wrothgar, roughly limiting to area west from waterway between Great bay wayshrine and Unfinished Dolmen. It is about one third of lower Wrothgar woodsland area. I used two accounts and ran same area three times. I didn't see any other player. I avoided beasts, but killed if they were close to a resource. Each run took about half hour.

harvestmap after first run showing the collection area:


Run results:

Note: run1 has somewhat too high numbers because i forgot to clean inventory. My gut feeling is that there were maybe 5 to 10 items from previous test in small area. Anyway, the run1 was a cleanout-run to set the area from idle to "in use" state. Run2 and run3 are the real results showing how much we can expect to find from previously visited area, and how fast the nodes spawn. Before run2 and 3 i cleared inventory.

It shows how initial run may be very successful, but real numbers of area "in use" are lower. After first run i thought that ZOS had already tweaked server parameters, because of so much Rubedite ore around.

It also shows how RNG makes numbers jump up and down. I woudn't bother calculating top tier drop rates from this small samples.

Afterwards my players got greedy and they stopped collecting second tier stuff. Results:

Run 5 found nothing but tier2 stuff and run6 one ancestor silk node.

So greedy farming quickly spoils an area. I also noticed that node spawn times are very slow. There are places that don't get new nodes after many hours. Run 4..6 results are combination of slow spawn and area degeneration, i believe.

My recommendations to ZOS:
- Check the spawn rate. I don't know if it is low because of low player density, but it is very slow now.
- Do something to greedy farming. E.g. reroll nodes at steady rate. Increasing the top tier drop rate should also help as more nodes rewpawn naturally.

newtinmpls wrote: »

I guess my question to ZoS is who are they targeting these nodes and materials for?

ZOS is contradicting itself. They have a CP cap and system in place to catch up.

That is for the "casual" gamer but to contradict themselves they put in things like Rubedite where the only reasonable way to get the material is to put in lots and lots of hours.

It makes no sense to me.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This is the official feedback thread for crafting node scaling found in Orsinium. Specific feedback the team is looking for includes:

• Is it clear that crafting nodes are scaling to the passive, and do you find that more enjoyable that scaling to your level?
• Do Veteran Rank 15 and above materials still feel rare?
• Do you feel you could obtain the Ancient Orc and Akiviri chapters and style items fairly reasonably?
• What are your overall thoughts about the new crafted item sets? Is it fun?

It's clear that nodes are NOT scaling to passives. People with 10/10 are getting 9th rank mats.

I am terrified that this new content release will make the Imperial City, especially the sewers, useless and abandoned. Increasing commonness of materials and falling prices of items purchased via tel var stones are driving people out of the sewers already. It's going to be even worse once Orsinium and these nodes come up..

KenaPKK wrote: »

I am terrified that this new content release will make the Imperial City, especially the sewers, useless and abandoned. Increasing commonness of materials and falling prices of items purchased via tel var stones are driving people out of the sewers already. It's going to be even worse once Orsinium and these nodes come up..

I would venture to guess that a lot of the folks that are missing from IC are trying out PTS as this is more their sort of thing and/or they just want something different to do.

tengri wrote: »

Nodes should scale to your crafting skill - not to the (may or may not unlocked because of skillpoint shortage) passives.

Working with mats - of course, crafting passives are the gateway. But for harvesting... no.
This just stinks.

Hirelings scale to crafting skill.
Stolen items in Craglorn scale to character level.

Does anything in the game scale to crafting level? Aren't all skill line levels only a factor in unlocking skills? Is there even a single situation where skill line level impacts anything in game? I wouldn't start now.

If people are going to run around harvesting, it doesn't matter much as they can pick the most sensible character. I suppose the advantage of scaling to passives is that lower level characters can get the best mats while playing Orsinium to level their character while players use their higher level characters for pledges and PvP. Also, if people are already spending on passives in order to get good stuff from hirelings, Orsinium would be an added bonus.

On the down side, if crafting writs start using v15 mats, people doing writs likely will choose to do them on a character with only 9 points into the leveling passive. That would mean basing Orsinium nodes on crafting passive would mean choosing between doing writs or harvesting nodes in Orsinium. I would probably just stop doing equipment crafting writs.

I don't mind the crafting nodes giving mats based on your skill points spent in that craft. It's ok to give a little something back to the dedicated crafters after some changes in the last couple of updates that were not very good for them (to be polite). It's a system that I can be happy with at first glance.

What I do not like is that there is only a chance to find the VR15 modes - I can understand a 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 chance, but a 1 in 6 (my limited testing numbers) is awful. The VR16 material grind is seriously one of the worst parts of the game right now and I really don't see the need for it. It's definitely better after Orsinium (especially for PvE folks) then it is now with just IC, but I suggest improving the odds of finding VR15 mats to be Double what they are now, at an absolute minimum. VR15 Mats are still Too Rare and it's hurting the game in my adamant opinion.

I have not done anywhere near enough PTS grinding to ascertain whether the new motifs are too easy or too hard to acquire. The amount of AP needed for Akavirii seems high, but then again PvP afficienados need a source of Gold and a reason to actually want AP again, so I'm ok with it at this time.

I have not tested all of the new sets, but as long as they are doing what the tool tips say I think they are all worth considering and some are (on paper) almost a must have for many builds. It would be nice to have more clarification for the tool tip on some of the 5 piece bonuses. For example, how long do the summoned weapons on the Morkuldin set last?