Vanilla game? Probably not. When you a reconstructing, you can do that. But crafting, no, I don't think so.

But good news!

Dolgubon's Lazy Set Crafter addon does not only that, but it allows you to auto craft the whole set in exactly the quality, weight, traits and enchants as you want with one click.

Use the UI to make a list of what you want crafted, then simply just interact with the crafting tables and the addon does the rest.

That friction, where you need to improve it 5 times, was actually a large part of the reason behind set crafter. (The other major part was those awful side scrollers in the crafting screen)
The first time I automatically improved a piece of gear from white all the way to purple is still one of the most satisfying coding moments I've ever had.

Eliahnus wrote: »

4 clicks too much effort ??

It’d be a bit of a different situation if it only took 4 clicks per set rather than per piece. OP mentioned a 5-piece set specifically, and 4 x 5 certainly isn’t still 4.

Especially at scale, it’s not about effort so much as time. I am happy to keep clicking buttons, as long as I am accomplishing something worth that time. I do not want to click buttons unnecessarily when I can be efficient about it instead. Interacting with content such as PvE and PvP is a good use of my button presses. Upgrading each item four times is not when we have the option to do it faster and with fewer interactions. The outcome of the upgrades is the same and guaranteed either way, unlike actual interactions with content.

ZOS seems to understand and appreciate this, since they implemented multi-refining. If they had preferred us to deal with the inefficiency, they would have left that bit of QoL to add-ons.

Ishtarknows wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

The outcome of the upgrades is the same and guaranteed either way, unlike actual interactions with content.

The outcome is only guaranteed if you have your crafting passives maxed out. It's possible to attempt to improve items with a reasonable chance of the item breaking and disappearing for good. The calculations for this scenario would probably be more complex if attempting to go from white to gold with fewer or no passives and it's always been my assumption that this is why we need to improve in stages.

I'd definitely welcome skipping the middle steps with having maxed passives as a prerequisite.

Yeah, even as a new player who put their first 30 skill points into crafting (and so struggled to kill two trash mobs at once—granted, well before the era of 16k base health, 12k offensive resources, 1k base WD/SD, 10% mit, etc.), I learned very quickly that upgrading anything at less than 100% chance is a major gamble of time and other resources. Actually one of the first things I remember being told in game is not even to try it. I have met only a few people willing to do it in my years playing. It certainly does feel like that corollary to Murphy’s Law: if you have a 50% of getting it right, you have a 90% chance of getting it wrong.

If someone wants to try upgrading at less than 100% chance, I’d say more power to them, but when someone’s willing to risk the whole thing on a gamble like that, I’d also say efficiency is not their primary concern. So having a maxed passive for the guarantee would seem to overlap pretty well with the players who are concerned with efficiency. On the other hand, if those willing to gamble it all wanted to automate their risk, I don’t see why they should be barred in principle.

You did note that there would be more complex coding to be done in that case, which is a good point, and one that’s already a question for me with any of this automation for improvements. For a long time ZOS’s approach has been to let much of the QoL be handled by add-ons, even when that meant leaving out consoles. When they wanted consoles to have a particular QoL improvement, they incorporated the add-on’s features into base game where it was in their scope to do so. Now that (current) consoles have add-ons, there is much less motivation to incorporate those features into the base game—unless they do something desirable but run into friction with the system (such as with guild mailers causing the game to boot or even social ban senders).

Meanwhile, the current model simultaneously supports making QoL like this native and indicates against it. Adding this to base game would seem to fit with base game refreshes/QoL becoming the main feature of updates now, as a replacement for new content. On the other hand, some things still remain out of scope for them at the moment, and I don’t think the budget and staff cuts are going to help. There are still a lot of requests for things we can’t do for ourselves with add-ons, like having the Armory save Scribing scripts. I imagine that’s a whole other spreadsheet they have about what would fill substantial gaps versus what they actually have the resources to do.