JEWELRY CRAFTING: Implications on the economy, gear meta, endgame, etc.

Yolokin_Swagonborn

From the ESO live stream. See twitch clip HERE or watch the entire Bummerset teaser HERE. Jewelry Crafting discussion starts at 25minutes in.

The Details:

• "Jewelry Crafting works like the other durable crafting skill-lines" (e.g. Woodworking, Clothing, Blacksmithing)
• Allows you to both craft and upgrade Jewelry
• You can make Jewelry for crafted sets
• 6 new traits will be added to Jewelry (in addition to Healthy, Robust, and Arcane)
• One of those traits will be called "Bloodthirsty" - do more damage to low health targets

The implications.

1. Can Jewelry traits be transmuted with the existing transmute system? Not Confirmed.
2. Will all rings drop in all 9 traits now? Imagine farming the Burning spellweave necklace if it can drop in 9 traits and only one is BIS with no transmute. Get ready to grind!
3. If jewelry crafting works like armor crafting, then new traits will have to be researched. Remember how long it took to research 9 traits for all armor? Good thing there are research scrolls in the crown store now Cant wait for the P2W cries. People who buy research will have access to the new system faster.
4. New powerful double crafted set combinations. Can't wait for some twitch streamer to "invent" Histbark/Tava's/Bloodspawn. No, you didn't think of it first, I didn't either. It's obvious.
5. If Jewelry can be transmuted. There are some strong sets that will get even stronger if you can change the trait. (I'm thinking heavy sets like ravager, fury, soulshine, elfbane)

Impacts on the economy for crafting

1. People will need donor rings for research. Will the 6 new traits drop in ALL zones on jewelry? If I was in the ESO marketing department, I'd know the obvious answer.
2. The new materials (jewelry upgrade tempers, trait stones, raw and base material) will be hoarded and price spiked by all those lovely people that just play this game to abuse the economy.
3. If you can deconstruct existing rings for tempers get ready for speculators to start hoarding rings now, especially gold ones.
4. How many legendary tempers will it take to upgrade a ring to gold? Does ZOS stick with the standard 8 or increase the grind?
5. There will have to be a raw material to craft rings from, I wonder how grindy it will be to get it. Inb4 gather 100pcs of flyspec, and refine into 1 glipglop, then combine 100 glipglops into 1 flipflop, etc.

Endgame Implications

• Gold Jewelry is currently only available from completing Hardmode content and from top 2% PvP leaderboards.
• There are concerns that the increased availability of gold Jewelry will decrease interest in endgame content.

If anyone can think of more gameplay, balance, crafting or economy implications, add them below and I will add them to this list.

Tommy_The_Gun

I am pretty sure that once you research certain trait you will be able to transmute it and change trait.
I remember Clockwork city livestream when transmute system was introduced and they said that you can transmute trait on any gear as long as that trait is researched. Now when we will have jewellery crafting we should technically be able to research jewellery traits and then switch them via transmute system.

btw. Can you imagine that ?! To have stamina or magicka (Robust / Arcane) trait on a heavy armour jewellery set

Yolokin_Swagonborn

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

btw. Can you imagine that ?! To have stamina or magicka (Robust / Arcane) trait on a heavy armour jewellery set

I can imagine a lot of those great sets getting nerfed because of this.

Also there will be some very powerful double crafted set combinations. Shacklebreaker/Julianos or Shacklebreaker/Hundings is obvious. Twitch streamers will have a field day "inventing" these builds while other Twitch streamers will claim they invented them first.

Kingslayer513

Thanks for the write-up.

Honestly my biggest concern is with upgrading jewelry. If it's not sufficiently difficult to upgrade, then is there any reason to run vet content anymore (aside from pride + achievements)? If it works just like any other craft skill, then for most players it'll be easier to go PUG normal trials and upgrade everything instead of honing their skills, joining guilds, and working their way up to vet trials for the better loot.

We still don't have many details yet, but it sounds a lot like the existing crafting skills.

Yolokin_Swagonborn

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

Thanks for the write-up.

Honestly my biggest concern is with upgrading jewelry. If it's not sufficiently difficult to upgrade, then is there any reason to run vet content anymore (aside from pride + achievements)? If it works just like any other craft skill, then for most players it'll be easier to go PUG normal trials and upgrade everything instead of honing their skills, joining guilds, and working their way up to vet trials for the better loot.

We still don't have many details yet, but it sounds a lot like the existing crafting skills.

Good point. I added that concern in its own section under "endgame," I'm not sure that crafting gold jewelry will be the death of endgame or even affect it. ZOS has done worse things to endgame trials like refusing to update gear to max level for 6 months essentially destroying the PvE endgame raiding community at the time. But it recovered from that so I think it will survive gold jewelry crafting. People who like that content will always come back and do it.

madchuska83

Can we upgrade dropped Jewelry, or just crafted sets? If so it will make doing Vet Trials and Dungeons pointless unless you just want skins/titles. Not sure I'd like the fact that someone could "gold out" their trial sets without ever doing a Vet trial.

Jaimeh

Will the upgrade/quality improvement work on non-crafted jewelery though?

Tholian1

Does jewelry crafting mean that craftable gear sets will be nerfed? I have been wanting Hunding’s jewelry for a long time.

ArchMikem

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Endgame Implications

• Gold Jewelry is currently only available from completing Hardmode content and from top 2% PvP leaderboards.
• There are concerns that the increased availability of gold Jewelry will decrease interest in endgame content.

So they made it easier to get a Gold Infallible Aether necklace out of doing AA. But you still have to do AA in the first place to get that necklace dropped, and you know they might make the drop chance for those even worse to compensate, so the grind still exists.

And who do you know plays PvP JUST so they can get gold gear from it? They play it cause they get their egos stroked, not cause of gear.

Vapirko

And once again ZOS takes a fantastic flying leap far beyond what was necessary into the realm of compelete imbalance. PvP is gonna be such a *** show between this and the new skill line.

Yolokin_Swagonborn

Tholian1 wrote: »

Does jewelry crafting mean that craftable gear sets will be nerfed? I have been wanting Hunding’s jewelry for a long time.

That is usually the ZOS philosophy. Add new mechanics to the game, then just nerf old things people like to stop power creep.
Example:
When ZO$ added Frost Tanking to the game, a mechanic NO ONE ASKED FOR or wanted, they then realized that holding block with the frost staff and wearing Desert Rose would be OP. So instead of removing garbage frost tanking, they nerfed the hell out of Desert Rose.

So yeah a few combinations of crafted gear will be very strong. Tava's/Histbark is one example. So crafted sets might get nerfed because of this change. We lose a lot of good class skills, basic mechanics, and great gear thanks to retroactive nerfs because ZOS didn't think through the implications of adding a new system.

Minno

Which sets would this be OP on?
We also haven't seen the other custom traits yet to determine what possible or not. It's possible, the other traits are more attractive than slotting stamina enchants and we'll have a different meta.

Based on crafted sets, it will add more flexibility, which already exists on the crafted system (pick your armor in any crafted set).

Need a dirty set for PvP? Pick a Regen crafted set, pick a DMG crafted set, and slot any defensive monster helm of your choosing (done in about 30 minutes as opposed to grinding for 2 hours).

But I can see some issues, but can't speculate till we get all the details.

Rittings

I think we are all jumping to a LOT of unfounded conclusions here. Looking at what is "BiS" for most content right now, a lot of it doesn't just contain a farmed set - it contains ONLY farmed sets.

TFS + VO + Monster set (stamina)
BSW + Moondancer + Monster set (magicka)

These are two generic examples... I don't see jewelry crafting changing the horizon too much - but it will make it a little easier for low level toons that you don't want to farm gear for until you've leveled them. Of course there will be builds based purely upon crafted sets - and that's okay too. Crafting takes a long time and needs some kind of rewarding for that.

I'm excited we are finally talking about a whole bunch of new builds that we'll have fun testing, as much as ZoS will have fun balancing (we know how much they love a good nerf fest!!).

I'm excited about this game now, and I haven't said that for the longest time (I'm a known whinger).

temjiu

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Tholian1 wrote: »

Does jewelry crafting mean that craftable gear sets will be nerfed? I have been wanting Hunding’s jewelry for a long time.

That is usually the ZOS philosophy. Add new mechanics to the game, then just nerf old things people like to stop power creep.
Example:
When ZO$ added Frost Tanking to the game, a mechanic NO ONE ASKED FOR or wanted, they then realized that holding block with the frost staff and wearing Desert Rose would be OP. So instead of removing garbage frost tanking, they nerfed the hell out of Desert Rose.

So yeah a few combinations of crafted gear will be very strong. Tava's/Histbark is one example. So crafted sets might get nerfed because of this change. We lose a lot of good class skills, basic mechanics, and great gear thanks to retroactive nerfs because ZOS didn't think through the implications of adding a new system.

While I see your point, I do have to say that unlike Frost tanking, players have been asking for jewelcrafting for a long time. It's entirely possible that they held off this long because it would affect the game so much, and perhaps they've looked at balancing changes that would help balance this out. Just thinking outside the box really, but seeing the silver lining in the process.

Also, there's no reason that they can't add more dungeon only sets that would still entice people to run the content. and the materials could end up being rare, much like Nirn is now, with more of it rewarded for doing the hard content.

Plus were getting new traits, those could also be balanced against the fact that we'll be able to craft them. Not to mention that we still don't know what materials are needed, and if they will even be farmable in the same manner as metals, wood and flower. We may have to get all our mats from deconstructing rings, and if they gold tier mats require gold tier jewelry to get mats from, there's your vet grinding right there.

Plenty of ways to keep end game content viable while still having the jewelry in the game. But to make sure I'm not sounding too optimistic, I do have similar concerns that other people do, I'm just not ready to jump onto the doom and gloom bandwagon yet. Yet.....

ADarklore

Why would they nerf crafted sets? It's not like other people can't run the same sets. The problem with armor sets hasn't been crafted sets, it always has been dropped sets, and especially proc sets. So now people will whine that crafted sets will become equal to dropped sets... and it's about damn time!!

DarkAedin

@Yolokin_Swagonborn


Prrreeeeaaaaaaccccchhhhhh

peacenote

The implications of this being tied to an expansion are hurting my head a little, lol. Trying to think if this has the possibility to actually split BIS builds between people that do and don't have the chapter.

If, say, all jewelry comes in nine traits now, but you can't research the traits, transmute, or upgrade without unlocking the trait line... seems like it could be very painful for some to get jewelry in certain traits if some of the new ones are more desirable than the existing ones. Especially since, the way it is right now, you can't as a crafter transmute gear for someone else.

I'm thinking of, say, the overland gear. Or even dungeons. You can grind for the blue rings, but they are BOP, so you can't turn them to gold without the skill line the way the game works today.

It really seems like this won't work unless all players can do jewelry crafting, regardless of whether they buy the chapter or not.

Also wondering if participation in the new craft will impact writ drops overall (am I "more invested" with another craft) and, with two new skill lines, hoping for a good bump in skill points.

klowdy1

I'm looking forward to upgrading my jewelry past blue. I bought it for the set bonuses, but I'm still spending money on other things (upgrading armor mostly, upgrading enchants, lots wasted on looking fabulous).

Dont_do_drugs

i dont know, wether its worth it having all those questions now, before we even know how it will work. zos didnt release any infos 'bout jewelry crafting yet, still people are already breaking their heads over it. even ur thread entry is full of assumptions, like how does it drop, research stuff, ugrading stuff, transmutation stuff.....way too much for way to low existing information. keep that thought in mind, but i dont think its of any use to discuss it, before zos released more infos or before its on pts. *headscratch* i hope u still gonna sleep tight and well when u go to bed tonight

Yolokin_Swagonborn

peacenote wrote: »

The implications of this being tied to an expansion are hurting my head a little, lol. Trying to think if this has the possibility to actually split BIS builds between people that do and don't have the chapter.

What I am wondering is if ALL jewelry will drop from ALL locations (bosses, chests, dolmens, etc) in all available traits.

Have you tried buying purple Briarheart jewelry? Jewelry in Wrothgar drops in all three traits, because ZOS logic. Because of that, robust Briarheart rings are much more expensive than any other overland jewelry. Now take that cost and multiply it across 9 different jewelry traits.

ZOS doesn't have a very good track record of creating desirable traits. We are still reeling over training/prosperous. So there is a high probability that only one of the new jewelry traits will be BIS, and the rest will just serve to dilute the loot tables. Without the ability to transmute jewelry, this will be a drop rate nightmare. Imagine farming for a hard to get jewelry piece like burning spellweave neck, then you finally get one and it drops in Healthy.

Kumbiya

peacenote wrote: »

The implications of this being tied to an expansion are hurting my head a little, lol. Trying to think if this has the possibility to actually split BIS builds between people that do and don't have the chapter.

If, say, all jewelry comes in nine traits now, but you can't research the traits, transmute, or upgrade without unlocking the trait line... seems like it could be very painful for some to get jewelry in certain traits if some of the new ones are more desirable than the existing ones. Especially since, the way it is right now, you can't as a crafter transmute gear for someone else.

I'm thinking of, say, the overland gear. Or even dungeons. You can grind for the blue rings, but they are BOP, so you can't turn them to gold without the skill line the way the game works today.

It really seems like this won't work unless all players can do jewelry crafting, regardless of whether they buy the chapter or not.

Also wondering if participation in the new craft will impact writ drops overall (am I "more invested" with another craft) and, with two new skill lines, hoping for a good bump in skill points.

Yeah, I definitely think jewelry crafting will an expansion on the base game, and not exclusive to people who buy Summerset; even if that did happen, they will be available to put in houses so all you would need to do is have a friend/guildmate that has the station (or have it yourself since it would be a writ purchase undoubtedly)

ParaNostram

Lowbie alt characters will be much more potent now. You can have two full sets more easily!

bloodthirstyvampire

5 hunding 5 nmg bis stamblade

Lynx7386

Here's a thought: For all the people worried about "upgrading" jewelry from trials, so that you can do the normal mode trials to get gold jewelry, what if the gold tempers required to upgrade jewelry from rare to legendary only dropped in endgame content?

Sure you can upgrade that blue ring of the vicious ophidian you got from normal SO to a purple, but if you want gold you still have to do vet SO

Kolzki

It could be a nice boost to hybrid characters who could now combine crafted hybrid sets like pelenials, acuity, shacklebreaker, innate axiom, assassin's guile or i guess clever alchemist. It makes a lot of combinations for hybrids possible that weren't there before.

SugaComa

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

Thanks for the write-up.

Honestly my biggest concern is with upgrading jewelry. If it's not sufficiently difficult to upgrade, then is there any reason to run vet content anymore (aside from pride + achievements)? If it works just like any other craft skill, then for most players it'll be easier to go PUG normal trials and upgrade everything instead of honing their skills, joining guilds, and working their way up to vet trials for the better loot.

We still don't have many details yet, but it sounds a lot like the existing crafting skills.

This actually a good thing in a way ... Most vet content is ignored cos people can't get the gear to complete it

So it's catch 22 no decent gear no vet trials no vet trials no decent gear ... Now as gear becomes more readily accessible people will be doing vet content for the real reason to do them

Pride and achievements ... Best gear should never be locked behind end content ... End content should be what you do with the best gear

Carbonised

Furnishing recipes based off of jewelry crafting skill line.

ZOS make it happen.

Minno

SugaComa wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

Thanks for the write-up.

Honestly my biggest concern is with upgrading jewelry. If it's not sufficiently difficult to upgrade, then is there any reason to run vet content anymore (aside from pride + achievements)? If it works just like any other craft skill, then for most players it'll be easier to go PUG normal trials and upgrade everything instead of honing their skills, joining guilds, and working their way up to vet trials for the better loot.

We still don't have many details yet, but it sounds a lot like the existing crafting skills.

This actually a good thing in a way ... Most vet content is ignored cos people can't get the gear to complete it

So it's catch 22 no decent gear no vet trials no vet trials no decent gear ... Now as gear becomes more readily accessible people will be doing vet content for the real reason to do them

Pride and achievements ... Best gear should never be locked behind end content ... End content should be what you do with the best gear

Only downside is if your end game isn't trial pve; you're punished by being casual/PvP player.

There are better ways to increase trial interest.

MLGProPlayer

A "sky is falling" post speculating on every possible worst case scenario before we know anything about the system. Nice.

disintegr8

It will be like everything else they have changed/introduced, we will try, we will love/hate it and we will adapt or leave. Mostly people will simply adapt and go with it.

Avran_Sylt

@Lynx7386

I almost wonder if they'll tie it into things like the drop-rates of transmutation stones.

One thing I hope they start doing, is having the drop tables of normal and veteran modes be different (different sets), so there's actually a reason to try the harder content.