Do horses count as the longest type of crafting?

DewiMorgan

People have complained about how long it takes to train in all crafting branches - up to 50 days if you don't take the speed-up traits! Zounds!

Crafting a fully-levelled horse takes... lessee, there are three 100 point bars, you start out with I think 20 points, so that's 280 points. Each point takes 20 hours and 250 gold, so that's 70k gold and 5600 hours, or 233 days to max your horse, if you do it at 100% efficiency. There's no speed-up that you can spend points on. And when you're finally done... you can't trade your horse to anyone else, or even to your other characters.

The massive advantages that you get from a fully-levelled horse are probably well worth the work... and it also makes the character you've built that horse on, really sticky. You won't want to start over on a new character, and go back to moving slowly, with 100 less inventory slots.

Great dame design? It feels like it to me.

Though I feel that there should perhaps be something in the elder game, perhaps a once-per-character thing, that allows you to retire a character and bequeathe your maxed horse to another alt for a large (a few hundred k?) fee, to encourage those who might otherwise be tempted to leave, rather than start over with a new build. But since a maxed horse is such a crushing advantage, would that be gamebreaking? I don't know.

I do know that the thought of playing a low-level character crawling around on an unlevelled horse with a teensy bag, and having to do that whole year-long levelling process again... would put me right off starting a new character. Once I max my main alt now, I most likely won't try other builds, specifically because of this.

But what do other people think?

Malediktus

You can only feed a horse 50 times I think.

Food4Thought

To the OP, I would probably just wait to start a secondary character once my main had aquired a small fortune. Then I would buy a 34k gold mount which most likely starts out with higher stats.

But I don't view this as a crafting system so to speak. You are paying for a minute upgrade each time. Plain and simple. Crafting infers some work or labor on your part to create the improvement. This one is simply a change of hands for gold.

DewiMorgan

To me, crafting implies *time* invested on your part to create or improve an item, whether the craft is farming animals, provisioning, or blacksmithing.

There's no real "work or labor" involved in the actual act of crafting in this game or most others: just time. You train over time, you collect things over time (or pay for them, or grind for them).

Then you make them instantly, with no work at all other than clicking a couple of buttons. The work is in the learning ...as my dentist tells me when he charges $1k for twenty minutes' work.

Yes, the more expensive mount starts out with, I think, 30 points instead of 20, but it's still really naff compared to 300 points.

but if the mounts max out at 50 points, or are only feedable 50 times... that's really sad, too And should be made clear and obvious in the interface, since at the moment I've been feeding for inventory capacity, on the assumption that I could build the other stats *later*.