How do you feel ESO crafting compares to other games?

Tasear · January 2019

What do you enjoy about ESO crafting compared to others?

What do you think could be improved with eso crafting?

How is ESO crafting different from other games?

macsmooth · January 2019

The only thing I enjoyed about crafting was leveling it because I thought I could get access to good gear and good materials to level gear

Time consuming can take my entire game time for the day up doing it on multiple characters

Doesn’t reward material to the max level which means game time is spent farming or having to spend what little gold you earn from writs on over inflated materials from guild stores which can take your game time away just having to look for a reasonable price (consoles)

Crafting of own gear isn’t the issue it’s the writs to get tempers that is destroying what game time you have and hireling doesn’t give enough often enough specially if you want to test builds and compare to equal level gear for accurate comparison

Blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking and jewellery (minus the hireling bit for jewellery because there isn’t any) all fall in the above

Alchemy once you get your head around it is fine and farming materials can take a long time as doesn’t give more than 1 or if your lucky 2 per flower pick plus no real hireling

No issues with enchanting and provisioning (recipes are a little time consuming to get)

It’s a necessity for upgrade materials but it is far from fun and removes you from actually playing the game

Dracan_Fontom · January 2019

The only other MMO I've experienced crafting in was in Final Fantasy VIX. And can i just say that it was the BIGGEST pain in the a**. It required so much effort to be a crafter in that game, and honestly not worth it to me. I rather pay millions (of rather easy to acquire) gold for any crafting items.

First of all, crafting was interlinked with each other which is a cool in theory but damn it's annoying. Basically if you don't level EVERY crafting class of which there is 7 I believe you may not be able to advance very well unless you buy all the mats you need which is expensive af. Not to mention that every expansion, the level caps increase and leveling crafters/gatherers is probably the only thing worse than being a crafter.

Furthermore, you are obsolete as a crafter until you can get gear for them with personally I never understood how to people even got this gear. It was a difficult for my friend, especially, and I to acquire this gear due to the requirements placed on it. In short, the best gear is locked behind a token system which is capped per week so progression is slow.

As to crafting itself, I found that crafting was more of a headstart when a patch offered higher tier gear. So crafters can make tons of gold, selling new gear than was on par or even greater than the tier last patch. After that, potions and food in the game though HUGELY limited to that of this game are still very important to parses and as such are good money makers.

My last comment will be...ZoS thank you for making crafting in this game so freaking easy to do...

Turelus · January 2019

I've enjoyed it more here than other games.

I feel it's more useful than other themepark games I've played, however it will never match up to the crafting of a sandbox game where there is higher demand for items.

There is still some more which could be done to improve it, but overall it does what it needs to and isn't useless at end game.

Xerikten · January 2019

in this game it is easier to level and to be able to make end gear beginning sets. some sets will last a long time. food, drink and potions are a main end game theme in this and other mmos i crafted in.

i have reached max crafting in eq1,eq2,wow, rift, swotr and this game. this game is easy except for researching the last few traits.

the only thing i would like to improve is to make house item recipes easier to obtain: greater choice of, and more building materials.

i miss eq2 housing.

Bouldercleave · January 2019

Xerikten wrote: »

in this game it is easier to level and to be able to make end gear beginning sets. some sets will last a long time. food, drink and potions are a main end game theme in this and other mmos i crafted in.

i have reached max crafting in eq1,eq2,wow, rift, swotr and this game. this game is easy except for researching the last few traits.

the only thing i would like to improve is to make house item recipes easier to obtain: greater choice of, and more building materials.

i miss eq2 housing.

I agree 100% on the eq2 housing. I made a fortune crafting storage boxes alone in that game. I also liked how you could set up the AH from your home. It gave people a REASON to visit your house.

I have a couple of really well furnished (in my opinion) houses here that no one has ever visited but me.

eso_nya · January 2019

Cool:
- instant craft (no 30 min timers to wait for until item is done)
- some easy access sets being close to bis
- lots of styles to pick from

Not Cool:
- mats to grindy (3 raws/node vs 100+ refined/item)
- nirnstones: too grindy/rare, no real use out of research and master writs
- masterwrits double rng (get one -> get a good one)
- masterwrits reward scaling (material cost vs vouchers not in line)
- jewelry crafting fails in all aspects
- "splitmotifs" suck -> double rng (get a page -> get a page u dont have already) makes farming annoying
- way to many motifpages in the game (more than 700 by now) -> catching up takes years for new players
- research to long (minimum 360 days to unlock all the things)
- writ rewards not a line (always same cost in mats/time, to much rng behind rewards: survey map vs box with refined lvl 1 mats)
- no efficient writ spot, even vivec city comes with to much backtracking and to long walks
- alchemy and provisioning not in line: alchy mats to rare, potion buffs to short vs prov mat availebility and food duration

Improvements:
- writs at home: boards and dropoffs for housing (i can log into 12 chars and send 8 companions each on crafting missions in swtor in a bit less than 15 minutes; doing writs on 10 toons in eso takes 45 minutes if im fast, most of the time spend in loading screens for reloading the same other players in the same zone over and over again)
- masterwirts: "u wont drop a writ that the char dropping it cant complete" -> convinience + the better u get at crafting, the better rewards u get; better scaling for cost/vouchers
- seperate nodes for jewelry (well i can kinda understand that noone wants to go thru all the zones placing new nodes for free when u can sell a lazy retex of a horse for 40$+)
- remove grains/dust
- higher node yield for higher material levels
- reduce motifpages: if a motif is older than a year, cut dropchance in half and replace the pages with the full book (e.g. most motifs from dailyboxes have ~10% dropchance, if motif is older than a year the box drops the full book at a 5% chance)
- increase alchemy craftresults by x10 (or more) per attempt, increase mats/node
- rework jewelry crafting
- generally: low dropchance on extremely easy tasks encourages botting. running writs on a daily basis over multiple toons powered by an autocraft addon feels very close to botting. if the addon could relog and walk, i'd prolly play swtor on my pc, whiles eso is doing writs on my notebook.
- and when u r on it: remove the npc patrolling in front of the dropoff spot who tries to push me so i "steal" the stupid axe he put there. remove the axe aswell. and fire the jerk who thought its funny to put them there. okay, dont be to harsh, dont fire him. just hit him with a broomstick a couple times. and tell him "nya says hi"

Finedaible · January 2019

I do not enjoy crafting in ESO. Here's why:

Base Game:
- After the long research times, there are only about 1-2 9-trait sets which come close to late-game sets. Some crafted sets even got nerfed over the years. What happened to "crafted armor being the best?"
- Out of all the available traits, only about 2-3 are somewhat useful for late-game. Traits are only there as time-sinks, and to bloat drop tables.
- Some high-tier materials are only available through Hirelings, which is at best a slim chance of getting 1 per Hireling in a 12hr period.
- Nodes do not have enough raw materials.
- Shared resource nodes make it hard for the honest player to compete with bot-farmers and/or account-farmers, or just major player traffic (events).
- Master writ vouchers are not worth the costs most of the time.
- Daily writ rewards suck (especially Jewelry).
- Motif pages are getting way out of hand. It might not be an issue if we were allowed to combine pages into one motif book and sell them.
- Alchemy Nodes do not have enough materials to supply players. Alchemy is too expensive as a result.
- Equipment crafting as a whole is too expensive and discourages players from trying out different set combinations. No one wants to spend all their materials and gold on a combination that probably won't work out.

Clockwork City (Transmutation):
- Transmutation crystal mechanics ultimately defeated the very purpose of transmutation.
- Aside from PvP during Mid-Year Mayhem, transmutation crystals are way too hard to get or drop in very low amounts.
- Transmutation crystal cap, even with ESO+ (200), is way too low for how many you need per piece of gear, especially across characters.
- Transmuted equipment is player-bound, so there is no commercial opportunity for 9-trait crafters with transmutation.

Summerset (Jewelry Crafting):
- Like transmutation, dust/plating mechanics ultimately defeats the purpose of crafting your own jewelry. You can craft it, but you won't be able to upgrade it along with your other gear.
- Even after the adjustments to improvement materials needed, the dust/platings cost is too damned high.
- De-constructing jewelry only gives you a %50 chance to extract a single DUST, while other skills are able to extract the equivalent of a plating for their craft.
- No Hirelings...
- Daily writs and Master writs are even more of a joke compared to other crafting skills.
- Did I mention how mind-numbing the idea of refining 10 Dust into 1 plating for 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x is? It has got to be the worst idea I've seen for this game since launch.
- They reduced the drop rate of purple jewelry with the Summerset update, so now we have even less sources of purple upgrade materials.

It feels like with the release of every new core content or mechanic within ESO, the general ideas are rock solid but the implementation is always woefully hampered by redundant mechanics. I get the impression that something or someones in the company is holding back these great ideas. Perhaps the marketing dept? Who knows really. It feels like they want players to have to grind more, so that ZOS can say, "Oh but look, we have x million players online," or "we have y amount of new players this chapter because of Jewelry crafting" when it's probably mostly bot-farmers across various accounts trying to gather crafting mats, or players who were enticed with the misleading addition. With every chapter that has a new thing, I cross my fingers and lie to myself that ZOS will finally do the right thing. Maybe I'm being too harsh, or maybe I should just move on, but I do believe the game can improve if they would just listen to reason and do the right thing.

I've heard people complain that Warframe is grindy (a true F2P game with no subscription model, btw), but I'd take Warframe's crafting grind over ESO's crafting any day. At least over there they care about players' opinions.

idk · January 2019

Turelus wrote: »

I've enjoyed it more here than other games.

I feel it's more useful than other themepark games I've played, however it will never match up to the crafting of a sandbox game where there is higher demand for items.

There is still some more which could be done to improve it, but overall it does what it needs to and isn't useless at end game.

This sums up what I would say. The two biggest plusses of crafting is being able to upgrade gear and change traits on anything.

There are also some good sets in the mix for someone focused on dealing damage such as Juliano and Hundings. They have been meta before and are still solid if someone does not have everything they need.

It was disappointing when Zos nerfed Nightmother's Gaze as having sets that offer a buff to the group (or debuff on the targets) is beneficial.

kirgeo · January 2019

The other decent crafting i've seen is in FFXIV. But that is too complicated. Only thing i liked there was fishing ZOS could take some pointers from them.
Remove the grains from jewelry crafting and the double RNG from the new motifs.

Starlock · January 2019

My sentiments about the crafting system has evolved as the game has.

I first started playing ESO not too long after the xbox release. The game didn't require a subscription to play, and zones were still leveled. Crafting was a significant focus of my character for a number of reasons, and the progression through crafting felt mostly smooth and enjoyable. At that time, item sets weren't that easy to acquire, so the only way I got any sets at all was by crafting them. The best thing about crafting my own gear was being able to control the aesthetic of my character. The worst thing was getting materials as a new player without a craft bag or much gold to speak of.

Now, crafting feels largely obsolete. Character development in general is weird since One Tamriel, and crafting suffers from the same roughness. It's not difficult to get other item sets anymore, so using crafted gear has lost that niche. The style system made the control of aesthetic obsolete as well. While master writs introduced something new and interesting, it's yet more grind that isn't that fun on the whole. Transmutation could have been interesting, but was gated behind group and/or competitive content. Jewelry crafting was (and still is) nearly worthless; it requires either transmutation or violating ToS to make any real use of. One bright spot is furniture crafting, though again the grind factor and material costs are on the onerously unnecessary side.

What would revitalize crafting for me? Things that, are on the whole, probably too drastic for the game (or many of its players) to handle. When outfit style system was announced, for example, I wanted to be able to design outfits for folks. The main reason why I went and learned all styles to begin with was to be a fashion service crafter. At this point, the outfit system would have to be completely gutted and redesigned to accommodate that sort of thing. I'm also sick to death of this "bind on pickup" nonsense making somewhere around half of all item sets functionally inaccessible. Let me craft them, or learn to craft them.... and let this not be done in a way that's a ridiculous grindfest. And the real dream? Real, meaningful item set customization where you can build-your-own set. Like spellcrafting, but with item sets. The creative possibilities this would open up are beyond amazing. It also won't happen, because it's too drastic and would require too big of an overhaul.

Finedaible · January 2019

@Starlock brought up some points that I can relate to.

My opinion on the Outfit Styles:
The introduction of Outfit Styles was (and still is) sort of controversial to me. Outfit Stations did bring a lot of good to player customization, but it also introduced absurd gold costs for no good reason. In this game, gold really does = time grinding, so why is there a need to hamper player creativity with gold costs that weren't there before? I can understand charging crowns for extra character outfit slots (although, I do think upgrades should be for all characters and not just 1). It's like I said in my previous post, great ideas hampered by unnecessary grind.

Starlock · January 2019

Finedaible wrote: »

Outfit Stations did bring a lot of good to player customization, but it also introduced absurd gold costs for no good reason. In this game, gold really does = time grinding, so why is there a need to hamper player creativity with gold costs that weren't there before?

It is quite weird. There are a couple things in particular that struck me as weird about how this was implemented.

First, where exactly is the gold spent in the outfit system going? There's no "outfitter" NPC standing next to the stations taking your gold. It's not a shrine to the divines where you can figure you are leaving an offering to the gods. They basically threw this system in there with no consideration for how it would fit into the world. Perhaps this sort of thing would be excusable for an MMO that doesn't really care much about story, lore, and immersion. It is not excusable for ESO.

Second, the costs to do outfit changes and dye changes are just ridiculous, even if there was a proper NPC actually taking the money. It is often claimed that gold is "easy" to make in this game. That really depends on how you play, and how often. If you are not in a trading guild, forget about gold being "easy" to make. If, on top of that, you don't have a thieving character, definitely forget about gold being "easy" to make. It's obvious, of course, why the gold costs were made exorbitant. It's the same reason why the cost of new outfit slots is obscene. And probably the same reason why we didn't get a system where players could craft outfits to sell to other players on the market.

Iselin · January 2019

It's relevant and accessible except for jewelry crafting which they just made annoying.