Goblin Squad Member
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I know I'm a bit early in this, and I do realize that there is an expected interdependency on resources and other crafting skills. But it seems to me that just to be useful as an iconographer requires significant resource gathering and pursuing levels in not just one crafting skill, but several. And with the increases in the XP cost for these levels, we have ventured into a serious concern.
It's clear that anyone engaging in crafting will not be able to advance a character very far, so almost everyone who is going to be doing any sort of crafting is going to have to either a) utilize the Destiny Twin perk of Kickstarter or b) maintain a second account. I do not believe you can be an effective crafter and adventurer all on one character. At about 6th level for a character, the cost of advancement becomes quite significant, whereas a crafting alt will hit significant xp costs when just trying to advance to 3rd rank.
It could be me, and likely is, but I finally made my first +1 item after four weeks. Granted, others could have helped, but I was trying to see what would happen if I wanted to excel in a single crafting field as an adventurer. I feel that you can't. I'm a rank 3 iconographer, a rank 3 sage, rank 1 in two other crafting/refining skills and have made some +3 components, but am a bit stymied in iconographer. Which makes the required weapons and implements for my class. For example, to be able to make certain 0-level implements, a Golden Crystal is required. That requires Sage 3 to make. Sage 4 if I want a simple +1 crystal. That same implement also requires refined parts from a smelter. So Iconographer 3 + smelter 2 + sage 3 to make a single item that's really of minimal power. Not to mention needing dowsing & mining gathering skills. And we haven't even hit the big time yet. Thats literally THOUSANDS of xp funneled into these skills to make, putting this in carpentry terms, a baseball bat.
Am I alone in thinking this crafting skill needs work?
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Goblin Squad Member
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To expand on Giorgia's statement. PFO is designed to require us to work in large groups. Rather than knowing the broad range of things you need to make high-end equipment,the devs are trying to push us to work in teams, with a couple of hundred people doing the bulk of the gathering, while another large group does the refining and a third group generates the finished product. Each dependent on the others as in a true economy.
Further, no one settlement will be able to do it all. Each group will have to create an excess of everything they gather to trade with other settlements, since many of the components you need will not even exist on your part of the world map.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Cloakofwinter, unfortunately, the great bulk of games out there have allowed us to have alts collection to manage crafting alone. Try to set that aside.
My main will be a refiner - a tanner. The attribute governing tanning is Constitution. If I want to be a leatherworker as well as a tanner, I need to eventually boost the Dexterity attribute that governs that crafting. If I want to be a scavenger, to gather the hides, I'll need to also boost the Wisdom attribute in time.
While I could do all of these, I think that sets me up as a second- or third-rate tanner in the short run. If I want to be a first-rate tanner, I need to be a tanner first. I must rely on others to provide some of the raw materials, and others will rely on me to provide the prepared hides and strips for leatherworking and other crafts. Not everyone needs to specialize, but many of us will, just like other people will specialize with PvE or PvP builds for their characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I actually had minimal trouble with iconographer and have been churning out +3 acolyte holy symbols and +3 battle focuses without too much trouble.
Admittedly to save messing about I got the +3 crystals form Kaziil who churns them out by the dozen for her staffs and wands and +3 wire from the TEO material bank (they have thousands of bits of +3 wire sitting about from some experiment or other) but I can make everything myself. Iconographer is not particularly hard.
On the other hand making spellbooks is a serious PITA. You need something crazy like 100 green just to make the ink for one good spell book :D
I approve of the new changes making higher level crafting harder. Considering you are meant to play this game over 5 or 10 years the way everyone in Alpha was churning out +3 stuff (admittedly only T1) after 4 or 5 weeks play was rather worrying.
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Goblin Squad Member
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+3 is now a lot more resource expensive now than in the halcyon days of last week.
But yeah, the trick is to sell the finished good for enough to buy more refined materials plus some profit for the time and skill. We can eventually do it all a year or two down the road but crafting currently requires receiving some or all of the refined goods form other players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose the other thing I would add is if everyone could make +3 stuff easily, gathering it all themselves and just crafting away after just a few short weeks their would be no market for dedicated crafters at all because most of the population would either craft or have a friend that crafts and everyone would be getting advance stuff for "free" (not really free as you have opportunity costs like the time put into gathering etc, but from the average players perspective free)and hence the AH sell price would be totally nonviable.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The problem for those of us that don't play when the server see peak use is that:
1) currently the auction house is horrible;
2) direct trading is working badly (really, I can't decide to give away 5 units of some material without clicking 5 times, and woe to me if I click too fast?) and require to have the people with which you want to trade in the same area;
3) trading stuff directly between your main and your Dt will not be possible as they can't log at the same time (or at least that is how they are said to work at this time).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Im in with Diego here, there is a bit lonely sometimes as a EU player, and with the general chat gone, it will be way worse (but I want it gone ASAP, as it will increase the community feeling).
A functioning AH would mediate some of it, but I think we have to accept that EU players (until we can create a own community or at least a company) will be living in the fringes. I'm quite fine with that, being the smelly trapper coming in to the settlement once in the while to dump treasures in the AH. Hooking up in random fights when opportunity offers.
Or as I lately have tested, being a peddler trading this and that moving around. I had thought the role would be of use selling stuff to camps outside Settlements, but that is a bit in the future it seems.