Azeroth vs. Tyria part 10: Crafting or "That Moneysink You Did Because It Gave You Extra Stats"

I know we've still got one profession to cover and there's still all those posts I need to write up about the lack of tanking and all that, but since Med and I are taking our research trip later this week, it seemed like I should try and find something simple. Something I could write up that wouldn't, you know, change after I wrote it up.

Little bitter about that, huh?

Eh, more that it's editing that I'll need to do at some point when I should be writing new stuff. From what I read, it made sense. Learning weapon skills from using weapons and using energy just for dodging and not for your skills - those both seem logical to me. There's also the bit about how to learn your non-weapon skills, but since I haven't really covered that yet, it's not a problem.

So if you're not talking about the changes, what is the topic today?

For today's post, we're going to be talking about crafting, a particular area of interest for me. That's one of the things I've always pushed with the team: everyone picks up trades and everyone works to perfect them for the benefit of the group. Besides that, I've always taken a great deal of pride in my work as an armorsmith (not blacksmith - I did that long obnoxious quest chain, so I earned that title), miner, and chef. I know Sol feels the same way about his work as a jewelcrafter and Med has made it abundantly clear that he is an engineer, not a warlock.

The sooner I can be rid of this tiresome reliance on fel magic, the better!

I know, you've told me. Repeatedly.

Just think. You get to listen to that all weekend on your trip.

I'm hoping to leave him by the engineering stuff and just pick him up before we head back. Regardless, let's get back on topic. We all know how crafting works back in Azeroth, right? You pick two primary tradeskills and you level those up. Unless there happens to be something you could use along the way, you find out whatever the most efficient method of leveling your trade is, then you grind out those items until you're done. If the stuff you made happens to sell well, you can recoup your costs. Otherwise you send it to an enchanter friend to disenchant for dust and essence. I know I made many, many worthless green items on my trip to master blacksmithing.

Yeah, I remember burning through stacks and stacks of green gems and ore you mailed me. I'd just stand next to a vendor while I worked. Cut gems till my bags were full. Sell all the cut gems. Go back to step 1. It was a little monotonous.

Yep, especially when you took into account the times you had to work on a yellow or green recipe. You'd keep throwing materials at the recipe for that last skill point because even though it kept failing to give you a point, it was still the most efficient way to level or it was the only recipe you had that would give you a skill-up. I remember some stretches of smithing where I was basically living in a zone for a week to gather ore. I'd long since stopped getting skill points from those veins, but I needed another three bags worth of that ore to catch up to the next tier.

Okay, we've managed to cover what was tiresome about crafting back home. What makes things different in Tyria?

Well, you still only have two tradeskills at a time. However you no longer have to "waste" a skill on a gathering skill. Everyone knows how to harvest materials from the world. That'll provide the bulk of your materials, but you'll also be able to find some on creatures you've killed or being sold by merchants. In addition there's a kind of disenchanting that anyone can do. If you get a salvage kit, you can use it to destroy old equipment and reclaim some crafting materials from it. You even have a chance to get upgrade components when you do so. These are kind of like gems in Azeroth, though they do have two distinct differences: they only work with specific kinds of gear (e.g. light armor, melee weapons, etc.) and in addition to being stat bonuses, they can also do things like adding effects to your attacks or adding a visual effect. I can't find any information about whether or not you have to level up your harvesting skill, but I imagine even if we do, we'll need more materials for crafting than we'd need to level harvesting anyways. Besides it won't be nearly that bad to harvest materials in Tyria.

Are you sure about that? I seem to recall the days of Hellfire Peninsula and Howling Fjord where we rushed in with every other member of the Horde. Finding ore back then took ages, especially for the mountain of ore I used for jewelcrafting when you had a good chance of not finding any gems in the ore you prospected.

Ah, but here's the difference. Let's say you and I found a vein of ore while we were out questing. Now back in Azeroth, the ore would go to whoever was faster, so your cheating "I get a 10% faster mount because I'm a pally" self would get the ore.

Jealousy doesn't suit you.

Bite me. Anyway, over in Tyria, both of us would get the ore. You might've got the vein first, but it's still available for me to hit. If we were running around in a full group and found a vein, every single person in the party would get a chance to mine for ore.

That's certainly an improvement over the old system. I can think of a few herbalists who would've loved that system when they were competing with Grunzford and his flight form. So you've established how we get our materials and that we can have two tradeskills. What are our options and what makes things different on the actual crafting side of things?

There's eight choices for tradeskills. For those looking to make armor, you've got tailoring (light armor), leatherworking (medium armor), and armorsmith (heavy armor). If you want to craft something to kill monsters with, we've got weaponsmith (melee weapons), huntsman (physical ranged weapons), and artificer (caster weapons). Lastly you've got jewelcrafting, which should be pretty familiar for you, and chef which is now a full-fledged tradeskill.

I assume that you're looking at armorsmith and chef?

Armorsmith yes, but to begin with I should probably pair that with weaponsmith. By the time we're likely to need buff food, I can powerlevel that. Weapons on the other hand help all of the melee people on the team.

So you're planning on dropping weaponsmith at some point then? What if we need a weaponsmith again? You'll have to do all that work over again unless you're planning on making someone else on the team level the profession.

Ah, but therein lies another difference here. Let's say I did level weaponsmithing up to the cap of 400 and then decided to drop it for chef. Now let's say I went to the trainer to relearn the skill. When I do so, I not only relearn the skill at my old level, but I also retain any recipes I may have known.

Sounds quite useful. I always wondered why I immediately forgot everything I knew about mining when I dropped that for inscription. I assume there's some system in place to discourage you from leveling every single profession yourself, because if there wasn't, you'd just do all of it and not bother to tell the rest of us that crafting existed.

True enough. To discourage people from doing so, the cost to relearn a skill goes up with your skill level. The system allows for those like me who want to know everything while still encouraging people to focus on something and trade with others for what they're missing.

How about leveling the skills themselves? What are we looking at for recipes? Trainer with a smattering of random recipes from reputations and vendors?

Yes on the trainer bit, but there's more. There's a discovery system. I know alchemists and engineers already have one back home, but this one actually makes sense. Those guys would be making things and all of the sudden get an idea for a recipe. May not have had any connection to the recipe they were working on, but they got the new recipe.

The audio cuts out pretty early on, but this is the best view I could find. Just try to ignore the repeated attempts to learn something from the exact same item combinations.

For Tyrian crafters though, you discover recipes through somewhat of a guided trial-and-error system. Let's say I've got 10 kinds of materials in my bags. I'll put one of those on the table while I'm working on discoveries and it'll say something like "8 recipes available. Add more components." That means that there are eight recipes I can learn from that one component type, but I need to add more to narrow it down. If I add something that doesn't work, the number goes down to zero and I know I've made a mistake. If it's correct, the number goes down and I repeat this until it says "We have a match. Craft the item to discover the recipe." At this point, I craft the item and now that recipe is added to my list. Because I learned this recipe on my own, I could choose to either share this recipe with my friends or I could keep it to myself if it's likely to be a profitable recipe.

Until there's a crafting wiki that shows every possible combination of every material known.

Well yeah, but for those glorious few hours, you could have a unique recipe. Regardless you're actually discovering recipes by working with the materials that recipe uses, so it's research that makes sense.

That's all well and good, but what about leveling the tradeskill itself? Are these discoveries capped by your skill level?

I believe I heard someone mention that in that video, but I may have misunderstood. As for actually leveling your trade, that's actually the best part. So you know how we were complaining about leveling through ambiguous yellow and green recipes? Never knowing if you'd actually get those last couple of points from the recipe. Well with Tyrian crafting, there's no ambiguity. Your tradeskill has an experience bar just like your profession. When you craft something, you gain experience and when the bar's full, you go up a point. No wondering if your recipe will give you a point or not - it's all simple numbers.

Any possibility of failure? Some of those other worlds you were looking at had crafting failure as a possibility.

Thankfully no. Can't imagine who would think that was a good idea. There is however the possibility of a critical success.

Like my perfect green gem cuts?

Thankfully no since that destroyed the market for any non-perfect cuts. If you get a critical success, you either gain extra experience or you don't use all of the materials while crafting your item.

So far the system you've described sounds fairly reasonable. Two crafting skills, but everyone can gather and you can learn new things without sacrificing old progress. Gathering that isn't determined by whoever has the fastest mount or has memorized vein locations in the zone. A discovery system with a sense of order to it. No failures, but the potential for bonus rewards.

Yep, that about covers everything. We still have to figure out who's doing what later on, though I assume you're sticking with jewelcrafting.

I see no reason to switch. It is a specialty of mine, after all.

That can wait for later though, since we're not looking to make the move any time soon. Hopefully I'll dig up a bit more on the trip, but I'm going to be focusing on combat and being a warrior.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 9: I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again

Did you seriously use lyrics from that terrible song for this post?

Cut me some slack, I've been on vacation. Gonna take a bit to get back into my game. Consider yourself lucky it's not more puns. If you've got a better title for a post about the downed state, I'm all ears.

Without delving into some more obscure music, I do not. Regardless I thought you were going to talk about the traits system or how healing and tanking is supposed to work in Tyria. Wouldn't the downed state fit into the latter of those two posts?

I am trying to cut down the size of these walls of text. I usually fail, but I try. That's not the main reason for this though, but I'll get to that later. Back to the task at hand - today's post is about the downed state and how it's different from what we're used to back in Azeroth.

I'd feel sorry for the human, but I can't blame the big guy for being mad about an axe to the groin

You mean being dead?

Exactly. For you or me, when we ran out of health, that was it. You were down until someone decided to resurrect you or you released your spirit to run back to your body. Until one of those two events occurred though, you were just sitting there staring at the floor.

So how many raid dungeon floors have you stared at over the years?

More than I care to think about. Hell, with AQ40, you could've shown me a picture of the floor and I would've been able to tell you what room it was from and probably where in said room. Man, I hated that raid...

Schadenfreude aside, what exactly is there that could be different in how dying works in Tyria? Seems fairly standard from a biological perspective: your body takes a certain level of punishment and once that threshold has been passed, you expire.

The difference would be that downed state I mentioned. It's sort of an intermediate state between okay and corpse. Picture it like this: you've been fighting for a while, but you're running out of steam. Something hits you and you go down, but you're not dead yet. You're hurting and not able to jump back into the fray, but you've still got some fight left in you.

In this example, that spot where you went down would be where we would run out of health and die back in Azeroth. That bit where you're on the ground and still fighting is all new for Tyrians.

So basically in Tyria, you just get this extended bit of health bar for combat then? Still able to do what you could before, but now you're stuck in place? That also doesn't address the fact that you're still out of health and dying. The way you've described it, you're basically just getting off a few extra shots while you're on the ground but you're still going to die.

Let's start with that first bit there. Yes, when you're on the ground, you can still attack your foes, but not the same as when you were standing. When you're downed, you've only got four attacks available to you. One of these is a shared shout skill to protect yourself and the other three are based on your profession - they're weapon independent. For warriors like me, we've got a shout to buff our comrades, rocks we can throw, and a type of last stand ability to bring us back up to fight. That last one may sound really powerful, but it has a catch: once it wears off, you're defeated. That's basically the equivalent of dead for us in Azeroth; you're stuck until someone comes over to revive you or you teleport back to a waypoint on your map.

Do you choose where I respawn at? Seems unnecessary if I'm running back to my corpse.

That would be true, if you were in fact running back to your body. With Tyria though, if you pay to respawn back at a waypoint, then you are back up and running. There is no need to return to where you fell unless you need to return there for quests or you just feel the need for vengeance. If you went down and you were finished in that area, you could decide to come back in town and save yourself the walk back to clear out your bags.

Sounds convenient. Back to the skills though - what do engineers have available to them in this downed state?

Wish I could tell you, but unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up those skills for engineers. Got them for the other professions though. Guardians get some holy type skills. Elementalists get an immobilize, a lightning attack, and a vapor form that lets them move their body if they want to get out of the fray or move closer to someone that can revive them. Similar stuff for the other professions.

Okay, you've described all of these attacks that you can do while you're downed, but that still doesn't address how you get out of said downed state. Is this just an extra way to put in some damage before you're in the same shoes as an Azerothian, waiting for a respawn or a resurrection?

Ah, but there is a difference here. Sure, you can be revived by your party members like we're used to. I believe this can be done in combat, though it's somewhat awkward given the time required. The reason you have those abilities available to you is because you have the potential to rally yourself back into the fight. Basically if you or your pet manage to kill something while you're downed, or even if you get experience for something dying while you're downed (say, from a monster that your party member managed to get the final blow on), you are rallied. This means you get a quarter of your health back, a second of invulnerability while you get your bearings, and whatever energy you happened to have when you were rallied. At this point you can return to the fray, though you most likely want to use your self-heal before doing so; 25% isn't one foot in the grave, but it's not exactly fighting fit. It's also possible that you could be rallied by your allies. Some professions have abilities that can rally nearby allies when they kill an opponent or some similar trigger.

I assume that these rallying effects have some sort of limiting factor, correct? Given how liberally most raiders use combat resurrection spells, I could see that being quite powerful.

It's definitely powerful, but yeah there's limits. For one there's a rez timer like we're used to. Basically the more you go down in succession, the longer it takes to revive you. Yes, there's always the rally effect for that instant revive, but you only have so many foes available to provide that rally and when you're down, your allies may going to have a harder time finishing the fight. If you keep falling down, they may not be able to avoid being defeated themselves. Still it does give you more options to get back into the fight other than stacking druids for combat rezzes or running back to the dungeon. Anything that reduces downtime is great in my book.

True enough. Anything else to add on this topic?

Nah, that about wraps things up. It's not a real stretch from the dying that we're all used to, but it is different enough that it should be addressed. Nothing like the healing and tanking stuff that I'm gonna have to figure out how to write.

And when can people expect that dissertation?

That one's gonna have to wait until we get some hands-on experience.

I was wondering when you were going to mention that particular fact.

You can't just come out and say these things. You have to build up to them - it's called showmanship.

It's called "burying it at the end of a post, so less people are likely to read it".

Bah. Anyways, what Med's talking about is a little trip we've got planned next week. We found out about a place that's going to give us a chance to have some hands-on experience with how stuff works in Tyria, so Med and I will be attending. Can't bring anybody else from the team for this trip (not sure where this "Seattle" place is but it's not cheap getting there), so it'll just be the two of us taking notes for this trip. We are however going with a couple of other people that are looking for a change of scenery from Azeroth, so we might be able to get some impressions from them once we're there. Personally I'm hoping to get some video while I'm there, but since I've never been to this show, I don't know how easy that's going to be. I'll definitely have some notes though, so be ready for that.