VGOEmulator.net

I haven't seen much in the way of crafting stuff, so I thought I'd post my thoughts here for consideration.

-We could use more crafting quests if possible. There's a lot of 'in between' quests that requires just tons of grinding. Worse than POTA grinding.

-Does anyone know if they changed this since F2P? Did they ever give Non-IOD starter cities a crafting quest that rewarded gear as good as IOD gear? If not, they need to reward gear as good as IOD gear. IOD makes the 1-10 grind much more interesting, immersive and fun than the old starter cities had.

-The faction grinding is also atrocious.

-Make work orders endlessly respawn. A lot of people did their craft level grinding in Tawar Galen because it never ran out of WO (because it was the only outpost on Kojan). On the other continents, you'd have to keep bouncing between outposts as they would run out of work orders. It would be nice if we could just sit in one spot and craft for the XP/WO.

-The quests that do exist could probably reward a little more XP and faction than they do. Most of them require a lot of running around which makes it significantly less effective than just doing WO's. (Except Banishers. I think that one was pretty much spot on... or was that Executors? I get those names confused with the diplo quests.)

-Sigil drop rates should be increased at the lower levels. Don't give me this 'you have to earn it' stuff. Some of us crafters would like to see crafted adventuring gear be useful. We can't do that if no one can get the sigils. It wasn't until you hit the 40's that sigils started to drop like candy. I'm not saying they should drop like candy at lower levels, but I went from level 21 to level 35 on one of my toons without seeing a single one.

-Don't go back to the old system of upgrades, please.

-WO should have a chance to drop the rare recipes themselves. (Make it relevant and no-trade.) In other words, don't put outfitting recipes in WO turned in by a blacksmith. Pretty sure this code is already in the game somehow, when you get relevant tools from WO rewards.

-Can we get a different way to get Galleon blueprints? I mean, sure, make it so raids have to get them, or make it really tough. But for some reason I was never able to get them off the Core Processor. (Which may or may not be related to the guild being able to kill it in less than a minute and a half). Though if we're looking at low raid turnouts, and even fewer crafters, Galleons might as well not be in the game.)

One of the problems with crafting is that it was way too hard in the early levels, and then way too easy. The inflection point was in the mid-20s when you could get jewelry from the NT/Ahgram societies. After that, each tier just got easier and easier. This was known in the beta, and we crafters begged Silius to fix it, but he blew us off.

IMO, the IOD gear was way too good, both crafting and adventuring. In my perfect world, they would be scaled back significantly, and the gear from the original starting areas scaled up.

There were a few quests that gave nice lower-level gear: there was a halfie in Rindol Field that gave a quest for one of the few pieces of jewelry you could get before the societies. There was a nice tunic (IIRC) in Leth Nurae. There were a couple good pieces from a guy on the dock in Dallerjuba (Tanvu starting area). Of course, faction was a problem with some of those, even after they removed KOS races.

Also, every starting area had one or two nice quests that required materials from all 3 crafting archetypes. These were designed to encourage cooperation among crafters, but became kind of silly after the population dropped in the starting areas.

In any case, I never had trouble with crafting until about level 15. You could pick up enough gear here and there to get you that far. But from 15-25 was murder without some help. So what I'd like to see is a few crafting quests in each starting area to pick up the T2 stuff. Either that, or significantly raise the drop rate for gear from worker orders. I almost never got anything good from a grade A batch at T2, whereas that was my bread and butter after T2.

As for the banisher quest line, I enjoyed doing it. It was nice to have a quest line that was interesting, well thought out, and than went on for a while. Like IOD, I thought the gear was a little too good. However, the big problem with the Banisher quest was that the experience was way, Way, WAY too much. You may as well just have a button that said "make me level 25." Even my level 50 crafters gained a level doing it. I did like the little recall rock though.

I enjoyed crafting, and I crafted a lot in VG. I wanted it to be difficult. IMO, its biggest problem is that it got too easy. The post-50 progression was ridiculous. That NT quest line was a joke, but then a lot of what SOE was putting into VG at that point was a joke.

I suspect that is something of a minority opinion. However, it seemed like a lot of what SOE did with Vanguard over time (and had done previously with EQ and EQ2) is to try to make crafting appealing to people who didn't really like crafting. While that did expand the appeal of crafting, it also kind of shafted those of us who do like to craft.

As long as that dearth of anything to do in the 30s is fixed I'm happy. The Banishers line was great, and even getting to that point was fine while off of the Island. It was 30-43ish that was awkward as heck. Work Orders for days.

Galleon recipes should require a raid. I never had to go on a raid to build the largest houses. Sigil claimed that crafting would be separate from adventuring but then made housing and boat crafting worthless unless your crafting character was also an adventurer or was in a guild that could protect you long enough to view that corner stone or whatever. I see no reason why raids are needed for crafting recipes. X sigils should be sufficient where X is server configurable. That way there will be galleons even if a player base is too small for raids, ESPECIALLY on private servers.

Actually the Galleon recipes weren't soulbound, so you could buy the Galleon recipes from raiders, there was no requirement to raid for it.

I just, frankly, did not like the way SOE expected you to get it.

Ah I'd forgotten that galleon recipes could be purchased on the exchange. I think I am the one that bought my wife's recipe(s). Our guild did raid from time to time and we managed to build a guild hall but it was mostly a family guild similar to our old Everquest guild where my wife and I met. Ideally, it seems like there would be a quest to get the plans similar in difficulty to the artificer quest needed to build a two story home. I found and read the official plan for 1.0 of the emulator and saw that most of my concerns were already addressed almost two years ago. I just wish I'd noticed that post before listing my suggestions.