GU59/DoV: Tradeskill XP Changes

In a change that has so far received mostly positive feedback, Destiny of Velious will likely alter the methods Tradeskillers will choose to level up most efficiently. While the Destiny of Velious NDA remains in effect, Domino has been allowed to share this change with the community to provide an opportunity for feedback before Velious (and its associated game update which we are calling Game Update 59 — SOE has yet to name it).

Most tradeskillers level up by first crafting new recipes (thus receiving a 200% Crafting Pristine Bonus), and then move on to writs (Rush Orders or Work Orders), and also fill in the gaps with other Tradeskill quests which have been added in the last 2 years. Tradeskill classes especially the scholars (Sage, Jeweler, Alchemist) have always been at a huge advantage here because of the number of new recipes earned with each level.

After the jump, Domino‘s posting on the EQ2 Forums about the upcoming Tradeskill XP Changes:

Heya folks,

Waters gave me the OK to post in advance about a change we’ve been testing out in beta. It’s going to seem like a big change at first, but we feel it’s the best solution to an issue that’s been causing complaints since launch if not before.

The issue is the fact that the game awards an XP bonus to crafters the first time they make a new item to full quality (aka “the pristine bonus”).  Although this was long before my time at SOE, my best guess is that this was originally implemented because pristine was supposed to be the unusual, rare outcome of crafting, and the “normal” level of a crafted item was supposed to be the third bar of progress.  So this would have been intended to be a rare reward for an unusual feat.  However, almost immediately pristine quality became the standard, expected result of crafting, so everybody could make every item to pristine quality and thus get the bonus.  The side effect of this was that classes with more recipes therefore got more pristine bonuses, giving them a significant advantage to leveling speed.

The difference between classes in the number of recipes is pretty significant, mainly due to spells.  Scholars make the spells for adventuring classes, and with roughly 2 spell upgrades (at 2 quality levels each) per level per adventure class, and 24 adventure classes who can reach level 90 each, a little mathematics shows you that spells alone account for 8000+ recipes in total, an entire half of which (12 classes) are made by sages.  As everybody knows (and many frequently complain about) the other crafting classes get nowhere near this number of recipes. It would simply be impractical to try and give equal recipe numbers to everyone; for example an adventurer is never going to need 2 new weapons per level every level from 1 to 90 even if we could add that many more meaningful recipes, which we certainly could not. And it would benefit nobody in the long run to add more recipes that are useless, just for the sake of adding them.  Nor is it a simple or satisfactory solution to try giving classes with fewer recipes a larger bonus; we had a longer discussion about this in beta which I won’t detail here, but suffice it to say I don’t believe this could ever produce a truly fair balance and it would not be a simple or low-work solution to implement on the back end either.

The root of the imbalance is clearly the pristine bonus itself. It’s essentially a reward for having more recipes, so of course the classes with more recipes get more rewards.  Therefore, after much discussion, we believe the best solution is to remove the pristine bonus.  Without the bonus, it doesn’t matter how many recipes you have; everyone is on the same footing and nobody is either rewarded or penalized.

With the launch of Destiny of Velious, the pristine bonus for crafting will be removed.

The immediate next question is how that will affect leveling. Crafting items will continue to give the same amount of XP as ever, so whatever you get from making an item now, you will continue to get after the expansion launches. You just won’t get an extra bonus the first time you make it.  However, to compensate for the removal of the pristine bonus helping speed people along, what we have done is increase the amount of xp awarded by tradeskill quests (including, but NOT limited to, writs).

Tradeskill quest XP will be increased to compensate.

Basically, this is what we expect it to feel like:

• if you formerly had very few pristine bonuses, and just crafted the same items over and over, leveling up will feel pretty much the same as ever.
• if you formerly had a lot of pristine bonuses, and crafted one of everything in your new books, leveling up will feel slower after this change.
• if you run through crafting quests and/or do crafting writs, the speed should feel comparable to how a scholar class would have leveled up with a ton of pristine bonuses prior to this change.  So, should feel like about the same leveling speed for scholars, and will probably feel a bit faster for classes with few recipes.
• there is no longer any need to make one of every item in your recipe books just to turn around and sell them to a vendor, which should be nice.
• there is no longer any reason to hold off on making your exciting new items until a level cap raise to “save up” pristine bonuses – if you have a recipe and want to make it, do it!

Overall, nobody should be leveling up slower, and low-recipe classes will find it now feels faster, since they will now be on an even footing with the scholar classes.

I realize that big changes like this will always have a mixed reaction, and change is always worrying in general and takes some time to get used to. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there is any one perfect solution here that would please everybody completely – life just isn’t like that, alas – but I do believe this is the best solution we could find to produce the best outcome for the majority.

Once Destiny of Velious goes live, I’m sure there will be a lot of feedback on the changes, and we’ll be keeping an eye on it to see whether there are any issues or whether the xp bonus needs tweaking at all.  In the mean time, I hope that you’ll take the time to think about the reasons I’ve explained above, and wait until the expansion to try it for yourself before drawing a conclusion about the changes.

Thanks for reading!

It is also worth pointing out that due to how Tradeskill Vitality works, doing quests has always been advantageous to doing individual combines and getting the Pristine Bonus. This change could be very welcome indeed.

More from Domino:

I do suggest waiting to draw firm conclusions about it until you’ve actually had a chance to try it when Destiny of Velious goes live. With a complex system like EQII’s crafting, it’s very difficult to accurately predict how a change will “feel” until you do physically try it out in game.

If you have only ever done Pristine Combines followed by Rush Orders, you may be surprised to learn just how many Tradeskill quests there are from level 10-90.