LE Crafting overhaul

[Roltak]

Good Day,

 

this isn't a fixed request, more a collection of some of my thoughts about crafting and how to improve it, perhaps someone will find it and make a mod around it or aspects of it, perhaps not.

 

To make it harder:

 

The general idea of it would be the concept of minor perks or skills, or however you wanna call it. Basically the three Crafting skills aren't going to be real perks anymore, you don't have to spend perks to use them and you don't get experience towards the next level for improving that skill. Instead you have to either spend gold and/or do quests to achieve the perks we know right now. The first ones you can simply go to the next Alchemist/Blacksmith/Echanter, give him a hundred gold and he shows you (given enough experience) those special tricks we know as perks.

As soon as you get a bit higher(around 30-40 I would say) you have to travel to some of the more well known craftsman and the training gets more expensive, also you will have to first win their favor with some easy quests, like bring me that or brew/smith/enchant me an item to show me how good you are, the usual stuff.

For the highest perks you won't have to pay, but make quests, every perk another one, something like the Quest for the thieves guild where you have to retrieve 24 gems in order to get that one perk. Perhaps something like "Retrieve the whole armor set of the legendary Blacksmith xy to learn from his work or Gather all the pages of the ancient book of herbs to uncover ancient secrets".

 

In order to defeat the "Make 3000 daggers and be a legendary Smith"-exploit I would say that every item gives less and less Experience the more it is below your current experience level, perhaps also the possiblity to make higher or lower quality items if you are trying to make equipment above or below your current level (Think of Ultima Online). So in short iron dagger-smithing becomes useless(for leveling) at about Level 10-20, but the daggers you produce are higher quality (sharpened) so they are worth more.

 

Also I would say, that every Crafting profession should be split up into 2:

Smithing -> Weapon,Armor

Echanting -> Weapon, Armor (Or Offensive, Defensive enchantment)

Alchemy -> Potion, Poison

 

To make it easier:

 

So all the above changes make Crafting more difficult so lets see how we can make it a bit easier again.

 

One possibility would be that about 25-50% of the Experience from one Crafting profession also goes to the sister-profession. So a Weaponsmith with Level 100 would already have a rating of 25-50 in Armorsmithing, the same for Enchanting and Alchemy. It isn't logical that they are masters in both, but it is also illogical that an Alchemist that can make potions doesn't know how to make some basic poisons and the other way around.

 

Another thing that I personally think would be a good addition are craftmans guilds, not something complex, just guilds that offer basic Radiant quests that (based on your crafting experience) give you some materials to work with or send you to places where you can gather those materials. For low levels "bring that armor to my client" -> "Thanks, here is some iron ore and gold for your trouble" and for higher levels "Our mine was overrun by frost trolls, go in and clean it out, you can keep the ore we left in there.". The guilds should also be the places where you can find the quests for the high level perks later on.

 

The new guilds could also be integrated in some of the existing guilds:

 

Smithing -> Companions

Potion -> Mages University

Poison -> DB/Thieves

Enchanting -> Mages University

 

Either directly into that guild or just a room/house/cave somewhere near the guilds so people don't have to join up with guilds they don't like.

 

So, hope I didn't forget anything, or ask for something that was requested a thousand times over, I didn't write anything about how hard/expensvie the crafting itself should be, but that was intentional to leave some room for further balancing/costumization.

Edited December 19, 2011 by Roltak