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Remove gear smart boxes
This is a huge chunk of the problem with several aspects of the game
It's really simple if you have a quarter of a brain.
Take the first +15 patch, ambit/discovery/generation
None of the gear dropped from smart boxes at all, and the feedstock market was healthy because PEOPLE WERE ACTIVLY RUNNING DUNGEONS because they needed gear and the dungeons were also profitable.
Armor and weapon crafting was also viable because 1) you didn't need to use ore that you use for vm mats to craft them (big one here), and 2) some people didn't want to deal with the rng state of equipment drops.
Look at now - all the class specific pieces come from smart boxes and people instantly get geared in a handful of runs. What happens when you get 4 pieces of slaughter in 3-4 runs and only have a few hundred feedstock acquired during those runs to show for it for an average player? They use the few hundred feedstock for a handful of attempts, have a single piece at like +6 and the rest +0, then proceed to use what little gold they have to drain what they can from the market without putting *anything* into the market.
Oh let's not forget the thrill that you would get when your class specific devestator chest dropped, and you'd look over, beady eyed at the other 3 players of the same class in your REHM run, hoping and praying you would get it. That was what made the loot fun in this game.
It's really simple if you have a quarter of a brain.
Take the first +15 patch, ambit/discovery/generation
None of the gear dropped from smart boxes at all, and the feedstock market was healthy because PEOPLE WERE ACTIVLY RUNNING DUNGEONS because they needed gear and the dungeons were also profitable.
Armor and weapon crafting was also viable because 1) you didn't need to use ore that you use for vm mats to craft them (big one here), and 2) some people didn't want to deal with the rng state of equipment drops.
Look at now - all the class specific pieces come from smart boxes and people instantly get geared in a handful of runs. What happens when you get 4 pieces of slaughter in 3-4 runs and only have a few hundred feedstock acquired during those runs to show for it for an average player? They use the few hundred feedstock for a handful of attempts, have a single piece at like +6 and the rest +0, then proceed to use what little gold they have to drain what they can from the market without putting *anything* into the market.
Oh let's not forget the thrill that you would get when your class specific devestator chest dropped, and you'd look over, beady eyed at the other 3 players of the same class in your REHM run, hoping and praying you would get it. That was what made the loot fun in this game.
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Comments
In regards to this so called "feedstock" crisis we have, here's what's going to happen. In 1 month when everyone is done enchanting their gear and selling their excess feedstock, feedstock will drop like a rock and people will start complaining about how impossible it is to earn gold again :P
Amen to this post
That's what armor and weapon crafting is for (and what made it a viable thing to do), for those that wanted to bypass the rng aspect of the game.
considering the BoE gear cost anywhere between 30-50k a piece at the time (which was more valuable than what 30-50k is currently) i imagine the cost of crafting it was about the same so I don't see how that's a viable alternative for casual players trying to get mid tier gear
You don't understand. It's what made weaponcrafting and armor crafting a viable thing to do for income. HINT: they crit. Do you really think people make brooches to break even?
People used to be able to craft weapons and armor and sell them to people that didn't like RNG for profit. Weapon and armorcrafting is now dead because of two things - the gear smartboxes AND the fact that you need vm ores to craft mid tier gear.
The feedstock market was healthy in the first +15 patch because it wasn't actually the first patch of that expansion. Fate of Arun P1 launched months earlier, bringing in partial content. Ambit gear was introduced, which was a low-tier set that was easily skipped by players who already had BiS and 2nd BiS gear from the previous patch, yet the content kept dropping feedstock at a normal pace. After the first few weeks, however, no one used feedstock to enchant Ambit. Everyone was saving it for the day they might finally see a rare Discovery weapon drop. Most players didn't get one during that half of the patch and entered Fate of Arun P2 with massive stockpiles of feedstock they never got to use. The feedstock market was boosted out the gate by massive quantities of leftovers.
//twitches
who cares.. all forms of crafting have died. alchemy died when they put nostrums and vi scrolls in dungeon npc's and etching died after the mats became so hard and expensive to get. the people who were buying the gear were usually people that wanted to quickly gear up alts, not casuals that couldn't even afford it in the first place. and few people used to make money like that anyway. this is why spades were so hard to get rid of and people used to offer to craft gear for people rather than craft it with their own mats; because it wasnt a money maker unless you crit. Don't know if you saw that as a good model of business but i sure never saw anyone find success with it. Especially not after BoE drops from SCHM were littered all over the broker. You also dont take into consideration many reasons why armor crafting , which was needed to make the embers or whatever for vm4, could have been more popular in that patch, you attribute it all to the grind struggle.
In any case, if people back then grinded for the gear itself, they are now grinding for the mats to enchant it. -shrug-
I'm sorry that you view things so negatively that you have the mindset of "it is dead it is going to stay dead"
you mistake what i say for negativity. in fact, as I said before there were other reasons why weapon (and armorcrafting specifically) were more impactful in that patch, you literally couldn't make VM4 without armorcrafters, people back then could make money by turning embers into torches. this type of thing could easily be done with future vm gear to make different crafting professions relevant. i just think that this is a stupid solution (for lack of better words, sorry)
They didn't enter the patch with "massive stockpiles" of relevant feedstock, everything that dropped was t5. if you farmed up 60k t5 feedstock from that patch you would only have a whopping 10k fs to enchant a full disco set. But that is kind of irrelevant, your post LITERALLY shows how having a gear barrier is healthy for the feedstock market if you bother to read what you wrote.
This isn't a solution for weapon and armor crafting. The impact on weapon and armor crafting is a side effect.