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Lord of the Rings Online: Introduction to Crafting
Taera
Community ManagerMember CommonPosts: 1,078
Since the publication of Lead System Designer Nik Davidson's Developer Diary on the origins of LOTRO's Crafting System, hopefully artisans of the Lord of the Rings Online community have eagerly awaited more details. Well, today you get what you want - Turbine brings us a basic overview of the LOTRO crafting system, including details on how to get started in your crafting career.
Check it out here!
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
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If any of the skills involves harvesting like forrestry, then all you need is an axe and toggle your 'find wood' skill (no jokes please). On your map you'll see new icons for your chosen resourse. Run up to it or if you know the key command, you can 'select nearest resource' then click 'follow'. You will run right to the resource. All skills have tiers. So Tier one forrestry requires Rowan Wood which is available all over the starting areas. Right click the resource and you will chop/mine/gather it. A loot window opens showing how many you found. Wash, rinse, repeat. You get no crafting xp for gathering resources.
Then you need to refine the resource. Take it to a workbench/forge in any major town and gind your way to the next level. Each item refined or treated gives out xp like 6 or 8 depending on the item. You may need an additional items easily bought at a grocer or tavern. Wood requries wax for instance. If you have enough of resources, you can plug in how many items you wish to refine then your guy goes to town treatng his wood
Crafting skills are failry simple too. If you have all the ingredients in your inventory, the recipe items become green showing you can make it. Just like refining a resource, just click ok and you make the item. You'll need refined or treated resources to craft. You grind your way up to the next level, however unlike gathering skills, you only advance after a short quest. The first tier requires you to just speak to a contact, but the next tier up requires a crafting quest. Woodworking for example, requires you to craft a staff you are given a one shot recipe for. One of the resources you need is a drop from a named enemy in a lvl 20 area. To craft, you must kill a dude. Bring the item back plus other required resources and make your staff. Give it to the contact and they move you up to the next level.
You automatically know some recipes, but others can be bought or found as loot. These are generally better than what you learn at first. You can also achieve critical successes which eitehr add multle versions of the item or a better version of the item. A critcal success on treating wood can result in 3 treated wood instead of 1. Or your critical success on a bow could add -1% induction time (how long it takes to shoot.)
The downside? Crafted items are marginally better than store bought items or looted items. A store bought axe cold have a 15-20 damage while the crafted one is 16-21. There can be some really good crafted items which require a critical success and an item dropped off a rare creature 20 levels above you. The other downside to crafting is needing to wannder into dangerouus areas or engage in combat to level up your crafting skill.
There are some nice things though. Some npcs give crafting quests "Oh dear, I lost my amethist ring. Can you or someone you know make one". They also attempted to make item gathering more available with 'work orders'. Pay some money and come back in 6-20 hours (depending on the level) and you get 3-6 resources. Their heart was in the right place, but 3 items can be harvested in minutes.
Crafting is easy and available, but there are some barriers and not enough payoff. Anyone have a different expierience?
Give a man fire and he''s warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he''s warm the rest of his life.
For the people out there that don't like clicking and waiting what would you suggest to make crafting alot more fun and engaging?
I am slightly disapointed with the crafting, but it works. I was hoping VSoH would have a innovative crafting system, but it just involved more time and more clicking.
Currently Playing: Everything but MMORPGs
Cancelled: L2, FFXI, VSoH, LotRO, WAR, WoW
Looking Forward To: SW:TOR
Just to preface. i hate crafting. so much so I wish it was abolished from any game I play as I never want to "have to craft" to get any decent equipment.
However...
One night I was screwing around with a "Neverwinter Nights" module that allows you to create a character and outfit it. One of the things I started spending a lot of time on was mixing and matching the armor pieces (upper arm, lower arm, neck, pauldrons, etc) as well as choosing the weapon parts for the sword (Blade, Hilt, Pommel).
I would spend several hours finding combinations that I really liked. That's when it hit me.
I don't hate crafting. I hate gathering ungodly amounts of stupid little mats to match a recipe so I can click and suddenly have something.
My idea of a crafting system would be like the "Neverwinter Nights" system where players can design their own weapons or armor and then apply their own special abilities a la "Masters of Orion II, Race creation"
ok... stay with me.
In the game, "Masters of Orion", You can opt to play a custom race. You get 10 "picks" or points to play with and you get to pick your race's abilities. Some abilities take many points, some less. In some cases you have to pick a few negatives in order to get what you want. however, you can only go "so" negative. You can't just pick -10 points on things you don't care about so you can have +20 points to play with.
I propose a similar system in which you have a few special abilities such as more damage, faster attack, fire damage, etc. However, you have only so many points to use and you might have to pick some negatives. Added that, the crafter would then pick from a "stock" piece of armor or weapon to create "or" you can be inventive and change certain visual aspects of the weapon. They might only have 5 sword blade choices. But coupled with Hilt and Pommel choices they would at least be given a chance to create something that is theirs.
That is my type of crafting system. One I would wholeheartedly engage in.
Otherwise, the LOTRO system is fine and also still in the process of being "worked" and tweaked. it's easy enough that anyone can use it but not unwieldy enough where, if you gate "crafting" like me, you will hate using it.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Yeah that would definately be alot better system, the point of crafting should be to create your own weapons not ones similiar to drops. Hilts and sword holders etc should all be your choice. The visual side of crafting definately needs to be focused on more in games.
Now we just need a solution for the click and wait problem, one that doesn't involve much clicking and waiting, but is innovative. But personally I am not crafting fan either, I hate the idea of playing a game to craft, I want to kill and go no adventures.
LOTR will hopefully improve greatly with it's crafting and maybe step out from the norm.
Currently Playing: Everything but MMORPGs
Cancelled: L2, FFXI, VSoH, LotRO, WAR, WoW
Looking Forward To: SW:TOR
When you fill up the the crafting progress bar for one tier, you can fill it up again to master it and then the crafting process almost becomes interesting because you can add a different kind of mat (always the same one for that item) to get a critical craft of a boosted item. The only problem is that even these boosted items are only comparable to average quest rewards. If you get a decent rare drop then you may as well forget about crafted goods.
Customisation of items is separate to crafting - you just dye whatever you want, even quest reward equipment (someone has to make the dye though).
Farming is like crafting except you don't need to find/hunt for ingredients, so you can power level to the top level in about a day.
There is no real crafting economy, it's just an in-game pass-time. For some reason a lot of people craft so you can at least make lots of cash by picking a harvesting profession and just auctioning the mats. Which is probably what I'm going to do.
Decent crafting MMORPGs: Ryzom, Roma Victor, Vanguard. I've also heard SWG and EQ2 are good too. Even Auto Assualt has a more involving crafting system than this. Even Matrix Online has!
Been in the beta since November...I have to say that the crafting system is lacking. I was so excited about being able to farm, but was very disappointed when I found out that the planting/growing/harvesting cycle takes under a minute and a half to complete. Hopefully they'll improve upon it later.
Crafting in Lotro is worse than a joke for any serious crafter. In addition to being mind-numbingly simplistic as described by Boinged, it gives the appearance of being tacked on as stated in the dev article - as if no thought at all has been given to creating a system which is workable. Crafting doesn't even rate dev regard as a pursuit in and of itself! When we do crafting quests to progress from apprentice to journeyman etc, we get adventuring experience - which imo expresses the Lotro dev mind set re: crafting.
Basic issues for crafting to be workable appear to not have been considered:
> There is gross mismatch between availability of resources and requirements generally, and unequal availability of resources in starting areas. There should be a warning on create screen: Don't create an elf or dwarf if you want to craft! as there is no medium leather, and insufficient tier 1 ores to reach tier 2 collecting skill b4 one's character is adventuring in tier 2 areas.
> Crafting experience appears to be random - we get the same exp for crafting with 2 resources as we get for using 10 resources.
> Many items are too costly to use even if crafting them oneself. Some foods usable b4 level 10 cost 4-5 silver to make and give only a 5 minute buff. Armors have similarly prohibitive costs and by the time one collects the approximately 130 hides required to make a set of armor one has outleveled the armor. Very poorly thought out. I don't mind I don't get much if any better than looted as I craft for the fun of making things, but I find, and despite buying all I can at auction and running alts to gather resources at each tier to slow my main's leveling, that the imbalance between availablity of resources and requirements is still too great to address with some crafts, and in particular tailoring.
> Drop centered crafting (yawn and groan) starts immediately which exacerbates the mismatch between resources and requirements. Each tier of crafting has 2 sections: basic and mastery. Mastering the tier enables us to use a mastery option that improves the item. It also requires the use of drops - some of those required for lvl 10 items I have never seen in game despite having several lvl 20+ characters - as again, no effort has been applied to making crafting workable in all starting areas. If you want to craft, only create in Bree as u have a marginally sporting chance there - but I still doubt you will be able to make armor u can use b4 the time spent to gather enuf for just 1 suit of it has caused u to outlevel its usefulness.
> Craft quests to advance tiers are insane. Unbelievably insane. To obtain journeyman in order to progress to mastering the journeyman tier to make lvl 13 armor we are sent to a lvl 25-30 zone to kill a named for a drop (I told u it was insane lol). To make lvl 10 foods we are sent to a lvl 20 area to collect an item. To make lvl 13 (I think) weapons we are sent to kill a named in a lvl 20 area. I have yet to do the metalsmith quest to make lvl 15ish armor, but am told that is in a lvl 30 area. We can't even swift travel to these locations after finding them at lvl 20 and we are sent there if we want to make lvl 13 items!
The "rationale" for this is that crafting is supposed to be linked to adventuring level - which again imo reflects an attitude of crafting not being seen as a worthy pursuit in and of itself. I find no rationale whatsoever for the gross disparity between the level of crafted items and the adventuring levels of the quests. I think it dismissive to link crafting to adventuring level (why not make progress in adventuring dependent on craft level? - not suggesting this, but it highlights the issue), but if it "must" be done in the view of the Lotro devs, at least they could have matched the quests to the lvl of the items we can craft.
> No thought appears to have been given to the sellability of items. I suggest the devs make all items and put them for auction at cost to make + posting fee + whatever % markup they regard as desirable to compensate crafters for their time and see how many sell - and then lower the resources required to make items, increase availability of resources, reduce npc costs to buy etc so crafted items can be sold! Very basic stuff here to have been done early on when developing a crafting system and I very much doubt it ever has been done as the lack of parity between resource requirements, costs and items yeilded is the most messed up of any game I have ever played.
> Inventory is unworkable - my bank filled on day 2 lol. Inventory is fine if one adventures only, but there appears to have been no planning for all those drops, resources and components at different tiers they created - and while this is an issue in most mmos, it is the worst of all of them I have tried by far.
The world is alive and beautiful and the most fun to explore of all mmos I have ever played. I love it, gets a 10 from me
. Crafting is the worst of any game I have played and gets a 2 at best. I hope they fix it as the world makes me want to get a sleeping bag and move right on in 
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Zeka - Intrepid server early SWG: 14 houses, 6 factories, 20 lots, aka
Zysha - Arispotle, Ryzom: 15 crafts at lvl 250, able to make all items at Q250 and inventor of many unique recipes
Certifiable Craftaholic