Ryogure

Thank you for reading and liking my post! I do agree with your comment a lot and sadly is already happening: if you go to Goblin B3, Breezy Hills, Anima Lake and other insta-spawn mobs with good drop rate you will either see level 250 aoeing or directly, bots to exploit the Dirty Spiritual Stone and chemicals Market. So I can agree it may be an issue and mix your solution with the solution of loot tables I proposed. I also was lucky to rush along the first EA wave but playing on alts now, seeing dead towns, seeing the drops they get and analyzing what new Artisans tells me, the class was only good if your rushed on EA and are now, as I mentioned, at the top of the pyramid. Things not being 100% would be ok if the material rate was high and not valor-only or locked behind dirties RNG. Because nowadays if you fail a gem cutting you lost easily 30m. If you failed a Meister, you lost all that valor and that 17-18m that frame sells for now. And CG which is intended to be the Luxury big deal for Artisan by lore being PVP-locked is hilarious and chaotic. That's why if we have to gamble with a not 100% it shouldn't lead to the potential desire of starting a whole new character. It also makes you feel bad when you fail a friend a millions of zuly items because you can't force much more con in and you are stuck at like 97.1% and you need to pump 360 millions to almost delete that margin of error. I think that's my point with 100%: impossible to 100% items that are in the dozens of millions are frustration inducing and fear of failing your friends, your clan mates or your regular clients. And is also harsh if you farmed it yourself as an Artisan which is tedious and slow due to the class limitations to end failing. People also moving on from gear to gear so fast makes your easy to make recipes useless. Artisans after the EA rush was just reduced to the items I mentioned and as you mentioned MS for SEN Artis. And building your character, being way more expensive than I would say all the other classes (Maybe not raider now that there is a crazy amount of people rerolling raiders and FV and Wired sky-rocketed) should have a reward, because you are playing a fully handicapped class. I really like your idea of introducing materials way early on. Also things like insect drops dissapear once you are past mid-Junon and reapear 70 levels later in Eldeon, it makes no sense, let me craft that lvl 40 mask.

Hi, I'm Ryogure you may have seen me around discord and trying to help other fellow artisans. After helping other Artisans grow and being a regular high-end crafter for a lot of players I came around to a very sad conclusion: there is little to no point to Artisans as the class exists right now. So this will be an in-depth post with suggestions, analysis and problems the class faces. First I will state that I'm a lvl 250 Artisan, with thousands of CON and a very high SEN. I played the class in past official versions and I dedicate 90% of my playtime to my main currently so this comes from experience. I have already been through all stages potential Artisans will have to face. So this is a list of big picture and detailed issues Artisans currently have. Issue: materials, recipes, rates, class identity and demand. Analysis by level gaps Lvl 1-100 The first and most notorious issue an Artisan or dealer-to-be Artisan face is drops. With the current quest design, leveling speed curve and items given by quests to players based on the class they choose to play rarely any profitable or interesting item comes from crafting on the first 100 levels. It all boils down to making Fairy Wings, Little Angel, Little Devil, Angel, Devil and Worm Dragon Wings. With only the Angel/Devil wings family having a good drop rate and fair recipe for beginners. Is impossible for a dealer to craft Worm Dragon Wings because it is impossible for one to find a party farming them in Gorge of Silence as most people won't want to face this rare monster at that level or they will move from krawfis directly into Luna repeats. Lvl 100-160 Similar to the first part of the experience, just job changed Artisans won't have access to the materials they need. Luna has so much repetition that it boils down to people building from drops and ignoring Artisans completely with maybe the exception of Shaman Ghost Wings (With a miserable rate of success but I will talk about crafting rates later on in another paragraph) and Ferrell Bag. This will be worse once players reach Eldeon: they will learn about what I call "Valor Culture". Players will be focused on repeating pollen and other similar turn-ins. Artisan players have also little to no choice of going valor themselves as the materials to make a set are extremly difficult to get and Armor Endowment and Reinforcement won't beat the stats of a valor item and the very low repair cost valor items have. It all boils down to selling just one thing: Hardened weapons. That requires the Artisan to either buy the base weapon or crafting it themselves and breaking weapons to gamble the chance of Hardening the weapon. 160-180 People will be grinding in Ruins without any desire except of maybe upgrading their weapon or valor sets further which Artisans do not have any role in. 180-250 At the leveling point of Orlo players will have an influx of zuly coming from quests but they will use it to acquire an unique type weapon which will be their final weapon. Making Advanced Weapon Craft and their sub-skills, useless. Artisans will also be invited to groups only if they are seen with a launcher and their first class aoes maxed. Some groups may be nice and may just want your buffs but is not the norm. 250 Congrats, you made it to the end of leveling an Artisan. But what now? Well, your armor and weapon crafts will be even more useless as people will be running dungeons, getting exalteds, uniques and valor. Here comes the biggest problematic: Artisans, even with a full dps build, exalted set and upgraded launcher won't be as good as their other 2nd job option, the bourgs and they shouldn't be. Artisan is a crafting class and not a DPS class and there are no ways to earn valor at 250 outside of dungeons from where you may just end being kicked from just because they don't want an Artisan, they want Mages, Clerics, Knights and Champions. By this level you will have to work hard and spend hundreds of millions to pump your CON: Exalted items, Legendary Mana Fusion items, Max Stat items, Blank Scrolls, Hands of the Crafter (Unique skill), Accesory Crafting (Unique skill), off-hand and a sapphire for your hammer because mostlikely you are not capable of getting a decent % on a [5] let's not even mention a [7]. But this doesn't mean you wil hit 100% nor does it mean you will be able to get what you spent building all that CON in return. Best in Slot is even worse: you need level 240 jewelry with CON as the main stat (Which at the moment of writing this people sell them for 120mills a piece which means a BiS base jewelry set will cost you 360 millions), drills and more gems. At this point you sinked hundreds of millions to build just the following items on demand: -Arua/Hebarn/Oro jewelry sets, and is almost impossible to 100% them. -Meister/Racing/Sporty frames, Rapid Wheels, Steel Backseat and Dural Engine. Meister, like the jewelry set, is close to impossible to 100% and all the core materials are Valor locked. -Eudy Wings (You can farm the materials for these... on grey monsters) with a 100% and Wings of the Risen Phoenix which is even worse because these needs very rare and very expensive Dungeon locked items. -Gems - Depending on your CON you will be able to reach [5] without too many risks but from [7] and onwards, is gambling, and is gambling 2 very expensive jewels (Along 10 pieces of Prismatic Dust at 1.5m a piece currently on the market) you are going to spend the millions of market value of gems and millions of prismatic dust in a gamble. And you will have to keep gambling and losing millions to reach that [10] Sapphire that might enhace your crafts by 1~2%. -Castle Gear, everyones favorite showing-off item. Locked under PVP and PVP Only, Artisan is not a PVP Class. -Pots for dungeons: they are cheap to make in a batch, people will buy them, but with so many in the market right now the profit margin is very small. To sum it up: with half the amount of zuly you can build any other of the 7 classes to their max potential and reach an almost BiS with even [13] jewels. Artisan is just a class to create luxury for other classes who are almost fully built. You are not a DPS, you don't excel at dungeons, you are no good at PVP and clearly you are not a crafter when you don't use 99% of the recipes. How we could solve this? -Rework most loot tables into materials and not upgrade items and coins. -Rework armor craft and weapon craft to create desireable items at any level. -Make accesory Crafting and Face Item Craft base kit. -Create a passive that enables Artisans to bypass the drop decrease that lower color monsters have with a rule that does not ignore this for Bronze/Silver star monsters and kings and unique drops. Received feedback: this may create issues between Artisan or low levels, a very good solution to this has been commented below and I agree with it. -Keep valor and Honor materials as an option, but return all the exclusive items and recipes to loot tables. -Create level 250 8 hours before a repeat valor quests that work like the oasis quests in high quantities so Artisans can do them or players who want to request our services can get their materials. The Faction Npcs are right there in Orlo! -Rework the formula of craft chance %, do not make it easy to reach 100% on the most desired items but do not make them impossible to 100% them. -Create a Jewelry set oriented to crafting at level 250 to remove the inflation of the lvl 240 CON uniques and give a chance to artisans of building it themselves by hard work not zuly. -Add desireable items (By looks or stats) at all the dead points I mentioned so we can afford at least bullets, this can clash with IM, I know, but at least a few nice looking items besides the ones sold in NPCs would be nice. -Add drop rate bonus if an Artisan joins a dungeon for the first time since the daily reset that goes away when the final boss is killed. Then make it reset at the same time as dailies, this will prevent Artis from being kicked, at least once a day. -Add Mount Craft - Self explanatory, enable Artisans to build mounts, even if the recipe is absolutely crazy. -Enable Sapphires to be in any slot as an Artisan or create a gem called Soul of the Artisan or something that works like Saph but only works when equipped on an Artisan. -Do not lock Forest Ash or Prismatic Dust to dungeons. Make them a drop as well. Or a weekly quest or daily, it will also lower their market price making it easier for Artisan to craft gems and Risen Phoenix Wings, deflating the price of these materials and crafted items as a good side effect. -Enhace exp given per craft based on item level and the character level. I don't mean this as an avoid the whole game by just crafting, but it would be nice for new artis to get a nice chunk of exp for their hard work. -Remove MP and HP regen items from mobs from counting in the order-looting, it already takes 10 turns for Artisans to get maybe one material, chemical or item to just end up with +1000HP. -Give Artisan a PAT ASPD and Damage passives so it's viable to fight with a car or CG. Also introduce better Car weapons to PAT Crafting. This will make Artisan end game work cohesively with the class identity. -Add a transmutation craft: allow lower tier materials to be transformed into a higher material of the same family. Example: 3 pieces of white fur can be transformed directly into the next fur. Just to tell you how bad it is, with thousands of CON, Royal Crown, a Dealer recipe, a 30 charm to equip item only, I hit 87% after hundreds of millions invested. That's how bad it is for Artisans, we don't craft, we gamble. And we should be able to provide ourselves with items to be real crafters, if we depend on charging people for crafts that may fail, we are just a slot machine to other players and those of us at the top of the pyramid will be the ones being called to craft all the time, I want more Artisans to be Artisans, but I also want the experience to be fun and meaningful, we are already cut short from PVM and PVP. Thanks for reading.