An *idea* for Tradeskill Raids.

[kiztent]

What is the point of ANYTHING in the game?

It is to play.

I am just trying to think of a DIFERENT thing for tradeskillers to do.

That's all I was asking. I'm sure you know from experience if I disagree with the idea I'd express that clearly and unambiguously

I was just curious what you wanted to get out of these tradeskill raids.

Personally, yes, it does sound as interesting do as 'real' raiding (not at all), but it does sound like some interesting ideas.

[Sylphan]

One of the fundamental mechanics of the game is that level 1 characters don't get the same items as level 60 characters. There are a few other mechanics this idea would break too, but that's the important one.

If the reward is limited to things suitable for level 1, it's going to be unpopular. Perhaps it should be just a bonus to a killing raid, not a pure tradeskill raid. I know that's not what you really want, but I suspect it's a necessary compromise.

Rather than having this stand alone, perhaps you could have this as an added component of a more normal raid. Something like "Congratulations, you've earned a Velium BP! I could give you a nice augment stone for it, but only if you help me finish this Vial of Soul Trapping within the next three minutes." If you say 'what Vial of Soul Trapping' he gives you some components and spouts a recipe... if you return a completed vial to him in time then he gives you a sweet augment. It'd be really cool if rescued wayfarers gave you a little task like this at the end of an LDON adventure... that would be a reason to do rescues instead of collects.

As to other mechanics... here's a way to assure that it takes six tradeskillers instead of just one. Have a mob drop six lore-nodrop-norent tools. Have an NPC spawn 9 minutes later that gives out additional components (so that corpse will have already rotted). Have each recipe use both the tool and an additional component. Even better if it returns the tool on failure so you can try again.

Another way would be to have NPCA hand out the tools, and then once he's handed out six of them (or upon hearing a certain keyword) he despawns and NPCB spawns to hand out components. That spares you the 9 minute wait. Note that it doesn't necessarily need to be one combine of each tradeskill. You could arrange it so that all six combines are tailoring, but this setup assures that you have six seperate tailors.

But... I'd really rather have a quest where people combine their skills to do a recipe. Instead of getting one smith, one tailor, one brewer, you would need six smiths. That could require a new interface for 'group-combine' though. You might have a recipe with a trivial of 1510 and a minimum-required of 1450 that checks against the sum of the Smithing skills of all six characters in the group. You could even do it by specialists... you could have a smithing combine that requires one cultural high elf smith, one cultural dwarf smith, one cultural troll smith, one cultural barbarian smith, etc.

[Ngreth Thergn]

One of the fundamental mechanics of the game is that level 1 characters don't get the same items as level 60 characters. There are a few other mechanics this idea would break too, but that's the important one.

If the reward is limited to things suitable for level 1, it's going to be unpopular. Perhaps it should be just a bonus to a killing raid, not a pure tradeskill raid. I know that's not what you really want, but I suspect it's a necessary compromise.

That is why as I thought it further, I thought it should go more towards adventure points.

[Arbigger]

Cats have all the luck.

Have you tried out the shar vahl cooperative tradeskill quests yet? Here's a link to to writeup. More stuff like this without the racial restrictions sounds like what you're after.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Have you tried out the shar vahl cooperative tradeskill quests yet? Here's a link to to writeup. More stuff like this without the racial restrictions sounds like what you're after.

Sorta, though I am looking for a "timmed" event, where that is not

The advent of the Tannan Mastery AA means that if there was no race restriction, people would just be able to "solo" that(except for the class limits) since there is no time limit It is not a bad example though.

[Saleani]

I don't think there's any real point to trying to make puzzle solving in a static game.

Actually there is one, and as far as I know, only one puzzle in the game. It is part of the 3rd badge of honor quest out of qeynos. The step involved "curing rats" by playing a variation of "othello" or "reversi."

Pretty much every other quest in the game are of the following types:
A - go over there
kill that (usually)
loot/forage/pickup something, maybe make something out of what you looted
hand it in

or

B - say the magic word and win a prize.

Sometimes faction is involved, sometimes not.

Oh, I can see it now, at the end of such an event, something like a PP pops, and it turns out that Aid Grimel has an evil twin brother who moonlights as a Planar Projection.

Hail, AGETB Projection.
(if your baking skill is too low)
The projection says, Arrrrr, you scurvy mutt, you couldn't bake the dew off of grass. When you make spaghetti, you burn the water.
(if your smithing skill is too low)
The projection says, Arrrrr, you scurvy mutt, when you walk up to the forge, the fire doesn't go out, it escapes.

[KyrosKrane]

Hum, now that's an idea I hadn't considered. Tradeskillers I've met seem to enjoy mental challenges (which can be level-independent) more than hack-and-slash challenges (which are very much level dependent).

Perhaps to gather resources for this raid, you don't have to kill something, but instead have to play some mini-game puzzles. Games like that reversi in the badge quest would be quite neat, and I'm sure we/they could come up with variations based on tic-tac-toe, checkers, and other relatively simple games.

So, the raid then becomes a bit different. Take 20-30 tradeskillers into an instanced raid zone. Each person is allowed to play one game, selected at random by the NPC from a library of a dozen or so. If you win, you get a "prize" -- a chunk of material with which to work. The material is used in several combines (failable, of course), which in turn are used as subcombines of another product, and so on, until you craft one final item and hand in to the NPC.

I like the idea of collective crafting. You'd need a new UI, though, that allows the cumulative tradeskills of all raid members to count as a single number, and the combine trivial would be suitably high.

As a scenario, imagine having to build a house.

Stage 1: collect metal ore, wooden branches, mud (for making clay bricks), leather hides, and so on. Each of these comes from a mini-game with an NPC.

Stage 2: convert the raw materials into usable tools. Metal ore into nails (smithing), wood into planks (fletching?), mud into clay (pottery in a kiln), hides into strips (tailoring), etc. This uses individual tradeskill proficiency.

Stage 3: each group in the raid combines their parts into a "subsection" of the house. For example, nails + planks + (other stuff) = a wall. This has a trivial somewhere in the 500-1000 range, and uses the total skill of everyone in the group in a single tradeskill.

Stage 4: Once enough of the subsections have been made, the raid leader initiates the final combine, which has a trivial in the thousands and checks against the collective tradeskills of all the raid. This step requires at least one person of 250 modified skill in each tradeskill within the raid. (Yes, they could all be the same person.) If the total tradeskills of the raid are above a certain threshold (very high), the combine is no fail; otherwise, there's a chance of failing it.

That pretty much eliminates all level requirements. Farming is still there, but you now have to play through mini-game quests instead of killing mobs. A level 1 could raid with a level 65 to win the raid.

I'm starting to like Ngreth's points rewards idea. It's probably more balanced than handing out just a couple of items to the raid.

[tibbwini]

How about this. You have a zone, which is instanced based on your group makeup and respective tradeskill scores. (OK, maybe it's not instanced at all, it could be East Commonlands, if there were some way of tuning the encounter each time it's run without instancing the zone)

So you have a village or an outpost, where there's some "naked" NPC's who are panicking because they're about to be attacked. You have a load of incoming waves of mobs, who are set to attack the outpost.

Now then, the goal is to keep them alive, by outfitting them with crafted armour and weapons, so they have enough strength to win against the incoming army. The incoming mobs and the NPC's could be untargetable/ unbuffable to avoid cheating or some random person ganking the encounter.

Combines are based on.... what? Materials scavenged or otherwise collected from the zone. You have a finite number of materials, so you obviously have a strategic decision to make - do you make 1 uber axe or 5 not so uber ones? 3 Pauldrons or 1 Breastplate? Maybe there are crates of materials that open in between waves. Either these crafted items when equipped by the NPC's could decay in battle so you have to replenish them, or you could just have to make better stuff between waves. Your skill in the various trades would determine the number of successes you got so that you had to be careful risking higher level combines. Skillups could be given for these events, which would enable them to be used as an alternate skillup path for most difficult trades like tailoring and smithing.

Keep the NPC's alive through n waves, and there is a boss mob maybe, that you can join in and kill. The reward is dropped in the form of loot from the boss mob and could include amongst other things, tradeskill modifying charms or something useful to tradeskillers.

Edit as I think more about it:

Can you imagine how cool it would be to defend "Inn 1" from Orcs? It would also reinvigorate the old world content if you *could* get it to work in old world zones.

I know from the hints dropped in the summit that they are considering making AI NPC's that know how to fight and work together for use in solo instances. So the AI should be there for this to work, if all goes well. You can use pretty much all the tradeskills for this, even stuff like poisons and brewing for buff potions that the NPC's could use. Also there would be a nice strategy involved in just making the stuff if you have 1 forge, 1 oven, 1 brew barrel, you would have to coordinate with the others in your group carefully to get everything made in time so you're not hogging the forge when they need to use it.

[Minda]

These are some really great ideas!

[KyrosKrane]

Heck, why restrict it to one zone at all? Imagine a quest where you had to get drops from East Commons, West Commons, Nektulos, and Lavastorm. You do the combines in Freeport and Neriak for the first-stage items and bring them to the raid NPC (who could be in any of the zones -- I'd imagine in an unused corner of WC like that empty camp). There, you plug into the new UI by opening a "Crafter's Workbench" interface and start doing second-stage and third-stage combines. If you fail, you have to go back and get more components. Your challenge then becomes the time limit, not to mention fighting off the normal mobs in the zone (trivial for high levels, but a challenge for levels 1-15 who may be helping the raid).

Now, do the same thing but put the Stage 1 NPC's in Velks, Thurgadin, EW, and GD, and you have a much tougher adventure purely due to the beasties.

Move it again to some of the tier 1 PoP planes and you have a quest that would challenge level 65's -- you have to fight off the normal wandering beasties to reach a quest NPC in each of PoD, PoN, PoJ, and PoI, get the quest items, port back to PoK, and do the combines there.

If the tradeskill portion was of equal difficulty in all three scenarios, this allows you to tailor the item (or points) rewards based on the level of the players. The EC scenario would have rewards balanced for tradeskillers of level 10-20. The Velious scenario would be for levels 30-40, and the PoP scenario for levels 50-60. If you want, you can take a level 1 tradeskiller to Thurg for the tradeskill part, but that level 1 would probably die trying to get to the quest NPC's to get play the games and get the tradeskill bits.

Yes, this does contradict what I said earlier about levels not being a good measure. Still, it's something to consider.

[Ngreth Thergn]

All sounds good

And don;t be tied to my "raid" wording.

Such ideas for just 6 people work too