Proposed Cultural Change - The Death of Tinkering?

[Catweazel]

I am, up until now, a happy Tinker. After years spent camping rare drops and many many mountains of Yttrium mined, after many hundreds of thousands of platinum, I finally reached a high enough skill to be able to make a decent return on my investment. 4A or AAXA boxes were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The proposed change to Chronal, Discordant and Bazu / LB augs will remove a huge demand for them by many guilds raiding in DOD. Why spend an additional 100k minimum for a Bazu aug with stats that are exceeded by many group aug drops? Even the LB aug - attractive certainly to Tanking classes with 45AC - will now have a big question mark hanging over it come time to spend those DKP. Knowing that an AAAA box is required to turn it into something useful will stop the majority bidding.

The proposed change to Cultural will kill the Tinkering business stone dead. Shortly after, Cultural Armor will become a quaint memory for those die hard Tradeskillers.

[Roanne]

Couple this point with the issue that although SoF introduced new sources for all the tinkering combined parts of AAXAs, many parts for the subcombines still only drop in DoD content and are not available (even at outrageously inflated prices) in the bazaar. Ive found myself spending more and more time away from groups and progression so I can farm parts I need for subcombines and its getting to the point I will just raise my selling price on an AAXA to drive demand down or just quit making them all together so I can reclaim more time actually experiencing the game content. Not because AAXAs arent selling; they sell almost as fast as I can make them. Its because the balance of my time to make these is shifting too much and they already took a significant time investment when supply was good.

Ive already quit making mechanoinstructions because even if I farmed every moment I was in the game, the drop rate on Dreadspire Gargoyle Dust and Witheran Biles is so low I could not meet demand. Now the price on the few remaining mechanoinstructions have almost doubled and I have to constantly turn customers away.

Ive tried strategies like asking customers to supply their own subcomponents for a break in the price but people want to bring me the stuff I can already get easily and feel put off when I reject the deal because they think they've collected most of what I need.

even as good as cultural is, its getting to be not worth it. If cultural is nerfed as is being proposed this will become a niche market overnight. If your goal is to deflate the tradeskill economy, this is the way to do it.

[muana]

well with the change....Ngreth should consider adjusting the recipe a bit...instead of the XXX # of combines make it XX. This would lower the price in one way, and make it less time consuming to make.

Or maybe an alternative way to make stuff with some of the new nodrop tradeskill stuff that otherwise would only be used for certain quests. This could then push people to be working on the quests but also willing to help others on it and have a push pull of putting people into the new areas all over.

[Catweazel]

The recipes have just been adjusted - partly because SOF is released as a balanced expansion with all itemisation decisions balanced with each other across an intended design range.

Suggesting a change to the recipe is missing the underlying problem which is that if you mess with part of the design, there are implications that can be far beyond what you perceive. Nerfing LB's after 2 years will have many many unintended consequences. Tinkering is a rather obvious one that will get whacked. The knock on effect could be to damage many tradeskills, drop rates, quests and bazaar market mechanics let alone the impact to SOF gear drops in general.

The simple fact is that Tinkering any kind of "aug converter" for Last Blood type augs is complex, time consuming and expensive. If it becomes mostly vendor materials, then the trivial has to drop, then the rarity disappears along with the value and no-one will be interested in making them.