Smithing after the Changes

Khizan

 One major problem I've noticed, at least in AM, is that the Smithing change has resulted in us losing all of our active smiths. None of the Knights who had learned Smithing to get access to Fullplate have bothered to relearn Smithing now. And why should they? There's no benefit to them for it. Concoctions can be worthwhile because it sells items that get purchased in bulk and consumed fairly rapidly. Toxins cost nothing but time to create, so they can turn dead/chatting time into gold, albeit slowly. Smithing, though? Smithing is awful to learn.

• Weapon standardization has lowered the profit margin on weapons substantially because you can't charge premium prices for premium items anymore.
  
  
• Smithed items still have a fairly long turnaround, since people only replace them about once every two months. Over the course of a year Bob the Outrider is going to buy 6 spears, 6 shields, and 6 suits of chainmail  These are not the kinds of sales numbers that encourage people to drop 300cr on a tradeskill; Antioch is the largest city and it might have the population to support one Smith, since people with artifact weapons are non-customers.
  
  
• The actual smithing process itself is utterly miserable and it requires that you code a system to do any kind of bulk smithing without hating yourself. I mean, goddamn, the steps are something like... "put material one in forge, put material two in forge, put material 3 in forge, smith for item, smith, get item, quench". If you can't code a system and try to do this manually you will absolutely hate it.
  
  
• Armor smithing is still absolutely miserable; getting usable armour means you're going to get to spend a few hundred thousand gold on comms and spend half an hour playing smithing roulette. This makes stocking your shop with armor an exercise in frustration. If you just bang out 5 suits of scalemail, you're probably selling your customers shitty scalemail. This means that knowledgeable people aren't going to buy from you and the people who do buy from you are going to have a worse playing experience because they unwittingly bought cardboard armor, not to mention the fact that you're quite possibly selling your teammates garbage and thusly hurting your chances to win fights.

The end result here is that Smithing is still useless but there's even less incentive to learn it since fullplate isn't dependent on it. The only reason to learn Smithing is because SOMEBODY in your circle has to learn it and if you're lucky it's not going to be you; the unlucky bastard that gets stuck with it ends up dropping $100 worth of credits so that you can make no gold supplying mandatory supplies to your city.

Siath

Further. Putting resmith at trans pushes people to learn smithing just to be able to fully enjoy their artifacts. Resmith should be inept since its already minimum of 350 cr to buy a weapon, it shouldn't require any other ability.

Iniar

I'm curious: @Wysrias never made much profit smithing out 237 speed light-sabers. Did anyone else have any different experience?

Also, sharp takes weapons to 45 days.

Bathan

There was a point on Anarion where I was smithing high damage claymores. It lasted all of a week but I ended up making bank. I stopped because, a. smithing is the least fun activity in Imperian and b. I generally ended up selling to people I would later have to fight. It didn't feel particularly intuitive to keep going when I could just pop on Netflix and bash Demon's Pass for crazy gold.

Ultrix

I'm curious: @Wysrias never made much profit smithing out 237 speed light-sabers. Did anyone else have any different experience?

I don't know about others, but at least for the Crusaders' guild, we were selling weapons pretty much "at cost" given how many re-dos you had to go through to get anything decent.  And we were providing the weapons and armour as a service to the city/circle/guild, not trying to turn a profit.  I would hate to actually have to rely on smithing as a real tradeskill to make money because unless you have a smelter (who other than Mantlus actually has one, anyway?), the new comm costs pretty much wipe out any shot of a profit unless you have a zillion comms stockpiled from who-knows-when.

Now? I don't know what it is like in other circles, but the number of people who are trans smithing in AM is less than what I can count on one hand. Putting aside whether you can lean on a favor from a friend, I don't think it is reasonable to put an entire city/circle's smithing needs on what amounts to basically 2 people. It got so bad that I was one of those "unlucky few" that dropped the lessons into transing the skill last night because the guild and circle need it, not because I have any desire to stand there slaving over a forge and whatnot. 

Wysrias

I picked Smithing back up solely because my shop only sells armor and weapons, and my stock was worthless since the changes went in. I never turned any real profit on it, but it was nice to be able to offer high quality wares to my circle-mates.

The current scenario is pretty much exactly what was predicted when these changes were announced, and I still think that they were a poor decision. I understand the impetus for standardizing weapons, but the complete lack of incentive to actually smith combined with the massive price increases on commodities means that weaponry will always come down to hoping someone will be generous with both their time (because the actual process is still pretty awful) and their commodities.

Bathan

I would really like to see Metalworking merged with Smithing, with a refund given out to those who currentlly have Metalworking. The change likely wouldn't mean much to most players, but it would make it a tempting prospect for some, and at the end of the day each circle needs like five people to just fall on their sword [pun totally intended] and provide weapons and armor for the seven or so people who do not own artifact weapons. 

Iniar

I just got both!

Jules

We didn't have the number of batshit forgers Achaea did before this change, although I was still overjoyed at standardization for the same basic reasons.  It means I don't have to hunt around for a "good" weapon (or worse, try to forge one myself) and it means any artifact is always a solid investment.  But from what I can tell, Imperian never quite experienced the full effect of unbelievably determined people creating crazy weapons.  So, again, thank you for saving us from that, admin folk.

As to profits and such, in theory it's good that relatively few people can smith - and also that smithing isn't tied to any "perks" for me, because that always creates lots of people who learn the skill just for the perk, and who can be easily tapped for free/nearly free favors.  I know when I had some stuff added to my artifact, I gave the guy a pretty hefty payment (without him having to ask) that would cover his costs as well as a pretty nice profit.  I'd at least give this a chance, and if we get a few people learning this as an actual trade, the Ultrixes of the world should hopefully be saying "so and so would be glad to help you" (in other words, no, I'm not going to do all this free work for you).  At the end of the day, you'd hope that weapons/armour and services would be expensive enough that there is some genuine profitability, without them being obscenely so.  

EDIT:  hell, we should try to push people away from a norm of "hey can you just do this for free" now.  With so few smiths around it's probably the best chance to change people's expectations we'll get.

EDIT2:  also boo to armour apparently not being standardized along with weapons?  But my fullplate was... got to go look over the announces again.  

Luthyr

Why don't Knights who had trans smithing before just get it back to trans now.  No one is going to trans Smithing without some major overhaul to the system  as it doesn't give you anything to make a profit.  As it was stated with the knight changes, they basically split up one skillset into two and just made us pay for smithing again.

Khizan

With that said, here's some ideas I'd like to see for smithing:

1. I would really like it if the Smithing process could be refined down to a single command, something like "smith for sharp heavy broadsword 1 veritum 1 crystehl 6 stehl" and have it work something like fashioning an engineering item. This would practically remove the requirement to write a system for mass smithing, especially if you let us put an amount in the command.
   
   
2. Armor and shield stats should be standardized; making 5 suits of scale for the guild shop shouldn't require us to make 15 suits and throw out the 2/3rds of them that are statted like ringmail, and it shouldn't be possible for people to inadvertently buy garbage armor especially because this is a problem that primarily affects new players.
   
   
3. I really think that Smithing should provide some sort of inherent benefit to somebody who learns it. Maybe something like "Transcendent Smiths using a weapon that they crafted themselves do +5% damage". This wouldn't stack with artifact weapons, of course, but it would make Trans Smithing into something rather like a Level 0.5 shifting weapon and it would be beneficial for people who have multiple professions but don't want to buy multiple artifact weapons.
   
   Something like a moderate stat improvement on your armor when you're trans Smithing could also work, maybe stacking with artifact armor, maybe not. This one is probably preferable because it helps deal with increased damage instead of contributing to it.

Jules

Khizan said:

1. I really think that Smithing should provide some sort of inherent benefit to somebody who learns it. Maybe something like "Transcendent Smiths using a weapon that they crafted themselves do +5% damage". This wouldn't stack with artifact weapons, of course, but it would make Trans Smithing into something rather like a Level 0.5 shifting weapon and it would be beneficial for people who have multiple professions but don't want to buy multiple artifact weapons.
   
   Something like a moderate stat improvement on your armor when you're trans Smithing could also work, maybe stacking with artifact armor, maybe not. This one is probably preferable because it helps deal with increased damage instead of contributing to it.

I definitely love ideas 1 and 2 (and the quote here shows 3 as 1 because I can't figure out how to remove the formatting).  This one, it really depends on what people envision smithing being.  If we do it like this, absolutely everyone like me will learn it for the perk, unless it's a pretty worthless perk.  Having people like me in the system always seems to translate into a norm where people expect services for free or close to it.  Then again, maybe that just doesn't really matter.  Anyway, I know Achaea recently separated forging from knights and at least some people report "making bank", but I don't know that that is the common experience, or whether it will last.  

Ultrix

Jules said:

EDIT2:  also boo to armour apparently not being standardized along with weapons?  But my fullplate was... got to go look over the announces again.  

Fullplate has been standardized for awhile (i.e., at least for as long as I have been playing, so at least a RL year). It's everything less than that that is still random.

Jules

It's weird to me that one smithing thing would get standardized while the other remains RNG.  

Khizan

You can blame that one on me!

Fullplate stats were standardized because the stats on a suit of fullplate ranged from low 60's to low 100's and mass forging for highquality fullplate was awful and I hated it, so I managed to classlead it to a standardized value.

Jules

But it's always your fault.  Always!  

Selthis

Just a bump to bring up some issues.

1. Normalize shields and armor.  

2. It is insanely slow to smith sans hammer.

3.  Just remove dwarf smithing bonus at this point or maybe give it to everyone at trans.  

Can we please have some sort of fixes to this sort of stuff? Its like we did a half measure with smithing to make it more useful but didn't take the full step.

Thanks.

Garryn

Yeah, the armour stuff is coming. No plans to remove the dwarven bonus.

Khizan

@Garryn

Is there any chance you could take this a step further and normalize offensive stats for shields when used by Wardancers?

Firstly, right now artifacts shields are one of the few remaining areas where you can buy speed. As Strong, my L3 shield hacks at 1.88s, which is a 0.19s gain over a buckler hack. So that's bad in and of itself, imo; affliction rates should not scale to artifacts.

Secondly, any shield large enough to do decent damage is too slow to be worth using, so you end up in a situation where artifact shields are basically mandatory for any fighting WD. It is the only way to get a shield that's fast enough to be worth using while doing more than 30 damage per hit and providing any kind of decent amount of protection.

Thirdly, the "choose the ideal shield" situation is awful, because Wardancers without an artifact shield end up in a situation where you need to balance your shield size against your other attacks by choosing the heaviest shield that isn't slower than your slowest other combo ability. Having to carry around 5 shields and rewield by individual combo is awful and nitpicky and 100% optimal. 

Ideally, we'd just make it so that all shields have the speed of a buckler and the damage of a tower shield and then we'd just scale the artifacts shield damage up with the 10/15/20 progression used by artifact weapons. Shielddance would lose the awful shield syncing, Wardancers would get to use the heaviest shield they could carry, much like every other class that relies on a shield for protection, and we'd lose the abilty to turn credits into affliction speed.