New Tradeskills Page

[Finnien]

http://www.blizzard.com/wow/townhall/tradeskills.shtml

Looks pretty cool... =)

[Synn]

I never really liked tradeskills much in any mmorpg. But heh..what to say, I'll be doing them in wow :o

[Revith]

As a human mage, I'm either doing tailoring or herb-gathering/alchemy. I'm not sure yet. Alchemy sounds cool, but it'd be nice to be able to make my own armor and bags and stuff. So depending on what everyone else chooses, I'll do one of the two.

[Hyrax]

Am I missing something or does this sound like every other tradeskill setup in every other MMORPG (minus failures and experimentation, mind you, which is good but mostly just removing self-inflicted punishment)? I was hoping for something new and cool, but I'll keep my fingers crossed for later details. Plus, I'm mighty curious how they'll handle the specifics of the loot/quest/craft balance of item creation...

Rax

[Revith]

First off, guaranteed successes and skill ups by spending level-driven skill points, and not mindless combining, are both innovative.
Then you add in the fact that you can gain recipes via quests and mob drops rather than just spoiler sites, which is kind of cool.
Lastly you have the fact that some items can only be made in special locations (say, the forge in the depths of Blackrock Spire... which is totally innovative and very cool. "Hey guys, I want to make the Uber Sword of Goblin Smiting +4, can we get together a group to help me fight through this dungeon so I can do the forging at the molten river in the bottom of this dungeon?"

[Hyrax]

AC1 had level-driven skill-ups (forced you to pick only one skill if you really want to be good at it, which isn't evil but results in crafting mules a'plenty), AC2 had quest/drop recipes and flavors of the location-specific crafting stations...the guaranteed combines sounds nice but I wonder what it will do to decrease the value of high crafting skill (after a certain point you shouldn't fail on some stuff, and at low enough skill nothing should be guaranteed)(i.e. give me flour, water, veggies, and some meat and I could probably turn it into a pizza, but it ain't a sure bet). Also, as I'm reading the scoop right now, any poor bastard soloist will never make the USGS+4, as he won't be able to organize a raid to get to the forge. I'm not sure if this is bad, but it does complicate matters.

I guess I was looking for more revelations that made me say "Wow, what a great new idea!" Right now I'm just hoping that they do this stuff better than those who have come before.

[Finnien]

Personally, I'm in love with the tradeskill system. Nothing pissed me off more than the fact that in DAOC, a guy could make the best items in the game without ever leaving town.

It completely devalued all raid loot, quest loot, or adventure drops. When the best shit is made by going down to a vendor and making 100 suits of armor until you get a masterpiece, then all dungeons become good for is farming cash. And that really really bites, from my point of view.

So what WoW did was try to intermingle adventuring with tradeskilling. You can only use the recipes your character has learned, and they come from easy or basic ones from vendors, to medium ones that come as a result of quests, to very rare and difficult recipes that come from drops off very high level mobs. That means if you kill Nagafen, and he drops the Fiery Avenger smithing recipe, you'll be the only one who can make it. It won't just get posted on the web and have everyone else making it.

Then you have resources which are very rare. It would be reasonable to assume that after you have the recipe, you'd have to either venture deep into another dungeon to get the materials, then get a quest to get some gem to mount in the hilt, then venture to the heart of a mountain to make the sword itself at the ancient forge. And at that point, failing the combine would just be shitty.

The individual aspects of the system may have been scattered here and there in other games, but what makes this so incredible is three things - first, the combination of the best of other systems all rolled into one; second, the intermingling of adventuring and tradeskilling so that dropped loot is not obsolete but tradeskill loot still has value; and third, the unique balance and attention to detail which makes Blizzard games so good.

Blizzard isn't known for radical new ideas. They're known for taking an idea and polishing it and detailing it and really perfecting it, making it a shining example of what other games could have been.

Oh yeah, and the stuff that comes out of tradeskillls are USEFUL. Healing potions, stamina potions, fire shield potions, drinks that act as a mana restoration-over-time, meals that act as heal-over-times, clockwork inventions which scout ahead for you, and god knows what else. There seems to be a huge variety of useful tradeskills, nothing like Brewing in EQ which is totally and utterly devoid of value.

I can't wait.