User blog:Alma J Wetzker/One Tamriel and Crafting

One Tamriel makes some interesting changes to the crafting system, crafting needed to be fixed, zos may be on the right track. With the ability to go anywhere, regions no longer have specific ingredients or nodes. It is no longer possible to head to a higher level area to collect more advanced materiels, nor to head to a cleared area to collect older marerials. Every node in every location yields what you are tasked to use for writs presently. The challenge with that is if you want to craft something for a lower level player, you cannot harvest the materials for it. Not possible.

Another quirk, that I hope is an oversight, is that the rewards for completing writs contain shipments of materials of only the beginning type. That is, you only get Iron, Jute, Rawhide or Maple, even if you are crafting in a higher material. That means you are spending time harvesting just to be able to do writs.

Here is the fun bit, all the random critters are now scaled to your level. Everywhere. There used to be some areas where you could go in and harvest, where no critter could do you harm. It was a one-shot to drop them. Conversely, there are no areas where that high sneak is needed, you can fight everything. Unfortunately, that means you have to fight everything. Especially if you need to craft in Hide, Leather, or something in that tree. That means lots of fights that take effort, but yield little experience, to simply gather enough for a writ.

With Alchemy, it is a lot easier to find the solution needed to craft a potion. Ingredients are more evenly distributed now, so some of the rare fungals are now possible to get anywhere. Still rare, but more easily found. Enchanting has always been pretty random, so little has changed there. Food and drink ingredients are still everywhere.

With the changes, it is no longer a problem to advance yourself out of a way to drop off finished writs. You can go anywhere. The real problem there is hitting the 25 quest limit while crossing areas.

Overall, I like the direction of the crafting game. There were things about the way it was that were interesting to try to get around. But it also impacts my play style. To get through the harder boss fights, I would simply level up a bit, then I had a chance of getting through it. With everything scaled to my level, my craft intense characters have no chance at all against a level equal boss. That has stopped all forward progress on all characters for me, and there are no options to move through them. If combat is your thing, nothing really changed, but now everything is more forced into combat styles of play. Ah well, change is the state of life, we adapt.


 * "I served the writs with a smile so bland, and copied all the letters in a big round hand."  --H.M.S. Pinafore