Being overly fixated on crafting in any game and probably having a masochistic streak, I jumped in on Smithing ASAP. Here's a brief rundown of my experience :
- First char I made went for the refining perks and tried to smith through refining, mostly. Well... It does not really work. Refining is like playing whack-a-mole, the way it works. You're severely limited by charcoal and stamina (which I find extremely poorly designed and implemented, but enough has been said on that in other threads) plus the way it works (take 2 of this, send one up and one to the BOTTOM of the pile) is an endless treadmill. Plus you get very little XP and almost no unlocks.
-Second char, I decide to take the unlock perks and use companions for refining. We become an intinerant circus circling the whole world for wood. Because you get out of wood, fast. All of the world's wood I mostly smelt everything gotten in battle, make my companions refine, forge and re-smelt weapons. Progression is ok.
-At some point, something wacky happens : I decide to craft a cutting polearm for myself to up polearm a bit (that char went 2-handed). I get a large boost to smithing xp. When wanting to equip the thing, I look at the price... 58686 Gold Pieces !
- From that point, I went the world around, buying all the wood and emptying the coffers of every city. Craft a bunch of these sort-of-Voulges, sell as many as they could afford, make my companions re-smelt the rest etc... I'm sitting on 4.3 millions Gold Pieces pretty soon, even after buying every high-end piece of equipment I could find and hundreds of horses. I'm also capped at 302 Smithing. (!)
- Speaking about re-smelting those things : They made my companions' smithing skyrocket. The first they smelt often gave 5 to 15 points. Even at more than 100, they would gain a point. More often than not, crafting one would also give me one or two unlocks.
- And here's another out-of-whack thing : If I change that design to a thrusting one (same tier, difficulty somewhat higher) the price goes down to 1028 gold... And it gives very little xp. If I change the design to all high-end tier parts, to around 200 difficulty, the price and xp value goes even lower ! (around 800 GP)
My guess is that the value of the weapon gets calculated mostly from its stats. Since that cutting polearm is very long and does very high cutting damage, it gets an absurd price. And XP / Unlocks are probably predicated on that. So if you go for the longest and hardest hitting thing you can craft, you can probably max smithing and break the economy rather fast. I plan to retry that, as an experiment with a new char.
A few other conclusions :
- Refining is really whack-a-mole. Make one ingot degrade one level and one go up, not fall to the bottom of the pile. Or better, make it just move one up. There's just not enough Hardwood around for more than one smith in the world with that system. Smithing is already a grind without that treadmill. Plus the refining perks are a player trap.
- Prices are utterly ****ed up. You already must have guessed from what I've reported above, right ? I don't know what formula was used, but it's bad. Plus, I suspect, seeing how I ended up with different weapons I tried with the exact same price (58999 now ,with Beta 1.20) , that this goes actually beyond that and I've hit a price cap.
- Too many parts / Not enough unlocks. I'm capped at 302 Smithing with 4.3 million GP. I've smithed hundreds of these high-end weapons. I still lack between half and a third of the parts. And most of those are, in the end, largely cosmetic. Further, since I don't gain xp, I get unlocks only on "fine" or "legendary" weapons.
- Extra bonuses need to be calculated otherwise. Whenever you get bonuses, they're 1 or 2 points, regardless of the stat. Well, going from 101 to 103 speed is a nice boost. Same for length. Going from 149 cut to 150 is absolutely irrelevant.
Here it is. That said, I'm having fun with the game and I will try other things and maybe report on them
- First char I made went for the refining perks and tried to smith through refining, mostly. Well... It does not really work. Refining is like playing whack-a-mole, the way it works. You're severely limited by charcoal and stamina (which I find extremely poorly designed and implemented, but enough has been said on that in other threads) plus the way it works (take 2 of this, send one up and one to the BOTTOM of the pile) is an endless treadmill. Plus you get very little XP and almost no unlocks.
-Second char, I decide to take the unlock perks and use companions for refining. We become an intinerant circus circling the whole world for wood. Because you get out of wood, fast. All of the world's wood I mostly smelt everything gotten in battle, make my companions refine, forge and re-smelt weapons. Progression is ok.
-At some point, something wacky happens : I decide to craft a cutting polearm for myself to up polearm a bit (that char went 2-handed). I get a large boost to smithing xp. When wanting to equip the thing, I look at the price... 58686 Gold Pieces !
- From that point, I went the world around, buying all the wood and emptying the coffers of every city. Craft a bunch of these sort-of-Voulges, sell as many as they could afford, make my companions re-smelt the rest etc... I'm sitting on 4.3 millions Gold Pieces pretty soon, even after buying every high-end piece of equipment I could find and hundreds of horses. I'm also capped at 302 Smithing. (!)
- Speaking about re-smelting those things : They made my companions' smithing skyrocket. The first they smelt often gave 5 to 15 points. Even at more than 100, they would gain a point. More often than not, crafting one would also give me one or two unlocks.
- And here's another out-of-whack thing : If I change that design to a thrusting one (same tier, difficulty somewhat higher) the price goes down to 1028 gold... And it gives very little xp. If I change the design to all high-end tier parts, to around 200 difficulty, the price and xp value goes even lower ! (around 800 GP)
My guess is that the value of the weapon gets calculated mostly from its stats. Since that cutting polearm is very long and does very high cutting damage, it gets an absurd price. And XP / Unlocks are probably predicated on that. So if you go for the longest and hardest hitting thing you can craft, you can probably max smithing and break the economy rather fast. I plan to retry that, as an experiment with a new char.
A few other conclusions :
- Refining is really whack-a-mole. Make one ingot degrade one level and one go up, not fall to the bottom of the pile. Or better, make it just move one up. There's just not enough Hardwood around for more than one smith in the world with that system. Smithing is already a grind without that treadmill. Plus the refining perks are a player trap.
- Prices are utterly ****ed up. You already must have guessed from what I've reported above, right ? I don't know what formula was used, but it's bad. Plus, I suspect, seeing how I ended up with different weapons I tried with the exact same price (58999 now ,with Beta 1.20) , that this goes actually beyond that and I've hit a price cap.
- Too many parts / Not enough unlocks. I'm capped at 302 Smithing with 4.3 million GP. I've smithed hundreds of these high-end weapons. I still lack between half and a third of the parts. And most of those are, in the end, largely cosmetic. Further, since I don't gain xp, I get unlocks only on "fine" or "legendary" weapons.
- Extra bonuses need to be calculated otherwise. Whenever you get bonuses, they're 1 or 2 points, regardless of the stat. Well, going from 101 to 103 speed is a nice boost. Same for length. Going from 149 cut to 150 is absolutely irrelevant.
Here it is. That said, I'm having fun with the game and I will try other things and maybe report on them