Everquest II Tradeskills

Not one week has passed since the launch of Everquest 2, and I have already put my first character on hold for a while, because he was gimped. He made the inexcusable mistake of leaving the Isle of Refuge, thereby ruining his crafter career. My only excuse is that I couldn't know that, this is all due to fundamental changes to the crafting system since the beta.

There are simply not enough resource nodes in the newbie zones of Qeynos and Freeport. Crafters now must skill up their harvesting skills, foresting, mining, gathering, trapping, etc., and that separately. And you can only do that by harvesting in the newbie zones, where you will literally need hundreds of each resource node type before you have enough skill to be able to harvest in the tier 2 zones Antonica and Commonlands.

As crafting is pretty essential in Everquest 2, you are competing for these resource nodes with hundreds of other players. You often find two people trying to harvest the same node. So most of the time, you are running around fruitlessly, and if you make 1 skill point per hour you count yourself lucky.

Especially frustrating are the wholesaler quests, where you need to gather a number of resources and bring them to the quest giver. These quests take many, many hours, for little direct reward. But you need to do them to increase your faction with the wholesaler, because otherwise you can only buy the most basic tradeskill goods from him. It is rumored that if you do enough of these quests, you would finally be able to buy the mythical "suspension", which is used to make the basic fighter app3 skill upgrades. But nobody got that far yet, and fighters are now the only class without skill upgrades in the game.

If you want to make a crafter, you need to stay on the Isle of Refuge, hopping from instance to instance, and harvest stuff there until you are maxed out in all of your harvesting skills. Of course that is getting harder and harder too, as more people realize how impossible it is to find resources in the city newbie zones, and make new characters to stay on the isles.

A totally unbalanced system, much worse than the system that was used throughout beta. I simply cannot understand what they hoped to achieve by letting people beta test one game, and then rewriting major parts of it before release. There are some good ideas in the new tradeskill system, but it is realized in a horribly half-baked way, where it only serves to frustrate players.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:57 PM Permanent Link