One aspect of EQ2 tradeskilling that I have always loved is that tradeskills are completely disconnected from adventuring. You can be an adventurer without being a tradeskiller and completely vice-versa. Some tradeskill quests can be highly dangerous without being a high-level adventurer, but that’s part of the fun.
World of Warcraft crafting requires adventuring levels to reach certain tradeskill levels, and then has recipes which drop from high-level instances that are bind-on-pickup, so you can’t make some items without running endgame instances. And then also limits which tradeskills you might choose by making the items you make bind-on-pickup, so if you’re a mage you must also be a tailor to make some of your own gear.
Rift didn’t have required adventuring for tradeskilling, and that was good.
- Apprentices
You could purchase all recipes, run all missions and earn tokens for rare recipes even as a low-level adventurer. Travelling for the missions could be lethal, but it was possible. But then they also had bind-on-pickup recipes that dropped in expert instances, so again, as a pure tradeskiller you were cut off from being able to meet you the best gear.
In my opinion, this is a failing model. While some people love to do both adventuring and tradeskilling, many only care about one or the other – or choose to do one or the other on different alts. A good tradeskilling model might make it difficult to tradeskill without adventuring, but should never make it impossible.
Well, EQ2 just added their first adventuring-required tradeskill artifact. The new tradeskill apprentices drop in high-level instances. Now they’re not bind-on-pickup, so they can be bought on the broker, but adventurers have a huge advantage, as do tradeskillers who choose to buy gold (through legal marketplace trades or otherwise). The point being that the apprentices are not something that as a tradeskiller I can earn through questing or grinding.
And to me after putting in all the days, months and years I have learning every tradeskill ability I can, that isn’t acceptable.
Update: I had meant to withdraw this entry. After a lot of thought, I decided that tradeskill apprentices as high-level adventuring rewards is not all that much worse than advanced recipe books being adventuring drops. Somewhat worse in that the apprentices teach extremely powerful recipes, and advanced books aren’t especially uncommon (and are mostly questable now), but within the same parameters; an unlimited potential supply that will eventually filter down to any tradeskiller who needs.
And then I discovered listening to Holly on EQ2Talk (Episode 44) that there are actually two new tradeskill apprentices: one is an adventuring drop, the other is an adventuring quest reward. To me that’s completely unacceptable. Quest rewards are one-time items, and it means that tradeskillers have a very limited supply, being completely dependent on an adventurer willing to give up a piece of unique loot.
So, yeah, I’m still going to claim that I don’t like the way EQ2 is moving.