Crafted items

Crafting UI. Alpha-1 screenshot. Image credit: Guild:Overlord

Crafted items (also referred to as Completed items, Finished goods, or Final products) are items produced by crafter artisans using crafting stations.

• Completed items can be accessed by players in warehouses at any node regardless of citizenship or housing ownership.
• Crafted gear is considered best-in-slot in Ashes of Creation.
  • Previously it was stated that crafted items will be on-par with boss dropped items.
  • Crafters will be able to assign different skills/abilities and stats on gear.
    • Master crafters will be able to influence several (but not all) stats on their crafted items.

Crafted gear in the game is the best gear... One thing that I'm not a fan of is that you develop a crafting system in a game and you've spent a lot of time making this from a material and resource perspective. All the tables that you can receive, all the connectivity in the economy and how crafting is associated with the game; and then you undermine the crafting entirely by presenting a separate route of gear acquisition that is on-par with the crafting efforts. So here you have these people who are acquiring all of the resources getting, all the recipes, leveling up their professions and then everything they make is less or equal to anything you could just have chosen the easier path of and gone down the questing and received the best gear. So what we do focus on is that crafters make the best shit. Excuse me, the best things. – Steven Sharif

• The rarity of crafted items will be commensurate with the effort required to gather, process and craft the items.
  • Stats on crafted items will vary based on the item's rarity.
  • Gear appearance is influenced by the rarity of the crafted item.

That plays into our crafting system in and of itself. The idea is for those stats to be variables that can be dictated based on the mastery level of the particular crafter; and the higher they become a master of those professions, whether it be for armor or for weapons or for accessories, they're going to have some agency and put their mark on essentially what items they're introducing into the economy. – Steven Sharif

• Crafters are able to influence what their crafted items will look like.
  • At the moment, harnessing corruption to warp items into demonic or decayed things is not on the cards.
  • A crafter's name is embedded in the items they craft.

We believe that every item that exists in the world should in some way reflect its creator. As such, there will be extreme versatility in our crafting system – giving crafters the ability to create unique items that represent their strengths and weaknesses.

Skills and stats on gear

Crafters will be able to assign different skills/abilities and stats on gear.

Crafters will be able to 'rejigger' stat blocks; and there will be a couple of other ways to move things around to create both the look and the stat block that you're looking for. It's not always going to be easy. There will be a lot of challenges involved with that. But the goal is to give you guys the option to customize your gear the way you want them to be. – Jeffrey Bard

• Master crafters will be able to influence several (but not all) stats on their crafted items.
  • Stats on crafted items will vary based on the item's rarity.
• There will also be methods of moving stat blocks around but this won't necessarily be an easy task.
• All gear will be able to be assigned any stat.

This section contains potentially outdated information from Alpha-1 testing.

Gear is broken down into Core Stats and Additional Stats.

Gear enhancement

Gear enhancements are possible both during and after an item is crafted.

There is a combination of systems that take an item to its max potential. Players will need to contribute in a certain number of these systems to reach max. Some of the systems are an either/or situation. – Kory Rice

• Crafting recipes can be enhanced by adding higher rarity or different crafting materials into their selectable crafting slots at crafting stations.

• Enchantment scrolls and tempering allow gear to be enhanced post-crafting.

• Gems and sockets enable the addition of additional waterfall stats to items.

• The bulk of a weapon's power comes from its crafting recipe and the materials used in its construction.

The contribution of materials to crafting an item results in advancing the rarity of that item. Now, that doesn't exclude players who don't have the legendary or the higher quality contributed resources from progressing their common item up the rarity tree through enchantments such as scroll enchanting or through tempering the gear. Both of those can affect the quality and the rarity of the gear that you produce, but by contributing the resources during the crafting process you are getting a head start with the higher quality item and now are less dependent on those other avenues to achieve that, which might be again a different vertical space of progression that you don't have as good of access to. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Runes/Power stones are potential methods for enhancing weapons.
• Enchantment stones are potential rewards for performance over six month PvP seasons. These grant temporary PvP-focused benefits to gear (via a socketing system).

Enchanting

Enchanting is not an artisan profession in its own right. Scribes create scrolls that can be utilized by different professions to create enchantments relating to that profession.

• Enchantment scrolls can be sold on the open market.

• Enchanting does not increase an item's level requirement.

You don't really push a particular item's level requirement or the identity of that item. You can enhance it, you can add enchantments to it, but it's still the item it is. – Steven Sharif

Best in slot items

A design goal for Ashes of Creation is to not have overarching best-in-slot items (BiS) that are meta for all situations.

• What is considered best-in-slot is based on a character's role and the type of encounter they are facing.

There's still going to be customization within realms for your archetype that you will want to spec into, knowing you're going into a certain fight, or into a certain raid, or into a certain war, or whatever it may be: and you may want to spec specifically and gear specifically and have people set up in a way that makes the most sense for that. – Margaret Krohn

• Crafted items are considered best-in-slot in Ashes of Creation. Previously it was stated that crafted items will be on-par with best-in-slot items.

• Instanced content will contain scripted and difficult boss fights that drop gear, but the gear drops will not be best-in-slot. These can only be found in the open world.

Item rarities

Item rarities in Ashes of Creation.

• Poor (legacy pre-alpha-2 rarity).
• Common.
• Uncommon.
• Rare.
• Heroic.
• Epic.
• Legendary.
• Artifact.

Legendary items

There is a small RNG chance of looting rare and legendary items or crafting materials from mobs based on the level, status and type of mob. This also applies to harvesting resources with a gathering profession.

• There is a much higher chance that materials and unique recipes are dropped that can be used to craft items of equitable value.
• Legendary equipment is only dropped by Legendary world bosses.
  • Legendary equipment will have a roughly 6-12% improvement in base stats, subject to testing and balancing.

At each stage from Gatherer to Processor to Crafter you are required to have certain prerequisites before those elite types of materials can be essentially gathered, processed, or crafted. – Steven Sharif

• Gatherers must have high quality tools to gather rare resources.
• Processors must have high tier processing buildings on their freehold to produce rare materials.
• Crafters must also satisfy certain prerequisites to craft legendary equipment.

The amount of effort needed and interdependencies across the different types of players – between raiders and PvPers and crafters and even role players and the taverns and businesses: the processors and gatherers – all of those systems will likely have a component that lends toward creating or crafting that legendary item... We want to stay away from the highly RNGd system, and instead take our multiple progression paths that we are offering the players and put the construction components for achieving these legendary items within them so it encourages communities to work together because it's going to be difficult for just one person by themselves to gather everything. Not to say that they couldn't in an economic sense, by buying those components, that's possible. But achieving them from a time investment standpoint we want it to be considerably less RNG focussed. – Steven Sharif

Certain legendary items may be limited to one per server realm at any given time.

• If the player character leaves the server then the item will become available for acquisition through whatever means it was acquired previously.

There are absolutely legendary items and they're not items that are attained easily nor are they granted out in a volume. There might even be items that are single items that will exist on the server realm at any given time.

A legendary weapon is easily distinguished by its visual appearance.

It will be a very ornate and detailed weapon, more so than any other weapon or piece of equipment in the game. It will also include some awesome looking effects that won't too gaudy, they won't be too bright and shiny so that it doesn't look good, but they will be subtle and people will notice it and know wow that guy has this weapon. – Steven Sharif

Legendary items are not intended to be temporary.

• A notable exception to this is Flying mounts.

The fact there is only one of them... or very very few of them depending on what it is. I think that in and of itself is a balance component right and you need to make sure that the players who are striving for those legendary things and who are devoting the time energy, resources in order to achieve them are accurately rewarded... We do not intend on having legendary items that are temporary. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Discovery of legendary items will unlock further chapters of the Lore.

Gear appearance

Alpha-1 female plate armor 3D render.

We want to be realistic with the application of particular types of armor, such as plate armor. In this regard for the different sexes there's a fine line that has to be drawn between accentuating the form of the sex as well as making it somewhat realistic and actually applicable to the environment. – Steven Sharif

• Gear is intended to be realistic in appearance.

• There will not be "oversized" weapons.

• Armor will not be overly sexual in appearance.

  I'm more of the mind that it wouldn't really serve a purpose to have bikini plate armor, just in like reality, if you're going to have armor, it should be protective. I think from a fashion statement is enjoyable for some people, but it's a an immersive issue. – Steven Sharif

  • Some armor and costumes will be more revealing than others, but there will not be nudity in the game.

  There might be sliders, but there are not gonna be naked sliders. – Steven Sharif

• Armor will take on a racial appearance. Weapons will scale in size based on race.

Each race is getting its custom geo pieces, which then will share thematic components such as color palette, attachments, design filigree. Those types of things will get shared across the geo but generally you're going to see unique races with unique geo. – Steven Sharif

• The appearance of crafted gear is influenced by its rarity.
  • Particle effects are used to denote the importance and rarity of some weapons.

• Crafters are able to influence what their crafted items look like.

• Cosmetics can be used by all races but there may be slight variations to make them work with the body builds of each race.

• Dye cosmetics can be used to change gear colors.

• Helmet display can be toggled on and off.

• Hair will likely be masked if helmet display is toggled on.

• Weapons are able to be sheathed.

Appearance slots/Transmogs

Alpha-2 plate armor set 3D renders. 3D model by Jan-Allen Cauton.

Gear will have appearance slots (Transmutation/Transmog/cosmetic slots) that are used to copy the appearance of an item (in some cases).

We do have a transmog system that is planned. It's not in yet of course, but we have plans around it; and our armor sets are crafted in such a way to facilitate that, both from a dye perspective as well as to swap individual pieces of mesh appearances with other mesh types. – Steven Sharif

• There are rules when applying cosmetics to specific items, unlike costumes, which don't have level restrictions.
• Cosmetic slots can be toggled on or off on their character by the player.

Cosmetics, whether purchased from the shop or earned in game, are an important component of MMORPGS I personally enjoy; and there's a lot of collectors out there who spend a great deal of time either in-game achieving these things or spend money purchasing them from the cosmetic only marketplace; and we don't want to demean or reduce that achievement or that expenditure. So it's going to be situational where the default appearance will be applied and can be activated. – Steven Sharif

• A default player appearance may be automatically applied during sieges, PvP events, or other large-scale battles to improve client-side performance.

When you enter into a siege environment, when you enter into a PvP event you are then able to utilize the default player appearance perspective, which removes cosmetics and removes specific gear visuals and instead gives a basic appearance for each armor type, whether it be cloth, plate, or leather. This obviously cuts down on the rendering performance issues that can occur in high density battles. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Crafting
• Artisan classes
• Quest rewards