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Thank you for the feedback, Hambrick. While we don’t have answers to all of your questions, we can offer some clarity.
We just completed a tuning pass on all reagent difficulty and crafting difficulties and these changes will show up in the next Beta build. While still subject to change, these are real values that are representative of our intent and we would appreciate feedback on them once they are in your hands.
The design philosophy for crafting difficulty in The War Within is that a well-honed crafter who is fully specialized, equipped with the best crafting tools, and using Quality 3 reagents can guarantee maximum quality on every craft, with a few targeted exceptions on certain non-equipment crafts. Concentration is intended to offset shortcomings in any of these variables.
However, one major change coinciding with this approach is a significant increase to the difficulty curve of acquiring higher quality reagents. In Dragonflight, there was a skill threshold where you graduated out of Q1 reagents from gathering completely, defaulting to Quality 2 with the occasional Q3. Now, you will continue to gain Q1 even when fully optimized, but your progress in your profession shifts those chances gradually in favor of Q3 as expected. Additionally, intermediate crafted reagents (ingots, bolts, etc) will also have much higher crafting difficulties relative to Dragonflight.
The reagent contribution toward a recipe’s final crafting difficulty has increased relative to Dragonflight. Reagents are now 40% of a recipe’s difficulty up from 25%, so the impact of lower quality reagents will be greater.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the recipe reagent costs have not yet been tuned. While some recipes are more final than others, you can expect significant changes to the costs of recipes across the board in a couple weeks which will better represent our intent.
Concentration’s tuning pass is still a couple weeks away, but we agree. Additionally, Ingenuity’s refund is being adjusted to a percentage rather than a complete refund. This change affords us the opportunity to provide modifiers to the amount of concentration returned in the form of specialization bonuses or finishing reagents, while ensuring that concentration remains a finite, marketable resource. This is behavior is not yet present in Beta and the tooltip does not reflect this intent.
Concentration can also be tuned separately per profession so consumable based professions will lean toward generous tuning due to their bulk crafting nature.
Profession Knowledge (and Artisan’s Acuity) acquisition are tied closely to NPC Crafting Orders, which are not yet ready for testing. Progression is indeed capped per week, however there is catch-up built into the system that turns on pretty early. We anticipate there to be some slight variance in total knowledge points across any sampling of players at any given time, but an invested crafter should be able to catch-up within a couple points as long as they have made an effort to diversify their recipe list and routinely engage with NPC Crafting Orders.
We’re excited to share more details about this feature in the near future.
Specialization trees are in their near-final state across all professions. Most of the work that remains involves fixing up some obvious data errors and some minor tuning adjustments. We do not expect any significant changes to tree layout or perk design going forward.
Regarding Alchemy, there was a third Potion node early in development that we simply weren’t happy with, and ultimately cut. We acknowledge that this left the Potion tree feeling light on content, but have no current plans to expand it.
Artisan’s Acuity will be used in greater amounts for Recrafting than in Dragonflight, as well as being used for most crafts intended to improve your profession (such as profession equipment as you mentioned). Additionally, it will be used to purchase most vendor recipes. A repeatable sink for Artisan’s Acuity is a bag that contains a random assortment of reagents and a small chance at rare drop recipes.
A small amount Artisan’s Acuity will continue to come from knowledge acquisition as before, however Thomas Bright will not be offering a weekly sum of Acuity this time. The currency’s main source will be NPC Crafting Orders. A couple large sums will be offered a week, with many smaller offerings of Acuity on a more frequent cadence.