So, after mulling over a lot of the recipes for end game equipment, its clear that grinding for karma, gold, resource nodes and skill points is the main way of achieving the necessary ingredients.
I think this can change a little.
The Short of it—-
Crafting ingredients should obtained through a more randomized process. For instance, Rare ingredients should be found at the end of a complicated DE, or off randomly spawned rare-mobs, or randomly spawned DEs, in addition to the time commitment necessary to farm massive amounts of karma/exp/nodes.
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On the surface, what a.net is asking for in the current crafting system is a time commitment. There are benefits and negatives of the current system:
Lets break it down a bit more: The current system …
1) Allows all players to farm at the same time
2) Allows a.net to funnel farming into karma/exp/item. In general, the most efficient farming would be to farm repeatable events that have high chances at dropping high tier materials (bags), or world bosses to get high tier lvl 80 weapons/armor.
While this is well and good, and gives players a ‘quest’ or goal to shoot for each time they log on, it becomes extremely daunting due to the lack of randomization and exclusion of luck.
Gold translates into a lot of things in this game. Essentially, gold is a way to mark your time investment put into the game. The more you have, the more you played the game. ~Some drops allow you to boost this value a lot faster than others, but in the end it should even out.
You see, when big guilds get together to focus on completing a task quickly, they can pool their resources to effectively dump, ‘time invested’ into one players lap, excelling the process.
Now why am I bringing this up? Because gold can be farmed throughout every facet of the game. Looking at the crafting process in a different light, it is essentially a really LONNNG experience bar that very slowly increases based purely on time invested into playing the game.
The current crafting system, relative to how players obtain ingredients, focuses solely on that concept.
I don’t think thats right.
The lottery system, ala Diablo, and many other games, adds a lot of flair to the item grind. Utilizing DE’s and implementing a random rare-DE system would add even MORE flair to the system.
Rather than farm 250 rare ores, which might take 20 hours of played time, there should be a rare spawn that comes once every 10 hours (in a random location) that can reward an item of similar value.
This not only makes traveling in different zones more important, but is fun to discover, and mimics hitting the lottery, while providing unique content.
This kind of ingredient hunting still requires a time investment, but offers the reward in a different type of fashion. Systems can be put in place to ensure that not everyone that takes part in the rare spawn DE can receive the rare item, based on tiered prereq system. For instance, you stumble upon a rare DE, you get to the end, a vendor spawns for a short while. Everyone can buy some semi-rare ingredients…but only those with the pre-req item can start a unique conversation to purchase the REALLY rare item.
This kind of idea creates a more immersive and surreal experience in the game world. Players are simultaneously rewarded with both content and progression, which is what DE’s were originally intended to do.