Guild Wars 2

I suggest changing the tooltips of crafting material to reflect all uses of the item, thus including automatically learned recipes and bought recipes as well, not only discovery recipes like it is now.

When the game was released and one had to figure out which items to put into the inventory to discover recipes, the specific tooltip had it’s benefits I guess, but already back then the tooltip system was not explained ingame (I think) and thus tended to be misleading. Now that we are able to discover out of the account vault, I’d say the tooltip becomes even more important for profession requirements in general, so one knows what to think of an item and for which professions it might be worth collecting them.

I am not sure whether people are even aware of the current system, for instance the english wiki has a bug note at Glob of Ectoplasm about missing professions.

There was a previous ANet reply in which it was stated that the inclusion of non discoverable uses in the material tooltip may lead to player frustration as they believe there is a discoverable recipe that they haven’t found yet. Doesn’t feel like there’s a win-win solution here.

That explanation seems odd to me, but thanks.

As said, I don’t think people know the current system, which should imply confusion and frustration too.

Yes, the current system makes no sense. You see a material that doesn’t list any of your crafts and sell it in the TP or to a merchant, only to find out later that it is used by your craft(s) after all.

People can already see which materials are used for discovery because those will be the only ones appearing in the discovery section of the crafting window.

The tooltip should be a reliable source of information about whether or not the material is useful to a given craft.

If this is “by design”, then it’s a design / usability bug.

For reference, this is the post I meant. This was before the discover tab also displayed items in the bank, so the context have changed since. Worth re-thinking.

LinseyMurdock.4165:

Tooltips only report disciplines that the item can be used to DISCOVER recipes for, it does not report recipes that are unlocked through an item. So for instance, the Godskull recipes are all unlocked through a purchased item, so the skulls don’t report anything to the tooltip because they are only used for those recipes. Basically, just because a crafting material doesn’t list any disciplines in the tooltip, doesn’t mean it’s not used for anything. We did this for a few reasons, many because it allows us to have hidden unlockable recipes and because it actually reduced confusion a lot. We were finding that if we reported all recipes to the tooltip, even the ones that players couldn’t discover, it meant that players were spending a lot of time frustrated that they couldn’t figure out the ingredients for that last recipe or didn’t understand why it wasn’t showing up in the discovery pane.

In case it’s possible with manageable effort, one could include automatic recipes and the buyable ones from the profession master NPC next to the crafting station.

This would exclude the hard-to-find uses in a recipe you only can buy from a specific heart-karma-NPC, but wouldn’t leave out recipes that everyone uses. Especially items like ectoplasm, which partly even have to be used to master a profession (if I am not mistaken), shouldn’t leave out those professions in the tooltip.