Quest based crafting

[Ceyl]

After seeing the crafting system there has been a lot of complaints about the lack of armor-/weaponcrafting. Personally, I like their system. You can`t balance earned armor against crafted armor - one of them would become obsolete and useless. Quality over quantity, having a small crafting system that works beats having a large system that leads to inflation, farming and boring grinds.

On the other hand it is cool to design your own armor (or weapons), so here is an idea for a quest-based "design-system".

I could see armor/weaponsmithing working only if they involved personalized quests to get the ingredients, that way avoiding mass production of powerfull weapons and armor. But if you still need to do a quest to get a armor piece, why need another player to do the crafting? What I would like to see was something like this:

"Upon reaching level 40, you go to a mastercrafter NPC. Here you can choose your own armordesign (decoration) and armor properties (stat bonusses, special abilities, set bonusses ect.). Do you, for instance, prefere strength over stamina, you design an armor with lots of strength bonusses. Based on your choice you get a chain quest to collect ingredients. Collecting your own armorset should involve PvE, RvR and renown."

After you reach a certain renown level, you can contact a "legendary artisan" to design a new armor set and starting over. This time the quest chain culminates in getting the pendant of Karl Franz/earring of Finubar/nosering of Malekith... (you know what I mean).
This could be a way to design/craft your own epic weapon or armorset without going through the impossible balance issue with a armorcrafting profession. It could also be a way to diversify players and items.

[Renholder]

I support this message.

If they made this quest chain exhaustingly long, think Breastplate of the Chromatic Flight (Sorry, WoW reference), which took awhile to acquire all the ingredients, and add a ton of steps to it.

Kill players on all the different fronts, collect these ingredients from different PC crafters, win these scenarios, do these instances, complete these Public Quests, and kill this King. You're looking at several months or so of doing this quest.

Throw in a high level of customization, both appearance wise and stat-wise, and I think you've got yourself something not only unique, but something that is a clear indicator of accomplishment in WAR. Maybe make additional quests for an entire set.

[Nordug]

Sounds like a great idea.

However if the quests are not balanced perfect there could be alot of whining.
Make the gear too hard to get and people will complain, too easy same deal.
Make it too powerful compared to other gear and people will complain.
Make it too similar to other gear and poeple wont bother to do it, unles, they have alot of spare time :p

I definately like this idea, but devs would have to be very careful when they design it :)

[Pballs]

Maybe if they only had one quest each faction and a very long quest chain, it could have a piece of really awesome gear/set.

[Ceyl]

People will complain nomatter what ;)

There are different ways it could be implemented, but I can only guess what would work best.

[DunRaven]

Great idea and would love to see something like this also :D

Being able to follow a long quest-chain (perhaps from Tome Unlocks even) given by a Master Smith to forge your own 'unique' weapon or armor would be fantastic.. perhaps having possible 'upgrade' quest parts late on also would be even better ;)

[Hericus]

Great idea. Something like that would be really cool to see in the game. One quest per race would be nice for a start. Just so they can test if that's what people really want in the game. The item shouldn't be too powerful. Maybe a little stronger than the highest tier of armour but it should be really unique in design and easily identifiable on the battlefield. Maybe some animated parts on the chests and shoulders :)