Sazu wrote:CRAFTED items are MORE hard-earned, take more time and effort to make, and they should be better than basin enchanted items.
Arguments could be made for both sides of this and I'm not going to address that. Instead, I would prefer to see Enchantment act more like a crafting skill. It already does, to a certain extent - it has DCs (success percentages), consequences for failure (destruction of item; and loss of XP), and a way to make one better at it (enchantment focuses; godsaves).
One key difference: instead of ingredients, raw cash which can be ground out of literally anyone and anything on the server.
I have to make a concerted effort to go to place X to acquire ingredient Y to make item Z. Perhaps I even have to find a crafter of another discipline to process Y into Processed Y, to make item Z of my own discipline. Going to that place means knowing that you can even get Y from there, which means interaction. Furthermore it requires knowing what's needed to get there, survive the things there, and get out alive, and doing this repeatedly. It takes, at the very least, some level of skill, and oftentimes interaction.
Enchanters, by contrast, need a pile of cash which can be gotten from places A-Z, the only key differences being the amount and the time. Similarly, you can keep throwing this resource, which doesn't discriminate in its source and can be acquired through actions unconnected to your discipline (you don't go out to acquire Enchanting Gold, just generic gold. The same resource you get for handing over a Leader's Head is used for enchanting and buying lenses, for example). You only need to procure the item to be enchanted (which can at times be literally farmed from trash loot), throw this universal reagent of cash at it, and hope it works. There is very little actual penalty for this, though it can be a frustrating and time-consuming process in and of itself that non-Enchanters often don't appreciate. I certainly didn't have much respect for their woes 'til I played one. The process, however, is simpler, even if the "understanding" makes it something more of an art and science to get your head around, certainly compared to "here's a DC, here's a list of ingredients, here's what it makes".
tl;dr: Crafting is easy to understand, hard to see through, and time consuming.
Enchanting is more of a skill, the actual process is simple, and generally quicker.
So, what's my suggestion? Turn Enchantment into a parallel Crafting Skill influenced as it is right now by random chance, Enchantment focuses, godsaves, and RNGesus. But furthermore, introduce ingredients to this. Your typical magely fare, a brand new suite of chemicals, bizarre concoctions, seemingly-random objects, alchemical (as in lead-to-gold style thematics) thingies, and so on and so forth. Skilled enchanters (via spell focus and godsaves) are likely to use less of them in their efforts, or save some if/when they fail. But perhaps most importantly, these Reagents should, particularly for high-level enchanting, require high-DC crafting skills to create.
That Dragon's Blood needs to be carefully processed to remove impurities (Alchemy), that Beholder Eye has to be crystalised (Art Crafting), those spirits need to be distilled into aqua vitae (Cooking), lead fume has to be gathered from the flues of a smelter (Forging), and so on and so forth.
I could develop this idea further if there's any interest, but I also think a large part of this should be the discovery of Formulae (recipes) through sheer trial, error, and experimentation, rather than a known Book of Trade. Ravenloft has a somewhat similar but also hilariously dangerous twist on this.
Hunter548 wrote:Instead of making enchantment worse, making crafting worthwhile.
Quite right. Crafting atm is a decade outdated, and perhaps my entire idea delineated above could be consigned to scrap and instead raise the bar on Crafted goods to somewhere approaching what can be done with basins. Although I do think more Modular Crafting would go some way to prevent crafted goods that are too generic to be useful and too specific to be made, which is a serious problem with the current matrix. Or of course items that are so woefully underpowered to be absolutely useless, and never used for over a decade (Warded Leather Suits).
