Hi all, Narcan here (in-game name). I've read through most of the tradeskill threads here, and I want to try to pull the concerns together and then propose an actual direction rather than just add another "prices are too high" post. Prices are too high, but I don't think that's the real problem, and I don't think tuning them fixes anything.

I want to say up front that I know tradeskill design is genuinely hard. It can't be too easy. It needs bottlenecks somewhere or nothing feels earned. It can't wreck the economy. And I understand the devs want crafters to depend on crafters. Those are all legitimate goals. I just don't think the current system achieves any of them.

The problem in one sentence

The system charges crafters in three currencies — time, materials, and now gold — and pays them in items the game itself has made worthless.

Every lever pulled recently has been on the cost side. Nothing has been done to the payout side. You cannot fix that by re-tuning prices.

The concerns already raised here, consolidated:

The recipe gold gate. A schematic costs multiples of what the finished item vendors for. Casters who can't even afford their spells in their early 20's are being asked to fund a career entry fee at level 5. As Raybane put it in another thread, you can't turn an activity whose whole purpose is to generate value into a gold sink, because the trivially easy way to avoid the loss is to just not do it.
Crafters were made the sink for gold they didn't create. Gold enters the economy from mob drops and vendoring. Adventuring generates it; crafting doesn't. Taxing the entry ticket to crafting doesn't touch the actual faucet.
Learned recipes were wiped and the path forward went invisible. No skill requirement, no ingredient list, no con color on the vendor. People are buying blind and re-buying what they already had.
Crafted gear loses to loot, and twinking finishes the job. With no level requirements on gear, steel becomes baseline twink kit and every tier below the current top is dead within a couple months. Nobody is buying bronze mail shoulders.
Interdependence isn't producing socialization, it's producing second careers. The padded leather strap thread is the proof: seven days advertising, no takers, and the conclusion that it's faster to level a leatherworker yourself. That's not player interaction. That's a toll booth you eventually route around.
Single materials choke multiple skills at once. Wool gates tailoring, leatherworking and first aid simultaneously. People are sitting on stacks of leather they can't use because they're short on cloth. That's backwards.
The grind is measured in thousands. 500 logs for 4-7 skill ups. 3,000+ elderwood planks and still not light blue.
Endless subcombines are not depth. Fasteners, padding, straps, flux, boards. They exist to create bottlenecks, and they do it by eating bank slots and attention rather than by testing skill. Bank space is a real, finite resource and this system spends it carelessly.

I want to be fair to the other side of this. The argument that the economy has too much gold entering and not enough leaving is correct. The inflation analysis some folks have posted here — that player-to-player trade creates no gold, and the real leak is vendoring crafted goods for more than the mats are worth — is also correct. The diagnosis is right. The prescription is what's wrong. The faucet is adventuring — that's where gold enters the world. They put the drain on the crafting bench, which doesn't slow the faucet one bit. It just makes people stop using the bench.

The proposal

Five pillars.

Crafters finish loot instead of competing with it

This is the highest-leverage change in the whole proposal.

Dropped gear above a certain tier drops unfinished — a Pitted Greatsword, an Untanned Drake Vest, an Unstrung Bow. It's usable in that state at meaningfully reduced stats. A crafter of appropriate skill converts it to its finished form, and the quality of that finish depends on their skill and the grade of the reagents they supply.

What this accomplishes:

Crafted output stops losing a fight it can't win against drops, because it is drops.
Demand becomes permanent and self-renewing. Loot drops forever, so crafters are needed forever.
Twinking can't kill it. The handed-down sword was already finished by a crafter once, and the next one still needs finishing.
Crafters are relevant at every level, because loot exists at every level.
It creates a real, recurring gold sink — finishing fees and repair on finished gear — paid by the people who actually hold gold. Adventurers and raiders. Not a level 10 trying to start a career.

That last point matters. This is a better gold sink than recipe prices in every respect: it's bigger, it recurs forever, it scales with wealth, and it's paid voluntarily by people who feel like they're getting something.

Quality variance replaces the subcombine chain

Delete the fastener/padding/strap/flux/board layer entirely.

Replace it with a quality roll on the single combine. Same recipe, five output grades, weighted by:

your skill relative to the recipe's trivial
the grade of the raw materials you put in
your tools and workstation

Depth now comes from how well you made it, not how many boxes you clicked. Bank space is reclaimed immediately. And the system gets deeper, not shallower — being a good crafter starts to mean something visible on the item.

Pair this with graded raws: a vein yields Poor / Standard / Fine copper ore. Gathering skill finally has a payoff instead of being a pure access gate, and a master gatherer becomes someone worth knowing.

Interdependence as a bonus, never as a toll booth

Any crafter can produce their own basic inputs from raws — slowly, and capped at Standard quality. A specialist's input raises your output's quality ceiling.

Collaboration becomes an upgrade path instead of a wall.

Under this, the strap problem doesn't happen. You make serviceable straps yourself, hit a ceiling, and then genuinely want a leatherworker — and you can pay a premium, because the finished item is worth more. That's the socialization the design is reaching for, and critically it still works at low population, which is the exact failure mode the current design has no answer for.

Also: no single material should gate three skills. Cloth needs a gathered source — shearable mobs, flax nodes, something — so wool stops being a simultaneous chokepoint for tailoring, leatherworking and first aid.

Tradeskilling as its own sphere, with mastery caps

Craft progression is already independent of character level — keep it that way, and cut the gold dependency too. A level 1 can take blacksmithing to 300 today, and that's fine. The new coupling introduced by this patch is financial: recipes are bought with gold, and gold comes from adventuring. That means craft progression now runs on a currency crafting doesn't generate. Recipes earned through crafting itself (turn-in quests, drops, discovery) keep the sphere self-contained.

Skill-ups from achievement, not repetition. Large skill awards for your first successful combine on a new recipe, and for the first time you hit each quality grade on it. Small trickle for repeats. Nobody should need 3,000 planks. The grind gets replaced by a ladder of "make something better than you made last time," which is actually fun.

Mastery pool, FFXI style. Everyone can take everything to journeyman (₁₅₀). Past that you spend from a limited pool — master one, maybe two. Reallocation is slow and costly but possible.

This is the only version of "limit tradeskills" I've seen that works. A hard 2-skill cap breaks rogues who need poison making and archers who need fletching. A soft mastery cap doesn't — you can still dabble in everything you need for your class, you just can't be the server's best at all of it. Make the pool account-wide per server and the alt-mule loophole closes too.

Recipes are earned, not purchased
Tier 1-2: free, always visible, with skill requirement, ingredient list and con color displayed. Entry to a career is not a paywall.
Tier 3: crafting guild turn-in quests. "Bring me five Fine-grade iron bucklers and I'll teach you the steel pattern." This is simultaneously a material sink, a modest gold sink, a reason to craft items you'd otherwise skip, and — most importantly — a goal instead of a tax. Have the guild NPC sell the turned-in goods at prices that don't undercut players.
Tier 4: drops, rare gathers, exploration. The fun chase. This is where paid or rare recipes should have started.
Two things this depends on

Discovery. Player vendor stalls, or at minimum a server-wide WTB/WTS channel or board. The strap thread proves a market can't function on a local-range auction channel — the demand existed, it just couldn't find the supply.

Protecting low and mid tier demand. Either level requirements on gear, or binding on equip for crafted items. Without one of the two, twinking permanently kills every crafted tier except the current top one, and no amount of crafting redesign survives that.

Why this isn't a moonshot

None of it needs new tech and can be introduced in phases.

Quality tiers use the existing con/trivial framework.
Unfinished loot uses the existing item and combine systems.
Turn-in quests ride on the current quest system.

The mastery pool is the one piece that needs new plumbing — account-scoped state and a cross-character check on skill-up. Not enormous, but it's real work, which is why it belongs in the last phase rather than the first.

The phases:

Phase 1: Quality variance + subcombine removal. Immediate relief, minimal economy risk, huge quality-of-life win.
Phase 2: Unfinished loot. The payout-side fix.
Phase 3: Mastery caps. At a wipe boundary.

And it addresses the inflation concern better than the current patch does. Gold leaves the economy continuously, through finishing fees and repairs paid by people who have gold — instead of being extracted once from a level 10 who doesn't, and who responds by dropping the tradeskill entirely.

Crafting should be fun and it should be useful. Right now it's neither, and the direction of travel is away from both. I'd rather see the system aimed at what it pays out than at what it costs.

Interested to hear what other crafters think, and where this breaks.