Reworking Skill XP

[Arrowsden]

Proposal

As the name implies, I think that gaining skill XP should be changed up a little. Each of the 3 skills right now are a bit of a grind, or have training methods which don’t make sense, or are absolutely required to be viable in the current meta. So, I have a change to each type of XP in order to mitigate this.

Details/background on your proposal

First: Cooking. Vetex has mentioned in the Trello that he plans to add a cooking journal where you can review each type of food you’ve made before. My suggestion is to attach one-time cooking XP bonuses to each unique type of food you create.

This makes it a little more viable to experiment with new combinations to find new recipes in order to claim these bonuses, and the amount of XP given by these bonuses is based on how complicated the recipe is or how difficult the ingredients are to obtain.

Second: Brewing. For starters, increasing the XP gained from higher tier potions with a multiplier based on the catalyst would make higher tier potions more worthwhile for grinding.

Something like 300 for tier 2, 500 for tier 3, 700 for tier 4, and 1000 for tier 5 would do nicely, to make it more worth considering making the higher tiers for grinding.

Common seashells would provide no bonus multiplier to XP gain while something like Dark Sea Essentia can provide a 2x bonus or more to the XP gain from the potion.
Not all same-rarity catalysts need the same XP multiplier, pinecones could be worth slightly more due to how they don’t spawn in as many places as seashells do

Last: Jewelcrafting. You no longer need to have Perfect Jewelcrafting to make Perfect jewels. Your skill level still determines where your jewels start, but you can upgrade them further and gain XP in the process.
In order to upgrade past your skill, you need one of the following on top of the Galleon requirement:

A. A copy of the initial gemstone used in the jewel. You only need to provide this once, after which the jewel can be upgraded to Perfect without any other sacrifice.
B. 3 of the reagent used in the initial crafting. This material payment is required for each upgrade.
Note: you can only gain XP for going past your current skill level. You gain no XP from upgrading up to your current skill level.

Reason to add/change

Overall, these changes would be a net positive for… most people in the community. The only people it might affect severely are the people who dedicate their time to grinding out millions of XP in these skills, and even then this would only shake up the people doing Brewing because the other two skills will eventually have the extra XP run out (you’ll eventually run out of unique cooking options, and you can’t benefit from XP by upgrading jewels once you hit perfect).
I’ve seen people talking about how much of a pain it can be to max out your skills- how it’s a painful grind and especially in the case of Jewelcrafting it’s required to complete builds. These changes to XP might be a little much (especially brewing, the numbers on that are probably wildly out of proportion) but I think this is a solid baseline to expand off of. If you guys have thoughts on how to adjust any of this, feel free to speak up.

[NoBanana]

pls add more paragraph breaks

The cooking and brewing changes seem good, but the jewelcrafting change feels like a bandaid solution.
This will make usable gems accessible without the grind, which is good, but it also somewhat defeats the purpose of having the skill at all - there’s not much value in getting a discount on making perfect gems when you’ve already got perfect gems.

Perhaps gemcrafting should be important for getting gems with high secondary stats? Or the upgrade process could consume additional gems.

[Arrowsden]

shoot i forgot paragraph breaks good catch editing

also added a quote from your reply in the jewelcrafting section

[archrono]

Having super grindy methods to get good gear kills games for casual players. This would lower the barrier of entry for PvP, as it isn’t as hard to get good gems and I’m all for it.
For the people who’ve already grinded to max, they don’t lose anything because they still have perfect gems every time.

[Tr0xic]

I grinded up all 3 to perfect, and yeah all of them should be reworked in some wat. Cooking has a good change, and brewing has an okay change. I think these changes should be applied to both (cooking and brewing have both a unique recipe bonus AND a higher tier/ingredient rarity bonus). Cooking technically already has a rare ingredient bonus as they give more hunger, but this is really minor so a multiplicative buff would be nice.

Cooking is in the most dire need of changes because it has the worst xp to button press ratio and item to xp ratio. Brewing is already pretty easy right now, but I wouldn’t mind if it was even faster.

The change to the jewelcrafting skill is weird and unecessary, but people probably don’t usually use jewels outside of dull or perfect so I don’t think the change will negatively affect anyone.

The idea to make upgrading jewels give skill xp is nice. Galleon cost increase for upgrading jewels is questionable but probably fine.

Overall, good suggestion that basically improves everyone’s experience with the game without removing anything of value.

[Arrowsden]

@Tr0xic

The change to the jewelcrafting skill is weird and unecessary, but people probably don’t usually use jewels outside of dull or perfect so I don’t think the change will negatively affect anyone.

The idea to make upgrading jewels give skill xp is nice. Galleon cost increase for upgrading jewels is questionable but probably fine.

Just in case, I crossed out mentions of increased Galleon costs and added a note about alternatives to that in a dropdown text thing

[Gamehero14]

Keep cookin’.

[nyawalking]

A bit hard to read, but good suggestion.

[Arrowsden]

Any suggestions to improve readability?

[NoBanana]

Your ideas are sort of strewn across long, rambling paragraphs.
It would help if you summarised them and then extrapolated on any important details, rather than presenting the ideas piecemeal. For jewelcrafting in particular, you haven’t even settled on a specific, concrete idea, and the strikethrough text is confusing and not worth keeping around for historical reasons.

@Arrowsden

Second, brewing. Currently only the tier of the potion has any impact on the XP you get. I suggest that the values you gain from tiers be changed (it doesn’t make sense that spending 5 t1 catalysts only nets you 200 xp, and 10 nets you 300, though i’m not suggesting a 1:1, just make it more worthwhile, something like 300 and 500 might work better with 700 and 1000 for t4 and t5) and then they get a further multiplier based on what catalyst you use. Rarer catalysts add multipliers to the XP bonuses, with golden pearls and dark sea essentia giving the biggest multipliers due to their rarity. This is probably the most drastic change due to how much XP it enables someone to get, but it makes other methods more considerable than just spamming t1 potions to perfect

@Cooler Arrowsden

Second, brewing. I suggest that more expensive potions should provide more XP, so other methods of levelling up are viable compared to spamming T1 potions.

To achieve this, the XP you gain from higher tiers should be increased to be more proportional to the cost - not necessarily 1:1, something like 300 and 500 for T1 and T2, with 700 and 1000 for T4 and T5. Then, potions get a further XP multiplier based on what catalyst you use, with rarer catalysts like golden pearls and dark sea essentia giving the biggest multipliers. This is probably the most drastic change due to increasing the XP from most potions, but it should just make other levelling methods comparable to T1 spam.

[Arrowsden]

words are hard, editing time

[Arrowsden]

@NoBanana

Your ideas are sort of strewn across long, rambling paragraphs.

I think I did good on taking your advice? Thanks for the advice either way, I’ll try to keep it in mind for the future