So I’ve been levelling up my KA Engineer so I can build the Deathcycle from Horrific Visions, and I’ve noticed something strange. Under “Crafting Details” for a specific item, my skill keeps changing. I’ve been checking to see how close my skill is to being able to craft the required Rank 3 item. Tonight, for example: I finally would have been able to craft Rank 3 Convincingly Realistic Jumper Cables, I was over the Rank 2 mark and could use concentration. BUT i still needed to make a Saftey Switch and some Whimisical Wiring first. Made the Switch and ran out of bismuth. When I came back to the crafting table with the bismuth, I pulled up the Jumper Cables to see how many Wirings I needed, and my skill level for the Cables had dropped below Rank 2 again. WHAT THE HECK?? Is there a bug that’s doing this? Is there a temporary skill buff from crafting something just before that? (I had crafted a Red Button for a Public Order just before checking my skill for the cables.) SO FRUSTRATING!! Has anyone else noticed this?
Without more details it will be more difficult to assess what you experienced.
The crafting UI has ‘issues’ when calculating potential craft skill before someone has all the materials, or components.
When you have no materials with a rank, it defaults to calculating everything as Rank 1.
When you have a single stack of materials with a rank above 1, it defaults to calculating all other materials as that rank.
When you have a mixture of R1 (no bonus), R2 (20% bonus), or R3 (40% bonus) materials for a single component, it will calculate that item then attempt to apply that same distribution across all other components.
Based on what you describe, you had Rank 2 or Rank 3 Bismuth Bolts and Gyrating Gear in your inventory. But when you crafted your Safety Switch, it came out as the next rank lower than the Bolts and Gear. That caused the game UI to update the calculated skill for the Jumper Cables based on the new Switch. You might still get over the threshold if you crafted the Whimsical Wirings at the same higher rank of your Bolts and Gear.
Edit:
Jumper Cables
Recipe Difficulty: 430 skill
Threshold to R2: 215 skill
R3 materials provide: 172 skill
R2 materials provide: 86 skill
Components:
10 Scrap (no rank)
2 Bolts
1 Gear
2 Wiring
1 Switch
Total: six components with rank adjustments.
Assuming equal distribution (some crafts do not have equal distribution) between components.
At R3, each component provides 28.67 skill.
At R2, each component provides 14.33 skill.
At R1, each component provides 0 skill.
If your Jumper Cable skill fell between 215 and 229 before crafting your Switch, then crafting it one rank lower would knock off 14 skill from the calculated craft knocking it below the threshold.
So what’s happening here is that when you don’t have the items in your inventory, the game is guessing what you’ll put there to give you an estimated result.
It guesses based on the average rank of materials that you already have on hand.
So let’s say you have a recipe with two ingredients. If you have ingredient 1 but not ingredient 2, and you have rank 3 of ingredient 1, its estimate will be based on you having rank 3 of ingredient 2 as well.
As you purchase ingredients, you are changing the average rank of materials, causing its guess to change.
Thank you both! I don’t fully understand the explanations, but I understand enough to make sense of it, about the game estimating what the rank would be, based on what materials I have. One of my take aways: if I get enough rank 3 ingredients, I could potentially make Rank 3 cables. Thank you again for your help!
So this is a reply to Solaria. Everyone else who’s not a mathy type should avert your eyes! YOU WERE WARNED!!! (You don’t need any of this info at all, it is purely for people who like math puzzles!)
So the way crafting skill works is based on material weights.
Generally, common raw mats are the lowest, uncommon raw mats are the next lowest, and reagents which are crafted are the highest.
For engineering, I know the relative weights for some eng mats are:
Bismuth = 3
Ironclaw = 4
Aqirite = 4
Handful of Bismuth Bolts = 8
Whimsical Wiring = 7
Gyrating Gears = 17
Entropy Enhancer = 41 <— you can see anything that is crafted with elemental reagents like writhing sample have a much higher weight
Safety Switch = 20
To determine how much skill each material gives you, you need to do the following calculation:
max material skill = recipe difficulty * 0.4 //i.e. materials can give 40% of the difficulty
total divisions = #bismuth in recipe*bismuth_weight + #ironclaw in recipe*ironclaw_weight +...
base skill = max material skill/total divisions
Then the skill given for each material is
bismuth skill = #rank 2 bismuth given by player * base skill * bismuth_weight/2 + #rank 3 bismuth given by player* base skill * bismuth_weight
Rank 1 gives 0 skill, so only rank 2 and rank 3 count. Rank 2 gives half the skill and Rank 3 gives the full skill.
Then just repeat for all materials in the recipe, with their appropriate weights of course.
Example:
Entropy Enhancer takes 4 bismuth, 2 aqirite, and 2 ironclaw and has a difficulty of 410
max material skill = 410 x 0.4 = 164
total divisions = (4 bismuth) x (weight = 3) + (2 aqiritie) x (weight = 4) + (2 ironclaw) x (weight = 4) = 28 divisions
base skill = 164 skill/ 28 divisions = 5.857 skill per division
Then, for example, you place 3 R2 bismuth, 1 R3 bismuth, 2 R3 aqirite, 1 R1 ironclaw, and 1 R2 ironclaw into the recipe.
The skill added by the bismuth will be
(3 R2 bis) x (weight = 3) x (base skill = 5.857) /2 + (1 R3 bis) x (weight = 3) x (base skill = 5.857) = 43.9 → round to int–> 44 skill
The skill added by the aqirite will be
(2 R3 aq) x (weight = 4) x (base skill = 5.857) = 46.9 → round to int–> 47 skill
The skill added by the ironclaw will be
(1 R2 ir) x (weight = 4) x (base skill = 5.857) /2 = 11.7–> round to int–> 12 skill
total skill given by these mats is 44 + 47 + 12= 103 skill.
You can enter these mats into your crafting page to see that the calculation is correct.
Obviously though, this is a bit much to calculate by hand, so if you want to figure these out you will probably want to make a spreadsheet or a program. Or… not… I mean nobody needs to calculate this, it’s just nice to know how it works!
That’s actually…quite interesting.
And unfortunate.
I had noticed the variation of material values for certain crafts, but the differential was often so low that it didn’t matter enough to make me look further into it.
I think I see what Blizzard is trying to do for the system design using this additional layer of complexity, but the values are so meaningless in most situations that they might as well have not even bothered.
To make full use of this layer Blizzard would have needed to make material scarcity much worse (big outcry), or skew the scaling to the point that it actually matters at the gross and small production scales (which would also produce a big outcry).
Despite liking where it could lead, I think Blizzard does not really want to poke the player base bear with something that would only be liked by people who enjoy number crunching, and sometimes not even them.
Mmm I think the idea is to make sure that you want higher quality crafted parts. If an entropy enhancer, which costs a lot of mats and needs writhing sample to make was worth the same amount of skill as a bismuth, let’s be honest, we’d all get bunches of bismuth and cheap out on the crafted part.
By making harder to craft reagents worth more, it creates a market for people to sell parts.
But like I said, no one needs to actually calculate it. You just have to be aware that some parts will swing your results more than others.
Agreed.
But at the scale of materials available on most servers, even with the weighting, people don’t think twice about it assuming they knew it to begin with.
For the system, that means the differential is not significant enough to actually matter. So why put the work in to define it to begin with? I think there is tons of potential there, but Blizzard would have to make the differences significant enough to make enough people pay attention.
While yes, the people who notice and care about minimizing costs for maximum efficiency and profit will take advantage of such fine details. But the majority of players will fall into one of two camps, those who don’t care and will purchase the max rank mats anyways to make sure of the highest rank outcome, and those following a guide without understanding it (and will lose their minds when following the guide doesn’t return the desired result because of other factors that they didn’t know they needed to account for).
So this is how I use this info:
When I’m leveling and doing patron orders a lot of time I will run out of concentration. So I need to make up for skill I lack with better materials.
Example: I am required to make a rank 2 flask, but I’m 40 points short. Because flasks require 2 gilded vials (a crafted part) and a bunch of raw mats, I know the vials will pop me up over the line more than the flowers.
If I’ve finished leveling, I don’t need to consider this at all, because I know that if I put all rank 2 materials I’ve already hit the plateau where the concentration cost is almost constant.