by mattlow on Oct 20, 2009
To provide full disclosure, I do not usually like crafting in a game. I
play a game to have fun, usually by busting the heads of computerized
orcs or villains, or by throwing down in some PvP. I do not play a game
to spend hours collecting materials from three different zones from a
variety of sources in order to knit the Colossal Sweater of Neverending
Doom and Gloom Upon Thy Enemies. It’s a chore and reveals
what crafting really is in MMOGs; a time sink. Yes, I said it! Crafting
is there to siphon off even more hours of your life and to ensure that
your main priority is to
style="font-weight: bold;">play the game.
Personally, it’s not
for me, but I know that many people enjoy crafting. Good for them. If
people want to spend all their free time searching for materials, then
they’re free to do so. I should just as equally be free from
having to do the same. I still have nightmares of having to fish in
World of Warcraft.
As for Champions Online, crafting is both
easy and difficult.
Let’s start with the easy part. Raising your crafting skill
isn’t too hard to do and crafting components are easy to find
(even though they tend to have bad guys close by).
Researching items is easy as that you can just click and drag onto a
crafting table. Creating an item is easy too. All you have to do is
click on the blueprint and you’ll see right away if you have
enough components to make the item. The difficulty with crafting in
Champions Online begins with deciding on what profession to take. Each
profession focuses on specific stats, so it’ll help you to
choose carefully. In my case, my hero uses Munitions, which relies upon
dexterity and ego. Checking with the craft trainers gives you breakdown
on which stats are affected by each school and by slot (offense,
defense, and utility). Offense in science has dexterity rated number
one, so that’s a good one to pick. Ego, however, is a
tertiary trait for this school, while it’s a primary one for
mysticism utility. One profession is good for one of my stats, but not
both. To maximize the bonuses from crafted items, I’ll
eventually have to take two different professions and max them out.
So, all this talk leads us back to our basic question; is crafting
worthwhile or not? Well, it’s a little bit of both. Foremost,
if you’ve picked a good profession based upon your build and
powerset, then you can craft some really good items that go into your
primary slots early on. The secondary slot stuff you can create is
really just so-so. Most of the secondary items you can create are about
the same power level as items you pick up from looting dead villains or
from mission rewards. Outside of boosting your main stat, crafting
seems to do very little. There are some nice perks, such as some
costume unlocks with various items (one example are flintlock pistols,
which are arms and not science!), but you’ll have to devote a
good deal of time to working on your crafting for them. At higher
levels, you can craft items with a variety of bonuses, all while
increasing the rarity of the item (thus increasing the bonuses further
at the expense of needing many more components). However, the items you
acquire from beating up bad guys and solving missions scale with your
level as well. To be honest, the main thing I used my crafting for was
to make bigger bags to hold my inventory. Outside of a nice boost to
your main stat, I don’t see crafting as very worthwhile.
It’s not a game breaker as you go up in levels if you ignore
it. If you want to min/max your character though, crafting can help get
you that extra few points that you so desperately desire.
Overall, crafting in Champions Online is rather straightforward (if you
read all the details from the trainers) and does offer a few perks
along the way. However, those perks are really few and far between and
I found myself not really caring about raising my crafting at all. The
blueprints I could buy for new items seemed to be about the same power
level as the gear I had already acquired from defeated enemies and
completed missions. Outside of gaining a bonus on your primary stat,
crafting seems to be pretty much a waste of time, in my opinion. Feel
free to disagree, as I assume a lot of you will, but I believe that you
don’t get much out the time you spend to work on crafting.