Am I the only person who thinks that all craft techs should be made purely out of crafting materials, and adventure techs should be made out of things mobs drop?
Makes sense, right?
I was thinking about this last night while leveling my Blacksmith. Since I have very low Adventuring, I have pretty much nil chance of ever teching my gear, and crafting with 0 techs is starting to get more painful as I am looking forward to having to go to Level 40+ before I can even start Tier Two stuff. I'm at 32 now, and a full diskload gives me about 9.5% of a levelup.
I was thinking "Gee, it'd be nice if I had more than 1 single line of techs that I could actually put on stuff" and then I was like "Why do I have to kill monsters for craft techs anyways? That's kinda dumb -- crafters shouldn't have to kill monsters to put crafting techs on their stuff." Especially when some of these crafting techs require things that are by no means easy to get, like WA drops, or Ogres/Pygmies.
And then, on the Adventure side, if you want to be a good adventurer, you need a godly craft skill compared to your adventure level, because sticking on techs requires a ridiculously high-levelled craft, by the time you get to T5, every tech you stick on a piece of gear greatly inflates the minimum skill it takes to craft the item.
So my suggestions are as follows:
1). Make all craft techs take crafted items instead of mob drops. For example, Mining I would take Dim Orbs, and 2 Mining Picks or maybe 50 Bars kinda like the Bounty techs (which there are none of for T1 that I saw).
2). Make Adventure Techs, Tech Kits instead so that an Adventurer doesn't need ridiculously high craft levels to make tech'd gear.
The above two suggestions would only apply through T1 to T4, as T5+ is supposed to be "Endgame" and hard, but at least the journey there wouldn't be so painful.
EDIT: Clarification for above: How the Adventurer suggestion would work, is that an Adventurer could obtain Formulas (Beginner and Jman) that produce the tech kits, but have no skill requirement. It would work a lot like quested Tech Kits do -- you drag and drop the item onto the one you want to apply the tech to. It'd be like you go out, kill a mob, use its body parts to enhance your gear. The forms could either be dropped by the same mobs that drop the body parts used in the tech (your character gets the inspiration from seeing the body parts, like "These fangs would make awesome arrowheads" or "This bone sliver has some odd magical power to it"?), or maybe put them on WA/Ogres? Not sure about that part.
EDIT2: Also, this would enhance the market -- imagine if all adventurers T1 through T4 had something to actually use money on, to actually buy from consigners? Make the Tech Kits attuned, but yet since the Adventurer would not require Craft Skill to tech his gear, people would sell more untech'd gear at the consigner, and they'd sell the components of the stuff. The adventurer would then buy the armor, the components, and then go out and kill the right monsters until the formula drops. Then he'd make the tech kit, apply it and viola! Tech'd gear, using both the Consigner/Market AND having to fight the mobs at the same time.