As background my husband & myself did play Istaria some years ago & left due to getting married and having to coordinate an international move, new jobs, et cetera. Life's calmed down so we've come back to Istaria to have a poke around at things and there have been many changes, mostly good, but one in particular that I admit I find downright baffling. I really want to come back and enjoy the game and be part of the community. We made our characters on Order because I'd like to think there would be opportunity later to engage in the roleplaying aspect of the game which has always held considerable appeal.
I offer this as both feedback from a somewhat-new player's perspective as well as a query, i.e. "Am I just doing it wrong?". By somewhat-new I mean that I do have previous familiarity with Istaria's systems and a historic knowledge of geography.
Barriers to Entry
Spirit Isle & the associated quests on New Trismus are for the most part good at explaining the game's systems or reminding people how things work, giving a taste of each of the broad schools, etc. I have no real issues with any of that. However I will add that at the level the quests are received, some of them are just downright un-completable. I.e. Red Tusks completely obliterated my character in 2 hits and I had to grind out level 25 before I could finish the Valor questline, the one that awards the level 10 chestpiece. I know that part of the idea with an MMO is that you group together to do things but given the low population and the fact that through this entire process I saw two other people - both dragons and maxed in level chatting in town - there wasn't a lot of opportunity for this. While I'm not above asking for help, I do at least try to do things myself first but the absolute impossibleness of it was a bit daunting.
Fast forward three days, I've reached 25th level and -still- not done all of my new Trismus quests, having levelled up through a combination of killing things 10 levels lower than me, eating crystals, and turning in collectibles. Particularly, I reached 25th level (of Shaman, so essentially, all of the prerequisite classes as well) almost completely and exclusively by killing level 11 maggots and eating the crystals they drop. Most of the quests I'm given ask me to kill things that completely obliterate me. I've come to the conclusion that the major reason for my difficulty is because of one major factor: lack of availability of starter gear formulas.
Apparently the early tradeskill progression, that let you earn more crafting recipes by actually crafting, has been removed from the game. The formulatrons have been revamped and now offer a 'random' recipe for the extremely prohibitive cost of 5s a pop and you can't even choose what recipe you get. Considering that in levelling two tradeskills and two adventure classes to 30+ I've probably made a grand total of 150s this is pretty steep.
So, I have to rely on the consigner (checking daily for 2 weeks now, still not got the recipes) or farming whatever drops the recipes.
The chainmail formulas apparently don't drop anymore on NT, and the ghosts, which used to drop an assortment of crappy blighted gear, no longer do this, so to get the level 10 formulas we must go kill level 18ish sand pygmys near lower bridgeview. After about 10 hours spent killing (and being killed by) these while wearing my level 1 gear and casting my level 1 lightning bolt I'd accumulated quite a few formulas and techs, including 3 pieces of the level 10 chainmail armor set.
Once I was able to make the 'iron ringmail' armor set (based on a shop bought recipe)- my gaming experience improved considerably. But this doesn't address the spell issue, as in order to get even the basic, tier 1 beginner formula for spells like earthen crust, lightning storm, thunder - apparently I have to go kill level 25-30 mobs.
The expectation that a new player must level from 1-25ish (depending on armor use stat) while wearing the level 1 gear and using many of the basic, shop-bought spells, is a definite barrier to entry and I believe one that will certainly deter potential new players who just have absolutely no way to obtain new gear. Fortunately for my husband and I, I've levelled armorer had that not been the case I think we'd still be killing those maggots as they were the only thing we could effectively kill!
Now, this has been going on for a few weeks now and while I love the game and am enjoying the nostalgia and such, I am a level 31 shaman, wearing a self-crafted set of lvl 21 Iron ringmail, using improved lightning bolt II as my basic attack (fortunately, this recipe did drop from the lvl 18-20 pygmies). I can barely handle forest skulks my level, even with a lot of healing, and regrowth 2 (shop recipe!) and level 2 gift/enhance buffs (shop recipe!) if I get two of them, I'm dead. I feel like I keep levelling up but my character isn't going to get any better until I can break through the gear barrier since the level 31 armor set is unavailable to me for the same reason that the level 11 set is, and most of my spell arsenal is the same thing I was casting as a level 8 druid.
Frustrated by how much damage I was taking by anything over about rating 22 (as in, can barely kill it without running for my life) I revisited the idea of looking for the level 11 armor recipes which would also make the iron (lvl 31) versions of them available. According to what I've read on forums and on other threads about this very same problem, I need to be fighting level 25-30 semi-intelligents to even get these to drop. Level 11 recipes. Level 25-30 mobs. Considering how much trouble I had with the rating 22 mobs, I considered this carefully, but finally my desire to really want to enjoy this game won so I set out to try and find a level 25 semi intelligent.
Using the map pack and variuos forums/wikis I tried to find something that would drop these recipes.
After running around achieving not much for a few hours, I asked in marketplace what I needed to be killing to get the beginner recipes that don't drop off of the lesser aradoth sand pygmies near lower bridgeview.
My responses were:
Go kill sand pygmies - which I said no, I have everything they drop, in triplicate, I had been killing them for days. I need the next things up.
"For T2 recipes go kill Gregory's...[gave me some coordinates]" - tried those, they are level 35-41 and wipe the floor with me. I said in chat that I was struggling due to only wearing lvl 20 gear as its the highest available to me as a level 31+ character, until I can get those recipes."
I then got berated for trying to be self sufficient, and told that I should ask someone to just make me some armor.
I was told "I don't need all the beginner recipes anyway" and basically to just deal with it.
Hello, I am a beginner..I need gear; therefore, I need the recipes for this gear.
I suppose I should say that part of the large appeal of Istaria to us is the crafting element. I WANT to be a crafter. I WANT to make armor for myself, my husband, our future alts, whatever. What I don't want, is to have to beg, mooch, etc. off of the community to make basic, I-just-got-out-of-spiritiisle levelled gear (level 11!) since the recipes dont drop until mobs that you'd really have to be level 35-40 to even think about, or already have the gear in question!
This used to not be an issue due to formulatrons (v1) allowing CRAFTERS to unlock crafting recipes by well, crafting. I cannot for the life of me understand why this was removed, because without the spell and armor recipes, its a hodgepodge struggle of half geared misery trying to do anything. My husband, who is playing a scout, is having the same difficulty and finally just went and ..you guessed it, farmed maggots to get to level 21 so he could put on iron and a decent weapon. He's been almost completely disillusioned by the game because he can't really kill anything, and while we'd both be happy to just sit and craft, we don't have a way anymore to get our recipes without doing some adventuring and the adventuring is painful without being able to craft level appropriate gear.
So it seems my choices at this point are:
a) wait till the stuff I need shows up on consigner or if I can find someone selling the formulas
b) get someone else to craft my gear; which defeats the purpose for me as we want to be crafters. I want to make different sets for different things and tech them up differently and etc.
c) reroll as a dragon for hopefully a reduced amount of frustration, or at the very least reroll as something that doesnt rely on spells for damage due to the long, long period between upgrades to to lack of recipe availability.
d) stand in town and beg for money to try the v2 formulatron ripoff machine
...
z) leave in a fit of rage
Now, I've posted this in rants for two reasons 1 because I feel that this is a serious, serious flaw in the early part of the game in that you can't do better than refurbished gear even if you're willing to put in the time and level armorer 20 levels higher than your character you still can't make them any actual armor. Same thing with levelling spellcraft beyond my adventurer level but still can't get spell formulas because can't make gear allowing me to actually kill the things that will drop them.
If a recipe is for an item usable by a level 11 character, I strongly feel that a level 11 character could be able to obtain said recipe and not need to wait until level 35 for it.
I'm concerned because even if I did decide to mooch/beg and/or ask people to make me gear with the specific techs I want etc. and I actually found someone willing to do this, I'm going to be in the same position later on as I presume there are going to be more missing recipes requiring me to be 20 levels higher than I need to be to USE it to get the recipe drop?
Can someone advise me if I've just missed something huge or is this actually my only option for being able to craft these?