*Performs thread necromancy!*
Well, I spent the last couple of days doing some leather working. So far it seems a bit pointless. None of the stuff you make is worth any money, not even DC34 studded leathers, which are the best you can make as far as I know. Also, as Catacomb pointed out earlier, stores sell better leather armors.
A few remarks:
First of all; you need hides. This is fine for the low DC hides like wolf fur and animal skin, but when you want to go for the better stuff you need dire animals. Which means you're dependent on spawns. People regularly kill off those animals when they encounter them. So unlike the other crafts, where your only competition for resources comes from other crafters, you face competition from *all* players who kill animals.
For example: To get the best hides you need ancient dire bears. They live only at one place, as far as I know, and it needs to be at a pretty high spawn to find them. And that place gets visited by others as well who are not after hides. Which means you need luck to get a handful of hides (getting three hides, that can give a total of 18 patches if you pass the DC25 curing and boiling, is the best I got so far)
That means that the best hides ae pretty rare. Should you get them, and prepare them they turn out to be useless, property-wise: When boiled, grizzly patches become hard boiled patches. When you boil ancient dire bear patches, they become sturdy boiled patches. When you make an armor out of these the DC is 5 higher than with hardboiled patches but the end result is the same. So the only use they have is increasing DC to gain more CXP.
Aditionnally, all the pointing and clicking you have to do is giving me RSI. Because it is also boring as hell your eyes glaze over and your mind goes on standby which often results in buying something with a full inventory, removing the item from the merchant inventory until next resest. Fix this please!
But about all the clicking: First you need to buy tannine for ever hide. Then stuff hides and tannine in the curing basin. Use the knife once, open the basin, click on all the patches and use the knife again. Then you need to get wax, which means strolling to the beekeeper. You'll need 40-60 pieces, which involves a lot of clicking again. Luckily you can boil a lot of the skins at once. Basically, a lot of the time spent on crafting goes into the logistics of transferring stuff from inventory to container and back. This is not just boring, it gets annoying after a while. And it can be easily fixed.
Some suggestions for streamlining:
- Make tannine and beewax available at larger quantities than 1. Sell them also in sets of 10 or 25 or something
- Allow for bulk curing: toss in a whole set of hides, along with the apporiate amount of tannine and do it all at once. You're already going to do plenty of pointing and clicking to make the armors.
Earlier in this thread there were already some good suggestions to make leatherworking into a more useful craft. im going to quote them again for emphasis:
Gonna start throwing out suggestions for other bonuses that leathers could provide.
Wolf leather
+1 discipline
- 2 Tumble
Wolf leather is less flexible than other types of leather, resulting worse restriction on movement, but better support against blows.
Small animal fur (make it into it's own type called "thin leather", and have the DC be the same as using normal leather)
- 1 AC
+3 tumble
- 2 Discipline
Because small animals typically have thinner skin, armor made from them is much more flexible. This can be a good thing for dodging blows, but it also provides little to no support when an actual blow is struck.
Snakeskin
+2 Influence
+2 Antagonize
Wearing snakeskin armor draws the eye. A person trying to persuade or bluff can benefit from the attention their armor draws. In the same way a person can use the extra attention their armor draws to make themselves look completely arrogant and threatening.
Winter Wolf
10 Cold DR
+ 1 discipline
- 2 tumble
Extremely warm, winter wolf fur is superior to other cold weather leathers in that it's not any more flamable than normal wolf leather.
Dire (insert type)
10 cold DR
+ 2 discipline
+ 2 antagonize
- 4 tumble
A person wearing Dire leather armor is obvious. The leahter is thick and impressive helping against the cold, helping to absorb hits, and even helping the wearing frighten off enemies. Just don't expect to do any rolling in such furs.
Ancient dire bear
15 Cold
+ 3 discipline
+ 3 antagonize
- 5 tumble
Ancient dire bear hide is everything that dire hide is, only to a greater extreme.
Here are some alternatives for dire and ancient dire bear hides
Dire (insert type)
10 cold resist
- 1 AC
3 slashing DR
Dire leather is bulky, making a wearer easy to hit. Even so bladed weapons have a terrible time dealing with the thick leather.
Ancient Dire Bear
10 cold resist
- 1 AC
3 slashing DR
3 bludgeoning DR
Ancient Dire Bear leather is bulky, making a wearer easy to hit. Even so, blunt weaponry typically bounces off the the leather, and blades have a hard time slicing through. Only piercing weapons are truely effective.
Could also have dire/ancient dire hide increase the items weight maybe.
Any sort of leather that gave bonuses to Move silently and or Hide would be vastly appreciated by the leatherworkers of the server, seeings as when I'm asked for leather armor about 75% of the time the person who asks wants stealthy leathers.
Now this is fun. Plenty of diversity and stuff that can be actually useful to. And its not already for sale in shops.
Would like to see some of the more.. exotic hides added but probably not on regular drop so they can be used as rare quest items.
Lycanthrope hides
Zombie Skin
Hides from the various player Races (obviously for those evil types... human hide padded armor?)
And like I said, not on regular drop. Would make great quest items or RP rewards.
Now this would be fun. Make 'Skinning' a third thing you can do with a corpse, other than mutilating and burning. This gives an item called <race> skin. The item can then be further processed with leatherworking. It might be impractical from a developers point of view but Hell it would rock!
Also, it already got suggested earlier in a different thread: It would be great to be able to craft other things than armors. I'd love to be able to make boots, gloves, belts and cloaks as well. Masks too.
To summarize:
In order to make leatherworking into a fun and useful skill it needs to be streamlined and expanded with more useful items that can be made.