02 April, 2007

Some Thoughts on Poison Crafting

Taken from a post to the forums. It's interesting how much negative feedback I've received on this from people in my guild, justified solely by the notion that poison crafting is an innate skill and therefore it should be treated differently from other crafting. But in the end aren't the other tradeskills complex and difficult because that's fun for us? If they make us unhappy why bother with them? To me it's the complexity of the professions and the challenge of collecting recipes that make them worth pursuing.

Poison Crafting - More interesting, please!

Playing my first rogue, I was dismayed from early on that after the initial quest our poisons were just freely given to us. There are no problems or challenges involved in raising the skill or in acquiring the materials.

This and all games are at their best when they present the players with problems to solve and challenges to overcome, so I offer a wish list I've been mulling over.

1. Let's see the Shady Dealers stealth around town, and switch towns from time to time.

2. Let's see them have faction alliances and longer respawn timers so that losing your poison vendor hurts and people protect him, maybe even escorting him from town to town.

3. Require some poisons to be mixed at Ravenholdt Manor. Let's see a battle there. Let's see a shaky peace there.

4. Allow Herbalists to harvest some of the ingredients. Place them in areas just a little too hard for a rogue who's just learned that recipe. Make some ingredients only available via Herbalism. Make a few of them soulbound.

5. Make some the poison Alchemy recipes, and let's maybe see Enchanting get involved a little.

6. Give us a specal bag to hold poisons in.

7. Make the poisons deteriorate after 2-8 hours if they aren't in the poison bag, so that we have to contact and place orders with other players.

9. For extra credit, let's see some poisons only available from players in the opposing faction.

There's no need to throw out or render useless the existing poisons. While all of them need to be a little more trouble to make, a whole range of new poisons could be added without ruining the old ones, featuring slight but desirable variations in DPS, fail rates, charges, duration, stacking, cost, and allowed combinations.

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