Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Crafting has become an integral part of MMOGs in the last few years. If a game brings up the possibility of not including crafting during the game’s development, such as Warhammer Online did, then a core group of gamers go nuts and the hissy-fit frenzy begins. While a player can totally ignore crafting as he plays, crafting itself does add an extra dimension to the game. It is no lie that some games have a better crafting system than others. To that end, the purpose of this article is to ponder the question of crafting in Champions Online; is it worthwhile or is it worthless?

First, let us begin by looking at the crafting basics in Champions Online. There are a total of three main professions: Arms, Science, and Mysticism. Each of the three professions has three schools. You increase your skill in crafting by gathering materials and by researching. Researching is when you take an item that you’ve acquired and you take it apart to see what makes it tick. In addition, by doing research, you gain materials and can gain insight bonuses. You can only research items that are of the same profession that you currently have. The interesting thing in Champions Online is that you can leave one profession and learn another, all while continuing to keep the knowledge you have already earned. In the future, you can switch back to your previous profession with all the knowledge that you had learned, but your skill resets at 1, so you’ll have to work hard to bring it back up again to where it was before. As of now, there are currently four tiers of crafting, based upon character level and crafting level.

• Tier 1 (Crafting Skill 1-100) Minimum level 1
• Tier 2 (Crafting Skill 101-200) Minimum level 11/Crafting 90
• Tier 3 (Crafting Skill 201-300) Minimum level 21/Crafting 190
• Tier 4 (Crafting Skill 301-400) Minimum level 31/Crafting 290

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 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.