Thread: The "new" lower-level jewelry recipes are worthless. Discuss.

Apologies if I'm duplicating too many other threads here, but I haven't seen any really angry threads about the sweeping stat changes to the jewelry recipes, just a lot of justification for why it doesn't matter.

I'm pretty angry about it. My kinmates are pretty angry about it.

The stats are now, on average, about half as good as the old stats. The non-crit results aren't worth using over vendor-trash, and the crit results are only slightly better than quest rewards.

Those extra stats made a pretty big difference for players leveling up alts. It was nice to see the results of the work done to level up a profession that wasn't usable until you'd out-leveled the stuff you made the first time through. No more.

The "choice" about which version of some items to make is just to pacify us, I think. Even the illusion of choice, or the ability to choose from one of several sub-par outcomes, is usually enough to make a person happy. I think it's a dirty trick to pass this off as an improvement of any kind.

I can't speak for others, but I'm not ranting about it now because it was obvious from the moment it was announced that it was going to be another massive stealth nerf.

I'm sickened by it, but it's not like you can stop it now.

I like the multi-output options, but I do agree, the changes to the stats are horrible.

/signed

I do have to say I expected something like this and am glad almost all of my alts are high enough level to bypass many of the nerfs...but this is just another reason not to level my lowbie Minnie and keep her as a mule.

I can imagine the other profs are glad they didn't get "updated" first now.

Originally Posted by macdadg

I like the multi-output options, but I do agree, the changes to the stats are horrible.

This

I have been very curious about the lack of comment on the jewellry changes. I was horrified when I started looking through the T1-T3 stats. You'd think I'd have learned by now that with Turbine anymore, change = nerf. I don't think "nerf" quite covers what was done in this case though. I wouldn't waste silver or gold ore on this stuff.

I don't even want to talk about what they did to the Etched Beryl jewellry... What a travesty.

I pray Turbine doesn't "improve" the other trades in this manner.

Originally Posted by macdadg

I like the multi-output options, but I do agree, the changes to the stats are horrible.

Agreed. Why would I want different options when every single one of those options is worse than what we had before? Some choice.

I'm extremely new to LotRO, but a veteran of plenty of other MMO's. With that said, since I'm so new, I thought I was missing something and the jewelry changes were actually something good that I was just too new to realize. Glad to see that I'm not the only one disgusted by the "improved" jewelry crafting. I just wish I had stockpiled enough of the old jewelry to get my alts past their low levels. As it is, I'll just leave them without until they get jewelry from quests rather than waste the metals.

Perhaps they realized that the low level jewelry was SO MUCH BETTER than any of the quest drops that they needed to adjust it?

IMO gear is basically irrelevant until about lvl 25+. If you have a good weapon you could basically run around naked and not notice the difference in difficulty.

Originally Posted by AceItcher

Perhaps they realized that the low level jewelry was SO MUCH BETTER than any of the quest drops that they needed to adjust it?

IMO gear is basically irrelevant until about lvl 25+. If you have a good weapon you could basically run around naked and not notice the difference in difficulty.

I think this applies more to some classes than others, at least based on my experiences. I'm not naming specific classes, but one of my brand-new alts made it to 30 with all of his intro-quest gear because he was so powerful that I just forgot about gear. On the other hand, one of my other alts can't solo for beans even with decent gear, and is forced to group to tackle on-level quests. Don't tell me to lrn2play either.

Some classes (since mirkwood) get more morale per vitality point than others. I'm guessing that's part of why the lower level jewelry that used to have +vit is now just +morale. If there's supposed to be a morale cap at a particular level, just make a morale cap. Why punish the weaker classes and an entire crafting profession?

Yeah, I'm disgusted with the nerf to lower level jewelry.

These changes weren't tweaks or adjustments to the existing jewelry, these changes were extreme--altogether creating a whole different piece of jewelry, with very trivial stats.

Even worse, as an example, the level 7 newbie quests yield better jewelry rewards than the majority of the level 7, 10, 12, 14 and 16 crafted crit jewelry now.

And here we were under the delusion that crafting gear would matter.

Also, its pretty crass and dismissive for anyone to trivialize or devalue any level range lower than the level cap, saying "lower level gear doesn't matter", because for some--maybe, just maybe--it does matter. And I really hope this isn't the mentality of the developers themselves.

Ok they nerfed the lower level jeweller made items to quest gear level. One of the reasons I came to LOTRO was because the tradeskill gear is worth having unlike most other games. Now it looks like Turbine is going to fix that. Well when the player made gear is no better than the solo quest gear I will be on my way to something else since for me thats a game breaker.

PS. The NEW glittering copper ring will not advance the crafting quests. You have to use the old glittering copper ring.

Originally Posted by Nadain

PS. The NEW glittering copper ring will not advance the crafting quests. You have to use the old glittering copper ring.

I was worried something like this might happen. Now I'm curious to take a new character I have to try it to see if it works. When you (or whomever told you) tried to complete it, had they taken the quest before the change, or after? If it was before, the quest might have to be abandoned and retaken.

If it is an oversight, and the quest givers only want the old ring, then it's a bug because they removed the old recipe from our stock.

And speaking of which, I was quite annoyed to find that my recipes for the glittering copper ring and necklace had vanished (amongst others), and once I was told by other players in game that it was to be expected, I sighed and bought the new recipes since I make those two items quite often to sell at the AH because they are quest items. Why they couldn't simply replace the old recipe with the new one, I do not understand because they did exactly that with so many other things.

Count me amongst those who are unhappy with the changes. Although some matters in regards to crafting were thoughtful to a point, so much more each time they change crafting, it only seems to make crafting less worthwhile, which I find troublesome because I actually like crafting.

I am quite happy that I happened to have a few items I crafted before the changes in storage--especially because I am one of those crazy people who takes my time leveling. Those items I will treasure for a long time!

PS. The NEW glittering copper ring will not advance the crafting quests. You have to use the old glittering copper ring.

Whoa. This must be a bug. Attention, devs: fix it please, and SOON.

I did some futher testing involving the glittering copper ring (GCR from now on) and quests.

1. I had made 2 of the old GCRs on my tinker LM alt and he was wearing them. This was pre patch.

2. Post patch I obtained journeyman jewler and did the quest for that. On the way to the forsaken in my elf LM picked up the quest in Bree and the one on the road to the forsaken inn for the GCR. At this time I did not know that I no longer had the recipe for GCR.

3. When I got journeyman done and went back to Bree I bought all my new recipes first. this included the new GCR recipe but I did not look. I just bought all that I did not have thinking they were all journeyman recipes

4. I then made two NEW GCRs. Neither quest advanced and please remember that the quest giver for one of them was right beside me in the Bree crafting all.

5. I put in a ticket and was told to bug report it which I did.

6. I then took one of my pre patch OLD GCRs off. As soon as it was no longer equipted both quests advanced. I put it back on and the quest went back to needing the ring.

7. I dropped the Bree quest and waited till the timer ran out and picked it up again. Still will not advance with the new GCR.

Note: The icon for all the old apprentice jewellry has been changed. Not just the GCR but all of them. I don't know if this is the cause of the problem but I did confirm it. The new GCR and old GCR have the exact same name but different icons. I also have some of the other pieces pre patch. They all are different icons from the new craptactulare stuff.

/signed

I feel the recent changes to jewel crafting are too drastic.

I can understand devs wanting to scale back on some of the bonuses the previous lower level jewelry gave but the extreme they've gone to is ridiculous. For the resources and effort involved in making many of the now-current items it just doesn't appear to be worth it anymore.

The idea of using 3 ingots and a polished gem to make a magic ring that in the past made you mightier or more agile I could at least accept. Now using the same materials to make a ring barely better than ordinary but leaving me far less agile or mighty than I could be from eating some sausages or coney stew seems an utter waste of time and resources to me.

Feel free to list me as one of those that are a little and a little with regard to the current situation.

First they changed the Brilliant White Gold Rings to be Polished Adamant Rings, fine i can live with that one. It just mean that i had to pay a little extra to purchase adamants off the AH so it cut into my overhead profits but they also changed it from requiring 4 white gold ingots to requiring 3 so it was an almost balanced trade off.

My costs were increased slightly but the business in my niche market was still booming.

Then they go and make this change?! Niche market is GONE!

They changed a +24 Vit +24 Will +12 Might ring into a +24 Vit +12 Fate +86 parry rating.

I had sold such a steady and constant stream of those rings at a price of 350 silver a piece that it easily accounted for at least 75% of my overall revenue in the history of this game (something that was possibly over 500 gold).
As a tank with house payments, one of those rings would cover me for a month's house payments and cover me for one or two wipes when doing an instance run.

I used to be able to pick up full stacks of white gold ingots for between 500-600 silver. Every run of turning those ingots into rings would give me on average between 5-7 gold per stack.
When you factor in that those rings accounted for almost 3/4's of my total in game revenues, you can see why i am PISSED! that this freakin' over-NERF has taken place.

They are taking the armour off my guardians back and eventually will take the roof from over my head as well.

Sinistaset jeweller's will be slowly phased out.

I'd also like to point out that i'm only a casual player of the game and spend at most 3 hours online maybe twice a week and even though i started playing two weeks after Angmar went live i didn't start working my niche until a few months before Moria went live.

Can someone explain to me what the problem is with Tier 1 jewelry stats? All I care about at that low a level is +morale, so the changes appear to be an upgrade across the board for my non-tanks and more like a side-grade for my tanks (a couple of pieces went up in morale, a couple went down.)

I understand that my view is limited since my jeweler only has Apprentice tier at crit level now, and I believe you that there are problems higher up. But people are complaining about Tier 1 too, and I don't get it. Anyone want to enlighten me?

Originally Posted by Banelorn

Can someone explain to me what the problem is with Tier 1 jewelry stats? All I care about at that low a level is +morale, so the changes appear to be an upgrade across the board for my non-tanks and more like a side-grade for my tanks (a couple of pieces went up in morale, a couple went down.)

I understand that my view is limited since my jeweler only has Apprentice tier at crit level now, and I believe you that there are problems higher up. But people are complaining about Tier 1 too, and I don't get it. Anyone want to enlighten me?

Here is an example.

Old Glittering copper ring +4 vit
New Glittering copper ring +10 moral

14th level Elf Lore Master loses 12 hitpoints per ring with the new glittering copper ring.

Twin new GCRs his morale is: 434
Twin old GCRs his morale is: 458

Thats a total of 24 morale for a 14th level elf LM just for his rings. All the tier one pieces were nerfed and as I understand, but have not looked at yet, so were the tier two an three pieces. On top of that the new glittering copper rings will not advance the crafting GCR quests. Only the old ones. I just logged on and confirmed this bug is still there.

Tried the glittering copper crafting quests around 3am EST today. It's not just the rings. Nefi won't take the new recipe necklace either.

I was thinking about this as well, as I was looking through the tier 5 and 6 jewelry options.

Sadly, this falls right in line with so many other parts of the game. For whatever reason, someone at Turbine is terrified of players actually having good gear.

- The current "endgame" armor is less useful than the level 60 armor, and that goes for both radiance and crafted armor.
- PvMP items are beyond useless and the time and effort it takes to get them is utterly ridiculous.
- LIs have become a massive grindfest, and you have to win the lottery three times to get a good level 65 Second Age LI.
- Now this absurd nerf to jewelry. Others have said it, and it's true: jewelry was the one craft skill which could provide truly outstanding pieces of gear.

As an example, Vitality does so much more for a character's stats than just increasing Morale--so its pretty infuriating to see Vitality being replaced by much less than the equivalent Morale.

I just resubscribed after being gone for about two and a half years. I like alts, so I made 5-6 characters and am lvling them at about the same pace. (they are all between lvl 12 and 20 atm). When I looked to buy the first one jewelry I decided to just make a jeweler instead of paying that much for jewelry for so many alts.

THE DAY AFTER I got him master T-1 was the patch. Omg the pain of looking at the low lvl jewelry that I could make post-patch. Others have said it... what is the problem with us being able to actually look forward to some of the lower lvl equipment? Do they just want everyone to rush through the game so that we can get to the high lvl content, get bored and quit? I used to really enjoy getting to lvl 7 or 12 and getting a friend to make the crit. jewelry for those lvls and yes; for those that do not know it, it really was THAT much better than anything you would ever get from questing.

I cannot for the life of me understand why they would have even spent the time or resources to change it, especially that drastically. Give us back our little bit of newbie happiness please

Originally Posted by Nepenthea

As an example, Vitality does so much more for a character's stats than just increasing Morale--so its pretty infuriating to see Vitality being replaced by much less than the equivalent Morale.

For all the stats, I would MUCH rather have pure stats bonuses than a morale, power, evade, or etc. increase. Like you said, the stat bonuses provide much more than just one advantage!

I would love to hear a developer come on here and explain their pre-Book III comment!

"Jewellery Stats Rebalancing

All bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and rings crafted after the arrival of this update have been rebalanced to provide better, more useful stat increases, and to generally improve the quality and consistency of jewellery stats across the board! "

Yeah, right! I made an alt the weekend before the patch and filled all of her bags and vault storage with the best Tier 1-4 jewelry (crit and non-crit,) and it looks like the old non-crit jewelry is equal the crit jewelry of the next highest tier now! Way to "improve the quality" and "provide better, more useful stat increases!"

Ha!

I recently re-subscribed to roll an alt and play through SOA. I got on my jeweler and suddenly every recipe is a piece of junk. What were they thinking? Why is everything in this game getting nerfed to ****? Why would I spend the time and effort ot make the **** thats available. I might as well level my toon up without any jewelry; at least my tailor can still make some nice armor (until they nerf that too).

Yech.

I only typically bother with jewelry for my and my wife's alts... but I was looking forward to the 18 / 28 / 38 / 48 jewelry upgrades.

Maybe the Jeweler's guild guaranteed crit recipes are going to be worthwhile now... I hadn't bothered because critted stuff at the 8s was nearly as good... and cheaper, not needing shards and all.

Ah well.

I doubt highly they're going back to the old system, ever, so just have to adapt.

I agree. I went to make some lower level jewelry for the first time post-patch a few days ago, and some of it, I skipped making it. It wasn't worth the ingots and crit ingredient to make it.

Originally Posted by Doronlas

I agree. I went to make some lower level jewelry for the first time post-patch a few days ago, and some of it, I skipped making it. It wasn't worth the ingots and crit ingredient to make it.

Same here. I wasn' t even aware of these changes, and I went to make some jewelry for my girl's lowbie guard. I got to the crafting bench, got all set up, opened the recipes and was like "What the....".

I ended up not makin her anything. The lvl 16-18 crit jewelry I had made for her alt months ago was far and away superior to anything I could make for her until she gets into the 40's with these new recipes. That's pretty pathetic.

Originally Posted by Sonzia

I would love to hear a developer come on here and explain their pre-Book III comment!

"Jewellery Stats Rebalancing

All bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and rings crafted after the arrival of this update have been rebalanced to provide better, more useful stat increases, and to generally improve the quality and consistency of jewellery stats across the board! "

Ha! is right. Better, more useful, improved quality? In what universe?

I still get mad when I think about this. One more step on the downward spiral this game has taken.

It seems the stats for each piece of jewelry were (erroneously) changed for the worst.

The current stats are so under-whelming and mediocre (read: extremely nerfed), it feels as if a stat for each jewelry piece was accidentally omitted and now each piece is just missing a stat. >.<

A good example of this is the Tier 2 Silver Earring. It used to be +5 Fate, and now its only... +9 In-Combat Morale Regen. *boggles*

I can't begin to describe what a letdown this "update" is. And not just for lower-lev jewelry. Crafting higher level jewelry is more stress.

I racked up 50 branches for Lothlorien picking flowers and all that other epic stuff. I try to make the most of a Supreme Crafting Lore Scroll and try to craft a couple of Combat Hoops in one go. Crit fail with a 71% on the first one. Then I get a success on the second one using the same process before the buff wears off. Success! Oh, wait...I forgot to switch the output and I now have a Willpower Hoop. Lovely. Guess I'll pick more flowers.

Want to update the system? Beat up whoever came up with an RNG that lets you crit FAIL 6 out of 10 times when your crit rate is 68% and above. Start there and the rest is gravy.

On the plus side, my 65 RK did finally find some crafted rings to replace his quest rings ... from like level 58 or something.

The Lorien ring(s) of tactics were an upgrade. Finally.

Most of the jewelry - meh.

I VERY much like the CONCEPT of the new multi-output recipes. The fact that the stats apparently took a giant nerf is just sad.

What aggravates me MORE though is the the whole crit chance thing. One SMALL change they could make would be that for each tier you master you get 1% MORE added to your base crit chance%. That way as you increase in your skill level you are MORE likely to have criticial success and by the time you are supreme master and have the best tools and best craft lore and mastery component you could have an 89% crit chance instead of an 83%.

I was crafting for a lowbie the other day and with 83% crit chance failed a tier 3 item 4 times in a row (!!!!!) -- soooo annoying and really illogical.

First off, it's not the crit rate that I am disappointed in and I believe it is unrelated to the topic. To be fair, I usually get "lucky" with my crits, which tells me that most of the people complaining about crit rates are the "unlucky" ones.

That being said, tiers 1 and 2 are now almost worthless as they not only give much less bonus, they only give generic stats like moral and power. Thus, it is much more difficult to customize jewelery to your specific class even though we now have many more options through multi-output. I really liked tier 1 before when you had to combine the different levels of gear in tier one to truly get the best setup for each class. Now, basically all of the levels of gear in each tier only slightly improve on the same stats - rarely worth upgrading.

However, I do agree that the jewelery was unbalanced as it seemed that crit silver jewelery was much better and more useful than most tier 3 and 4 stuff. For example, after the update I still had a crit silver ring for lvl 18 that gave something like 18 vit and 9 agility. I also had a non crit gold ring for ~lvl 33 that gave 10 vit and ~200 wound resist. Clearly something needed to be changed. Also, I am glad tier 4 got a needed upgrade.

Overall, I believe Turbine did well in re-balancing the profession, but utterly failed to "provide better, more useful stat increases".

I can't wait until they nerf MoM gear so that people will start using the junk from SoM.

It seems to me that Turbine is afraid of stat inflation. The changes to all the levels of jewelry, with the radiance armour stats being the best on the initial +10 set, and worse from there on out, they felt they needed to reign in the attributes. They need to keep an upgrade path for equipment through the final expansion, and I guess that the way they were going, they felt the stat inflation would be too high by the time we hit the final level cap.

1-50 is very easy, and nerfing the crafted jewelry doesnt hurt as much as it would if they nerfed armour. With these changes, some of the quest reward jewelry isnt automatically insta-vendor like all the quest reward armour is after level 20.

Originally Posted by macdadg

1-50 is very easy, and nerfing the crafted jewelry doesnt hurt as much as it would if they nerfed armour.

They did nerf armor. By raising the levels required for much of it by as much as 6 levels. Last year.

I totally agree. I am actually trying to use some of my T1-T3 recipes now and find a number of them to be worthless. I hate how messy my recipe list is now with duplicates and I am actually wearing jewellry crafted by me pre patch that is better than critical success post patch. No point in me changing that now that my skill has improved.

I used to craft jewellery for my lower level toons to speed up the leveling process. My newest champ, wow, I couldn't find one thing WORTH crafting yet, and they just hit lvl 35 (now there are a couple things worthwhile). Even the amethyst ring is gone, which also screwed up the jeweller quests in bree-land (Verity/Barton Tyne wouldn't take the new item that they requested)...

I guess this is the devs way to make up for the jeweller trade being one of the only useful high level trades. They are now the useless low level trade.

I agree a hundred perecent. The stats are worthless from the original recipes. The effort to master the craft is time consuming and expensive. The chances of selling jewelery is even worse. You get more prophit selling the ore than selling jewelery. Even the shard consuming jewelery is not even worth it, for you can find better uses for it such as armor and recieve better jewelery as quest rewards.

It makes me mad that when you buy buy a reputation sheet for crafts when it says make a Ruby Ring... which you can't do anymore. "OST GURATH"

If you're going to make an improvement the system you created about multi outputs have done nothing then make jewelery making near worthless. Especially in lower levels when you need all the stat raise you can get.