Gold Essence

[Cillbo]

I didn't see this change in the notes, but Scavenging now gives the usable gold essence. No need for goldweed, apothecary, and what not.

[Gisli]

Doesn't that eliminate a major purpose for cultivators? What do cultivators do for the economy now?

[Hrothvar]

Cultivation is the only way to get certain reagents for apothecary. You can't scavenge, butcher, or buy what it takes to make Screening potions (the damage absorb shields) for example.... and it is the only way to get dye components.

[Wazdakka]

It's still a cultivating nerf, IMHO.

[Gisli]

That is good. But I'm not sure that it was wise to disassociate cultivators from talisman making in this way. More convenient for us, yes. But I think that crafting should be more intertwined. This definitely strengthens the value of scavenging at the expense of cultivating.

[Hrothvar]

I agree to a point, but I believe the gathering skills were a little TOO intertwined. They should have moved cultivation to an actual trade instead of gathering skill so you could be a scavenger/cultivator or butcher/cultivator because of all the cultivating finds for those skills.

Of course, this comes from the perspective of one who likes to be self-sufficient and not rely upon getting what I need from AH or other players, since I tend to cover all the craft bases for my own personal benefit... I tend to only use soils/water/nutrients rarely since I don't like having to swap to a scavenger to farm up more and do most of my cultivating with no additives...

[Affrell]

if the cult change was an actual intended change, then i will probly drop cultivating. at 200, there is a very small percentage to get a resin, or a fixer, or other rare moment and it makes apoth very very hard to maintain at higher levels without consistant access to waters and vials that come from scavenging.

i do see goldweed as a bottleneck for talisman making, but it was really the only thing that made a cultivator viable as part of the web of trade.

if cultivating ever gets some love, it is an easy thing to train up. save up seeds, use the artisan buffs, and you can PL it to 200 really fast.

EDIT:

this update note

Crafting
* One of the things we’ve been hearing from players is that our Talisman making system was a bit more time-consuming than we wanted it to be. So, in an effort to make Talisman making more accessible to lower/mid-range crafters, our Items team changed Gold Essence (originally a product of Apothecary) to Gold Dust and added Gold Dust to crafting merchants to eliminate the need for a third crafter to level their skills. Unfortunately, this change was released slightly ahead of schedule and Gold Dust had no sell price. Rather than rollback everybody’s character, we decided to leave the change live. However, in order to avoid an impact on our economy, we have made it so that Gold Dust that had been purchased prior to server restart cannot be sold but it can still be used. This item can still be traded. So, since Gold Dust could previously be bought for no cost, well, you haven’t lost anything

- Players who previously had Gold Essence will notice that it has been converted to Gold Dust, which can be used in all recipes that previously required Gold Essence.

- As a result of this change, Goldweed, which had previously been an ingredient used to create gold dust, has now been converted to a stabilizer for Apothecary. This is a boon to Cultivators, who could not previously create a stabilizer and it will help make tie Cultivation and Apothecary more tightly together.

so now i dunno, goldweed was rare. i suspect looking at AH, that the flood of 10g water stacks means that ill still be a better apoth by switch cult to scav

[Drakhon]

The problem with making Cultivation a Production skill is that then you couldn't be a Cult/Apoth, which gives you access to the widest variety of primary ingredients (types of potions, in other words) for your trade.

I still have not figured out why they didn't just let you pick any two trades, though. You will always need more collection characters than actual production characters as far as mat requirements go, especially due to the ratio between the two.

[Hrothvar]

They didn't allow you to pick two gathering because they did not want one toon to be self sufficient. They wanted to force you to rely upon other players for part of your crafting materials (either guildmates, alts or through AH).

[Drakhon]

I made no suggestion of increasing the total number of trades a character can have concurrently beyond the current two, just that there is no real reason to make everybody choose one Gathering and one Production. A Scavenger/Butcher is no worse than someone who took only Scavenging (without a Production trade) from a self-sufficiency standpoint.

Cultivation is the only iffy point here because it is somewhere between a real Gathering trade and a real Production trade. Even so, I believe Cultivation uses items from both Scavenging and Butchering, so it still wouldn't be self-sufficient if you use all three optional ingredients.

A Salvager/Scavenger would be able to provide all of the mats a Talisman Maker needs (with the Gold Dust change), but still wouldn't be able to be a Talisman Maker to take advantage of that on a single character.