LotRO dev blog talks Rise of Isengard crafting changes

"Furthermore, Turbine has eliminated component recipes in the new tier to "reduce the amount of time spent crafting intermediate ingredients.""

Thank friggin' GOD.

"Finally, there are also a couple of changes to resource gathering, including yield tweaks and the ability for Farmers to produce crops individually or in bulk."

So good.

I was disappointed not to see an individual overview of each crafting profession. It seems like we've seen bigger changes to crafting in previous non-expansion updates.

I also don't like the idea of recipes always dropping in stackable unidentified scroll cases. It sounds like this may make rolling on recipe drops more complicated while in a group.

P.S. -- The "More coverage" link in this article seems to be broken.

The crafting guilds in LOTRO strike me as a useless waste of time and materials (and shards) for marginal advantage. And the hidden Cash Shop fee to advance beyond the first tier is a vile, sneaky cheap shot. For shame.

Components never bothered me much. A couple lucky rolls while making components means you can stretch your materials for another assembly or two.

The farming changes on the final tier will be a great relief to the two players that got that far, I'm sure.

I love LotRO's crafting system. It's the only game I've ever played that had a viable system: you can craft stuff you can actually use and which is pretty damn near instance and raid drops. Turbine's been really good about catering to the non-raid crowd. I hope they continue that trend.

(Though I do dread grinding more reputation with the crafting guilds.)

i see no need to remove components seems silly but whatever

The removal of "intermediate ingredients" might be a curse or a blessing.

To decide that we need to see the final numbers of crafting xp.

In the past, you would have gained 4 xp from the component (lets say a Leather Pad) and then 6 xp from the armor made with the component for a total of 10 crafting xp.
If the amount of crafting xp is now only 6 xp for the armor itself, raising your crafting skill will be a major pain.

Also, with no critical results on the intermediate ingredients, we will need more materials than before.

One thing I like about the crafting of component recipes is that you can use rare materials to boost the crit chance of producing additional components. So instead of getting 1 component, the crit will give you 3 instead.

This is useful for components that require comparatively more materials. So basically, you can choose to forgo the increased chance to create crit version of the finished product for the increased chance to create more ingredients (and hence, create more finished products).

Taking this away seems like a stupid nerf. It's already tedious and annoying to farm all those animal hides to level tailoring.

And I thought component recipes was a way to promote interdependency among crafting professions so there is an economy when X profession can supply components for Y profession. Isn't this why LoTRO has the pre-fixed 3 crafting professions, so people can't do everything by themselves?

Yeah, I guess in today's MMO in which people want to do everything by themselves, interdependency is out-of-fashion. Heh.