Lord of the Rings Online's latest Beta Journal gives us more information on the crafting system.
I've been a big fan of crafting, ever since the tradeskills in Asheron's Call. Crafting in AC2 occupied my time for hours on end, both before and after the big changes! I was looking forward to crafting in LOTRO.
Looking over the crafting charts, I decided to give the Historian profession a shot. One of the parts I've focused on the past few weeks has been farming, and what I've found is...farming is fun. Fun, but expensive (at least for now). There's nothing like planting seeds and reaping the crop that you personally planted! Instead of questing one day, I spent the entire play session in the fields, growing potatoes, onions, and so on. One of the nice aspects of farming is that even if you fail to grow a good crop, you can turn your failed crop into seeds, and plant a new crop, essentially feeding the process all by itself! The farmer is just a supplier though - she can't provide a finished product. So, basically, I sell all my crops to cooks, who then turn it into finished product for people to use.
The other part of the Historian that I've tried is the Scholar skills. Scholars can make lore, both battle and crafting. The hard part of this particular skill is the ingredients are all loot drops. That makes it a LOT harder to craft battle buffs or crafting buffs on your own. You need to get out and kill things, or rely on others to get the components you need to make these things. The things that can be made are actually useful - they're just going to be rare.
I haven't played much with the Weaponsmith skill yet. I expect that it will be along the same lines as Scholar - get parts from other folks, and make weapons.
The mechanics of crafting are pretty simple - get your components, head to a crafting place, and craft. I'm very used to that from AC2, so this is a very smooth transition for me. All in all, crafting looks to be shaping up pretty well. I expect that when we go live, I'll be bugging my kinship to no end, for all the bits and bobs to go into making the lore buffs, and I'll be spending a lot of time 'down on the farm', supplying the cooks with fresh produce!
Read more here.
