Pax Dei’s recent Proving Grounds update changed a lot. Some of the crafting, building, and resource overhauls have proven so frustrating that Mainframe is addressing the issues and their plans moving forward.
The team acknowledges the frustration. This is Early Access, so things do change, but their intention was not that things changed so much that they felt unworkable. The new XP bonus system on recipes meant to make crafting more complex recipes more rewarding, but the resulting XP curve took a hard swing. All this will be getting rebalanced since the changes were, they admit, “too dramatic”.
Crafting and building updates have also gotten more complex, sometimes unclear, or sometimes completely unintuitive. Some crafting issues are due to incomplete patch info. And other issues include having separate parts of the same item require different levels in separate skills to craft.
Affecting crafting overall is increased resource scarcity. Resources like leather and some ores, have gotten much harder to get without extensive exploration, and are sometimes gated behind skill requirements or gathering-specific limitations. This also leads to slower skill progression, and has impacted blacksmithing, leatherworking, and tailoring the most. In some of these professions, there is stagnation and the grind has slow progression to a crawl. On top of that are issues when some professions require support from others, which can slow your progress even further.
The community's feedback since the patch launched has brought them to vow to make some changes. They're reevaluating things like crafting XP and resource distribution, and they're working to help release the bottleneck on skill leveling while also trying to offer that sense of accomplishment that they intended by adding things like the XP multiplier. Their update lists a number of the specific changes that are on the way, and it's a list worth taking a look at if you're currently affected by these massive crafting changes.
