Re: Poll: Thoughts on profession books?

[Armanant]

You're not going to be making a meteor spell at level 1  Remember the gems are meant to be the easiest of the components, not the hardest. Remember the selection of spells right now is definitely not hear what is going to be available on release, and I believe the idea is that those new spells will mostly have these extra components, which spawn in areas above level X, or in commodity towers above level Y for the 'super cool' spells, etc.

[zebramatt]

That's true - I hadn't accounted for rare commodities.

But I recall that when I wanted to make Death Touch to deal with monster spawners, the biggest gate was that it was literally the last recipe the Ilari offered me, which meant I had to collect rather a lot of books. After that, grabbing the walnut or cherry or whatever was trivial by comparison.

And although I wasn't necessarily married to the fashion in which it was gated - running about after libraries to find books to randomly unlock new spells - I loved how awesome the spell itself felt, simply because it had been hard to obtain.

[Armanant]

Well, imagine the thrill you'll get when you make the 'tsunami' spell that will require a 'dark water core', which will only drop from special Dark Illari super-bosses in their fortress-keeps within the Deeps 

[x4000]

This is true, right now there's too many options at the start.  Will look at that.

[Nalgas]

Here's the list of the current gating that's in the game:
    2: Quartz Rock
    5: Copper Ore, Sunstone, Moonstone
    8: Cherry
    10: Iron Ore, Magma
    14: Plum
    70: Coral

Look at the numbers in that list, and then look at the number of people who get to level 20 or 30 or even higher after playing the game for a few days.  You could take the level requirements out entirely, and almost no one would even notice because they out-level most of those things before they even get somewhere that has them.

[Gallant Dragon]

Maybe level progression needs to be slowed down?
Or maybe we just need more content.

[x4000]

More content is coming, and level gating for crafting recipes are likely coming at this point, too.

The level progression thing is a two-edged sword: people that play a ton get very high level very fast, and I think that's okay -- in terms of the stuff that is gated so far, the idea is that you should be able to get to all of it within a day or two of hardcore play.  Other more advanced stuff is obviously coming later, but if 90% of the game isn't available in your first dozen hours that's a problem at this stage of development of the game.