Warhammer Online Crafting Skills

Warhammer Online is attempting something different from other MMORPGs with their crafting system. Their aim is to a make a fun, and ultimately rewarding system that doesn’t feel like a grind. They have expressed that they want everyone out there in the battlefield and have allowed their system to let you craft/gather while you are exploring and killing!

No Recipes! In Warhammer there are no set recipes for your crafting. Basically, this means that instead of picking something out of a list, you gather up a few ingredients and throw them into a pot and hope something cool comes out when you are done.

Example:

A recipe based system would have you choose out of a list of potions. Say you wanted to make a healing potion, you would typically pull out your recipe list and see you needed A, B, and C to make the potion. You go to a merchant and purchase the items you need, or gather the items from monsters as required, and a short while later you have your healing potion. The value of this potion is constant so you are always sure of what you’ll get.

Overview
The Warhammer method involves a lot of guess work and luck, but also rewards you for trying out odd combinations. You may get something much better than you intended or you may get something horribly wrong. Another great plus is you do NOT have to be at a certain area to craft. Provided you have the necessary items in your inventory, you can craft anything anywhere.

Example:

Let's say you have been asked by a friend to make him a couple of healing potions for RvR™ later. From experience you know that a certain herb works really well for healing potions so you go out and gather what you need. However, you also know that you can’t just make a healing potion with just the herb, you’ll need other ingredients as well.From experience you have found that cheap wine helps stabilize the healing potions so you go gather that from passed out dwarves. On the way back to your friend you are suddenly attacked by a ravenous fairy! After the fight you decide to clip her wings, thinking it may help strengthen your potion.


So you’ve made it back to your friend alive and you start on your potions. The first one turns out normal, you’ve added all the typical ingredients you use and the potion comes out the way it usually does. The second one you’ve added all the normal ingredients but you’ve had a stroke of luck! Your potion has come out just a little bit stronger than normal, good for you! For the last potion you decide to drop in the fairy wings when your friend isn’t looking, just to see what would happen. By now your friend is giving you a funny look. The last potion is bubbling and spewing out multi-colored smoke, not to mention the sickingly sweet smell it’s putting off. When things settle down you quickly realized you’ve made a discovery! Your simple healing potion now offers a greater chance to dodge enemy attacks, WAY TO GO!

Note: The obvious drawback of this plan is that it is likely in the near future that we will see all known combinations published on the internet and this will, with time, turn into a recipe based system.

A breakdown of the System
Two crafting skills are currently available:

• Apothecary


• Talisman Crafting

And four gathering skills:

• Butchering


• Cultivating


• Magical Salvaging


• Scavenging

You can only choose one crafting and one gathering skill, so pick wisely! Keep in mind what you want to do. If you want to make highly magical Talisman’s you might want to consider taking up Magical Salvaging as your gathering skill. If you want to make powerful potions, you may wish to take up Cultivating so you can get the herbs you need.

A breakdown of the Gathering Skills

Butchering
What this involves is searching a killed monster for resources. This only applies to non-sentient beasts and is used to salvage bones, meat, and skins. You will be able to identify if a monster can be harvested by noticing the flies buzzing around the corpse. A simple click allows you to butcher, provided you have the skill trained.

Cultivating
There’s no flower picking in WAR boy! Weeds, fungi and herbs are some of the main subjects involved. For this you are going to need to buy some things and carry them around to make this work. First off you are going to need a pot to grow your plants in. You’ll also need things like; soil, seeds and spores. Seeds and spores can be obtained as loot from monsters, as rewards from quests, and bought or traded from other players. Pots and soil can be purchased from merchants.

So you’ve got your items and are ready to do some cultivating! What you need to do is this;
1- Place your seeds or spores inside your pot. Easy enough.
2- Water your little pot and carry that thing around with you a little while. Things take time to grow man!
3-To make your plant healthy you can add nutrients or other things you want to try. Always wondered what to do with that spectral essence? Well add it to your soil and find out!
4-Your plant is done growing, time to find out what you got!

When you harvest you will either get a new type of seed (to be used in growing an even stronger plant), or an ingredient that you can use with the apothecary skill.

When all is said and done the now empty pot will go into your backpack to be used again.

Magical Salvaging
You too can be an all powerful magical expert! This is a pretty basic system that involves extracting the magical properties from items. What you’ll need to accomplish this is any magical item that has some sort of bonus on it (i.e. +10 Power or +3 to health). Using your deeply arcane and magical skill you will be able to extract one of these bonuses off the item. The drawback to this is the item you are salvaging will be lost in the process, so keep that in mind when you are attempting to withdraw one of its magical properties. If the item has more than one bonus on it, you will only be able to remove one property, so keep that in mind as well and choose the power that benefits you the most.

Example:

You are exploring a new area of the woods and are attacked by a blood-thirsty Cabbit! After a long and exhausting fight you manage to defeat the beast and discovery a shimmering amulet around its neck. Using your powers of deduction you realize this amulet has a +5 Intelligence and +7 Agility bonus. You can’t really use the amulet yourself but you could really use the agility on something else, so you decide to extract that bonus. The process is pretty involved and the amulet is destroyed but you are left with a trinket that will allow you to use that +7 Agility on a Talisman in the future!

Scavenging
This involves recovering hidden items from more intelligent creatures, i.e. sentient. Basically you are rummaging through the dead body’s possessions to see if you can find anything of worth. As with Butchering you will be able to identify a body that can be scavenged by the flies that are buzzing around it. You will, as with Butchering, simply need to click on the corpse to recover items of worth, provided you have the skill trained.

Apothecary
So you want to create some potions, lotions and powders do you? Well in order to do this you will need training in the Apothecary skill. To be successful you’ll need some items such as a container, a main ingredient, and support ingredients.

A breakdown:

• The type of container you use will determine how many support ingredients you can add to your mixture.


• The main ingredient determines what type of potion you will end up with.


• Support ingredients assist in the creation.

A note: All main ingredients are unstable so you will need these support ingredients in order to increase the chance of a successful potion or the possibility of creating something new and exciting.

Example:
Using our previous example of the healing potion we’ll break down the parts.

• 1- You had your container that you used to make your potion in.


• 2- The herbs you gathered were your main ingredient that’s used in all healing potions.


• 3- The cheap wine you scavenged from the dwarves was a support ingredient.


• 4- The fairy wings were another support ingredient you decided to add as well.

Keep in mind that not all support ingredients you add are going to produce results. For example, you decide to use your old combination that you discovered when you made that last healing potion. This time you decide to try and add some left over frog legs as well. Everything seems to be going fine until the mixture starts to bubble rapidly and emit a thick black smoke. After a few tense moments wondering if you are going to survive this experiment, the smoke clears and you take a look inside. Nothing useful was produced! Obviously this is not a good combination and you make a note of it.

In keeping with the WAR effort and encouraging players to get out there and battle, specific things must be done in order to make certain potions. For example you may have had to capture the enemy’s territory in order to cultivate a certain rare fungi. Or you may have had to defeat Glowworm the Great in order to acquire some other special ingredient.

Side note: All potions have a chance of failing. If this happens your container may break and become unusable, however the ingredients you used will not go away and may be used again.

Talisman Crafting
Talisman Crafting is basically the process of creating things that provide bonuses to worn items and armor. In order to make a talisman you are going to need a container just like with Apothecary. You’ll also need various items from crafting/gathering skills and at least one item from magical salvaging. Like Apothecary you’ll need your main ingredient (item from magical salvaging), and your support ingredients. Talisman crafting can imbue bonuses such as; additional stats, bonuses to armor, and bonuses to resistances.

Example:

• You’re ready to make your Talisman so you’ve got your container set.


• You apply the item you got from magical salvaging.


• You apply the necessary support ingredients that are needed to facilitate the process.


• FLASH…BOOM… you’re all done and now have a highly magical item that you can equip!

Note: Only rare and powerful items can have Talisman’s attached to them.

Conclusion
Based on all the information, we can see that early on there is a lot of guess work involved with Warhammer Online crafting. With thousands of different possibilities out there for making items, it will be a fun and challenging experience to discover them all! Additionally, in order to make some of the more powerful items, you’re going to need to work with other players. This is where having a good guild or network of crafters comes into play. Crafting won’t be quite so easy at first, but in my opinion this system should prove to be extremely fun and rewarding, a stark contrast to current crafting systems out there today!