Nexus Clash

The complexity of the change means it probably will never happen. But I figured I'd make the suggestion anyway.

Currently, the crafting skills are coupled with the combat trees. This causes some weirdness, like using Smithing to work leather, cloth and wood, and using Bowyer to make slings.

Also, all the armors are under Smithing, too, which makes it disproportionately useful. And makes melee and thrown weapons disproportionately attractive, since maintaining them uses the same crafting skill.

The suggestion is to decouple the crafting skills from strictly matching the combat trees. Instead, make them more logically match the production method.

So, the trees would be:

Sewing - Working with thread, fabric, and leather. Requires a Toolkit (or inside a clothing store?). Or make a new lighter Sewing Kit item.
- fabric armors like Leather Jacket, Leather Cuirass, Fireman's Jacket
- ranged weapons like Sling

Woodworking: - Traditional wood crafting. Requires a Toolkit (you really should be able to do it anywhere you could craft a Toolkit, too).
- archery weapons like Shortbow, Longbow
- melee weapons like Battleaxe, Warhammer
- thrown weapons like Hatchet, Spear
- H2H weapons like Tonfa
- ammo like Quivers

Metalworking - Traditional harmer-on-anvil work. Requires a forge.
- metal armors like Chainmail Shirt, Plate Cuirass, Gothic Plate
- melee weapons like Sword, Cutlass, Claymore
- thrown weapons like Throwing Knife
- H2H weapons like Katar

Machining: - Using precision machines to craft advanced items. Requires a powered building with the appropriate equipment (or magical equivalent).
- advanced armors like Military Encounter Armor, Police Riot Armor
- firearms like Rifle, Shotgun, Flamethrower
- melee weapons like Chainsaw
- ammo like Pistol Clip
- grenades

Some items would logically require more than one. But short of adding multiple tree requirements per item, this seems like a logical spread.

New items could be added to further the spread. Maybe a traditional wooden crossbow as a Woodworking-crafted firearm, quarterstaff as a wood melee, modern hunting bow as a Machining-crafted bow, etc.

The Repair Item skill would be split into individual repair skills. Doesn't make much sense that knowing how to hem a leather jacket would let you reforge a sword. Maybe something like:

Hemming > Clothier > Artisan

Wood Repair > Crafter > Woodwright

Tinker > Metalsmith > Mastersmith

CNC > Machinist > Master Machinist

CP costs would be lowered accordingly. Maybe 5 CP per the entry repair skill, 15 CP for the crafting skill, and 20 CP for the master version. Or maybe 10 CP/ 10 CP/ 20 CP, if folks have an aversion to the number 5.

So Bowyer is basically unaffected except that it's now required to get the best heavy melee weapons, Gunsmith is unaffected except that now it's required to get the best armor, and Smithing is completely gutted outside just sharpening swords and crafting knives?

I understand the basic idea - that there are different material levels and that different equipment will be used at each one - but given how the combat trees are set up, there's going to be an overemphasis on woodworking for bows/arrows and machining for guns/ammo. Armorsmithing was previously its own skill, and got rolled into Smithing just to make creating and maintaining armor something that more than pure crafters and enhancers were picking up. Also, I don't think that making "melee and thrown weapons disproportionately attractive" is necessarily a bad thing, as melee mostly loses out to any ranged option (heavy weapon wielding chainsaw users being the exception) and I don't think throw weapons has every really been a combat tree most people consider, even with 40CP for the full tree and the weapons being 2 weight each.

Plus, I'd consider the crafting trees matching up with combat trees to be a positive thing. It means you know which tree to pick up based on which combat style you're using. Besides, if you needed one tree to maintain short bows and a different tree to maintain compound bows, then I highly doubt many people would be using the short bow-tree for their archery builds anyway.

This is just a spread of existing weapons to the proposed crafting skills. New weapons could be introduced, if it's too imbalanced.

Not sure how you mean that woodworking has the best melee, though. Battleaxe and Claymore are basically the same. Do you mean Warhammer? A bastard sword or mace could be introduced with similar stats as an all-metal weapon, if necessary.

Never use Military or Police armor, myself. For the weight, Gothic seems better. The token elemental soak on the former two won't do much to anyone actually using elemental damage. And if using enchants to buff armor, two pieces of lighter armor is better.

One of the goals of this suggestion is to make crafting trees logical to what's being crafted. Not sure how using Bowyer to craft a Sling or Smithing to craft a Tonfa or Leather Jacket is more intuitive than having Woodworking for wooden bows, Metalworking for metal bows, etc. Could also introduce a composite bow as the wooden version of the compound, if that's the breaking point.

The CP cost is also reduced, to make it easier to carry more than one tree. If necessary, that could be lowered, too. If the idea is that you must have all your weapon and armor maintenance requirements fulfilled by 60 CP, then the skills could be 5 CP / 10 CP / 15 CP. That would let someone take two full trees for the same price as the full Smithing tree now. And would be fair to ranged crafted weapon users.

And it's not like it's fully aligned now, anyway. The Sling is a throwing weapon that requires Bowyer for maintenance. And has no ammo crafting at all. The other throwing weapons use Smithing.