Economy and Stats Forged Anew

Glorious Alpha Two Economists,

We’ve been hard at work adjusting stats and rebalancing the economy based on your valuable feedback. Your continued support during testing is instrumental in shaping the future of Ashes of Creation! Our current focus is ensuring that testers can always outfit themselves with gear appropriate to their level - crafted with fair and engaging investment of time, effort, and skill. To support this, we’re refining gathering, processing, crafting, combat drops, and other reward systems to better align with player progression, enrich the gameplay loop, and make sure your time in Verra feels truly rewarding!

Crafting, Gathering, and Recipes

To start, we’ve rebuilt all crafting and processing recipes from the ground up to better reflect the time it takes to gather and refine materials. Each artisan level now correlates with a gear grade, and within each gear grade there are different tiers. From level one and beyond, starting gear recipes use plentiful, accessible resources, ensuring players can always equip themselves with gear appropriate to their level. At a minimum, there will always be at least one set that will provide a baseline level of power. As content progresses and gear power increases, we plan to have more recipes that incorporate even rarer materials, while still relying on a core of familiar and readily available ingredients. These types of recipes will become available later in our development.

Once you are ready to craft powerful gear, the required materials will scale accordingly, demanding significant time, effort, and coordination. These recipes will call for a broad mix of resources, including rare components, vendor-sold reagents, items dropped by specific mobs, and materials found only in certain regions. 

To support this new crafting structure, we have also overhauled resource spawn locations, yields, and respawn times. Our goal is to make every biome feel distinct and rewarding for gatherers. Caves now contain more metal and gem nodes! Coastal areas feature dead coral ready to be mined! Higher altitudes support gatherable like Acacia and Agave. Water-rich regions now encourage the growth of trees like Weeping Willows, Date Palms, and even Rividium! No matter where you explore, each location will offer its own unique set of resources to discover and collect.   

Drops, Vendors, & Quest Rewards

Speaking of mobs and vendors, we have made a number of adjustments to mob drops, quest rewards, and commissions. To help ensure crafters and adventurers stay in sync, mob drops have been tuned to be similar to crafting progression. In general,  roughly four hours of mob grinding should yield comparable gear progression to four hours of crafting - depending, of course, on player knowledge and skill. Mobs can now drop gear from various tiers within each grade. While most drops will be from the lowtier, there’s still a chance to score high-quality items as well! Vendors will also now offer low gear for all grades, along with reagents required for advanced crafting.

Quest rewards and commissions have received updates too! Many quests will now allow players to choose their reward which can include materials and gear. Commissions have been rebalanced to better reflect the effort required to complete them, and now feature reward boxes that reveal a surprise reward when opened.  

Altogether, these updates represent key steps toward building a more interconnected and rewarding player-driven economy. Whether you’re a crafter, adventurer, or somewhere in between, your choices will feel more meaningful than ever! 

Your Feedback

Your feedback continues to be invaluable in helping shape Ashes of Creation into the best MMORPG it can be. We've just posted a Dev Discussion focused on the ongoing economy and stat rebalancing efforts, and we would love your input as we move forward! Now is the time to gather your thoughts to assist us in crafting a great system.

We’re incredibly grateful for your continued support throughout our development, and we can’t wait to read your glorious feedback. If you haven't already, please be sure to follow us on your social media platform of choice for the latest updates and news.