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. To keep crafting at the center of gear progression, gear drop rates from enemies have been substantially lowered. In general, players can expect that roughly one hour of crafting will yield comparable progression to about seven hours of mob grinding - though outcomes will still depend on player knowledge and skill. This ensures that crafted gear is highly valuable and remains the primary path to power. That said, mobs can still drop gear across various tiers within each grade. Most loot will be from the lower end, but there’s always a chance to land a high-quality item.

Vendors now play a more central role in the crafting loop as they are the exclusive providers of certain reagents required for advanced crafting. This makes vendors an essential part of the progression pipeline and a key bridge between adventuring and crafting.

Quests and commissions have also been rebalanced. Many quests now offer reward choices, including materials and gear, allowing players to select what best supports their journey. Commissions have been tuned to more accurately reflect their effort, and now grant reward boxes that reveal a surprise when opened.

Altogether, these changes are designed to make crafting the backbone of progression, while keeping adventuring, questing, and commissions meaningful contributors to the wider economy. Whether you’re gathering, crafting, or hunting, your role will feel more interconnected 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.