The current "final" tier of armor has completely ridiculous crafting requirements.

[Hex: Maidenless]

So I'm nearing the end of what currently exists in the game. level 25 for several hours. Running out of quests. Just about have done everything.

One thing I want to do is craft the current highest set of armor I can craft. In my case, I'm playing a mage character, so I want the Archmage set.

Now, just playing as mage, pretty much anyone who has done the same will know the hell that is Flax. Flax is ridiculous. You start needing it once you enter the game's second biome. It is ONLY naturally found IN the game's second biome. It is also extraordinarily sparse and there is nowhere on the map you can farm it efficiently. There are a few fixed points in certain ruined towns, but only a couple of drops. Like, 4 to 6. Otherwise, you need to just roam the entire biome looking for the stuff.

The problem is, you need -hundreds- of Flax.

Flax is turned into Linen. Linen is used in EVERYTHING, and in no small volume. For most of the game, you get Linen in a ratio of 1 for 2 Flax.

To put this into perspective, you need 30 Linen for the T2 set of caster armor, the first one that isn't just string, torn cloth, metal scraps and the like. So for your FIRST noteworthy set after you leave the starting area basically, you immediately need to gather 60 Flax. The set after that requires 28 Linen, so you need another 56 Flax for that too.

Annoying, but not THAT bad given it's a OWSC. No, the problem is once you get to the last batch. To put it into perspective, I'm going to use the set I've worked towards. The Archmage Set require the following:

9 Padding
16 Yellow Fabric

Padding is a current-endgame material that requires several materials, most notably being Linen, and Fabric. It requires three of each

Fabric is a current-endgame material that requires three Linen to make. So basically, every single Padding requires 12 Linen. For Padding alone, this would mean you need 108 Linen, or 216 Flax.

But wait! You might have noticed the name of that second item. Yellow Fabric. These are indeed also made with Fabric, using 1 Fabric + 1 Saffron to make. So basically, add another 48 Linen that you need to the total, making it 156, or 312 Flax. Keep in mind, if you just run across the biome looking for it naturally, you could spend 20 minutes roaming and only end up with anywhere from 10 to 30 Flax.

But hold on! Mercifully, once you get to the endgame, you become able to craft a more efficient station at the carpenter which allows you to convert Flax into Linen at a ratio of 1 to 1 instead of 2 to 1. Much better, right? Now you -ONLY- 156 Flax. So, you know, instead of having to roam for something like a potential 7-10 hours, you ONLY need to roam for around 3-5!

Basically, this means that the only way to really reliably get Flax is to farm it. It forces you to engage with the farming system which is otherwise completely ignore-able for the entire game. And then you find out that the farming system is literally just agonizingly slow wait times.

It takes 5 minutes to craft 10 Flax Seeds. Each Flax Seed is 1 Flax once fully grown. So just to get the amount of seeds that you need, you're going to spend a combined 1h and 20m just waiting for the seeds to craft. This is the point when I tell you that the seeds themselves take over 20 minutes just to grow. Now, realistically speaking, 99% of people won't math all of this out before undertaking the effort to craft the armor. That means they're going to go through this step by step, growing a bit of Flax at a time, maybe doing so alongside trying to farm some naturally, without realizing just how much they need. Oh, did I mention that the game doesn't actually tell you about the new station that lets you increase the Flax-to-Linen efficiency in any notable way? It just shows up in the Carpenter's crafting menu with no fanfare other than the usual golden marker that unless you've been going over every single recipe that unlocks throughout the whole game so that they disappear, you wouldn't even realize anything had changed. I imagine the bulk and share of players won't even realize it's there. So a whole ton of people will likely undertake this whole affair taking literally twice as long as you need to.

Now, if you're wiling to game the system, there are SOME ways to mitigate this slightly. You can run through the Ancient Spire in the Kindlewastes and break all the pots, which have a small chance to drop Yellow Fabric. Then, once you've cleared it, restart the game so they all respawn and do it again.

But thats all up to the whims of RNG. I did 3 runs on it and ended up with 6 Yellow Fabric, not even half of what I would need to finish the set.

And keep in mind, this is just ONE armor set for ONE person. Nevermind if you're playing as a group. Nevermind if you have multiple magic users. Nevermind other things that take fabric or linen like bomb clusters, backpacks, glider upgrades, etc. And I can't imagine the other armor sets aren't going to need Padding, given its crafted at the Huntress.

The long and short of this post is to emphasize the fact that the amount of time you're expected to commit just to Flax is ridiculous. The only way to mitigate it is to be psychic and know it will become a crippling problem later on from the offset, and start farming it at your base the MOMENT you get access to it in the early-game. But realistically speaking, how many people are actually going to do that? Who is going to guess that this one material is going to become such a ball-ache?

The amount of Flax that you need to craft things needs to be notably reduced. That, or the amount of Flax you get from gathering it needs to be increased. The time commitment you need to put in to get this crap is insane. Especially when you consider, this armor set that I'm referring to, isn't even anywhere close to what will be the game's actual endgame. Do remember we only are on something like 1/3rd of the total map at the moment. This isn't even a real endgame grind, this is functionally a mid, if not late-early game grind.

Which just makes you think, what in the world are the grinds AFTER this going to be like?

[akanis]

I've got a whole box full of torn cloth. I'd have several boxes if I didn't start discarding it all. It would be very cool if one could take a number of lower level resources and combine them into a higher level one. Like being able to turn 20 torn cloth into 1 linen, or something like that. That would also give purpose to all those obsolete, low level drops that keep happening through midgame.