Yeah - which is why I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You can make a character you want within 500 skill points. If you want your character to have the best gear then you need to acquire it which requires crafting or talking to people. Just like if you want to get good at stabbing stuff you have to train your stabbing skill.
It was clear from the beginning that it is a crafting heavy server and that crafting would be the main source of gear. So yes, some participation in the crafting system is to be expected even if only as a customer or a supplier of raw materials.
It is. Lets just use a little logic here.
A) You invest in one Combat line. This means actually buying perks. you can argue two, if you want to have a ranged option in blasters, but every other combat skill ranked is ranked purely for the attribute bonuses, as the perks are weapon exclusive.
B) 100 SP is worth 30 attribute points. 20 Primary, 10 Secondary.
C) Crafting SP still gives attributes. You lose nothing for taking Crafting, and it doesn’t matter how many combat skills you have at 100 SP, or ranked in general, because you’re only encouraged to perk in one. 500 SP of pure combat is almost no different from 300 SP of combat and 200 SP of crafting related skills.
D) Each Item can range from 50 SP worth of attributes to 100. The RNG reliant nature makes this unlikely to be achieved, but it really only has to be achieved a select few times to throw things into a blender. A healthy system is never weighted with the edge cases being the norm.
E) The sum totality of equipment vastly outweighs the advantage of taking additional combat skills to tailor the attributes. You only ever get 150 attributes from SP. As someone near SP max, my attributes right now will not change overmuch as skill decay works in and skills readjust themselves to reflect this.
The only wasted points are 10 Intelligence. The advantage of being able to create and tailor my own weapons, gather my own materials, and effectively never be locked out of that regardless of how the server develops is worth significantly more than replacing them with extra combat lines.
And that is ultimately the problem. The gear related crafts do not suffer a downside compared to their vast influence in vertical power, and they are the only access to that supplemental vertical power.
Trying to say they aren’t the most important skills on the server is just so blatantly wrong.
Yes, less apply logic here since you’re forgetting about SP costs (and I don’t think actually read the original post).
Lets take a force character as an example, you want Light (or dark) side, staberstaff, force armour.
Total cost for Light side perks is 143. Total cost of force armour is 68. Total cost of saberstaff is 65. Just maxing those three at current values is 287/500 points, more than half your available SP - and this is before upcoming changes that add more perks (as more force abilities are in the making at least).
Now lets say you want to craft your own lightsabers and force armour because you feel there is an ‘advantage’. Armoursmithing minimum cost to produce the best force armour (with a mod of your choice) is 93. Lightsaber actually falls under lightsabers now, but needs weaponsmithing or electronic for mods - which is 44 for the blueprints for a total of around 109 to craft the best lightsabers you can do and again install the mods.
This totals to 489 points - leaving 11 for any new force powers, force perks, saber perks, rest, meditate, extra FP/health, dash, etc - and you can’t even refine metals so still need people. 202 points spent on making equipment which others are also capable of making.
Now I clairified my original post on the crafts - but lets say you went with Eng/weaponsmithing and were actually able to refine you own metals so you wanted to max harvesting.
This means (using my proposed changes) - 100 lightsaber = 20 dex/10 cha, 100 force armour = 20 cha/ 10wis (would lose int come to think of it), 100 lightside = 20 wis/10 cha, 50 engineering = 10 int/5dex, 50armoursmithing = 10int/5con, 100 harvesting 20 con/10str
This leaves you with a bonus of: 10 str, 25 dex, 25 con, 20int, 30 wis, 40 cha
Compare this to if you had gone 100 martial arts instead of the engineering/armoursmithing (both of which you don’t need if others build your gear, with lightsaber under lightsabers) - 30 str, 30 dex, 20 con, 30 wis, 40 cha.
So logically by choosing to pay others for gear (but harvesting your own metals for credits and to customize them) then you end up dealing 10 extra damage per hit and with 3 more AC. All while being entirely able to get exactly the gear you want (there will be crafters of each type), and saving 202 SP for other things which will make you even better at combat.
So I’m sorry, but they are -not- the most important skills on the server. Yes, it requires some work to acquire the materials to have your equipment made and finding a suitable crafter - but it also requires some work to grind up a crafting skill. This is just one example, there are many others - take two-handed melee for example, getting several strength boosting trees gives more damage/AB, ask Pip what he thinks of his ridiculously high strength; without a single craft skill.
It is and always will be more optimal to not get crafting skills - though I’m definitely not arguing that they’re fun to have and make it easier to get the equipment you want; but you tried to apply logic that was simply incorrect. With my proposed changes to make all crafting more reliant on intelligence then it only makes it an even wider gap between crafters and non-crafters which is as it should be with dedicated combaters stronger in combat and dedicated crafters stronger in crafting.