POWER CORE
The Power Core is the first thing you socket into your crafted item. The level of the Power Core determines how powerful your item will be, and the schematic of your crafted item determines how strong of a Power Core you can use. The higher the quality of your Power Core, the more powerful of an item you can create if the schematic you are using allows it. If you use a level 50 schematic but only a level 15 Power Core, the completed item will be level 15.
ELEMENTS, SOCKETS AND STATS
With the Free to Play Model, came a completely new stat system. Assault Power and Support Power are now base stats and players can choose when crafting items which one they would prefer as well as other stats for the item. Before crafting, players can use a slider, located just above the crafting button to determine if the item should have more support (healing, tanking) or assault (dps).
When a new item is crafted, stat sockets will have random elements. Each element determines which stats players can most efficiently put into the crafted item. Some schematics have sockets that will accept any element without penalty. That is not to say players can't put an air element into a fire socket. They can but the crafting failure rate increases and with that risk comes the possibility of losing all relevant materials.
The current socket types are:
- Fire - Critial Hit, Critial Hit Rating
- Water - Glance Rating, Multi Hit Rating
- Earth - Armor
- Life - Focus
- Air - Deflect Chance, Strikethrough Rating
- Logic - Intensity Rating, Vigor Rating, Critical Mitigation Rating
Once a craft begins, the players materials are consumed. However they can still abandon their craft at any time. They still lose the materials but wont have to use up a Power Core.
CHARGE
Players may Charge the sockets to craft an item with their ideal stats. If they overcharge a socket, they will increase the stat value of the item, but there will also be a higher chance to fail. Players need to focus on the stats they want. If they undercharge a socket, the stat value will be lower, but they will have a higher chance of success.
If they overcharge sockets or mismatch the stat and socket elements your craft attempt is more likely to fail. The higher the fail rate the more risk of losing all the materials and having to start over. Risk vs Reward. There is a failure cap and once the failure rate reaches this cap, the item cannot be crafted until the threshold is lowered. There are ways to reduce the risk. One is through the use of Talents.
TALENTS
As players level their crafting, they will earn points to put into talents. Among them are: Reducing mismatch penalties, reduced failure chance, increased failure cap, elemental socket filtering (the ability to removed socket types from random rolls) and reduced material costs. We will potentially see more ways in the future to reduce the risk either through consumables or other means (as mentioned in a FTP WildStar beta livestream).
For more information on how to craft using a specific tradeskill , please visit that tradeskill's article.
Items that were retired or altered previous to Free to Play[]
- Power Amplifier (Amp) – These provide additional Power to the item, effectively giving it a bigger budget for stats and specials. The item above has a Blue Power Amp, which in this case gives it 263 Power (roughly 26 stat points).
- Attribute Relay Chips (ARC) – These are casually referred to as Stat Chips. They convert 10 points of Power into 1 point of an attribute. They will convert all of the Power if they are in a terminating socket (the last socket in a branch), or some adjustable percent of the Power if they are not.
- Special Circuits – Specials are broadly defined as anything on the item that grants a special function to the item, instead of attribute points. They are subdivided into three groups:
- Ability Chips – These can provide a wide variety of bonuses from wearing the item, such as a chance to reflect damage, to poison an enemy, increased movement speed, or whatever we like, really. Most Specials fall into this category. The example above has an Ability Special called Power Shift. It comes from the chip with the crown itcon.
- Set Chips – These provide set bonuses. I will not be going into the details of this system.
- Item Challenge Chips – not much is known at this time.