[Ysharros]

Galagh, I had the same problem when I hit 11 blacksmith, which has eased considerably after I hit 12 (and rejigged my station skills down and the other 2 up). I suspect many of the difficulties I'd been seeing stemmed at least in part from being at the very bottom of a tier - I noticed for instance that even when I was doing easy / low-moderate WOs (working with copper rather than tin), I was still getting moderate complications, which I hadn't before; which leads me to think that complications may be partly based on the crafter's tier, not the Work Order's tier.

I've read a lot of posts and done a fair bit of thinking in the last few days, not least of which has been realigning some of my expectations. Sigil wants Vanguard to be around for years, not months, and because of this any system they create has to stand up for longer than a few months; what seems amazingly difficult for us now may not be so hard for those who come after (as I and others have said elsewhere). Akin to that is the fact that if we could all make As and Bs all the time, there would be little point to having grades C and D - and most importantly, grade C would become the red-headed market stepchild. This is particularly evident in EQ2 for instance, where although there are multiple grades, since it's not difficult to achieve pristine once you know the system, pristine has become the de-facto standard - and that being the case, what's the point of any of the lower grades?

On the bright side, I've seen a lot of C-grade items on the broker and they're really not bad at all. Sure, a B is better and an A is great, but Cs have bonuses, decent stats, and are quite useable. This should hopefully create tiered prices as well as opening up a market for the not-A grade stuff, which was presumably the intent all along.

I'm not entirely sure how the system will hold up over time - it may well be that in a year, nobody wants to buy anything other than A grade anyway. But at least the devs have tried to build a little durability into the crafting system (not to mention in many other areas of the game).

Having also seen that the crafting devs consider 4-6 complications the norm (as Silius posted elsewhere), I adjusted my own opinion that 3-4 should be the norm. I'd prefer it, but it's not the case, it's not going to be the case, and they may have very good reasons for it that I just can't gauge - the obvious one I can gauge being that if 3-4 were the norm, B-grade would probably be the average result.

All that being said, I'm going to observe what happens when I craft, read other people's experiences, and try to keep learning more about a system which seems to be even more complex than we ever suspected. C-grade may be the norm, but I sure hope I can reach Bs and As with patience, perseverance, and skill (as, indeed, I can). The random element on comps still seems very high but again, that may just be because we don't have quite enough information (another post by Silius hinted at this - I can dig it up if required).

(PS - Shinto, just saw your sig - nice page! :-D)