135518-armorsmithcircuit-board-crafting-feedback

== Content ==
			
I understand the reasons for streamlining gear crafting for the relaunch: the old model made it difficult to gauge the potential power level of pieces, and the changes to stats and itemization probably meant gutting most of it anyway. A circuit board crafting nerf was bound to happen, but with all that considered, I'm still finding the new sytem too frustrating and generally lacking fun.
 
In no particular order, here are some specific issues I thought I'd mention. For the record, I've played as an armorsmith/technologist (for power cores) since launch, so I have little experience with other tradeskills.
 
Failed crafts aren't worth vendoring. No matter the tier, failed crafts always reward a 10-copper vendor trash piece that doesn't stack. The value for these should be more along the lines of eldan tech-bits, or at least based on the level of the recipe. Raise the value, let them stack, or just remove it: failures are punishing enough without having to vendor each trash piece one by one. 
Green Life and Logic sockets difficult to tell apart. I can't imagine how color blind players could tell any of the other sockets apart without icons or mouseover tooltips. 
Life sockets do nothing but ruin heavy armor crafts. I could be wrong (Life and Logic are hard to tell apart), but the only stat not penalized by Life sockets is Focus Pool, which is useless for heavy armor classes. I know that Focus Regeneration could sometimes appear on some heavy armor formulas in the previous system, but most formulas didn't have that issue, and when they did, they were rarely for capstone items. This can happen in any heavy armor craft, and the only way to make it stop is buried near the bottom of the talent tree. 
Low-level tiers of circuit board crafting have only one socket. I know it's important not to overwhelm new crafters, but this is really boring. 
Base materials are too expensive. This is especially true given the potential for mis-matched sockets appearing in crafts. At expert tier, you will pay a minumum of 65G to craft any piece of armor, unless you take specific talents. It doesn't matter if you craft a green or a purple, or if you're making a pair of gloves or chest armor. Sure, it was probably too cheap to make superb-quality pieces with starshard and hybrid power cores in the past, but this seems too prohibitive, especially with expert power cores trading for 90G on the CX as I write this. 
Power cores are still named after closed-beta minerals. Exogen, Ferrocite, etc. were reverted back to their original names on Live, but some power cores still use those closed-beta names. As an aside, the Luminite Crystals used in novice crafting schematics can be confused with deprecated plain Luminite, which is still available on the CX. 
AH filtering is outdated. The current filtering options on the AH are limited to item levels 1-60. If you want to see any crafted gear with a higher item level, you cannot use any filters, because you still need to specify an item level when you do. Also, there's no option yet to filter for new stats like Glance or Multi-hit, and there are still filters for deprecated stats like Moxie and Tech Resistance.
Those are the specific issues I noticed as I was finshing my expert tree today. Generally, crafting feels too homogenized now: you can't specialize to the same degree as you could before, and every formula and skill tree looks exactly the same as the last. The added randomness with socket types is doubly punishing when coupled with the new minimum material costs. Even if it somehow manages to net crafters a lot of cash, this isn't a fun system to engage with anymore.	
----