Regarding my current crafting strategy, I want to make my team better armor. I do. But is it worth it? If instead of continuing to work on the Armor, which is a massive time sink and will take a very long time to bear fruit, I go for the weapon upgrades, I can certainly see how being more lethal would be a good thing. Specifically, ranged weaponry first, because if you can kill a monster before it reaches you, the monster has less opportunity to turn you inside out.

After the battle with the Orcs, the rest of the party would certainly appreciate an upgrade to their weapons. That was a very close battle, and if Joaqim and Bucky had been able to engage sooner, it likely would have helped. Beyond that, even Regina could benefit from a weapon upgrade. Her longbow is pretty good overall, but a composite version would be an improvement as it should have a marginally better range and, significantly, could be fired from horseback. Additionally, none of our bows can be set tightly enough to take advantage of the exceptional strength everyone in our group except me seems to possess. Bucky in particular needs an Odysseus style bow.

But… How long would that take? Well, nearly 6 months of continuous work to make an optimized bow for Bucky to use. In other words the comparative efficiency would be there, but the truth is that it is still far too much time invested for a limited benefit.

I continue to work on potions during travel, and at night I work on some simple crossbows for myself and Joaqim. They won’t make for good weapons in an objective sense, but they should be a notable improvement over throwing rocks.

We spend 3 weeks leisurely making our way back towards Diamond Lake during which time, as planned, I reach level 3 after we clean out a pack of wolves from a shallow cave. Sweet! This honestly doesn’t feel like it was as hard as getting from level 1 to level 2, but I think much of the comparative ease is owed to the group I am now with being better balanced than when it was just a crafter and 2 casters.

I already decided to try and ride this Architect class out for the foreseeable future, so I select it and choose to level up. Time to find out what benefits another level gives me. Hopefully it’s like a mage or priest and I get access to powerful new infusions.

Well alright then. My attack went up another point. I don’t know if that value represents some form of accuracy or damage or some combination of the two, but seeing it going up is a good thing no matter what the underlying mechanics are. I'm coming to accept that even with a class, fighting is just not my thing in this life, so how much it goes up doesn’t worry me too much, but improvement is improvement.

What else? 29 health now, nice, I would have been able to continue standing against a single Falchion hit from that weak Orc. I still think that was probably a critical hit, but whether or not I'm right about that, I'd want to be able to continue standing after getting hit, and seeing my health move beyond the highest single damage attack I've been hit by up to this point is nice.

It appears that my defense improvements are still directly attributable to my gear; I guess that one is particularly hard to increase, because outside of equipment it has only increased to 2 over the course of my life. I honestly would have expected my attack to be harder to increase rather than my defense considering my defense increased a couple points just by getting older… Though perhaps that’s the key to increasing defense, is that I will need to use attribute updates to improve it? If so, why is it under derived attributes?

Speaking of attributes, there were no updates to my primary attributes this level. Oh? What’s this, under Special Qualities? “Craft Miscellaneous Magic Item”. That… Is awesome. If there were no other improvements this level, I would still think that was a major win. But there are more improvements, so I will continue to point those out and then explain what differences they make afterwards.

I am up to 4 imbuements now, a nice incremental change, though hardly earth shaking as it only means that I'm finally up to the same number of spells per day as a real spell caster would have at level 1. Skills, anything new there? Nice: Balance (for some reason?), Sculpting, Cobbling (?!), Poison Making (?!?!), Alchemy, and Herbalism. Some of them once again make no sense. Balance is a skill? And that… Helps? With something? Somehow? And for some reason I received it over the other things I’d been practicing or learning about, like pottery or trap making?

Ok. Maybe it is class related, but for the life of me I cannot figure out why an "Architect" class would have any sort of emphasis on a "Balance" skill. I would assume it meant something in line with "leveling", such as one might want to do during construction, but no, this is applicable to the sort of balance one would need in order to walk a tightrope. Strange.

As for the other skills I gained this level, I have a sneaking suspicion that my efforts related to potion brewing, and its many failures, likely relate to picking up both Alchemy and Poison Making. Herbalism is probably present because Regina was so thorough with teaching me about the various plants she brought to me, as well as showing me what their various parts would do when prepared in various ways. It looks like I need to thank her again, because possessing the actual skill means my knowledge on the subject extends well beyond medicinal herbs now. Arguably, the most importantly change of all may be that there was the talent notification.

[You are eligible to select a level 3 talent. Would you like to select now?]

Yes. Yes I would. Skipping straight to the class specific talents I am once again tempted to select Efficient Architect for a second time, although this time I am also sorely tempted to select Expeditious Architect. Realistically though, I lack a solid basis of understanding for magical item costs and knocking 25% off of the manufacturing time would be very nice, but when you are looking at 5 years to craft a piece of nonmagical armor already, turning it into 4 years simply isn’t the level of impact I would hope for. Those talents are not even applicable for normal items, they only work for magical items. How bad must they be? I truly do not know. Wait, actually… I guess I do have some idea. On the whole it might be a lot more reasonable than I'd first guessed.

I should've taken a bit more time to digest my newest gains before trying to pick my talent, because that "Miscellaneous" crafting quality is still imparting knowledge of what it makes possible, and that goes a long way towards letting me know what kinds of prices and timelines I should expect when making magical equipment. Regardless right now, even though I know I will be prioritizing magical items to as great of a degree as I can from this point forward, I am still completely stumped by the difficulties associated with crafting regular items.

Before I select one of the two amazing talents that I am pretty sure will be my bread and butter in the future, I decide that I will look within the more general talent sections to see if they have any crafting related – Wait. What is this? Prior to switching to General, my eyes are drawn to a new talent within my class specific talents. There are actually a couple of new ones, or at least I think they are new, but most of them are pretty lackluster. One of them however, is worth looking at a little more closely. It is called “Craft Schematic”. As to its effect?

[Craft Schematic – You can craft schematics of spells from other classes, which gather magic power independently and allow daily use.]

Is this good? I am not sure. If this means I can craft spells from any school into some sort of a reusable scroll, that would be absolutely fantastic. But is that what it means? Would I be the only person who could ever use them? Would each of those schematics be giant stacks of numerous papers?

I think about it and I remember that according to my initial hypothesis on the fundamentals of magic underpinning the various classes, I suspect that as long as there are no compatibility issues when it comes to magic source and expression, and as long as these “Schematics” work the way I expect them to, where you build the source, the focus, and the medium, and some of the key points of expression into the schematic, it will likely allow people who otherwise would be able to use a scroll of that type to use this schematic.

In other words, if I made a Schematic of “Cone of Flame”, I would expect a mage to be able to use it, but a priest likely would not be able to. On the other hand, if I made a schematic of “Light” than all of them Mage, Priest, or Druid would be able to use that schematic. I would just need to be mindful of the selected power source and ensure that it did not eliminate the need for expression, but that it still filled out the core portions of the spell which made it *this* spell. If so, this could be amazing. Reusable scrolls and gospels?

Potions and scrolls have their place, but their consumable nature greatly limits the value they would provide to a group like mine. A reusable scroll though? If I had 4 level 1 cones of fire, that would mean I could pretend to be a level 1 mage. That is a very big deal to me, because I could be doing that in combat. Being helpless in combat hurts my ego far more than I like to admit, even to myself. More than that, having one of your companions be dead weight hurts the rest of the group you are with.

Of course, other items can also be crafted to accomplish similar effects, and now that I can craft other types of magical items that begins to become possible for me, but I don’t know if this might be cheaper, or faster. Not yet. I have not had a chance to fully review what my new miscellaneous items crafting ability can do, and now that I am in the talent menu, I cannot leave it without selecting a talent.

Fuck it. You know what? I would LOVE to be able to do something in combat. Maybe there is a better way to do it, but I haven't seen anything that would come anywhere close to matching what I think this is.

My talent selection is made, I can now craft Schematics. There's more to look at relating to my new level, but as I feel a flood of new information entering my head, I can't help but smile.