Long-time returning player here after a year and a half break from Conan.
What was anyone thinking with these bench designs? Not only are they offensively massive, ruining any chance a solo player had of building small while having access to the highest tier of crafting, but some of them are utterly useless.
The new furnaces and tanneries, for example. The fuel-efficient versions are literally pointless. The speed versions give you 3.6x speed and only consume 65% more fuel. This is a net gain in BOTH craft speed and fuel efficiency. The fuel efficient versions take so long to do anything that they are a complete waste of time.
My next point; the blacksmith’s and armorer’s benches. First of all, when it comes to crafting weapons and armor, nobody needs to mass produce gear at such a speed (for twice the material cost) that the speed benches are necessary. Completely useless in that regard. Second of all, when it comes to making iron/steel reinforcements, the improved blacksmith bench (the tier 2 bench, yes) is literally the most efficient. Why?? I understand you wanted to make a 
speed bench and a cost bench, but you really actually couldn’t give the speed bench a small boost to craft cost in order to reduce reinforcement costs to 1 bar? So if we are to use the tier 3 benches, we are left to decide between doubling the amount of farm required (which would actually be 4x the farm as before, because you changed the harvest rate on officials to 1x) OR waiting an excruciatingly long time for reinforcements to finish. OR, the magical 3rd option, literally just use the improved bench. It’s gets a speed AND cost reduction bonus, so it’s better than both of the T3 benches for making reinforcements. Was this even thought about in their design?
THIRD OF ALL, freakin’ alchemical base. All of the previous complaints pale in comparison to the fact that we now spend TWICE as much alchemical base to make high tier armor, and that alchemical base takes TWICE as long to farm as before, resulting in a QUADRUPLED grind in order to make some decent armor. This is due to the garbage design decision that in order to split hides and make improved leather/fur/silk we need to have an entire separate bench that does NOT have improved versions to cut the costs down. What an absolute joke.
And my final complaint, the cherry on top:
THE DYERS BENCH IS SO MASSIVE, WHY.
I just feel like these changes were completely UNnecessary and UN-asked for. I heard it was to reduce the amount of placeables and buildings people make, but that logic is so backwards that i don’t even think Funcom would do it. There are MORE benches, resulting in more placed items in the world, more thralls required to fill them all up, and we must build MORE space to fit these giant hunks of garbage in. What was the point? To give everyone access to reduced cost crafting without thralls but for the price of doing it at the speed of smell? I don’t get it.
Edit: I figured out a bit of a workaround for processing iron into reinforcements both quickly and efficiently. Get a tier 3 smith thrall or better. i’m assuming it’s at least tier 3, don’t have anything worse to test with. The important thing is that they have the ability to transform 1 iron reinforcement & 1 steelfire into 1 steel reinforcement. This recipe is the same cost on the garrison smith table as it is on the campaign table. Now, this will save you a ton of iron farming, because you’re getting 1:1 on iron:steel, which is normally 5:1. It also bypasses needing 2 bars for 1 reinforcement on the campaign bench. The only thing is, it’s going to take a long long time to make large amount of iron reinforcements and THEN have them crafted into steel. So the set up i have running right now, that works for me, is 4 improved (T2) smith benches (with or without thralls, don’t need em but they help the speed a bit) pumping out iron reinforcements non stop. You take these iron reinforcements out every now and then and throw them into your campaign bench that has a T3 smith capable of transmuting iron reinforcement into steel reinforcement at breakneck speeds. And that’s it. Profit from the incredible speed of the campaign bench while avoiding doubling your farm. In fact you can cut your iron farming down by 80% and maintain the same production. This is obviously an oversight and further adds to the theory that nobody on Funcom’s conan team has ever spent any significant amount of time playing their own game.
