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That's not exactly true, once you've got the 100% recipe and the hang of component gathering, and you gather them in bulk once every few months, the time needed to obtain occupation items becomes quite small.

The downtime they then save me may not be much more when measured in total amount of seconds, but it's time I'd otherwise have to spend waiting around - which makes it subjectively much more time :P

I can't judge what the time investment versus time saved of artificing catalyzers is. Ideally it'd be such that it saves time for the harder to level skills but costs time for the easier to level ones, compared to levelling them without cats....

Even if it is a slight cost though, it still gives you the extra option of alternating between making cats and levelling your skills, rather than spending 100% of your time levelling your skills. More diversity = good.

Unless you are saying the cost is substantial, as in it takes you 10 hours to make enough cats to save you 1 hour of grinding?

even if it takes 2 hours per hour saved, the cost isn't worth the time investment from a strictly logistical point of view (not talking here about the gameplay aspects of liking the occupation or not, roleplay aspects like you considering the work to be in character, etc., purely time economics for what the work saves you in time needed to grind skills you use the products on).

its all about diversity and just alternative way to get cristals without an outpost. with reduced outpost outcome, cristals could be a future exchange currency. we should just consider the long therm profit of it. maybe it is a first step to fix ryzom economy

An MMO isn't worth the time investment from a strictly logistical point of view :P

(not talking here about the gameplay aspects of liking the MMO or not, roleplay aspects like you considering the MMO to be in character, etc., purely time economics for what the MMO saves you in time needed to finish tasks you use the acquired relaxation on).

It's been brought to my attention that this patch seems to have also finally activated the modifiers on ranged weapons. Since this wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, I'm making a note of it here.

At first glance:

Launchers, autolaunchers and rifles lower your dodge and increase your parry. (So they're now meant to be used in parry mode.)
Pistols lower your parry and raise your dodge. (So they're meant to be used in dodge mode.)

To make this work, your parry while wielding a gun now depends on your level with that gun, instead of on your hand-to-hand level like it did before.

Pistols and rifles now get to-hit bonuses against both parrying and dodging targets,
Autolaunchers now get a to-hit penalty against dodging targets.
Launchers now get a to-hit penalty against both parrying and dodging targets.

Clearly they used this opportunity to boost rifles and pistols a bit and nerf launchers and autolaunchers a bit.

Good. Makes crafting them that much more interesting :)

The weird thing is that I reported the nerf on launchers to Sywindt on the very day of the patch and he was not aware of it.

As far as I tested, the nerf is rather severe for launcher on dodging mobs.

which finally reduces their ability to kill an entire healball in a single volley during opwars, hopefully.

Lol @ ninja patching!