Solstice Robes and your tribute master

[Poohjure]

I am in the tailoring drive right now and have gotted it up to 206. I have a ton of solstice robes sitting in my bank waiting for me to decide what i want to do with them.

I have 3 options...

1) Stick them on a bazaar mule to try and sell for 25-50pp each. The economy is mass flooded with Robes.

2) Sell them to a vendor for ONLY 17pp.

3) Give them to my tribute master for ONLY 37Tribute points.

Is it just me or did the nerfage of tradeskill items go just a tad far? A 335 trivial item that costs approx 1000pp to make and you only get 37 freakin' points from it? I just do not understand the logic in that. I can understand an item like animated bait being worth nothing, but items that require very high skills to complete should give higher reward. I really dont think my logic is flawed in this.

Just a tad Frustrated,

--Pooh

[Renjah]

Personally I was shocked to see that the Sickles which sell for 1kish on most servers, earn 1.3k tribute and robes which sell for 200pp on servers only get 30ish tribute points. Kind of unbalanced, but I assume this was to keep people from mass skilling on robes to get the tribute points in return. Since the return is minimal tailoring is still a pain or a money pit

[Silverfish]

Price Check

Poohjure wrote:

"A 335 trivial item that costs approx 1000pp to make and you only get 37 freakin' points from it?"

A Thousand plat? Ouch! That seems very high. Here's what I figure:

embroidering needle: I made an embroidering needle from metal bits I made myself in 37 tries, starting at smithing 0. It cost about 40 plat all told, so I put the cost of this at 40 pp, since you can make it yourself for this cost in about 20 minutes and you get it back when you use it, so you only need to do it once.

gem studded chain: this is tougher, but still it's possible to get it yourself for less than 1000 pp. Assuming two each of ruby sapphire and emerald, and two worked silver chains (2 enchanted bars of silver and metal bits you'll have left over from the needle), you'll have to pay a total for materials of:

2 rubies: 270 pp.
2 sapphires: 209 pp.
2 emeralds: 27 pp.
...and about 2 pp for the rest.

Total: 508 pp. This assumes the going rate of 50 percent failure on the chains for your jewelcrafter. Add to this whatever you pay the crafter for the attempts. For the enchanted silver bars, you can build an enchanter and level him up to level 9 in about two hours, and then enchant your own bars from then on. Or, you can add 10 pp per chain for the bars that you can buy in the Bazaar.

I also assume you're a good enough smith to make your own silver chains. If not, then you'll have to buy them, but it'd cost less than 1000 plat to get your own skill up to 100 (about 90 percent success for the chain), so don't pay a fortune.


Now, the costs per attempt, assuming you fail:

1 tunic pattern: 1 pp. (rounding here)
3 jars of acid: 2 pp.
6 poison vials: 3 pp.
6 scent of Marr: 9 pp.
6 spider silks: free. C'mon! One krag spider can have six silks, but even on the average, four kills will net you this number.. Farm them yourself, instead of spending 10 pp each.
3 emeralds: 41 pp. Add to this whatever you need to pay to bum imbues. Remember that wood elf druids can also do this imbue, so don't just harass your high elf cleric friends.

Total for this, assuming you can convince someone to do your imbues for 2 pp a gem: 62 pp. This assumes no failures on the sacred silk, but frankly, if you fail the silk too often, you really shouldn't be considering robes anyway. It also assumes you can make your own blessed dust of Tunare, but as the guides here will show, you can get over 100 pottery for about 30 pp.

Now, that grand total, assuming all costs for one attempt: 40 pp (needle) plus 528 (chain) plus 62 (disposables): 630 pp. If you fail, the next attempt is only 62 more. If you fail 7 times, you'll have spent 1000 pp. That's a 14 percent success rate, on average. I leave the formula to those better in math than me, but at higher levels (where you're looking to make the robe, not just skill up on it) I suspect the success rate is higher than 1 in 7. If it's 1 in 2 like most 335 combines seem to work out, that works out to (even assuming 1 in 3) 714 pp each, considering the cost of the needle is one-time.

Or, you can buy them in the Bazaar for less than half that much, but I won't open that wound...

Silverfish

[Moraganth]

Wether the 1k price Poohjure said was ment figurativly, or literally, isn't really the point i don't think... it's the fact that the item gives 37 tribute points.

Many of the tradeskill items were adjusted down to obscenely (you may substitue "stupidly" here) low amount of tribute point values. Any item that is above a 250 trivial, should give more points than that.

[Poohjure]

Personally I hate farming so after buying silks, and the failures on GSC with JCM2 Enc, it comes fairly close to 1k a success, but aye, the point is not the price, the point is the fact that the worthlessness of the robes that have such a difficult trivial.

--Pooh

[Silverfish]

Understandings and Disagreements

I do understand that the price to make wasn't so much of an issue, but I did want to map out the cost, both for us here and for anyone else who may be trying to do this as a skill route. But you're right, the actual cost is beside the point.

Moraganth wrote:

" Many of the tradeskill items were adjusted down to obscenely (you may substitue "stupidly" here) low amount of tribute point values. Any item that is above a 250 trivial, should give more points than that."

This is my disagreement, because it doesn't address relative costs, or difficulty except for the combine. Misty Thicket picnics and Bristlebane's Party Platter have the same trivial. Shadewood recurve and Nightmarewood compound bows have the same trivial. Platinum diamond rings and Electrified Earrings of Tempest have the same trivial level. If these pairs had the same tribute levels (ignore for a bit that the platter is nodrop), I'd be stunned. By the same token, I'm sure that Solstice robes and storm rider leathers have comparable trivials, but they're not similar in any other way.

To be blunt, robes are a very cheap 250 plus tailoring combine. They're a widely used skillup path because of this, and because getting the components is relatively very easy compared to other top-shelf tailoring. The end result is arguably the worst hand-tailored robe in the game (name anyone who could possibly build it who would ever consider wearing it for more than a minute to see how it looks), and it only has value to players because it's a component in a quest. Put these things together and it doesn't really surprise me that it's worth a pittance as tribute.

The big picture does have some flaws in it, but I've found that on the whole, the difficulty to craft an object is only a small part of its value as tribute, and that makes sense. I think it's reasonable to expect a black acrylia halberd to be worth more to the Tribute Master than a pair of shadowscream steel boots, even though they're about the same difficulty to make.

SIlverfish

[Reflan]

I don't find the solstice robes cheap at all. The failure rate on the gem studded chains is extraordinarily high for me even with 250 in jewelry. I'm also 250 in everything else btw, and recently made 250 tailor.

But it cost me closer to 400k than 300k, and I imbued my own emeralds, made most of my celestial essences etc., foraged and hunted a LOT of my own components and collected some literally over a period of years of playing.

The gem studded chains failure rate was so high that I regularly made only, say, one in six or worse. I could easily spend 2k per chain, and did many times.

That's why I was able to sell my remaining stock at 2700 and even 3000pp for the chains. Chains are notoriously hard to make unless you're a chanter with JC AA's.

Once you get to a certain level in tailoring, your click to skill up on robes turns extremely often into a robe that is either almost unsellable(some people sell them to vendors, some sell them for next to nothing in the bazaar, and of course on some servers people sell them for a few hundred still). So you turn what can be K's worth of components into an item that sells for very very little or sometimes nothing.

To me it's hard to imagine anyone at all doing solstice robes for tribute value even if they raised the tribute point value 10x or 20x or more. I know I sure wouldn't. No way, forget it. It's a very time consuming, long slow process, from hunting the spider silks and imbuing the emeralds all the way down the line.

[Silverfish]

Cost and Value

Reflan wrote:

"I don't find the solstice robes cheap at all. "

Well, you're right, if you get a failure rate of five in six on chains. For my chainmaker, who is 250 plus trophy but no AAs, the rate or success is about one in three over the long run (and he's made hundreds of chains, so his numbers are large enough to use for estimation). Still, the spider silk, which drops off of mobs a fifth level character can tackle, are the only component in the whole robe that can't be bought from a vendor. Assuming you need at least a friend or mercenary who can imbue the emeralds, that's still much easier than other tailoring combines at this level, which can involve hunting large numbers of creatures that can run level 50 characters to the zone line. This is why so many people use it for a skillup route. The other benefit is that until you get to about 200, the failure rate for making them is high, and a failure is cheap as dirt compared to acrylia reinforced gear or Velious combines. Again, this is why so many people do the robes. The last effect is that lots of people are making lots of robes that have only one single use, and that use is realistically limited to one robe per person needing it, so the market gets flooded with robes that were made for skillup purposes, not for robe-making purposes. Therefore, because the robe is not that useful, tribute value is low, and because there are so darn many of them, sell price is awful too.

All this goes toward your statement that nobody would build them for tribute value, and I agree, but then I don't know anyone who does any high end tailoring of any kind for the tribute. They do it for practice, or to get the end item. The tribute is a nice aftereffect, but not an end goal in itself for this skill.

Silverfish

[Sulkano]

Im not sure why this is an issue at all...before GoD, robes were worth zero (0) tribute points, as was everything else. While I will happily join in the argument that Aid Grimel did serious damage to TS'ing as a whole, complaining that they fixed something that was so obviously broken is out of line. If you dont like what the tribute master offers, dont hit accept...its as simple as that.

[baody]

Hmmm

I have no problem with the tribute price. Tailoring is a trade skill. It should be all about what you can make and what profit you can expect from it, not about being on a trade skill leveling treadmill/ pp sink so you can finish a quest.

Sorry, maybe I just have funny ideas.

[KanadWinterstorm]

I never expect tradeskill items to be worth more in tribute than some dropped items. But that's just me.

My new farm target is Blade of Insanity, GE drop post revamp that's easily soloable by a 65 shaman and worth over 10k tribute a piece. Several other nice things drop from the GE trash named too.

[KanadWinterstorm]

And how did Aid Grimel ruin tradeskilling? It brought in focused, dedicated new people to a skillset what had previously been practised by those of us the hardcore player call crazy or obsessive. It brought new life into these boards and created discussion that has lead to some very nice changes in the way tradeskills function. I think the little bastard halfling has changed things for the better, not for the worse.

[kiztent]

Originally posted by KanadWinterstorm
And how did Aid Grimel ruin tradeskilling?

Without going into a lot of detail, when supply is increased (by adding more tradeskillers), then prices go down - basic supply and demand.

In the same way, if you add people that aren't motivated by money (AG tradeskillers) that can distort markets as well.

Lastly, and this isn't a side effect of AG as such, by making tradeskills potentially profitable, you get people that ignored them as a waste of time to enter the market since it is now profitable to do so, increasing supply and lowering prices. These are evil undercutters, who may be associated with baby eating ubers, and they must be sought out and destroyed by everyone who knows the top secret "real tradeskillers handshake." Or something like that.

[Sanna]

Between Aid Grimel and the TSUI, servers are seeing more and more of these kinds of conversations:

Uberguildmember256: /ooc "WTB 4 stacks of Patty Melts and 4 stacks of Fuzzlecutter's Formula 5000, pst"
Tinkbang: /boggle
/tell Uberguildmember256 I can sell you some if you give me a moment.
Uberguildmember256 tells you, "Thanks muchly, I'm a GM baker and brewer but I'm too lazy to make em myself right now."
Tinkbang: /cry.


Skills are being achieved without the corresponding knowledge of the skill. Sure you can have 250 + trophy, but if you don't know that FF5k is BOUGHT... /sigh. THAT is why people say that AG+TSUI are such detriments. Not because they (AG+TSUI) themselves are, but because so many of the people around them are not 'worthy', to abuse the word.


Now I /know/ this doesn't apply to everyone, and I /know/ there is nothing that can be done to 'stop' it, but it's still unbelievably disheartening.

Now I'm all for anyone who wants to tradeskill to do it, but what bothers me is the growing lack of prestige that is beginning to come with having a skill. But, what can be done to change it. /shrug.

-- Sanna

[Lilosh]

Originally posted by kiztent
destroyed by everyone who knows the top secret "real tradeskillers handshake." Or something like that.

The council will be highly displeased that you have revealed this.

Report to the chamber at mid-day tomorrow.

-Lilosh