Sure hope GoD pans out, or something

[Reflan]

I'm pretty impressed that Maddoc checks these boards. Still, I hope his indications that things will get better pay off. He kind of hints that for non-ubers, they might not.

I would like, just for instance and I'm sure others would like tinkering or some such included, for smithing/tailoring, two of the most unquestionably fiercely hard and expensive skills to max out, to be worthwhile somehow. Right now they seem to be mostly for show. I am a 1748 and there is nothing I can make that sells these days besides qeynos teas and the occasional dye(the dyes are now very overpriced on my server, so even just finding a couple of honey berries on a vendor here and there can get me a quick couple hundred plat). Not exactly a big money maker, and everyone else is in the same market -- in the easiest, cheapest, and arguably quickest skill to master.

The failure rate is so high on PoP tailoring that it makes much more sense to sell the components rather than try a combine. Pretty much same with with smithing.

I can make tae ew shields, but so can many others, and they do. Right now I've rounded mine up to do with them just what I did with my cultural armor -- dump them on the tribute vendor. I can make nightmare bows, but the ingredients cost as much as the bow -- and selling ingredients has no failure rate. And the fulvous and other ogre cultural I made is some of the best cultural there is -- it's just not worth making for the cost and failure rate, at present day prices.

The only fix I can foresee coming for that is getting burned by having the tribute value adjusted later so suddenly my tribute points vanish, not making the average 1750-ish player something actually worthwhile to make either for himself or to sell, which is what I would much rather do with the stuff I'm making.

Kind of a shame, it seems to me, that a 1750 (or a 1748 for that matter) should find himself wearing nothing he made(I'm elemental flagged, but full ornate), and unable to sell much of anything to others either besides food or drink. Honestly, there's enough competition on the qeynos teas and misty thicket picnics, and the profit margin is slim enough, that even doing that is fairly pointless. I feel kind of like the only thing I can do is sell tradeskilling supplies to make enough money that it's noticeable, and pass on the suckerhood to the next guy, since I already paid my all my tolls. Heck, I feel kind of guilty! Like I should be warning them, not selling to them.

It would be nice to get excited about tradeskilling again. I just maxed alchemy too, and can't say I know why.

Would it change if I got to Plane of Time? Probably not a lot; but it's not like those guys don't have huge rewards in the first place for being there. It would be nice if people who actually cared about doing tradeskills had some things to look forward to, instead of just reserving that for people who already get the game's greatest rewards and perhaps only take up tradeskills in the first place because nobody else will make them the stuff if they don't do it themselves, or they need tradeskills for the aid gimel quest. There are actually people who like and look forward to tradeskills, as a relevant part of their game, not just something they're forced into doing.

Been a long time since I was one of them, I guess.

Making stuff just to turn it in for tribute value seems kind of a sad outcome to becoming max or effective max in all skills. Guess I see the nerf coming on that, so soon even that won't be possible, as tradeskill stuff all gets its tribute point value "adjusted" post hoc with no grandfathering. No point to making it for any other reason though. It's just not very desirable stuff at all anymore, at any price that makes it worth doing the combines.

Sure would be nice if I could make something me or my friends or even strangers would actually wear.

Even though...we're not flagged for Plane of Time.

[Mystrice]

Make stuff...twink out your Alts

[Reflan]

Already did.

Not all people have twinks or want them.

Not all races/classes have cultural worth making, or worth buying.

What "stuff" that is worth making, considering rarity of drops and failure rates? I have some "stuff." Is that the "stuff" you were talking about? I turned it in to the tribute master. It's okay "stuff," but not much better than that. Nobody wants it but him, really. Nobody would buy this "stuff" if I tried to sell it, and very few mains would want to equip this "stuff" at prices that make it worth the failure rate and time cost to make it.

Since I can already make "stuff," and have indeed a long history of making plenty of stuff, making more "stuff" is not much of a solution.

Unless you don't really want tradeskills or tradeskilled stuff to play much of a part in the game at all anyway.

Which is pretty much the part they play for me now, at 1748 +200 in alchemy. Can't help but seeing something not quite right there, somehow.

I have memories of things being different -- like when tradeskilled cultural armor could be made for a reasonable price and sold for a good profit. The level of quality of loot that is dropping has scaled up dramatically in this game, but the level of quality of tradeskilled items has not. The products have therefore become less desirable -- in some cases unsellable.

Yet they cost the same or even more to make, for that unwanted product. The price of velium blocks, one component of cultural smithing I do, has skyrocketed on my server(quadrupling), and campers are everywhere, as is their perfect right. Acrylia, silks, PoP loots -- everywhere, the money to be made off tradeskilled products is less than the money to be made selling the components. When people come to me asking to combine their PoP items, I tell them to buy the item in the bazaar and sell their components -- they'll come away with zero failure rates and a whole lot more money.

Finding there to be no reason to do the clicks myself for something I would bother wearing OR my own profit, and recommending that friends who come to me just sell their components and let some other poor dumb sucker take a chance on the failure rates of combines seems kind of beside the point of having tradeskills and getting such high skills in all of them in the first place. But why shouldn't me or my friends just save money by both selling components for outrageous prices and investing only in successful combines and not in potentially disastrous combine failures? I wouldn't be doing friends any favors by telling them how to take the biggest chances for the smallest pay-offs. Basically, even with a free click from me, they're losing money! Ugh.

Anyway, I do think we need some reason, regardless how many expansions we get and how quick they come, to keep the "trade" in tradeskills. Just letting the skills lie fallow because there's nothing worth making since you wouldn't wear it and nobody would buy it takes the life out of tradeskills. They could be a lot more vibrant.

And for the regular guy too, not just the guy in Plane of Time or the higher tiered GoD zones(which basically equates to Plane of Time anyway).

[Myrron]

Most of the time I farm my own supplies, so I rarely buy raw supplies from the bazaar. This cuts down on the cost a lot. For example, I sold 4 mastodon fur cloaks the other day. I tried 5 and got real lucky. Had I sold the furs, on my server that would have gained me around 8k (20 furs, 400pp each, if they sell). Toss in another 2k for vials and threads. So I "spent" 10k if you want to call it spending, since I farmed the hides myself. Perhaps it would be better said that I "lost out" the opportunity to save myself 10k.

That said, I turned around and sold each cloak for 6k. So I spent 2k-ish in raw supplies, "spent" the opportunity to gain 8k by selling the furs in the bazaar, but gained 24k from the cloaks. Even if I had only gotten 2 cloaks out of the 5 attempts, I would still have been ahead, albeit not by much. Plus in my case I got 5 more attempts at tailoring skillups.

I can think of several examples where farming your own supplies will still yield a huge profit over selling the final product. Engraved royal velium armor for smithing is one example...the no-drop gems can't be sold, and so the only supplies that could be sold are velium hound furs and velium. The final prices on many armor pieces (on my server anyway) far exceeds the cost of burning either the fur or blocks in a failure. Plus the armor has sub-200 trivial levels as well making combines a lot easier to succeed on.

Buying up supplies in the bazaar, in my experience, is a sure way to save a lot of time to yield a very small profit. I tried it once with blessed fishing poles (a shame...a forager actually buying oak and eggs...I felt so traitorous) and I did make a profit, but not nearly the amount I stood to gain from casual foraging.

Now anyway, the moderator in me says that unless people can watch their tongues, this thread has the potential to become a primal scream. So please be careful when adding your thoughts.

--Myrron

[bana-zir]

Myrron, I have made a number of those cloaks.

My whole average on 60 or so cloaks is almost exactly 25 percent with 252 (geerklok'd.)

That means you would have made 6K times 1.25 (0.25 * 5) on average. That is 8k. So in essence, you would have been better off selling the parts.

Most people DO NOT understand the fail rates are so high.
Most people "roll the dice" and hope they will get lucky.

What this means, is I haven't made something for over a year. I sell the supplies. I make considerable more pp selling the parts (especially elemental drops) than I could ever hope to make selling the complete item. For instance, for elemental items there are usually many different parts. You can sale any particular one for an insane amount of plat, because someone may have plenty of the other parts and need only the one item you have for sale. They are more likely to pay dearly for that item.

In short, the only thing that still sells is cultural, and then you need to be the only seller of that particular cultural item.

The last great tradeskill items are the ones for PoTC earring. Almost all of those the parts were readily available and highly profitable. I would not hope for this to happen in the future.

[kiztent]

I suppose we should've seen this coming May 8 of two years ago (I think some people *did* but no one wanted to admit it). It probably shouldn't be that much of a shock now anyway.

It's better to sell raw materials to the people doing Aid Grimel.

[Sylphan]

I am right around 1745 now. Since I essentially finished skilling-up I now sell components to other tradeskillers instead of buying them. I've also gradually sold off my warehouse of items, freeing up some bank space. Everything you say sounds familiar.

The single biggest surprise has been how much money I make now that I'm not buying tradeskill stuff all the time. My god, it's just flowing in! Not tradeskilling at all makes me even richer than being one of the only 250 smiths when BD cultural and solstice earrings were introduced! It helps that I know from experience exactly which items tradeskillers crave... but I'm still continually surprised that selling components to those other sucke... er, tradeskillers, is so lucrative.

Like you, I tried to make armor, bows, etc. for folks, especially from elemental components, but the finished items are worth less than the components (a truly bizarre state of affairs BTW) Other traders I know have reached the same conclusion. Like you, I now mostly make a few things to turn in for tribute and otherwise just pass on the suckerhood.

There are certain advantages to having the skill. I made a pottery trophy just because it looks good in my offhand... and I still enjoy my 8th shawl. But there's just not much that's worth making and marketing anymore -- nothing that makes people /auction WTB, nothing similar to Banded in the early days or BD cultural two years ago or Black Acrylia Halberds awhile back. Actually *making items* doesn't seem to be the main point of tradeskills any more.

BTW... what can a 1750 tradeskiller make that a 250 tradeskiller can't? There's Aid Grimel and Coldain Shawl quests, but no items. There aren't any recipes with nodrop subcombines but tradable final product. It's just another example of how tradeskills haven't scaled up with our abilities and the other parts of the game.

Smithable weapons are a good example. We're told they can't have better stats, it's just normal for really old items to suck because of mudflation. But when we get new weapon (or arrow) recipes (GoD), the stats seem to be scaled from old recipes instead of competitive with new items. So.. nobody bothers to make them.

[Lothay]

This thread, although mostly civil, is still more of a rant than anything else. Off to PSR with it.

And Sylphan - refering to people as suckers is rude and should be avoided in polite conversation.

[Silverfish]

Exceptions I've Found

While I agree that there are a lot of items that sell better as parts than for the finished product, there are many things I've found that are exactly the opposite. While most of them are pottery (since that's my expertise) there are others that work just fine.

Golden Idol of Tunare: They cost 250 plat each to make if you get your own stuff. Add to that the overhead on the distilled mana and the cost of the imbue, but since I've never sold one for less than 1000 pp (and I can't usually keep them stocked at 1200) that's a very good margin.

Faithstones/Soulstones/Spiritstones: Again, there's a big gap between the cost and the sell point, assuming you get the essence yourself and you sell for what I do (never less than 1000 nor more than 2000).

Anizok's Devices: These sell like mad for a decent margin, according to my tinkering friends, most especially the minimizing devices.

Solstice Kits: Make up all of the nine gifts for an earring of the Solstice, put them all in a deluxe toolbox with 3 iron rations in the top left slot so some doofus doesn't eat one of the gifts on the way to the forge, and sell the whole thing for between 5000 and 6000 pp. If you're a 1748, and you farm even some of the components yourself, you can do this kit for much less than the price you sell it for, because although the parts don't sell so well alone, people love to buy it in one stop, and will pay for the privilege. I've sold literally dozens of these kits.

Nightmarewood Compound Bow: This one requires farming, but oddly, only for one component. You can turn a profit on these if you farm your own nightmare arachnid silks. Everything else is relatively cheap, and if you get and make your own strings, you can sell for 3000 pp and still double your money (and I sell these all the time for 3200 to 3700 pp).

Subcombines: Sure, it's still selling components, but if blessed dust of Tunare and silk swatches sell for less than sacred Tunare silk, do the extra step for extra money. Leather padding, Tunare silk, prototypes, gem studded chains and so on are all worth banging up for the extra profit.

Leatherfoot Haversacks: These are the king of bags for profit, but the idea does extend to lower bags for those who aren't tailoring mavens. Everything from backpacks to lemming fur bags to Rallics sell for more than the cost to make, and if you're willing to farm for the parts yourself, even better for the purse. Heck, even charging to build fleeting quivers is a good, if slow, money maker. I've never seen an HQ lion skin sell for more than the quiver does.

Certain PoP jewelry and pottery combines: Your server's market will strongly regulate which of these items will move, so pay close attention, but for some combines, the finished product is worth much more than the components. On my server, it's relatively easy to get the components for electrified earrings of tempest, but the sell price is still very high, so I can get the parts for about a third of the value of the finished earring. This makes it more profitable to build the earring and sell it, even with a fifty percent rate of failure. The same holds for ceramic swords of war and totems of Xegony. The same used to be true of ceramic skulls of decay and ceramic hammers of innovation, but it's not true any more. So you MUST do your homework on this choice.

So you see, there are things you can still do for profit. You need to do the legwork to find out what sells, but realistically, that's just a matter of watching the Bazaar for ten minutes a night for a week, which is a small price to pay for the profits you can reap.

Silverfish

[Reflan]

Stuff you can only do if you're a certain race really doesn't apply to many people.

PoP pottery stuff has an incredibly high failure rate. Good luck breaking even. I don't even do pottery to sell, the failure rate is so high. I charge 1k per success. Let the other guy pay for 3 failures and 1 success -- I won't. Given the average failure rate, it's an expenditure of time for nothing really, VERY likely even a possible loss.

With some PoP combines, that possible loss is very significant.

Solstice combines -- the success rate is so high at 250 that you eat through gemmed studded chains like a wolverine. Success on other parts can be so low that on a server like mine, where everyone seems to be skilling up, can put you at a loss consindering what you can charge for your successes. A wash at best.

A lot of this depends on your server I guess, but combining the huge failure rates on PoP combines and the low sell price on what you can make, plus the low desirability of most of what you make, means that full combines generally lose you money, I would guess, on most servers. Certainly on mine, and not by a small margin at all!

Things like qeynos tea are still my money makers.

Fine if you're only a brewer...but for a 1748 plus 200 alchemy?

Kinda sad.

And no, that's not a rant, thank you very much.

[Angelsyn]

You know, I keep hearing about people xp'ing for days at a time in PoF.

I also hear that the MoBs that drop Metallic Substance (for Inferno Tempers) are rarely touched since they're harder to pull.

I personally would pay good money for Inferno Plate. It may not be as good as the other types of Elemental-level smithed armours, but it's plenty good in my book... especially for Clerics & Bards.

[Silverfish]

Parts and Wholes

Reflan wrote:

"Stuff you can only do if you're a certain race really doesn't apply to many people."

The only racially restricted combine I mentioned anywhere were haversacks, and that was in context of saying that they're not the only bags you can make for profit. I tried to avoid anything that was restricted by race or class for specifically the reason you state.

Reflan further wrote:

" PoP pottery stuff has an incredibly high failure rate. Good luck breaking even. I don't even do pottery to sell, the failure rate is so high. I charge 1k per success. Let the other guy pay for 3 failures and 1 success -- I won't. Given the average failure rate, it's an expenditure of time for nothing really, VERY likely even a possible loss."

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I don't have an outrageous failure rate on PoP pottery. So far, after about fifty combines, I have very nearly half success. Remembering that my watchphrase is "never buy it in the Bazaar", if you farm your components or get them from vendor scores you'll be getting more than twice your materials costs back on sales. There are of course exceptions to this, but in my example of the earrings, farming for the copper bricks and raw diamonds, the only out-of-pocket cost is for the vial of distilled mana and the storm rider blood, which you can also farm but on my server sells for 40 pp. Since I sell out in a day if I put them up for 2500 pp, and my cost is about 300, I could fail six out of seven and still make 400 pp. And my jewelcrafter doesn't fail nearly that often.

Reflan also wrote:

" Solstice combines -- the success rate is so high at 250 that you eat through gemmed studded chains like a wolverine. Success on other parts can be so low that on a server like mine, where everyone seems to be skilling up, can put you at a loss consindering what you can charge for your successes. A wash at best."

The rub is in the package deal here. If you don't want to spend 1000 pp making a chain, buy one of the many robes for 300 pp. Same with the steins. The point is to gather the parts together, and hand it in whole to your customer, who will pay more for the package than the parts cost. Heck, on my server, I can go around and buy all nine components, mark it up 300 pp and sell it in five minutes on a weekend. The convenience is the key. There's a lot more profit to be made if you make at least some of the parts yourself, but if you can buy a robe cheaper than building it, do so.

Reflan lastly wrote:

" A lot of this depends on your server I guess, but combining the huge failure rates on PoP combines and the low sell price on what you can make, plus the low desirability of most of what you make, means that full combines generally lose you money, I would guess, on most servers. Certainly on mine, and not by a small margin at all!"

I agree that you can lose your shirt on a lot of combines. My point is that, with some careful research, you can find profitable combines among the loss leaders. It just takes patience and attention.

Silverfish