Tradeskills now = exp grinding out AA points & raiding

[Jvani]

So as not to be griping without suggestions, here's what Im thinking...

What I would really like to see in EQ are quests which require turn in of tradeskilled items, something that is going to take me about a day or so to collect and complete (the going rate of AA points for people that exp) to release the cap on another tradeskill. Of course implementing that requires a little more thought and work than making us grind out exp. :roll: I was *really* hoping they'd make some good use of the new minimum level to attempt crafting an item, for example you couldnt create these quest items unless your unmodified skill was 250. I saw huge potential there and the only thing they've used it for I think is to stop skillup on etheral quest items.

How about nice items to make for yourself (LORE/NODROP) that you cant even attempt until you have 250 in the tradeskill? The GM trophies were neat, but I'd like to see more personal-use tradeskill quests that are more unique/skill-specific. Always thought 250 tinkers should be able to make a clockwork pet or mount, regardless of class. Doesnt have to be uber if it is a pet (druid bear-pet like maybe), just a status symbol. Or 250 bakers/brewers able to make 1 permanent stat food/drink. Alchemists 1 unlimited charge potion etc.

High-end crafters need more to do just like new zones for the high-end raiders. Do you think the raiding folks would be happy with only 1 new zone? Hell no! They'd be saying "ok been there, done that, looking for something else to do..." and screaming bloody murder. Thats how I feel! (Oops slipped back into the ranting there... )

Id also like to see Tradeskill Mastery abilities for EVERY tradeskill for ALL classes, that are unlocked via progressive GM-tradeskill quest/flags, *not* exp. And an alternate way to complete the 8th shawl that doesnt require more than 1 group of 55-60 people like shawls 1-7.

I'm grasping at straws. Maybe I should face that the fun in the game runs out for me at this point and just quit but I just had the urge to beat my head against the wall a little more. :?

~Jv

[Datul]

Jvani is the most bestest tradeskiller ever.

It hurts personally to see the one responsible for getting me started in 'skilling hit such a block. She's the one druid that I've met not more concerned with quad kiting than helping out others and advancing her craft. But I don't think she's passed a level or gotten an AA since I met her months ago (if you have Jv gratz; but I'm more amazed with your mastery of all the skills, even if you're not 1750 on your main).

To make a relevant point on the way post - why not have Tradeskill type quests, to prove that you're ready to advance past 200 in non 'primary' skills? Perhaps you need to use your 250 skill, and 2 or 3 others to fashion something akin to the 8th shawl quest - where the other skills are also 188+ or 197+?

Your tradeskill trophy is a decent example, but trivials in JC and Pottery too low and the seal is tradable. Lets focus on blacksmithing. You need to brew tempers and dust blue diamonds somehow, so lets use those as your backing skills. Now you want to brew to 250 (ya drunk!). So you have 200 brewing 250 smithing and 200 pottery, let's make you smith something from no drop components of brewing and pottery to make a 'New Tanaan Seal of Approval' to continue one skill past 200. Perhaps I'm rambling, but get the idea?

The point is, why not use Tradeskills to advance tradeskills, rather than the xp grind?

[Datul]

Stole my thunder!

Jv, you stole my idea as I was typing!!!

You're still my hero

[Clementine]

I hate exp grinding! I think I'll be forever stuck at L55 lol. I use my main primarily to raid with guildies and play with friends. Now, getting exp off tradeskilling would be something...

[Jvani]

Hehee *hugs Dat*

Oooh I like that idea even better... you have to make a nodrop item at exactly 200 skill in the skill you are attempting to release combined with other skills. Excellent!

~Jv

[Unmei]

hmm.

All of this chatter about unlocking mastery of other tradeskills is well and good and all, but if you ask me, it's also addressing the most minor of complaints in the list. I imagine that -all- of you probably go out and hunt, for XP, from time to time. This means that you will, eventually, be able to master any tradeskills you like.

The real issue, I think, is the fact that to get the components needed to make the really keen, nifty, fun and useful high end tradeskill items, you need to be in highpowered raiding guilds. Almost half of the tradeskill recipes that came out with PoP require elemental plane access, and that's not happening for most folks right now. Sure, the components are droppable, but they're seriously rare, and hoarded by the guilds who can get them. Sortof diminishes the fun, in my opinion. Not that I have a good solution or anything, but criminy...

[kiztent]

Some simple solutions to give xp for Tradeskilling but not allow powerleveling.

A) Set up any turn-in recipes with a no-drop component and keep the no-drop flag after the final combine. This would possibly require massive reprogramming of the database to include no-drop versions of existing recipes.

They actually do that.

B) Establish minimum levels(XP) and skill levels for the turn-ins to give xp. If you don't have the right skill level or min level, you get no exp. (And should lose the item too).

They have those too.

Trust me, any sufficiently determined person can overcome any barrier they can put in - short of forcing you to kill the stuff yourself which defeats the purpose.

[Axterix EnObelix]

Do you really want that?

The Shawl quests were one of the worst things for tradeskills. They led to a ton of people that weren't interested in the tradeskill, they wanted the quest item. They came in. They jacked up your price of parts. They flooded the markets. They trashed the prices. And they don't care. Because the tradeskill is nothing more than a means to an end.

It changed what should have been, that tradeskills exist to make things for people to tradeskills existing to make things for self. If you put in items that you can make only for self that require X in a tradeskill, then for everyone who can't get better through raiding, upping that tradeskill will be the route they take. They'll feel obligated, forced to up tradeskills to advance. Interweaving tradeskills is more of the same. The guy who just wants to brew is suddenly compelled to take up pottery. The pottery suddenly has to max JC. More forced levelling for all. More tradeskillers with your level, everyone knows someone with super high skill to do combines for free, no profit to be had.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

E&B is not EQ2, but it is the one game I have first-hand experience with that has a "tradeskill" class (tradeskills are class-specific, and the Trader gets many that no one else does).

The way it works for them, component wise, is that a large portion of the basic materials are available off vendors - BUT you get no xp for making items using vendor-bought components. Other classes have abilities to allow them to gather components, which the Trader can then use to build for xp, or the Trader can get dropped materials to use (either hunted themselves or bought from players).

The problem becomes the Trader is HEAVILY dependant on other players. Sure, you can still make a profit, you can auction or get a regular seller, but it still is a major pain and a large degree of dependance on others. For many, they tradeskill to avoid the eternal search for others (LFG, etc), and being routed to have to depend on them for tradeskills as well is a pain.

So I'm almost afraid of what system EQ2 will use ... EQ's tradeskill system has many problems, but overall I like it - I *earned* my skill level.

New Tanaan Crafting Mastery ... requiring 3aas for the tradeskills is a royal pain. I do hunt for xp occasionally, true - but I get somewhere aroudn 1AAXP / month, and that's at 90% to AA (10% to norm for deaths). So to get 1 New Tanaan is ~3months, to get it for all 6 would be around 18 months, or a year and a half. Thus the argument that I will "get it eventually" doesn't really carry much weight with me. True, that's based on my own choices.

Optimally there would be ways to get the drops & xp simultaneously at any/most levels (with probably higher drop rates for higher lvl mobs, to discourage people from just farming the lower ones since its less timeconsuming). Would be a lot of time to implement to ensure a good spread, and there are far too many components to make it reasonable to get them all onto a logical mob within the existing world.

I like raiding. I like tradeskilling. I don't like grinding, I don't like sitting LFG. That caused me problems with raiding traditionally, and I accepted that. But now its causing problems with tradeskills as well ... which is getting annoying.

[Cigarskunk]

I'm not too phased - it's nice to do a little bit of fighting or raiding or leveling after a long stretch of tradeskills.

What I usually do is work on tradeskills with a character for a few weeks and then, once I've gotten where I want to be, run out of plat or just burn out, then I do some good old fashion leveling with one or more characters.

Heck, my troll SK had been stuck at 47 for a long time, but then I finally GM'd baking and got my spoon and in the past week I've dinged up to 50 and completed shawl #3 & 4. I'm working on my 49 lifetap spell quest and shooting towards 51 - after that, I'll probobly pump up my general tradeskills to bang out another shawl or three.

[Yakk]

Re: Tradeskills now = exp grinding out AA points & raidi

5) for ALL my tradeskills I *STILL* dont have my 8th shawl because I havent been able to stomach begging 18+ people to help me with the Iceclad fight because I personally HATE RAIDING.

I believe you can do the general quest with 6 people and enough time.

Enc, dru, cleric, tank, shaman, cleric.

SoW the enchanter. When the mobs spawn, aoe tash them all, and kite them in circles (unsnared). Get them pretty far away from the main group.

The main group fights the NPCs one at a time. When each one dies, they run over and pick off 1 mob from the train the enchanter has. Pick the general off the train last, and mem blur him to get him back on the tracks.

Be caseful -- don't aggro the peel giant with damage, you don't want it to start summoning. Make sure you aoe tash FAST. The enchanter has to be careful about avoiding heal aggro. Have a half beefy tank and shaman to take the blows. And be very healer heavy -- this is a "with infinite time we can beat these mobs" solution to the problem.

You will probably need a few attempts at it to get it down pat, but you can do it with a small amount of people.

[Reflan]

I can't agree that you should get leveling experience from doing tradeskills.

Perhaps exp that would apply ONLY to something tradeskill related, like if new tanaan mastery could actually come from doing only tradeskills, would be a good thing. I've always thought it was laziness and an inability to come up with good creative AA skills that led them to pad out so many of the AA's with useless skills. My shaman, for instance, has a tremendous amount of alchemy related AA skills, which was even nuttier when the cap was 185, alchemy was very costly to level, and nobody bought more than one or two of the potions -- mostly nobody bought much of anything but SOW, which has long since been brought down to component plus failure rate coss OR LESS. In other words, tons of AA for a skill that has zero profit, an expensive skill up, and a very low max level to hit. This was padding out AA.

So was making many points necessary in "mental clarity" for shamans, who eventually get such high mana regeneration rates through regrowth, the massive cannibalization AA ability, and torpor/quiessence that the 3 mana per tick from mental clarity is pretty ludicrous for the amount of benefit a shaman gets from it -- yet it was required for massive canni.

But at least those points were related to actual fighting and battle in some way.

Getting tanaan mastery through fighting and other tradeskill abilities through fighting seems to be mixing apples and oranges.

But even worse than wasting precious FIGHTING experience on tradeskill-related abilities would be GIVING the equivalent of fighting experience simply by tradeskilling.

For you folks griping about leveling -- hey, we all have to do it. And I'm sure all of you knew you would going into the game in the first place. And really, it's not THAT hard. The weapons and armor in this game at dirt cheap prices are absolutely incredible to those of us who leveled with nothing remotely near that power and didn't find it nearly as worthy of complaint as people say it is today. Yet, they didn't up the level of mobs you can make experience off of so much that you simply can't level. The old world mobs are still there if you can't handle mobs from newer expansions, and if you can -- wow, the leveling is amazingly fast. It used to be a huge ordeal to get from 50 to 60; now people are starting to head into POD and PON and run through POP zones as soon as they hit 46, and are getting really great experience there really, really fast. If you dedicate just a little while to experience, either in a burst over a few weeks or in trickles here and there, you will definitely get to pretty high levels very quickly in the game now. Far, far more quickly than it used to take in the game. It's really a dramatic difference, even with ordinary armor and weapons.

Wanting to get there even quicker without actually fighting mobs? People who hate leveling and often hate grouping, though they might just pass it off as hating going /LFG -- hmm, what kind of partners will they be if you invite them to a group in an even moderately tough place or one with rapidly changing dynamics that it would take real experience and the confidence that goes with it to handle? Their pride will likely say perfect, if not even better that that. And I'm sure I'll now get flamed for even suggesting that people whose experience of the game coming mostly from being in tradeskills would make them on average worse and less flexible in battle than those who got their experience fighting from actually, um...fighting.

It would be a nightmare to have to group with level 50's and 60's who got substantial amounts of their experience from tradeskilling. It's already bad enough that with the armor out there, and high level being extremely common these days, the game is flooded with super-twink PL'd players who don't know what the heck they're doing(but THINK they know how, say, to play a cleric since they've played a warrior, or how to play a monk since they've played a shaman). Add even more people into the game whose levels come not through any experience or thinking or competency of their own? No thanks!

Mixing tradeskills and regular exp was not a good idea when they let you get tradeskill benefits from fighting, and it would be even worse if they let you get the equivalent of fighting experience from tradeskilling.

Now, getting the ability to go over 250 in one skill purely by tradeskilling alone would be logical and also a reasonable reward for achievement in tradeskills. Certainly it would be more logical than earning and spending AA to do it. It would be fair and wouldn't result in unbalanced characters who are a menace to everyone including themselves, either.

[Daikoku Ashikaga]

4) only +15% tradeskill items in the game are from a mob that only 1-2 guilds per server on the average can hope to kill

On TP, one of the newer server, and a slacking one at that:

Guilds that I don't think could get the interest to go kill XTC again, even as an XP day pick up: MI, CD, AS, ES

Guilds that are actively killing XTC, or trying, or getting bored of him:
RA, Acrop, CV, Aas/Blade, EoD, TuT, Maybe PN

As an evil, uncaring, eruotrash, guilded lizard I am likely leaving 3-4 other guilds out of the list.

If you want to go gauntlets of Dark Embers, MI isn't reallydoing VT anymore, CD, ES, AS are in there now, ES and CD have cleared.

An olserver should have even more guilds in these areas.

Dai

[Angelsyn]

Let's put it this way...

Sure, there are probably at least half a dozen (maybe even a dozen) Guilds on my server (Xegony, pretty old server) that can kill XTC or get the Gloves in VT...

But, if you're casual player you're simply not going to be in one of those Guilds... they won't let you.

Most tradeskillers aren't in Uber Guilds. Most tradeskillers are casual players.

Most tradeskillers will never get close to getting these +10% & +15% skill-mod items.