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Back in December I decided to give Spell Research a try. Like so many others, when I saw how difficult and expensive it was I gave up around lvl 210. A couple months ago I thought I would give it another try, and struggled to make lvl 243 on parchment solutions. Now I need to get my hands on large quantities of various Parchments to proceed. Sadly, I find that not many of these are available, at ANY price 
. At first I thought this was due to the release of PoR expansion luring everyone away from DoDh zones, but I hear the parchments also drop in some PoR zones (cannot confirm this). Must be very rare, cuz almost none for sale. I do not have any good char for getting mass quantities of parchments, so I must depend on the bazaar. In one month, I was only able to buy about 100 Grubby Fine Parchments, which is not much at all to skill up with.
So, I decided to check EQPlayers to see who my competition was on Quellious Server. Wow, what a shock!! IF EQPlayers can be trusted (another major topic itself...) there are only 7 chars on Quellious that have reached Research lvl 243, only 6 of us at Expert lvl of 250+. There are over 150,000 chars on the server, and I estimate maybe 20% are Int casters, so maybe 30,000 chars available to attempt Spell Research. After 8 months of DoDh, only 6 chars out of 30,000 have reached Expert lvl? Only one char has made lvl 290+ (I know him -- he had help from his guild giving him stacks of components). No char has come close to lvl 300 on our server. Not one. OK, granted Spell Research is the King of all nasty tradeskills. No other skill is even 1/4 as difficult to advance in at high levels. So, not surprising that 99% of all casters would ignore it. Fine, more satisfaction for we that do
. But seriously, 6 out of 30,000?? I cannot believe players on Quellious are so much lazier or weaker than those on other servers, so the problem must be lack of components. With only 3 chars between lvl 243 and 261, there is virtually no competition for grubby fine parchments, and yet I can only buy about 25 per week. Hoping that I will someday need Shabby parch, I also try to accumulate them but can only find about 10 per week. Something is seriously wrong here!!
If the Devs want to make Spell Research a viable trade, then this problem of lack of parchments needs to be addressed soon. I would hate to see Research "dumbed down", like so many other skills in EQ. Extremely difficult Quests or Skills separate the casual player from the dedicated player and are a good thing. But, give those of us who cannot 2-box or solo hi lvl mobs a chance. I would suggest a solution similar to the one recently applied to Treant Branches in PoR... make the lowest 3 levels of parchments (Used, Grubby, Shabby) forageable. Rare, but forageable. Even if I could only forage 2 parchments per hour, I would try it and feel more hopeful than now. Solo farmers would go back to DoDh zones if they saw good profit potential in the bazaar.
Hope Devs consider this idea soon. Even with reasonable quantities of Parchments available, Research would be extremely hard and expensive. With almost no parchments available now, Research is practically hopeless
. At first I thought this was due to the release of PoR expansion luring everyone away from DoDh zones, but I hear the parchments also drop in some PoR zones (cannot confirm this). Must be very rare, cuz almost none for sale. I do not have any good char for getting mass quantities of parchments, so I must depend on the bazaar. In one month, I was only able to buy about 100 Grubby Fine Parchments, which is not much at all to skill up with. So, I decided to check EQPlayers to see who my competition was on Quellious Server. Wow, what a shock!! IF EQPlayers can be trusted (another major topic itself...) there are only 7 chars on Quellious that have reached Research lvl 243, only 6 of us at Expert lvl of 250+. There are over 150,000 chars on the server, and I estimate maybe 20% are Int casters, so maybe 30,000 chars available to attempt Spell Research. After 8 months of DoDh, only 6 chars out of 30,000 have reached Expert lvl? Only one char has made lvl 290+ (I know him -- he had help from his guild giving him stacks of components). No char has come close to lvl 300 on our server. Not one. OK, granted Spell Research is the King of all nasty tradeskills. No other skill is even 1/4 as difficult to advance in at high levels. So, not surprising that 99% of all casters would ignore it. Fine, more satisfaction for we that do
. But seriously, 6 out of 30,000?? I cannot believe players on Quellious are so much lazier or weaker than those on other servers, so the problem must be lack of components. With only 3 chars between lvl 243 and 261, there is virtually no competition for grubby fine parchments, and yet I can only buy about 25 per week. Hoping that I will someday need Shabby parch, I also try to accumulate them but can only find about 10 per week. Something is seriously wrong here!!If the Devs want to make Spell Research a viable trade, then this problem of lack of parchments needs to be addressed soon. I would hate to see Research "dumbed down", like so many other skills in EQ. Extremely difficult Quests or Skills separate the casual player from the dedicated player and are a good thing. But, give those of us who cannot 2-box or solo hi lvl mobs a chance. I would suggest a solution similar to the one recently applied to Treant Branches in PoR... make the lowest 3 levels of parchments (Used, Grubby, Shabby) forageable. Rare, but forageable. Even if I could only forage 2 parchments per hour, I would try it and feel more hopeful than now. Solo farmers would go back to DoDh zones if they saw good profit potential in the bazaar.
Hope Devs consider this idea soon. Even with reasonable quantities of Parchments available, Research would be extremely hard and expensive. With almost no parchments available now, Research is practically hopeless
]. Just my bad luck to be on a server where parchments are used to light torches 
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. I keep waiting for him to post here as first member of the "3500 Club". LoL.
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