Cultural tradeskills. The way it is:

[Devilcharm]

I mean can it get any more clear then this.

Human/Wood Elf tailoring maxxed starting from character creation in less then 1 month for both characters starting from a skill of 0.

Reason, shissar scales drop in vastly, unbeilevably high quanities. On the last patch before this one, I went to Ssra to duo Rhag 1 with a cleric to try getting him his RGC spell on my 75 high elf mage. We invised all the way to his room as I am tired of Ssra. We kill Rhag 1, but no spell dropped. We were about to gate out when the cleric asked if he can run a alt there to loot VT key item and the focus crystal on a very low level alt (I will tell you all, it was a level 1 necro) I agreed. While he was running there, I went AFK right smack in middle of the room so the snakes would not agro on me on respawns. 10 minutes later I come back he is in zone, I load CotH, he loots piece. Got a very good piece of gear for level 1 and camped out. He got the cleric back in.

I asked him if he wants to take Rhag 2 down to try getting my SK the ranged item that it drops, he said sure as he has nothing better to do. So we invis again all the way to the first room right before the tube where the first see-invis mobs are. From there we fight all the way to Rhag 2's room. Mind you, for those of you who do not know the zone, it is a pathetically easy and short path to it. Clear one side in that first see-invis room and followed it, killed the one close to the door on opposite side, killed the first 2 right before the tube, killed 2 at the top of the tube and the 2 right down the ramp, ran past the 4 stationary w/o invising and got no agro (this zone is so easy to avoid agro) killed 4 more past the 2 doors, and 1 more "living" snake before Rhag 2's room.

Total mobs killed. 16
Total Shissar Scales collected, 23

Even Pre-TSS expansion with lower level caps, less DPS, it is not 1% easier at 75. Yet the same always held true for it. Shissar scales drop so often that that was a typical scale drop rate. Any fortunate class to use shissar scales has a easy route to 300 7/7 tailoring trophie in less then a month, smithing too for all if you can manage to get enough diamond dust.

Top that all off. My level 5 SK on that particular run got 3 very nice loots, as well as the clerics level 1 toon. Ssra temple is a top notch zone for tradeskillers and good twinking. I got 11 alts, all pre level 10 to break 1.4K HP and/or Mana. 2 races to 300 tailoring in less then one month starting masters combines (yes expensive) at skills around the 140 range.

Now take my mage, my partially DoDh raid geared, heavily DoN raid geared toon, that can get so many drops in that zone for alts cant even get enough storm volaa's hair for my mains to get 1 skill-up. Heck, even solo farming meldstones in KT soloing is better, drop rates are insanely higher the storm volaa hair, on a kick arse day I can get a whopping 3 or 4 of them (meldstones) but is typically only 1 or sometimes 2, you cant touch that in Storms on your absolute best week on drop rates. One week I got none, dispite killing over 100 giants in all 3 sections.

PoStorms loot has no respectable loot for any player, unless you happen to get a 1.5 drop from a guild clearing one spot in the forest fort for it. Other tradeskill drops there are a joke at best. Ore and strands... gimme a break. If your gunna have them drop in such vast quanity, do us a favor, make them tradeskillable at tradeskill values of 0. No one wants the gear any more since DoN cultural is better... sure they dont got a clicky, but the clicky on Ornate is a joke now at best. You can buy potions from vendors with better haste. Grab shaman buffs before you go for more HP's. Heck, for that matter, why dont we take off the flagging requirement totally other then level 46 to get the container from Bor. Heck, I take that back, make it not only competative with other DoN cultural, but put Bor in PoK and let level 1 toons be able to get/make PoP ornate gear. Maybe then people might actually start killing in these now dead zones so they can twink thier alts just as easy as one can from Ssra.

My SK... level 5 1496 unbuffed HP's all from Ssra with the exception of the cloak of lesser pernicity and 4 other JC'ed items. Other races tradeskills are all unfortunate as well. There is no reason to go for them. They are insanely rare drops, no decent loot, less XP, ROYAL PITA to farm just from pulling (oh yeah... GPP, the only place I used it was nerfed as well, so now except for a couple stray's... storm volaa hair is now virtually un-soloable for the purposes of farming. Can expect 4 or more mobs to come.)

Can it get any more clear then that? Ssra dominates all cultural in EVERY department. Drop rate (multiply all drop rates on any given day for all other cultural drops from all zones x 2 = 3 hours of farming shissar scales on your typical day there), twinkability for alts with no level requirements, ease of pulling and even easier mobs to kill. XP is better at 70 then all others as you can mass kill...
Cultural drops needs to be fixxed Yesterday, not tommorrow, not on some future patch note but YESTERDAY.


/rant off.

Okay, I take that back. Yttrium ore has a decent drop rate. So dont multiply x 2 all other cultural drops. They are equal to shissar scales when you add in everything else from all other zones. lol

/open option...
Make new twink accounts with 300 tailoring to sell on ebay... lol, one can finally get uber level 1's with 300 tailoring all thanks to Ssra. People dont care for low level toons, but soon as they see Master (insert tradeskill here) they seem to jump on price... and since they would be level 1, no one will know if they are ebayed. They will just be uber and finally learn how to play the classes from the beginning lmao

[Maevenniia]

rants, even mild ones, belong in PSR, moving thread....

[Twistagain]

I will agree that scales drop much more frequently than other items...but you got REALLY lucky with 23 scales off of 16 mobs, or I have been REALLY unlucky for hundreds of mobs.

I usually get around 6-8 scales off a run from the entrance to the west tube (22 mobs if I remember correctly, all living.) Sometimes I get more, sometimes less...but I've never had a run nearing a stack or more off of those 22 mobs. And I took my tailoring from around 220 to 280 on scales.

[Verdandi]

You're preaching to the choir, dear. What Ngreth needs is time to do something about it.

Feedback about it so it can be relayed to the people who set workload, so Ngreth (or someone else) can get the time to work on it. For example:

"/feedback Drop rates for DoN cultural are plentiful for some races and ridiculously rare for others. This is making some cultural armors almost impossible to make. Some races have a HUGE handicap when skilling up. This has been a really big problem for several expansions and is still just as urgent - these recipes are still in use and the armors they make still of value. It needs fixing!!"

[Ddemons Ddemise]

This has become a high annoyance to me as well..
I got Tailoring to 201 on Journeyman's thinking "It shouldnt be too hard to get 300, there has got to be an alternate path"
I haven't wasted money on Tailoring since then.. no point if the max i can go is around 250, and even then that would take me weeks upon weeks of farming the Wyverns/Othmir.

Another thing is it might actually bring some drop in price to me on getting armor..My armor is laughable in most cases (it is the 58 or whatever DoN bought) actually got told in a thread on Monkly-business that my hp needed a serious boost, and that I should look into the cultural.

Told them i am waiting on 70, because there is no way I'm buying even the Master's Shadowrise. Why? Because its ridiculously priced because of the drop it needs. People want ~20k a piece for Master's Shadowrise (and I believe that was the bracer) I am glad that someone other than the one person on the server who was making GM Shadowrise got there, because for a while there Grandmaster's Shadowrise was going at 200k -400k a piece.

Until I actually have a reason to spend money on tradeskilling im probably not going to, Tailoring was the one I liked the most, and now that I can't really reach my goal, it just isnt worth spending money that could otherwise be used to upgrade character on.

That ends this rant..

(*cough* and now i know why i dont normally type in "correct" english, that was frustrating :P)

[Devilcharm]

Think you were just very unlucky Twistagain. While not exactly what normal, it was just slightly above normal. On a typical run of 16 mobs, the average drop rate for me was 12-20. 24 on that particular run was a little rich, but not by much.

I would take my time farming them when I was there for farming purposes. A typical 3 hour farm run would yield 2-4 stacks. That was how it was possible to max out two races tailoring in one month. Not only did I have insentive to farm those scales, but as pointed out... the twink gear is nice. The zone has no level restrictions. All but the emporer's room is CotH'able. It is very easy to get to any place in the zone. I forgot what direction it is, but by far the best place to farm for me was str8 in from the zone in. You have those 5 mobs in the entery part, the 4 living just down the tube, and the 8 living in the room right before Rhag 1. Then if mana was permitting (I kill enough with 1 nuke on a critical blast) I can take out the ones at the locked door to Emp's tube, and the other one going up on the other side which mostly consist of living ones.

Sigh's. I sent many /petitions. See many posts about this all over the web including the occasional one at the official forms, Ngreth feels it is important. But dispite everyone telling Sony how messed up it is... they are doing 0 to my knowledge to fix it. Ssra is a EQ dream come true for the people that can use it as a cultural sourse. The Deep is almost as good. While I temporarily put smithing on hold for my mage even though it does have the Yttrium route... my wood elf had a blessing. 300 tailoring in 2 weeks from Ssra, and 300 smithing in 3 1/2 weeks. My mage can easily see 300 smithing from the current 233 skill in 3 weeks if I put the effort into it by taking the first step by renewing it's account. As it stands, mages have been getting uber nerfs since OoW on a huge scale. So bad that I chose not to renew it (and no, I am not refering to GPP, I am refering to all the rest)

Hehe, not even certain if I will continue to renew this account once it expires. The game has turned into the biggest bot game ever... I do admit I was botting, but now I see on all servers people 6 boxxing. 6 boxxing can yield a ton of platinum for a person with little effort. And Sony not only made the game where platinum is king, but discourages new people. Total lack of advertising, ability to get gear with just a level requirement even if the person has no skill with that class. And the inhospitity new people get from older people giving them the impression they need platinum and level's to be considered good.
On this account my 54 rogue can easily be MT in Valor and does quite a bit, but a 55 "tank" under most normal circumstances now cant from a lack of AA's and total utter junk expensive as all hell ... crappy bazaar gear or MM gear. For all the priases people give DoDh, PoR, and TSS gear. Gear from the like of VT while it has less HP/Mana is clearly superior in every other department... heck I dont even think they can do a 1.5 raid. To this date, there is no guild out there that is fully decked out in any of that one group gear with no other raid drops that has yet to make it to the elemental planes in PoP. They also believe there is no need as thier current gear is better just cause it has more HP's/Mana. New TSS gear is even worse then PoR gear, while more HP/Mana then it, most of it has no modifications whats so ever and the saves on them is a joke. On VT you see gear with +30 saves or close. New TSS does not even have half that, so every AE that mob has, eats these 1 group geared people like a hot knife through butter. And most raids have one or more AE's.


Anyways. Account is not expired yet. There might be some saving grace. But things sure are looking bad at the moment

[Ddemons Ddemise]

Will say your wrong on the PoP thing, on Bertox at least many guilds are currently breaking into PoP just for the training
My guild personally has had people tell the guildleader to stop PoP cause it serves no purpose..we have tons of 1.5s in guild do alot of 1.5 raids (just joined 4 days ago and iv been on 2 PoP raids and about 6 1.5 raids)
alot of people are in EP or so, i personally am stuck because i never see people doing Grummus/Bertox line (last line i need iirc to be completely teir 3 or whatever)

and on the stats thing.. stats dont really matter in my eyes.. far too easy to max out base stats.. and resists? 2nd only to hp ..
putting it this way: i play a melee, hp is king to me.. my resists are pretty high for my level (nearly 300 unbuffed in all) .. but my hp is what i worry about the most.. why? because in todays EQ mobs hit to freaking hard not to worry about hp..whats it matter if you resist that spell if you cant take its melee damage?

[Carmaris]

Worry less about HP and more about AC. As long as you've got the HP to avoid being one-rounded, AC is Emperor to HP's king.

[Suva]

Try being a half elf. We finally get a cultural and our masters armor piece is a great reptile hide. These drop in CT or in VP. Drop rates are reported to be better in VP, but this is a zone you need to complete a flagging quest to get into. Farming in CT and with what guildmates have given me, 6 hides in the several months I have been trying to get them. Maybe now at 75 VP will be easier, but geez is it frustrating.

[Ddemons Ddemise]

Same boat as Iksars are in..

will say i checked prices on Master's Shadowrise.. down to 4-12k per piece.. finally
but.. not wasting cash on buying it.. cause augs are still ~3-4k apiece..and why waste 7k on armor..then upgrade it in 3 levels for less than half the cost?

meh, thats just my viewing it