Missing the Boat

[Ndainye]

Personal rant please feel free to ignore.

I love tradeskilling always have I started playing EQ after having been extremely anti EQ for over a year after the original cultural recipes were added. I tradeskilled my way through UO for several years and the original lack of tradeskilling in EQ made it not appealing.

Once I started playing and realized that in order to tradeskill in EQ I would first have to level and second have to build a stockpile of pp I waited on the tradeskilling rush and just enjoyed EQ found a good guild played the leveling game always carrying a sewing kit in my pack and slowly working on tailoring. As a woodelf druid I didn't see a point in being anything other than a tailor it was the only (at that time) cultural opertunity for my character.

I was level 49 and 120ish tailoring when Lucin and Acryillia armor came out and I watched many people on my server rack up the plat making cloaks and selling for 10k or more. Meanwhile I was slowly farming silks and begging chanters to take time to make mana for me to work on WU's and it was still a money issue. As in real life you gotta have money to make money. I finally had the skill to make my first cloaks to find they had dropped to 800pp and there was an overflowing market.

Next came Solstice robes and BD cultural. I now have 170 tailoring plowing my way through farming hopper hides and acryilia. I can't make robes at a decent rate to sell them but I can occasionally take a break from acrillia and burn 100 silks and emeralds and maybe get a skill up. If I do happen to succed I don't know if I'm excited because I can sell a robe for 3k and make enough to fund another skill up round or to be upset that I need to buy some more chains.

By level 58 I can small group farm well enough in Seb to have funds for small runs of tailoring and I now have near to 200 skill so I'm feeling pretty good about tailoring and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel the sales on robes have slacked off but on a good day my trader can sell two at 2k each and that almost pays for 20 more chain attempts. Wyvern hides are easy to come by but the velium farming is driving my mage insane and buying velium and acryilla keeps me in the near broke level no matter what. PoP is out and there's some nifty combines in there but the drops are insane and I wouldn't risk the combines yet.

Level 61 life is good I can charm stalkers in PoN and get BD's stockpiled for cultural attempts tailoring is now 230 and I am pushing for 250 by LoY. It takes me three attempts but I have my needle and at effective 244 tailoring I've succeded at some cultural. Then I compare stats to elysian and other than a few pieces I can't see someone paying near the price on WE cultural that similar items on smithed goods can and do sell for. And those good items sit on my trader for a few weeks and I realize I was right in my assumption. Those few that wanted cultural just to have it got their's long ago and now it will be hit or miss. Only 3 of us on the server selling it maybe one of the others has better sales. Robes are down to 1500 and I'm swimming in them, but at least my guild has a supplier for robes yeah go me!

LoY comes out and there are new recipes! They are only for robe wearers grrrr. I'm excited for the robe wearing races that they got some cultural but bummed that once again I missed the boat pushing that last 10 points of tailoring is no longer a pressing issue and I'm wondering why I spent the last two years on this project. Oh yeah now I remember I love tradeskills :roll:

[Reflan]

Frankly, with geerloks, pushing the last few points of tradeskills seems foolish to me. I can see doing it with baking, JC, brewing -- easy cheap skills. Not the expensive, utterly time destroying skills like tailoring and smithing. Unless merely for the satisfaction alone of just doing it, in which case no matter how worthwhile or hard it is, it's your choice and nobody said you had to do it or that it had to matter.

Who knows how long EQ will last? Congratulations on finally having hit such a high level! Perhaps as expansions go by you will eventually be able to make huge amounts of plat tailoring by being already highly skilled when new types of tailored armor come out. We've all missed many boats in our EQ lives and perhaps regular ones as well, but sometimes just the trying puts you a little farther ahead in the queue once the boat comes back again for another trip.

Hey, be glad you had cultural in the first place! My ogre shaman is going to hate getting tailoring to a high level worse than you did. And you're a druid, so vendor farming is very easy for you. Thank goodness my first character was a druid, so I can port wherever I like and vendor mine for hours if I like. It's brutally slow for my shaman to do the same thing. You have had more things on your side than you might realize. That you didn't get rich(yet!) is just one of the downsides. But honestly, most anyone can make money faster by camping loot, group or solo, and leveling than they can by doing tradeskills anyway, so if you signed up for tradeskilling, hopefully it wasn't to make money in the first place. Perhaps more will come your way as the expansions continue to roll in.

Good luck to you and to all of us in making a few bucks off the long hours of work and effort we put into tradeskills. One day, perhaps, all our hours may come round at last.

[UbercyrusForbeis]

I've worked on Alchemy since I was able to start.

I didn't put any extra points into it and ground it out because it was fun for me. I was able to make SoW potions when they were 120p a stack on the Rathe and I never really made money on them.

Once I got to the SoW potions spot, everyone told me I was done. No need to skill up... who's gonna buy any of that other crap? I did it anyway. Because I think it's a pretty cool skill and I always figured new stuff would hit and make it cool to be an alchemist.

I made Ant's potions... Unlife Awareness. I made DMG potions and Titan potions...

Now, after quite a bit of time and money, illusion potions are out. Gate potions. Various other neat looking things. Am I glad I hung in there and was able to make these? YEP!

Long and short of it: Hang in there, you're at a point now that new stuff is going to benefit your love of the tradeskill AND your pocket book.

[Lilosh]

I missed the boat at freeport once.


But then I remembered I was a druid, and just ported to ButcherBlock.


-Lilosh

[Cigarskunk]

Don't sweat it - missed boat now means that you'll be jumping and ready for the next one that comes around.

I can't help but remember all of the folks that were comming here and ranting about the fact that thanks to PotC they can't get any peice and quiet and thier poor characters have made over 200k plat and they are sick and tired of doing the raw materials for that quest.

Wah!

I am very much looking forward to the next PotC grade quest that comes out so that my baker and my JC toon can be swamped by tells wanting to buy items at several k plat each from my characters all of the time.

I'm looking forward to having 100k+ in my character's banks.

I can't wait to be stuck doing nothing but cranking out plat for a few weeks of game play so that I've got enough plat laying around to GM every tradeskill sololy off of bazaar bought materials on all three characters.

Heck, I'm rather disappointed that they didn't have any PotC type quests with LoY because baby, I am ready and able for the next boat that sails through.

Boat me - PLEASE!