Halas 10lb Meat Pie - NOT a good way to skillup

[RangerTimy]

So I was looking at how much my bank resembles a schizophrenic's brain last night, and decided the best thing to do would be get rid of all this meat and cream that I had.

So I made the fennel cream sauce, which yields 6, and ended up filling about 7 handmade bags with it. Transferred to mule. Then I started filleting the meat and ended up waist-deep in wolf-meat. Then I smooshed it all together with the cream, made the dough, made pie tin, got the sage, and went to the Ironstove house.

All of this took me about 2-3 hours to get it sorted out, arranged, and divided between me and my mule.

So I had a total of 3 stacks of each required ingredient, with a wisdom of 218. Combined them all with a decent success rate (about 66% I think since it left me with 13½ stacks of pie), and got ONE skill up. My starting skill was 191, so now after about 3-4 hours of work, I got 1 point.

This was last night, and I just woke up, and my wrist is still numb.

Now, I realize this is not that drastic on the face of it - 3 stacks of combines for 1 point happens a lot. But, for the intense preparation involved in this, and the fact that it takes 7 ingredients for one combine, the damage felt much more severe.

So, there's my advice. Thinking about skilling up Baking? Halas 10lb Meat Pies = not your best bet. Think I'll go back to Ohaba Truffles now.

[cannyar]

sounds like you had a bad run.. i have to agree, o.t. are easier to make but they trivial out lower than meat pies (226 for pies, forgot what o.t. were). the biggest problem is getting mushrooms for the non-foragers out there (like me). getting all the ingredients for hmp is far easier, bear and lion meat are bought, i can farm mammoths easily as well as wolves (or just buy stacks from newbies). oh, also easy to farm baskilsk eggs in jagged pines.

as it happens today i took a break from exp and went on a grind. went through 8 full stacks of ingredients (16 of dough) and got 7 skillups (208-215). i consider myself pretty lucky & happy compared to previous results, though people have said they have done better. i lost track of how many stacks of hmp i have out of all of this, plenty to sell though.

the nice thing about hmp is i can easily sell them from my mule in the bazaar from 5-10pp depending on the competition (xev). i'm still making a profit per stack sold. out of 20 combines i maybe get 1 failure, usually not. so even though i don't always get a skillup i'm making some money for my time.

next for me will be MTP but i'm holding off because of the mega-sub-combines. maybe i'll have GoD before i get to those.

[Rerashyaka]

ugh, the 190s have always been a pain in the rear. My suggestion, since you're high enough level to do so, is to park in plane of storms with a few loads of bait and your fisherman's companion. (or plane of water to get to at least 208, maybe 222 if you've been foraging in poj) Spend a few hours fishing (you have a book you've been meaning to read or something, right?). Storm salmon filets are a two-click combine that triv at 202, the pos zone-in is completely safe, and while you can't really make a profit off of your sucesses, you will be in a much better position to get skillups from mtps or meat pies.

Rerashyaka
59 bard
Druzzil Ro

250 baking + trophy
250 brewing
191 jewelcraft
190 smithing
190 pottery
188 fletching
187 tailoring
195 fishing
200 drinking

[Balkin]

Heh,

Switch to MTP's... seriously...

Time yourself. Prep 100 combines of Halas Pies, then prep 100 combines of MTP's.

I bet you spend twice as long, or more, prepping to do the HMP's. I tried them once on my cleric, and will never, ever, do another HMP combine.

PoP combines are awesome if you can get them. I skilled up my wizard from 191 to 197 on Vann toes and Jord meat that I merchant mined, but for those who can't get PoP items in any quantity, MTP's are definately the way to go.

Good Luck!

[RangerTimy]

Thanks for the great advice (and the sympathy ). I think the plane of storms idea sounds good. I've been leery of it because I really don't enjoy fishing, but I guess I could paint my walls beforehand and watch them dry.

Does anyone know if there's a way to make a macro that puts the fished item in your inventory? Like a hotkey to drop in inventory would be great so I could just sit there and smash buttons without having to look.

Cheers!

[Lixivia]

This was last night, and I just woke up, and my wrist is still numb

havnt felt my fingers in over a year, welcome to the wonderful world of tradeskilling!

honestly, get a good mouse pad and wrist rest.

[Zyrtryx Conjureblade]

Truffles are definitely the way to go. I quit doing skill-ups when I hit 200, because I'm thinking of 250ing Brewing first, but I rarely, if ever, got skill-ups from HMPs (made a lot of profit selling them, though).

Truffles are harder to sell in the Bazaar (try selling them to fellow guildmembers, instead. Monks love `em), but I skilled up on doing those fairly quickly. I went from 189 to 200 on the Truffles.

[chiangli]

<quote>
Does anyone know if there's a way to make a macro that puts the fished item in your inventory?
</quote>

The command you want is "/autoinventory". You can hotkey it.

[Amaruk]

an easier way..

I GMed baking using o.t.`s until they trivialed then a combination of MTP and the melts using the meats from Jagged Pines. I was buying them for around 2-4pp each or 40-80pp a stack and since that is the most expensive part of the combine that is basically your cost as well. I have all the the combine data somewhere if anyone is interested.

I found after a short time that it was much nicer to do just 3 items in a combine with no substeps beyond getting the cheese then doing all those put combines with chances to lose potion ingredients to the RNG.

I really hated to mess up the cutting of a cake for the MTP with skill of over 200..

Anetu
GM baker
at 200 or about 10 from 200 in the other skills.

[Ndaara]

Look in the Fishing forum, there is a thread there called "Legal macro" or something similar. Lots of discussion on hotkeying fishing as well as foraging.

Also if you happen to have 2 systems and 2 accounts, what I do is have my forager/fisher on the other system while i do other stuff on my main system (well baking, of course!) I just have to be careful to put my fisher/forager in a safe place in case i can't look over there for a while.

[eniamn]

the meat pie economy on luclin is horrid. at 2pp each tops i didn't sell and started giving them away. i did mtps from 193 on. 10pp each means a stack sells for 200pp. the vendor bought stuff costs very close to 200pp for a run of 200. actually took me less time to do 400 picnic combines than 240 hmp combines. i'm not making pies again unless a friend needs them. the subcombines aren't bad on picnics. really it would cost far more otherwise. they all yeild at least 10.

[iasmin]

I started on MTPs last night myself and managed a nice pile of skillups and a nice success rate in a short period of time. Far shorter than I'd expected. The PRNG was extremely kind to me last night.

So now I'm left with 5 stacks of mammoth meat and literally a toolbox of wolf. There's still a pie market to some extent on my server. I'd rather not waste that meat. I suppose I could sell the excess. The wolf likely wouldn't sell much at all on my server, but the mammoth meat might. But I'm just odd enough to consider powering through the rest of the pies and mule them selling them a little at a time.

I'm still glad I tried the pies, though, despite the combines. They've made me appreciate the other combines.

[Baldaek]

For me, truffles to 199, then HMP's (still) to 224 or so.

I personally love the HMP setup, and find that doing 4 stacks at once is an easy way to both kill 2 hours and make upwards of 4 to 5K plat depending on what the going rate is.

Aid Grimel is a gimp and should be shot, but he is helping motivate my tradeskilling

After fishing 7 stacks of Storm Salmon - a full 7 hours of fishing, mind you - I made exactly 0 (zero) skillups on the combines while I was at a 191 skill. I avoid em like the plague now.

Jord meat, boar meat, justice fruit, blood raven parts, hobo meat, hero meat, vann toes, etc. seem to be plentiful for further advancement.

Happy Martha Stewarting!

[Zyrtryx Conjureblade]

I have a theory that the LDON expansion will really hurt the HMP market in the long run.

Wolf Meat has always been fairly easy to come by - there's a large # of vendors spread throughout Norrath that people sell to, so you can usually find some pieces fairly easy if you know where to look (East Commonlands, Kelethin and Felwithe, mostly), but it was next to impossible to do the same with Mammoth Meat.

Once more people realize that all they have to do is go to the Everfrost camp and see if anyone sold any to the Magus, and there are plenty of mammoths that walk by the camp if there isn't, the prices of HMP will probably go down even farther.