What is it with 202 fletching?

[Tryll Rapture]

Is there some massive hill at 202? I have done bunches of Acryllia combines, Mithril arrow combines, and bow combines and can't seem to get 203?

[Cigarskunk]

Yeah - they "fixed" fletching a few patches ago in order to stop macro bots from making thousands of plat banging out high end bows and arrows to sell back to the merchants.

Unfortunately, they fixed fletching so well that anyone who wasn't already a GM isn't going to have to worry about seeing GM status any time soon.

[Nieccole]

Broken? Bah, it's not buggy, it's working as intended! Honest! :roll:

[Newmoon]

The again, it could be that infamous progression stop that they supposedly smoothed out. I had over 500 combines at 202 before I got 203, and that was a few months ago... don't know, just speculating

[Errun]

Bah its not broken - just not as easy as it was

IMO, if you want to skill up, don't make arrows.

I made that mistake and poured tons of effort into makeing champion arrows and got 1 skill up in 100 combines. GODS that was a pain.

Switched to darkwood bows and it costs more per combine (I dare say but not per skill point) but skill went up smoothly.

Some trades used to be easy, now none are. Broken - not at all.

[Sirap Pancake]

If you want to do bow combines, but don't want to kick out the plat, you could try Trueshot combines. I had good success with them, but that was before the 'fix.'

[lonewylfe]

I did about 42 Trueshot combines the other day, only one skillup. And it took me about 4 days of 7 hour farming to get the servos...they don't drop as much anymore since the newbie armor stuff was added to their loot list.

[Tryll Rapture]

Yup. Did Trueshots for a little. No skill ups. It is hard to find the parts now that there are so many drops. Took a while for even 20 tries. Tried Mithril again. No skill ups. Had a friend convince me to try Mithril again. Here is to hoping that 203 is just a combine away.

At least I am not alone in the 202 issue. It does, kind of, seem that people that are now doing Fletching are getting over the 202 "easily" and the ones that started before are not. I started when you could combine anything (and loose everything when you combined the wrong thing.) Just finally got back to it.

Tryll Rapture

[metopu sureflight]

Being a Ranger who just got to the skill of 215 it seems I have not had much of a problem getting skill ups from any of the items you are listing. I do a bit of everything a few Trueshot and Darkwood bows, as well as Champion and Acrylia arrows and consistantly get skill ups from all.

Darkwood bows work well because you can sell them back for 20 pp per bow less than it costs to make them and continue a cycle. However you get many more combines making Champion arrows for the same amount of plat I think it is somewhere around 60 combines in comparison. The biggest thing with the Champion arrows is that you do not get much in return and is best to just use them yourself of find someone to buy them from you.

[metopu sureflight]

Correction

I noticed I made and error on my previous post. It seems I stated the comparison between Champion arrows and Darkwood bows was around 60. The true comparison is closer to 20 to 1 arrows to bows made.

[Tryll Rapture]

Just as an update. I finally got over 202. At 213 now. I used Champion arrows to get over 202 but afterwards was convinced to use bows. Bows do help to go up faster. I think I have been stuck at 202 for over six months if not almost a year.

Thanks Lunariel for convincing me to continue.

Tryll Rapture

[Kinladar]

Posted the same information somewhere else, Bows didn't do anything for me.

I consistantly got 1 skill up per stack of Shadow Tipped Acrylia Arrow components.

Max Dexterity.

I farmed my acrylia in the acrylia caverns. I did all of this after the "nerf" by the way. Bows are a waste of platinum, when at the levels I was at, we went to Acrylia Caverns, farmed a ton of the stuff, me and a shaman tailor, then would go back and merrily make our tradeskill stuffs.

Add to that decent experience at the levels of 50-55, and it was the best of both worlds.

Granted, pre-nerf I got 2-3 skillups per stack, so it was a signifigant hit on the rates. And the few times I tried Mithril Arrows of any type, I got the exact same results of few skill ups over my piles of components. But when I used the Shadow Acrulia route, it worked really well for me.