Refinement Looks Fixed

[Jarak_akn]

Odd, I have done about 2 stacks (of pale nihilite) with the new UI after the last patch. Having said that I already had it learned, and listed as a favourite.

Jarak.

[Grrumble]

I can understand people's apprehension with the refinement process "working as intended" actually being what was intended...

• Some of my refine recipes aren't learned and I've done all but the sludge...

• For quite awhile, my refinement message would be "You can no longer advance..." with 2 lines of "You have fashioned..." with some (not all) refines having another "You have fashioned..." message in another color. (Pink and Blue in my case). My refinements today gave only one "You have fashioned..." line in pink with some refines having the extra blue line.

• My Taelosian Stone and Bar of Aligned Steel refines today gave 2 stacked items upon refine while the wheat, nihilite, tea, and scales refines were unstacked. Since my last refines were before the last batch of patches, and I didn't have refines stacked on my cursor before, I'm assuming this was introduced in the batch of patches.

• My aligned ore refines (the second most I've done of all refines to date) today were all results of 2. In 20 refines, not a single 1 or 3 result. In contrast, my tea refines (the most refines total to date) wound up with a 1.62 average result with 26 refines. The RNG sucks, eh?

• With many hundreds of refines under my belt, I have yet to get a result of 3, except when the refines were broken.

• Refinement experiences seem to vary from one person to the next. Delores posted above the nihilite refines were giving stacked results. Mine were unstacked...

And all of this wouldn't bother me so much if the tradeskill drops didn't seem so rare. I literally spent over 10 hours in natimbi the other night killing hynids for manes. I walked away with 11 manes and saw less than 30 total tradeskill drops. I was killing every hynid in the zone and killing time killing other mobs while waiting for repops. Needless to say, lots of mobs died that night.

[Elfdruidess]

Experiment on how new GoD conversion works

Experiment on Talosian Tea Leaves with 250 brewer:

Brewer has:
Never done a single conversion before last patch.
Did the 420 quest combines (all freebie) to obtain ability to convert.

I had 100 Talosian Tea Leaves.

Combines 1-80: getting either 1 or 2 *unstacked*
Combines 81-100: getting ALL 2s *stacked*, no 3

My Conclusion:
Takes 80 combines to get out of the "1 or 2" period
Starting from combine 81: getting a confirmed 2 but not into the "2 or 3" period yet

For those who have seen a 3 after last patch, can you confirm if you are getting 2 stacked + 1 unstacked? If that is the case, then all we are missing now is what is the magic number to enter the "2 or 3" period.

[Delores Mulva]

Grrumble, try to think of the tradeskill drop rate in terms of product created. For example, when I do XP in Kod'Taz my groups average about one of each tradeskill item per hour. I can turn in the shimmering ore and raw shimmering nihilite to the quest NPCs if I'm not good enough at refining to guarantee two, so I will always get at least two Shimmering Nihilite and Bar of Shimmering Ore. With those, and 500-600 pp worth of cash (which is covered by the gem drops from the one hour of XP), one can make either one 16/20 one handed weapon, one 34/28 two handed weapon, or two 17/20 hand-to-hand weapons with about 90% total success rate at max skill. Every hour a group spends doing XP in the zone, one more 16/20 weapon hits the Bazaar.

Is that good for the game? Those weapons are better than just about anything you'll be able to obtain up to tier three of PoP, and because of how common they are they're quite easy to obtain. Right now on my server, the H2H weapon is priced at 9-10 K, and the other weapons are priced between 18 and 20 K. Once the 2HS was selling for 12 K because one trader dumped 25 of them on the market at once, but that was hopefully an anomaly. To put that in perspective, most level 65 casters could solo in Veksar, get a Soulscream Belt, and sell that for more than enough to buy one of these weapons.

So when you look at the drop rate for you, solo, try to think of the big picture and what would happen if drop rates were ramped up. To give you another example, relevant to what you were doing: hynids in different zones seem to have about the same drop rate on manes and stuff. There's hynids in Kod'Taz. Every hour, my XP group will see one Aged Muramite Scales and one Hynid Mane. If we saw one extra Mane per hour, then every hour I'd have the raw materials to create a 12/18 1HS with no rec. or req. levels on it with 95+% success. The whips would flood the marketplace in no time, and you'd have an entire server of low-level characters using whips with nearly double the intended DPS for the low to mid levels.

As for the other items you listed: at one point there was a recipe wipe, shortly after GoD release. If you learned the recipe from the quest, it got wiped then. Absor attempted to make the recipe learnable from doing the combine manually, but that introduced other unforseen side-effects and was reversed. So if you didn't do a refinement combine during that period, you'd still be missing the recipe. It sounds like they're working on the problem again, though. The different messages are related to what is going on in the background with learning the recipe and number of refined products made. And the stacked refines seem to occur when you reach a certain high number of refines, so that you always get at least two products.

Delores Mulva
Lotus Cult
Quellious

[Delores Mulva]

Last night: refined 15 Raw Pale Nihilite, got 35 Pale Nihilite total. This is my proof that I did get some "3" results since last patch. All my combines of Raw Pale Nihilite yield at least two Pale Nihilite stacked. I have never counted how many nihilite combines I've done, but it's quite extensive - I'm the primary seller of gold nihilite earrings on my server, they fly out of my inventory at my price point, and I always keep between ten and twenty in stock to avoid going out of stock overnight.

[Elfdruidess]

All my combines of Raw Pale Nihilite yield at least two Pale Nihilite stacked.

Can you confirm if you meant you were getting "2 stacked + 1 unstacked" when you got 3? That *should* mean you are in the "2 or 3" period. And when you get "3 stacked", then you are in the "always 3" period.

Hey all,
I had never combined any nihilite but had been gathering some for a run, so I decided to do the 5 stacks I had to see if it made a difference. Starting with combine 95 I was receiving 2 stacked on my cursor. Haven't received a third yet, but it looks like the threshold for me was 95.

Considering Dyllwin said his "threshold" was 95, while my "threshold" was 80, there are three possibilites I can think of:

1) Each raw material has a different "threshold" (i.e. my Taelosian Tea was at 80, while Dyllwin's Raw Nihilite was at 95).

2) Skill makes a difference (my brewing skill was at 250, and judging from Dyllwin's sig, the JCer that was used could have been at 200 skill)

3) How many combines you did for the quest NPC made a difference (i.e. I did 420 all freebie combines for it).

Can anyone provide more data on combines done after the last patch?

[Verdandi]

There are too many threads about this. I'm locking this one to consolidate. Please feel free to continue this discussion in this thread.