Grand Master vs AA Mastery

[Ngreth Thergn]

Please keep the discussion rational, and if you are too emotional about it step back and post again later when you ahve calmed down.

[Humlaor]

Well, I don't know how much this would help for the testing, but I have 222 blacksmithing skill and blacksmithing mastery 1. If anyone can think of a way that I can be put to use in testing I will gladly dedicate some of my time to it.

Boomlaor

[Obina]

Just a comment. The zero percent skill thing is not important. That's because the time/effort/knowledge to get to 50 or 100 or even 188 is pretty low for all trade skills. I know AA's are not that hard, but they are harder than early tradeskilling. I really think that the number of peops that would spend 18 AA's with no tradeskill are small. And most would still choose to get to at least 100 - more likely 188 - if they want to succeed on a combine or otherwise 'do" a tradeskill.

Now comparing 188 plus AA versus 250 no AA may still seem "unfair", depends on your view. I happen to think it means only those with AA make plat. But AA's are ment to be good. I'm used to it now. I certainly don't think SOE have a big problem with the calculation.

[Humlaor]

But as far as success rate (with no aas), on a 335 trivial combine, there is little to no difference between 190 and 0. There is, however, a big difference between 250 and <200. Given the amount of work it is to take a tradeskill from 190 to 250 (with the exception of brewing), 18 aa should not be able to replicate that. According to some claims, an aa every 20 minutes is not unheard of in high lvl exp zones. 6 hours of work should not get somone the same thing as the untold hours it takes to work up a tradeskill.

Boomlaor

[Kronepsis]

All this bruhaha is, of course, assuming several things:

- The combines people are getting in a tizzy about are not skill restricted
- The Mastery AA applies AFTER the failure rate is rounded to 95%.

If you have a 300% chance of failing something, 150% is still going to round down to 95%.

And if it's a flat 50% decrease instead, even better, because that would make the sample number of 300% go down to 250%.

[ColdHeart]

Krone, the worse fail rate you can get is 95%, where is your 300% fail rate coming from?

If you truely want to master a TS, 252+AA is the way to go. But it does seem odd a 0 skill person has about as good a chance of high trivs then a 252 skill person.

I will point out that 252 skill is better for subcombines where you can get 0% failure rates for sub 52 triv items. Sure, you may have tha same success rate as the Expert Smith for PoP armour, but you are failing like crazy on the subcombines.

[splunge]

Seeming as how no one has actually *tested this* by buying Skill_X Mastery 3 with a toon that has 0 skill in Skill_X and parsing combines, I'm gonna TOTALLY blame this on a faulty calculator and a faulty description of the AA Skill.

The calculator was created by GUESSES. Not by code copied and pasted from the .exe file. Not by a formula given to us directly from the coder that created the tradeskill success/skillup formulas.
It was all GUESSES based on a bad description of the skill. We guessed wrong.

The mastery AA skills increase your success rate. They do not reduce your failure percentage. They may say they do, but thats incorrect.

There are MANY spells/effects in the game where, if you read the description in the item info box in-game, they are in some minor or even *major* way incorrect.

For example, the lifetap procs on my weapons, when you read the description of them, all they say is they deal X damage. They say *nothing* about healing at all. I wouldnt have gotten them if they didnt heal me. The description is WRONG, just like descriptions are wrong on MANY things.

The description of my lifetap proc is wrong.
The description of the Mastery Tradeskill AA is wrong.
The eqtraders.com calculator is faulty, as it assumed the description was right.

Someone prove me wrong.
And by 'prove' i dont just mean parrot what the description says; I mean take a high level toon with 0 skill and buy Skill Mastery 3 and parse.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I agree in general with splunge, EXCEPT that Tanker very specifically said at a fanfair the the Jewelcraft mastery works as the description says... It alters the failure chance by that percentage, therefore upping the success chance)

Now this does not preclude them screwing up in making the new ones :/

[Eileah]

Someone prove me wrong.
And by 'prove' i dont just mean parrot what the description says; I mean take a high level toon with 0 skill and buy Skill Mastery 3 and parse.

Not looking to prove you wrong, or anyone else right, but....

Must it be level 3 in skill mastery?

I am admittedly bored out of my skull in EQ and have a level 61 Cleric with 0 Brewing skills, I could probably handle grinding AA's for one level of mastery but 18 AA's is way more than I want to grind on that toon.

Oh and I am clueless on parsing, would need info on doing that =/

But if 3 levels of mastery is needed then I respectfully withdraw my offer =P

[splunge]

Ngreth:

Bet ya a dollar Tanker is wrong.

Its very easy to think that 'Increasing the success rate' and 'decreasing the failure rate' are exactly the same thing.

Anyone have his email address?

[Twistagain]

Krone, the worse fail rate you can get is 95%, where is your 300% fail rate coming from?

What Kron was saying was that all the percentage chances are calculations. At some point in the calculation, the server says "Hey...that's over 95%..so we're gonna make it exactly 95%." The question is "When does the server do this?"

For instance, let's assume that the widely accepted forumula (Skill - Trivial*3/4 + 51.5 = SuccessRate) is correct:

At Skill 0, on a 335 combine, you end up with SuccessRate of -199.75% (or a failure rate of 299.75%). At some point, the computer makes this 5% instead, but if the master AA is calculated BEFORE this correction...

299.75% halved = 149.875%...making the successrate -49.875% (still under 5%...so changed to 5%.)

In other words, if the AA calculation was performed BEFORE the "minimal chance" correction, there would be no difference in this particular case.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Its very easy to think that 'Increasing the success rate' and 'decreasing the failure rate' are exactly the same thing.

Uh ... if it increased success rate by 10, 25, 50 percent, then that would make any combine with at least a 67% chance of success no fail for someone with M3.

The above was done without the EQTC calculator - just based on plain math. Now, using the calculator to *approximate* success rates, that translates into any combine with a trivial less than about ~315 being nofail for someone with a modded skill of 252. Personally, that sounds even less likely than a zero-skill char having a 50%-or-better chance of success on everything.

That's based on the presumption that the Mastery AAs are unaffected by the 95% successs softcap, which all the talk of 95%->97.5% presumes anyhow.

[Eleena Transient]

Eileah,

If you purchase 1 rank of Brewing Mastery, that should be a 10% reduction in fails. If you then take the cleric, remove gear (as to minimize skill up rate) and create 1000 mino brews. You'll still end up with a bunch of skill ups, but Mino Brew should give no more then a 5% chance up till 136 skill, and you shouldn't cross that.

With no aa, 5% chance, would get 50 success.
If aa is 10% reduced fails, then a 95% fail reduces to 85.5% fail, or 145 success.
If the aa is as Kronepsis says, then you should get a >5% chance at skill 125 with aa. Since I doubt you'll see 124 skill ups on 1000 combines, you should still get about 50 success.


While the RNG could still have a wide margin of error on this, the difference between 50 and 145 success should be noticable.

[Eleena Transient]

Dunthor,

When the JCM aa's first came out, I believe thats actually how it worked. I recall people getting near 100% success on valorium rings. Then they changed to how it is now. Instead of 72% chance going to 108% chance success (and then capped to 95%), it went 28% fail to 14% fail, thus 86% chance success.

I might be wrong on that, but I remember there being a big outcry of nerf.

[Tineras]

Is anyone in a position to test this?

We are making an assumption about the failure rate...

We have been told that there is always a 5% chance of failure, but have we been told (or verified) that there is always a 5% chance of success?

If those 5% on each side are handled special, it could very easily be that the calculated failure rate for something is 300% and if you happen to roll a 96 on the try it just skips the check and says it worked...

However, if it's true that the AA helps you for 100+ skill points or more, then it's clearly broken...