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**Akishka** · 12-12-2004, 11:46 PM

Is the 20 minutes from before or after the start of the clicking? You could save that 20 minutes (ish) by donating 20 pp for a port from PoK to Natimbi and be one click away from the Abysmal Sea. In that case, you would be approximately equal in time and pp. The Abysmal Sea quest would allow you the option of doing the further quests with them while the fish roll option would give you approximately 2 pp worth of food.

I agree, for some people, the quests are not worth it. However, what I disagree with is your premise that, because its not worth it for certain people, its never worth it. Lets look the the following scenarios:

Person A loves to do quests and roleplay, couldn't care less about the time and effort vs reward, they love to quest.

Person B is wanting to do lots and lots of GoD tradeskilling. Finishing this quest while managing to skill up, bonus!

Person C is so incredibly broke they can barely keep themselves in rations. They are trying to get enough skill ups so that they can really turn a profit on those fish rolls.

Person D couldn't care less about baking, they want to tailor. Mandrake roots actually do add up your costs quickly, especially if you are starting from scratch. 45 minutes for a freebie quest is certainly quicker than taking all that time to hunt pelts and silks at level 10. Plus, you get to skip making metal studs!

Person E is a warrior. Warrior be dumb. Warrior never see 198 int. Warrior lower level and trying very hard just to see 198 str. Warrior never have 'reasonable' amount of intelligence as defined by Splunge.

Now, in all these cases, it would be better to do GoD quests. I'm sure there are others we could think of. Does this mean its the best option for everybody? Of course not, but they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Rather they should be presented as another option which has pros and cons, just like all the other options out there.

**Beriberi** · 12-12-2004, 11:48 PM

baking is a cheap example to use, as would be brewing. I agree with you though, and personally would only use the free quests for jewelry and poison, which are a bit more expensive than the others.

Good data though.

Beriberi
Prexus

**Dunthor Warsmith** · 12-13-2004, 12:19 AM

Originally posted by Splunge

Conclusion: For any reasonable ammount of int/wis and 110+CHA (any toon should have 1-2 25CHA mugs by the time they can get to Abysmal sea safely anyways) the 'Freebie' quests are absolutely, positively not worth the bother.

Getting to 100+ skill in any trade is extremely cheap from just storebought items.

As noted by Beriberi, you chose one of the cheapest & easiest low-level tradeskills for the basis of your comparison. If you had instead compared tailoring, smithing, or even jewelrycraft, I'm doubt the results would have been so strongly in favor of non-AS-quests. Plus, with some tradeskills, doing the quest has the side benefit of the refinement skill, which initially adds convience and eventually also efficiency.

Getting to Abysmal "safely" can pretty much be accomplished as soon as you can get a adventurer's stone - getting to the EC camp or BBM camp is reasonably doable around 20, and the camp at Nedaria's is relatively safe. For a non-tradering (ie, no bazaar selling) non-twink getting together the ~50-70pp (Tunare pricing) for the pair of steins is nontrivial, at least for a caster (due to the spell costs) - especially if they haven't specifically cash farmed. Admittedly there are plenty of ways around that now for a knowledgeable player (twinkage, plague rat tails or equivalent, /tradering silks and pelts, vendormining, etc).

Though I do agree that overall doing 1-54 the "old fashion way" is generally a "saner" thing to do, I would heartily disagree with the global conclusion of "the 'Freebie' quests are absolutely, positively not worth the bother."

**splunge** · 12-13-2004, 05:46 AM

Person A: More power to em! They are an amazingly rare breed (all both of them)
Person B: The only useful things made with GoD stuff are either nerfed to high hades (whips) or market-flooded (velium gemmed stuff/stat food/drink)
Person C: Youve GOT to be kidding me. With lvl 1 Qeynos rats dropping 2g vendor trash, thats a real stretch there.
Person D: Ok, tailoring sucks wind 1-250. Ill concede that.
Person E: Re-read Step 1. Id say youd need 50 or so int/wis to make even the cheapest of tradeskills (brewing) close to par with the freebies.

People keep saying JC is expensive, but JCed items sell back to a vendor at almost exactly what it costs to make. Thatll be for the next experiment i suppose. =)

And I know fletching is cheap. I power-skilled a karana ranger in fletching to make some karana arrows with my dropable wis gear (got him to 200ish) and it cost 300p total to go from 1-202.

Oh, and the freebie quests are LOTS LOTS more clicks then the old-fashoned way, as you dont have to hand everything you make, one at a time, to someone. Saving 20p at the cost of hundres of carpal-tunnel-inducing clicks is like driving 3 miles out of your way to save $.02/gal on gas.

If all you want to do is get to 50, youre dumb as a bag of hammers (in game, not IRL) and have abolutely no money and no inking of how to make money in the game, or your doing tailoring then yeah, the freebies are a good idea.

Some of the quest-only combines are pure worthless (can you say Taleosian wheat?)
How many of the other items will you have to 'refine' on your own before you get enough '3' returns to make up for the '1' returns to equal thet ALWAYS '2' back from turnins if you didnt do the freebie quest?

(Ugh, theres got to be a better way to put that)

1. Make it easier for newbies to get to abysmal sea
2. FIX THE STUPID TURN-IN BUG so you can turn in stacks of stuff. If you can buy and sell stacks of things, why cant you turn in stacks for quests? You fixed MQing, fix this too. :boggle:
3. Make it so they are *really* free (you still have to buy a mixing bowl or JC bag etc.. for some of the freebie quests)
4. Lower the number of turnins. Even at 80 wis, the stuff i combined trived out WAY WAY before I turned in the needed number of items.
5. Dont release un-finished content where things like Taelosean wheat, dark matter, blah blah etc.. is worthless useless junk.

THEN, the freebie quests would be an interesting, useful, worthwhile way of skilling up thru those low levels.

**Xanafeldier** · 12-13-2004, 09:34 AM

You forget, by doing these tasks you get the right to refine your own product and eventually get better than 2 per refine back. THAT is the point of them, not the skillup path for newbies. Granted most of the recipes and results aren't terrific but they do offer alternatives and some variety.
I routinely get 50 refined items from a stack of raw. Dark matter, nihilite, aligned ore, etc and both varieties of each. Persistence does pay off.

Work with the lower level refine and turnin the higher levels if you need to. The system does work.

Although I suppose they could just make those quest recipes all trivial at 20. That would eliminate the problem too.

**Itek** · 12-13-2004, 10:53 AM

Baking is really cheap to 135. And not hugely expensive till over 190.

Brewing is really cheap all the way to 248.

Pottery is decently cheap to the mid 160's.

Fletching is dirt cheap to 170 or so.

Jewelcraft is dirt cheap to 180. (TheWife JUST the other day spent a few hours and less than 3000 plat going from 21 to 180, the hold up was having me enchant the gold bars when she moved on from electrum. I could enchant faster than she could combine electrum with C5. On gold she frequently had to wait for me to med up.)

Smithing is moderately priced thru 170'ish.

Tailoring .... bites holes in wallets. Noticeably I keep my wallet in my back pocket so it feels like the pain is....

Wait... Did I just say there's ONE tradeskill that has a sucky skill-up path compared to all (non-specific race/class) tradeskills?

I'm gonna agree with spluge and Xana both.

a) Any toon with any BUSINESS doing tradeskill work, let alone multi-tradeskills, will find it cheap easy and fast to get to what I call "Coldain Shawl" levels of skill for practically no effort, given the new interface.

b) Seems like these quests -are- more for improving refines than for "cheap skill up paths"

**Kaaba** · 12-13-2004, 12:44 PM

I was working on tinkering with my gnome SK and I figured I'd do the freebie ones to get the skill up, but in the time I spent turning in the stupid things I got impatient. Plus skill ups were slow. So I grabbed a couple k plat and started doing stalking probes. Skill ups went up a lot faster and now I have a ton of toys to play with.

**Silound** · 12-13-2004, 01:25 PM

I found smithing to be a good quest to do. The issue here isn't speed. It's how cheap are you?

Baking is an easy skill because for under 25p you can get well over 100 skill using one combine. Brewing is the same way, but for less than 5 p. Fletching will hardly cost you 100p to get over 100 in a series of 3 or so different combines. Smithing is one where it's nasty. Do you want to blow over 1k getting your skill to 115? It would cost about that much if you bought metal sheets and proceeded to make banded tunics from start (0 skill).

Most smiths use several smaller trivials to jump to banded level, then make a variety of banded things to 115. I know when I did smithing, it cost me about 300p to trivial banded with 255 str by first doing sheets, then something else, then lower banded stuff working my way up to 115. I may not have taken the cheapest route, but with the lowest banded trivial at about 85 or so, having 50 skill without having to work it up on your own or pay for it will drastically reduce costs (by as much as 35% is my guess) if you go from start making banded tunic/whatever.

Then, you also have to think of people who will simply drop 21 practice points into the skill. That's a boost as well.

**Ozmandias** · 12-13-2004, 04:55 PM

Originally posted by Silound

I found smithing to be a good quest to do. The issue here isn't speed. It's how cheap are you?

I am always broke, thus except when I was running on the 220+ part of my tradeskills, I tried to be as cheap as possible. Smithing I found laughably cheap. Of course, I am playing a necro, which makes this marginally easier, but anyone could do it. As a side benefit you can also get almost 100 skill in tailoring and 187 or so in brewing at the same time, also for (basically) free.

Skilling on - Condensed Shadow Arrowheads

1. Go to Shadeweavers.
2. Wait until 4pm or so game time, but no earlier than 2pm or you'll only be slowing yourself down (while you're waiting, you can be outside picking the berries off the ground for the mid-100 triv Shar Vahl essense combine)
3. Enter the alien tunnels near town and kill everything that moves. I mean everything. There are a few minor named, etc, kill em all. You can even kill the few that are above ground on the way in, but I wouldn't bother - you wont have time to come all the way back for a few pieces. AE them, put "/pet attack a" on a hotkey, whatever. You'll never keep up, but try. These guys drop some minor loot that I'd usually take the stackable stuff so that I actually make a profit on skilling.
4. Stuff will begin to repop. If you did it right, it'll be after 5pm game time when they repop (about 6 min). They will repop as the dark skinned aliens.
5. Kill these, again, as fast as you can. Loot their mutilated bodies. You will get tons of condensed shadow and shade silk (sometimes shadeling too, rarely). Tons. In just under 2 hours of farming I had 4 bags of shadow and 3 bags of silk.
6. Return to Shar Vahl (assuming you have good faction here, which almost every one does except the Nighty looters

).
7. Go to smith, sell your junk loot you picked up. Buy as much water (1sp)as you can carry, a stack of pieces of ore (1gp), and a file mold (1gp).
8. Make metal bits for a minute or two. You need to make a file - metal bits, water, file mold - so might as well skill up a bit for giggles.
9. Make the file, triv 21, can easily be made even at 10 skill.
10. File + 1 piece of condensed shadow + water = 2 condensed arrowheads. Eventually. You'll fail a lot, but the skill will fly up. Save the arrowheads for fletching later, give em away to ranger friends, or sell them.

Easy peasy. After that if you're bored, wander to the nearby tailor and weave the silk into swatches (no fail, 21 skill), then make random silk pieces (patterns = 1sp each) for a while. If you like, pause for a bit and work up your brewing with those shar vahl essences (berries + water = essence) to get up your brewing and then make some Heady Kiola and make Luclin's version of mini-Wu's. At this point you'll actually have to dip into your bank and spend 20-50pp total though, so you're off free. But before that you can easily self-finance from just seling what you make from the smithing and original clearing.

Cheap and fairly time-economical. I prefer to multi-task even in game =)

**Nolrog** · 12-14-2004, 08:05 AM

Originally posted by Silound

I found smithing to be a good quest to do. The issue here isn't speed. It's how cheap are you?

Very. LOL.

But not only that, you need to do these quests so you can refine the GOD drops yourself. I've done some of them. Not all, maybe half. I found a quicker way to do them, for the ones you don't have to run to a different device to combine to (like baking or fletching or tailoring.)

Stand at the questgiver. Get the quest. Combine the first one via experiment. Then you learn the recipe. Next, close the container, and open up the new UI. Now, search for the recipe and use it. Click combine. Don't autoinvientory it. Put it on the questgiver instead. Repeat until you have all 4 on the questgiver, then click give. You have to wait a second or two for the combine button to refresh anyway. In that time, you will have been able to give the questgiver the item, and gotten back for the next combine. Keep going until you gave them all your successes. Then it's SHIFT+UP to repeat the last phrase, get the next batch of 20, and repeat. This works so much quicker than having to pick them up one at a time after doing all 20 attempts.

**Baltazor Goldsinger** · 12-14-2004, 10:30 AM

This is a really good thread Splunge and something that needed to be done! I did all the tradeskill newbie quests in Abysmal Sea because I just wanted to be complete as a Tradeskiller and able to do all the conversions myself. At the time I did them I was hoping that I would be able to get 3s of the shimmering nihlite and ore after doing the quests + the 100+ other normal conversions you need to do ~ but lol... out of the 10s of subsequent combines I have YET to get even ONE 3, then the market went bust and I have 2 stacks of each in the bank sitting gathering dust!

I hate to say it, but imo, GoD tradeskills were a bust, EXCEPT for the new TS UI... that was a god send! The actual items are to rare to actually skill up on or don't "fit" into any particular skill up "path", and as far as any actual utility, aside from tea and the smithing combines (some of them at least) what is there really?

The newbie tradeskill quests were a good idea, but they need to be tuned as Splunge so rightly says above. It shouldnt take any longer, on average, to raise skill as normal items would for example. My biggest disappointment with GoD was all the crap drops that they never found any use for, can you say Taelosian Wheat?

**Nolrog** · 12-14-2004, 11:01 AM

Originally posted by Baltazor Goldsinger

I hate to say it, but imo, GoD tradeskills were a bust, EXCEPT for the new TS UI... that was a god send!

You know the new UI wasn't part of GOD right? It was made available to everyone (but around the same time if memory serves.)

**Melinia** · 12-14-2004, 12:23 PM

The new UI was included in the update for the release of GoD available to all. Gates of Discord added lots of possible recipes for baking with out to much effert needed for most ingredients. veggies stock went way up though.
all other recipes I didnt see any new recipes to really help the skills ups. most ingredients were higher level kills.

**Aeght** · 12-14-2004, 12:51 PM

Originally posted by Ozmandias

Skilling on - Condensed Shadow Arrowheads

Easy peasy.

Except during all that collection time you could have skilled up to 54 in smithing and tailoring in abysmal, and then would have fewer failures when you actually start in on condensed shadow arrowheads (trivial 116).

As for multitasking, while you are on the Queen of Thorns, you can also do the tailoring quest to get you up to 54 in tailoring, and any others of the quests that suit your fancy. When you are done, pretty much all store bought tradeskill components are right there handy should you wish to continue beyond 54.

Aeght

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