Trivial Changes (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)

[Taadieri]

In the first place, that was a single comment, made almost in passing, in an unrelated thread.

Second, if there was any tradeskill which I would have expected to need changes because it was too easy to skill up, tailoring would have been at or near the bottom of the list.

Finally, the previous smithing trivial changes were not officially announced ahead of time, but they were put on the Test server almost a month ahead of time. The result was a mad orgy of skilling up and some occasionally unpleasant behavior with people camping the HQ ore vendors, but a lot less disruption and anger overall than these changes are causing so far.

[Sophie]

My feedback is this.

Bad:

They didn't tell anyone about the changes.
Those who spent tons of plat or tons and tons of time farming are really at a frustrating loss here. Some kind of indication of a major change like this should have been communicated. I personally was not affected by this, but would love to see some kind of compensation for this to those who were affected. I'd love to see them flat out trade bulk components for raw skill up, but that would probably be too tedious and difficult to do.

Good:

I think some are missing the forest for the trees, here.
I, personally, would rather farm shissar scales and yttrium ore as the 2 sole components to farm than spend tons plat (which was hard-earned from doing tradeskills in the first place) doing Mistletoe Cutting Sickles and Ceremonial Solstice Robes. Not to mention the mind-numbing, endless imbuing and subcombines for robes and sickles or tedious farming velium, fishing cod, and farming crazy rare hides (in contrast to what you need to skill up). In my personal opinion, the skill up path for making Master's armors is much easier for my playtime. Now, I can actually get exp, raid, AND do tradeskills. I have had much more luck getting Metallic Drake Scales and Glossy Drake Hides to drop because I am out exp'ing with my guildies rather than farming endless green mobs or waiting for my mana bar to fill up so I can imbue more Emeralds and do numberous transfers to my mules just to save up for a maddening skill up session. The point here is that you can skill up progressively AND make an item that may actuallly even sell in the bazaar instead of selling it for next-to-nothing or tributing it and losing hundreds of thousands of plat in the process. Will you be 300 overnight this way? NO, but in the end, you're only competing with yourself. I have had some good success rates on the GM armor and symbols already with a 250 tailoring/smithing skill with trophies, WITHOUT the mastery aa's or the salvage aa.

I really like these changes, but for those who had stocked up on components, it's a very hard lump to swallow.

[Ziela]

I would like to farm shissar scales and yttrium ore too. However, the powers that be have decided that I may only use racnar hides and basilisk teeth, which to my knowledge drop in HoT and Veeshan's Peak, respectively. Unfortunately I never got around to getting my VP key and I don't see people flocking to a zone at the end of the world to kill dragons just to support my tailoring. But I suppose the incredibly unbalanced implementation of cultural components is more of a tangent to the topic at hand so...back to ranting about the trivial changes now

[Sharrien]

I agree with one of the earlier posters who mentioned that the value of the trophies went down considerably when the tinkered geerloks were introduced. I suggest that new augs with a 10% skill mod be avilable in the DoN camp. These augs should be restricted to fit only in the GM trophy for that skill.

Makes the trophies worthwhile to get and gives GM tradeskillers access to 15% mod items since they could purchase crystals instead of having to camp pain-in-the-butt raid mobs.

[Celestya]

I agree with one of the earlier posters who mentioned that the value of the trophies went down considerably when the tinkered geerloks were introduced. I suggest that new augs with a 10% skill mod be avilable in the DoN camp. These augs should be restricted to fit only in the GM trophy for that skill.

Makes the trophies worthwhile to get and gives GM tradeskillers access to 15% mod items since they could purchase crystals instead of having to camp pain-in-the-butt raid mobs.

What a wonderful idea! I'll be sure to /feedback that in game.

[Kahmon]

Weren't geerloks introduced before the trophies?

[Sharrien]

I forget. Either way, I think it would be a good thing for the trophies to have the potential of having a higher bonus than something that costs 100pp in the bazaar.

[CaiserSoze]

Trophies, Geerloks, Tinkering Robe, Creator Hammer, Massive Girdle of the Forge, and several other tradeskillmod items were all introduced in Luclin expansion, if I remember correctly, the trophies were added in *after* expansion release though... also, the original trophies had no skillmod, that was added after folks saw the mods on other items and complained (was a very legitimate complaint). Perhaps now would be a good time to add in a master trophy, either a conglomerate of the 7 primary trophies, with a 10 or 15% skillmod to all, or singular versions with 15-20%, requiring...say... 275 skill to try, but with a trivial combine high enough (say... 400-450ish?) to make it a low success rate even upon achieving 300 skill... requiring the original trophy as a component, returning it on a failed combine... somewhat off topic I know, not trying to derail =)

[Bobaten]

Trophies were added with the cultural armor/solstice quest patch, about 6 months after luclin launched with all the other skill mod items. The reason people wanted skill mods on the trophies was so they they no longer had to carry their geerloks. At the time of course, 5% was more than enough to hit the hard cap. It was just an extra feature that didn't give you any new functionality since neary everyone who had a trophy already had a geerlok. The real purpose of a trophy (much as in real life) is just as a reference for bragging rights. This purpose has now been covered with the title system though, and people are beginning to feel the trophies are useless. The thing about the trophies is, any one with sufficient skill can just buy the parts in the bazaar (ok blue diamonds are scare atm) and make one.
To make a true trophy that reflects the work of accomplishing 300 in a tradeskill you would need a quest that requires the following:
1. Hours of farming green mobs to do low level combines over and over so you can learn the recipe (somehing like the abysmal sea refining quests, only requiring dropped items). IE combine a small piece of acrylia, a spiderling silk, a zombie skin, and this doodad I just gave you and hand the result back to me (200 times).
2. Something foraged
3. Something fished
4. Some sort of enchanted metal/imbued gem/vial of mana (or all of the above)
5. A low level subcombine that you have already done too many times to maintain sanity (metal bits, heady kiola,leather padding, etc.)
6. A fairly high trvial combine from a different tradeskill.
7. A common drop from an ucommon mob, and a rare drop from a common mob.
8. A drop from a mob that requires you to get a group of friends together to help you with.

Basically enough steps to feel like you earned a 15% TS mod.

[Appren Hightowerr]

Dont...give...them...more...ideas. They are for sure {} enough to plan something like that.

[Kytelae]

I have a lot of faith in Maddoc. He's been a good friend to tradeskillers, and I trust him.

That said, doing this without warning is just not right. You need to roll back these changes, and re-add them once you've let people use their skillup items.

[Angelsyn]

Actually, here's a neat idea along the lines of an Aug to increase the skill mod....

Make them "Ammo Slot" only Augs. Make them +5% to skill. Make sure that, if you put a +5% Smithing Aug on a GM Smith's Hammer, it becomes a total of +10% to Smithing.

Thus, if someone really wanted to (why? I don't know) they could put a +5% to Tailoring Aug in their GM Smith's Hammer. Yeah, it wouldn't be a smart idea to do that.. so what?
What it would allow would be for anyone to put the Aug in any "Ammo Slot" equip-able item. Which the Trophies are, but Geerloks are not.

[calidorn2]

ummm

If I wasn't currently 1018 I could check. Does any % mod besides fish bait work from the ammo slot ?

[Ghismonda]

If you make an aug ammo only, then add it to an item that has multiple equippable slots, the item itself them becomes ammo only. Items equipped in the ammo slot do not give you stats.

Instead, they should change the geerlok and other raid-acquired hand-held mods to primary only, and make the aug secondary/range.

[Boleslav]

My recollection is that the skill mod on trophies was specifically coded so that it would work in the ammo slot. The other stats do not show up when doing that, however.

This is probably fine for most people who are serious about tradeskills as they have a range item with good stats anyway, so putting the trophy in range is not a net loss of stats.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 67th Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny