How much did 250-300 get worse?

[Liwsa]

The thing they seem to be missing is that going from 150-220 even with the "hell" levels is a heck lot easier and cheaper then going 250-300 if for no other reason then the components for those levels are 1) cheaper and 2) easier to farm/get/buy. Components for the 250-300 recipes are so rare and/or expensive.

[Bolas]

Am I understanding this correctly?

1. The plan is to smooth the progression difficulty, so that it will be easier to advance from 190 - 200, but harder to advance from 250 - 300. This upper level difficulty will be mitigated, however, because combines with rare ingredients will have a correspondingly higher chance to yield a skill-up.

2. The "smoother skillup path" coding has been added, so now it is easier to advance from 190 - 200, but harder to advance from 250 - 300.

3. The "rare ingredients bonus" coding has not been added.

Yes that's it exactly. I'm holding off on doing combines and hoarding rare ingredients meanwhile. Let's hope they have the brains to put in the rare ingredient bonus coding sometime soon.

I'm glad that I got to 300 in brewing, baking, pottery, and jewelcraft before they put in this "smoothing" nerf. Wish I woulda taken the time to do smithing too, but after the nerf to tailoring trivials I kinda lost heart for doing tradeskills for a while.

I'll be skilling up again soon though I think -- I just spent 18 aa's to get Blacksmithing Mastery 3 and I'm contemplating spending another 10 aa's to get Salvage 2 & 3.

-Bolas

[Verdandi]

Let's hope they have the brains to put in the rare ingredient bonus coding sometime soon.

That kind of provocative and pointless jab creates frustration and prevents communication. Let's hope they get the time and resources to make these changes that both the devs and players would like to see.

[Aavar]

smithing combines doing sickles so far have made 543 combines and have gone from 259 skill to 289 skill.

Int is 400.

[Macnair]

Very frustrating, though.

I have 6 tradeskills over 250 at this point; I have a decent collection of rare components; but what's the point in using them?

They'll just get used up, to no purpose.

SOE has a plan to make this smoother. The part designed to make my task harder gets installed right away, the part designed to help me is ... coming some day.

It would be a lot less frustrating if we could at least look at a timetable. Something that said, "You will have a 1 in 60 (1 in 80, whatever it really is) chance of a skillup on rare components for the next ... weeks; and then we will install the rare-component bonus on such-and-such a date; and your chance of a skillup after that will then be ... "

[Gayle]

Then I take it for the time being just don't try and skill up and do we know when the bug will be fixed? I am sitting at 256 I have tried tons of receipes in baking to kick this in and move forward, but nothing. Am getting really frustrated. Have the spoon can even make Misties with very few failures but no skill points.

[Maevenniia]

Then I take it for the time being just don't try and skill up and do we know when the bug will be fixed? I am sitting at 256 I have tried tons of receipes in baking to kick this in and move forward, but nothing. Am getting really frustrated. Have the spoon can even make Misties with very few failures but no skill points.

There is NO BUG affecting skilling up in the 250-300 range. There was a bug affecting ALL skillups (including swim, dodge, melee skills, etc) for under skill 150, but the patch of Apr. 20th presumably fixed it.

[tnexus]

Unfortunately I'm expecting this isn't a bug. However, I wouldn't be shocked if this was because they did not have enough data if any at all (was this on Test?) as to what they were doing. I wouldn't be shocked if in the near future they adjust it to suit the demands and expectations of tradeskillers. Have hope! In the mean time I just suggest hoarding ingrediants.

[Macnair]

There is NO BUG affecting skilling up in the 250-300 range. There was a bug affecting ALL skillups (including swim, dodge, melee skills, etc) for under skill 150, but the patch of Apr. 20th presumably fixed it.

Ummm. I think you are missing the point.

SOE said they were going to make two changes.

1. Make skillups harder from 250 to 300.

2. Give a bonus chance to skillup when using hard-to-get components.

This seems to be designed to be a balanced setup, then: it is generally harder to skill up, but if you are using rare items you get a bonus, so it balances out.

They have installed change # 1. They have not installed change # 2.

It certainly was not easy to get skillups before; but they have installed change #1, so now it's harder. And the promised way of alleviating that, change # 2, is not there.

Whether you want to call this a bug or something else, it remains very frustrating. There is basically no point in trying to skill up using rare components, until they fix this.

[Katrah]

I submitted a /bug on their latest patch. I'm a shaman and getting any post-255 alchemy components is quite a chore. So I finally stockpiled 60 draconic essences over a 2 week period. Yeah, they're THAT much of a pain to get! And that's with multiple folks foraging for me. Well, before all these TS changes, you could pretty much rely on a 1 in 20-30 skillup rate. Today I had none in 60! Now I had 425 str/dex going with a 390 wis and 385 agi or so (other stats couldn't hurt I figure). I ended up only failing 7 out of those 60 at my 267 skill on a 275 potion (Alchemy mastery 3 w/o geerlok on this run). So I ended up with an 88% success rate (not bad). I usually fail less, but I think they've tweaked the formulas some.

Anyway, since shaman (non-iksar and even they can't do it well) don't get a forage ability, this kind of skillup rate is just BS. Hell, I've only gotten 11 skillups with DoN items since the expansion was released! I know they're all about making 300 difficult but for crying out loud when will the hurting stop? SOE needs to get off their collective dev butts (yeah, I'm a sw dev by profession too) and prioritize their updates and fixes. And push on management (or we need to) to make sure the other part of their plan gets implemented in a timely manner. Otherwise more and more are gonna get frustrated with TS'ing and simply quit doing it.

But then again, maybe that's they're goal...

Katrah
Shaman of Prexus

[Akishka]

Ummm. I think you are missing the point.

.....

Whether you want to call this a bug or something else, it remains very frustrating. There is basically no point in trying to skill up using rare components, until they fix this.

Actually, the unfortunate point is that people wander in and out of here, get bits of information and sometimes wind up very very confused. Worse yet, some of them wander out and spread the 'confused' information.

There was a bug, the bug was fixed. There is this second problem, which is clearly not a bug but yes is frustrating. However, calling it a bug can lead to a lot of confusion for the more casual board readers. For instance, they could possibly erroniously assume that the first bug is still not fixed and thus stop tradeskilling from 0-150 but continue tradeskilling from 250-300.

So, best to keep the language clear and we won't be dealing with rumors of a bug for the next month

[Bupper]

Absor said they intended to increase the average number of combines needed to go from 250 to 300 by about 20%. Most of the posters to this thread have experienced a far higher increase in number of combines required.

Either...
- posters to this thread are just having bad luck, or
- Absor mispoke about the 20% increase, or
- there is a bug with skillup rates 250 - 300

I don't think this is resolved yet.

[Maevenniia]

let me quote the original post in the sticky, bolding/underlining for emphasis is mine:

...the largest of which being that it will decrease the over-all average number of combines needed to get a skill from 0 to 300 by about 15%. At the same time, however, it will increase the average number of skill-ups needed to go from 250 to 300 by about 20%.

NOTE: We use the word "average" in this discussion very frequently. There's a reason for that. We can only calculate the average rate at which a skill will increase. Any particular character will most likely experience deviation from that average.

AVERAGE, folks. This means that some people will, on average, experience only a 5 or 10% increase in the # of combines required between 250-300, some might not see any increase at all, and some may unluckily experience a 30% or even 40% increase in # of skillups. All in all, it will average out to about 20%.

Anyways, believe what you want to, my personal opinion is that there is no bug, but it's my opinion.

[Bupper]

AVERAGE, folks. This means that some people will, on average, experience only a 5 or 10% increase in the # of combines required between 250-300, some might not see any increase at all, and some may unluckily experience a 30% or even 40% increase in # of skillups. All in all, it will average out to about 20%.

My own experience has been more than a 100% increase, having achieved only 10 skillups in my last 758 combines, at 380 INT. I withhold judgment and won't categorically declare there is or is not a bug based on the limited sample here so far. However, I'm keen to see others' results.

[Boleslav]

This sort of thread tends to be self-selecting. The people who have worse than average results tend to want to discuss them, while those with better than average results aren't motivated to.

This can lead to a skewed set of data quite easily. That said, I don't quite buy the +20% line myself. My experience is worse than that, and many others are reporting more than that.

It will be nice to get more data on this so that some trends start to make themselves evident.

Boleslav Forgehammer