How much did 250-300 get worse?

[Mahlig]

I recently took my rogue from 202 to 275 (Spirit of Sloth is good). While I ranted to my guild that some of my points took a lot of combines (87, 19, 12 and 76), the average was about 23 combines from 250 to 275. Sure, it took me 11k of lost revenue for those 73 points, but I did not notice an appreciable difference between 202-250 and 251-275. Granted, I did not have any skill points over 50 combines less that 250. I had 3 over 250. However, in both sets of data, I had back to back skillups on consecutive combines. Further, I had 3 skillups in 4 attempts (all successes) in the 251-275 set.

Maybe Poison Making is the only one that works? /shrug Maybe I just have not gotten to the hard combines? /shrug Maybe I am just bad at math? /shrug

Brewing (on the other hand) got me 1 skillup (250 to 251) in 100 KC attempts. I do not hold any weight to that due to LSS (limited sample size). Now that was frustrating, but after a large string of profanity-laced shouting at the RNG, I felt better.

[greebmushroome]

160 (+salvage) kaladim constitutional combines tonight. two skillups (267, 268), right at the beginning of the run (in the first 20-30 combines). i got all excited at that point, but the run was a letdown after that. i was really hoping for 270 tonight.


i just boggle at the amount of time wasted on tradeskills recently: farming vendors for diamonds and blue diamonds. sitting in kaladim picking mushrooms for hours. farming green-con otters for uncommon furs. and, in the end, coming to naught: a few, meager skill-ups and well short of good progress for my time invested, not even a sufficient digital pat-on-the-head to make me feel good about the time spent. there has to be a better way for me to pass my life's time away than to collect tradeskill ingredients for more disappointing runs of combines (yet, like those women in abusive relationships on made-for-tv movies, i keep coming right back to tradeskills). /sigh

[Tiroon]

I did picnics from 191 to 234 before the formula change. At 265 WIS I got roughly 1 skill-up per 20 to 30 combines on average.

I did not keep a log, expecting the change with the new formula to be a minor annoyance below 250. I reckoned that even if it would take 20% more combines the result would not be too far off the previously experienced rate and impossible to eyeball measure. Boy was I wrong.

I finally made it to 250 on 800 MTP combines, effectively doubling the combines needed to get a skill-up.

[Zuko Takegami]

I think more to the point of the matter is that, while doing a bad partial implementation of what Devs were revamping for tradeskills, it is getting amplified by the fact that other than increased collection of combining items and pp, there are also some badly implemented skill up routes that need to be looked at. Fletching and Tailoring being the most pronounced.

They should have just not done anything until they had the full Ts implementation package ready. It was still not real easy to get to 300 anyways.

[Undo]

on Pottery: star ruby encrusted steins (1800 combines) yielded 29 skill pts
so about every 62 combines i got a point. the worst for me was the last 600 which gave 3 pts... (

-undo <assent>

[Kemie Dreamshadow]

Part of what makes some of us so frustrated over the recent skill-up difficulties is that uncertainty as to whether or not it actually IS working as intended, when in our own case or cases it doesn't appear to come anywhere close to what has been laid out as expected.

I started raising my jewelcraft skill from 250 before the patch which changed the skill-up function. I had been averaging a point every 30 to 40 combines, but had already had 48 with no skill increase just prior to the patch. Following the patch, that number just kept going up and I did not gain a point until the 210th consecutive combine (taking me from 291 to 292 skill). Now I have done approximately 112 more combines again without a skill-up.

I know from reading these posts that others are not experiencing the same results, so I must just have really bad luck. However, I'm not the only one I know in my guild who is having the same difficulty with 200 or more combines failing to achieve anything, and others have decided to just give up.

I don't expect tradeskilling to be "easy." I did, after all, achieve Expert Artisan status before the patches changing the rules. That wasn't at all easy. What I'm going through now is unaccountably harder.

Think about it... if you play a game like this for fun, and are simply killing things for experience... if you were to kill 200 plus dark blue mobs without any experience gain at all, would you just keep banging your head against a brick wall?

Logically their code for raising tradeskills does not give anyone a guarantee of a skillup at any point. All it does for those of us who have to go 200 combines without one, to see others gain a skillup every 20 or 40 or even 60 combines is add to our frustration, and the developers at SoE should be able to see that.

You'd think they could hard-wire some limits in there somewhere, so that if anyone has done X number of combines with no point then voila, POINT... just to enable us to see there actually is an end to our suffering somewhere down the road.

Kemie

[Oona Wynterbreeze]

Following the patch, that number just kept going up and I did not gain a point until the 210th consecutive combine (taking me from 291 to 292 skill). Now I have done approximately 112 more combines again without a skill-up.

I know from reading these posts that others are not experiencing the same results, so I must just have really bad luck. However, I'm not the only one I know in my guild who is having the same difficulty with 200 or more combines failing to achieve anything, and others have decided to just give up.

I'm sure the others who read all these forums religiously are tired of reading my numbers... but I'd have to disagree about others not experiencing this on these forums. I've read many posts with people having the same problem including me. Mine is also in jewelcraft. Notable runs include 133 combines to 288, 187 combines to 291, 117 combines to 292 and I'm currently at 106 and counting trying to hit 294. I just can't believe that this many people that are showing more of a 100% to 300% increase in required combines for a skill-up when soe swears they just increased it by 20% is just a bad roll of the RNG. There are just too many people having these numbers.

[Macnair]

140 attempts on Planar Fruit Pies this morning. Most of those I had foraged myself, but about 50 of them were given to me by others, including one avid tradeskiller who gave up on tradeskilling -- and everquest -- and retired from the game.

With 390 wisdom, doing my 140 attempts I skilled up 1 point, 269 to 270.

If I had foraged all of them myself, averaging about 8 planar fruit an hour, that would have been over 17 hours with my ranger in PoI to get those 140 planar fruit.

OK, 140 attempts for 1 skillup was maybe bad luck. But everyone is reporting way more combines than usual. A rough average of people's results looks like maybe 80 combines on average to gain a skill up, post 250. Worse than that as you go from 290 to 300.

If the coding is set at 1 in 80, that is 1.25 % -- way way lower than the ~4.5 % we used to lament.

If the new max-chance-for-skillup is 1 in 80, then I can expect 10 hours of foraging per skill up point to get to 282. If I devote 10 hours a week to foraging, I'll get to 282 in another 12 weeks.

[Maevenniia]

I have a chanter alt, level 65, with JCM3, int 280, skilled up from 265 to 269, 4 skillups in 71 combines = 1 in 18.

[Clamford]

I had earlier posted that I got 13 skillups in pottery on 400 combines (up to 263 skill, using Star Ruby Encrusted Steins with 335 wis). I was happy with that rate. I had also done 200 Gem Studded Chain combines, and gotten 7 skillups (up to 297). These rates seemed reasonable. That was before the 4/19 or so patch to fix skilling up with under 150 skill.

Since that patch, I tried 200 more combines of Star Ruby Steins with 263 skill, 335 wis. Zero skillups. Then, I tried 200 combines of Gem Studded Chains. I got 1 skillup (up to 298).

So, I need to give up tradeskills because I see that either:
1) I am remarkably consistently unlucky, as well as many other posters.
2) SoE wants people to skillup following a different path they have yet to make available.
3) SoE doesn't want people to skillup much at all, and tradeskills are now remarkably more difficult permanently.

Whatever the reason is that I am not seeing any skillups, I cannot afford to spend my in-game time and resources on something that is providing absolutely no return like tradeskills are now. Should I have faith that I am just facing RNG ill-will, and that my efforts will be rewarded in the end? Maybe, but I do not. I'll let everyone else be the guinea pigs to prove/disprove that the new system is working as intended. I've got all the data I need to make my decision for now.

Good luck to the guinea pigs...

[Zolina]

Honestly, I think the skill-up fix was a huge mistake. Now it's much easier to get to 200 through the storebought combines, which wouldn't really matter (a player would maybe shell out an extra 500pp and spend an extra hour at the combine container the old way, no huge savings). But the 200-300 combines, the really hard, farm-all-day stuff, has gotten horribly worse. Posts indicate it's about 50% more combines per skill-up at the 250 level than it used to be; a stack of combines here can take hours to farm.

So the fix that went through saves us maybe an hour earlier on and costs us hundreds of hours later on, it's a huge change for the worse.

[KB1]

I agree, the difference in the actual hard parts of the skill ups is horrible. Bad change and way more than the 20% stated imo.