Update Time Again (September)

[Nolrog]

Well, it's time to update the top 10 list again. Do we want to make changes? Add anything to existing topics, or remove anything?

You can find the current list here (as always, be sure to scroll down to the last posts to get the most current list.)

Here's the summary:

Tradeskill Top 10 Issues
1) Rotating stock on vendors
2) Nitram Anizok's plight
3) New Bag Designs NEW item added with the 2/4/05 update
4) Mass Combines With One Click - NEW item added with the 6/3/05 update
5) Tradeskill components are unreasonably rare - Item modifed with the 8/5/05 update
6) Balancing the Grand Robe / Grand Tunic / Phylactery quest for melees
7) Reduce the amount of storage necessary - Partially Implemented with the 6/29/05 Patch - New Information with 7/3/05
8) Difficulty in skill up paths to 300 NEW item added with the 3/4/05 update
9) Tradeskill Super-trophy - New item (sort of) with the 8/4/2005 Update
10) Stackability of various tradeskill components - New item with the 8/5/2005 Update

[Aleksandros]

How about rarity of drops/disparity in location of drops for Master level DoN tradeskilled armors? Beg pardon if this is included in one of the above, but it does seem to be a serious sticking point for many of us who are still working our way up the ranks.

[Sylphan]

Number 5 is about rare items. Perhaps you could also add a bit about nonexistent items. Toharon's page 22 and Words of Virtue may be rare, but Centaur Meat, Toharon's 18 left, Toharon's 19, and Small Bottle of Soy Sauce are actually nonexistent. They've never ever dropped even once on any server, but there are recipes that require them.

If I were to add number 11 it would be to improve the buyer interface. Have a way to automatically search for buyers for all the items in your inventory, and let buyer mode work at the same time as seller mode.

Number 12 would be lists for buyer/seller/merchant. A personal list of items you want to find buyers for, a personal list of item you want to find sellers of, and a personal list of items you want highlighted on merchants. It would make buying/selling faster.

Number 13 would be fixes to the bazaar zone. The teleporters-out should plop you in the central hub, not behind the teleporters-in. The default map should be fixed, it's still full of errors. A dev once said the bazaar would be revamped to be simpler and have fewer hallways... well it never happened. And finally, the round rooms are way too detailed, there's way too much lag in the trader-stalls areas. Please make a plain-flat-featureless version of the zone... or an option in the options window to turn off all the extra useless particles and textures and ceilings and wall fixtures and stuff.

[Nolrog]

We're limited to 10. In addition, those are not really tradeskill related, but rather game functionality related, and don't belong on the list. Perhaps you should start a thread on the EQLive boards (Veteran's Forum is the best place) with these suggstions.

With regards to the Soy Sauce, Maddoc (or was it Absor? I always get them mixed up) said that he will look into it after DoD launches and fix the problem. I'll add the others to the list

How about rarity of drops/disparity in location of drops for Master level DoN tradeskilled armors?

Check out 5c and see if that coveres everything. If not, tell me what to add:

5c. DoN drops - Another item might be the balance and availability of Master's level DoN drops. I know it has been brought-up before, but they are not equal. Take smithing for example. It would be nice if all drops had at least 2 zones from which they can drop, which are non-keyed/flagged. Any keyed/flagged zones should be only a 3rd option.

I used non-keyed to also mean non-flagged.

yttrium ore: Drop in multiple zones from multiple mobs. Seems to be sufficienly abundent.

pile of gravel: drops in 2 non-keyed zones of which I am aware: the hole & PoN. I usually get 0 to 2 in 30 minutes of killing gargs in either zone.

midnight stones: drop in 1 non-keyed zone, from multiple mobs. Usually end up with 0 to 1 in 30 minutes of killing in the garg area (nightstalker drop rate has been painfully bad for me). I think I've gotten one from hobgoblins but I can't remember (only done them once for my xp buff)

great reptile tooth: supposedly drop in 1 non-keyed zone and 1 keyed zone: PoN & PoEarth. (never even seen one drop but I'm going off of posts). Someone who has more knowledge of this drop please post.

Other rare DoN Cultural components: Storm Volaas Hair, used in High Elven Master Tailoring. Drops off two MoB types in one Zone. Great Reptile Hides

[Xulan]

I forgot that piles of gravel drop in rcod as well, so technically that meets the requirements of 3 zones. I know it can still be a frustrating drop, however, and it and the other drops are still not balanced with yttrium ore.

EDIT:

So:

pile of gravel: drops in 3 non-keyed zones of which I am aware: the hole, PoN & RCoD. I usually get 0 to 2 in 30 minutes of killing gargs in either zone.

[Aleksandros]

5c does cover it quite thoroughly, Nolrog, thanks.

[Tanliel]

great reptile tooth: supposedly drop in 1 non-keyed zone and 1 keyed zone: PoN & PoEarth. (never even seen one drop but I'm going off of posts). Someone who has more knowledge of this drop please post.

It's been a bit since we've tried to farm them in PoNightmare. We did successfully have some drops a couple months ago ... and it was perhaps 1 in 15 to 20 crocs. And with only 5 in the zone, it takes a while. Not plentiful in the least and I've NEVER seen any for sale. I'm guessing that I'm the only one who has made Master Half Elf Plate on Luclin(Veeshan) at this point, as no other pieces that I didn't create have shown up since.

[Nolrog]

There didn't seem to be a great deal of interest in changing things right now, so the list will stay as is for this update.

[Grants]

Only thing im really interesed in from this list is the DoN armor drops... Even them out and im a happy Half-Elf.

[Mendatenrognabs]

I very much disagree with number 2 The plight of Anizok in the list above. Anizok really does not need to be moved. Currently the difficulty of reaching him restricts the availability for using the Minimizing, Maximizing, and Necrotic Devining Devices as skillup recipes. This in turn keeps the prices for these items higher. A little risk in getting components results in a small profit. Further, having just recently gone through that trivial range in tinkering, there are plenty of other skillup paths. Perhaps making his steel casings stack is a reasonable compromise. With the new ability to control stack sizes this might be an item in which restricting stacks to say 5 or 10 is a good idea.

In my opinion a much more important problem is the use of geerloks as a skillup route. During the odd times when I am the only merchant in the bazaar selling a particular type of geerlok (extremely rare) it will easily sell for 2-4kpp. Given the essentially unlimited supply of geerloks these ussually sell for less than 100pp on many servers. I doubt the original intention when geerloks were introduced was to see them selling in the bazaar at such low prices. To correct this I would suggest, as many have suggested in the past:
1. Change the buyback price from NPC merchants to be similar to the 4 LoY geerloks. This effectively removes any geerloks sold to NPCs from the available supply (at least until player prices move above the 500ish mark on average).
2. Offer alternative skillup routes. DoN helped a bit with this. One of the problems with tinkering in general is that it has many items that, given a moderate supply, would be considered very valuable by other players. Geerloks, Clockwork armor, collapsables, etc. There are very few items that, given a moderate supply, would be considered low in value. Crab Crackers and Woks come to mind. The other sets of high value items mostly have some means of helping the price: Collapsable containers are lore, Clockwork armor is expensive to make, takes rare drop components, and has multiple sub-combines. Crab Crackers and Woks act as an alternative skillup route for the collapsables and armor. Geerloks have none of these advantages.

3. Raise the tribute value on the Geerloks.


A second problem that might be added to the list for tinkering in place of anizok is the rarity of knuckle joints and clockwork carapaces. DoN autoactuated armor made with tinkering uses 2 knuckle joints per piece. This is true for the Journeyman armor up through the Grandmaster levels. I would love to see level 20 gnomes able to farm PoI for the knuckle joints. I would suggest leaving the grandmaster autoactuated tinkering recipes as is, requiring 1 knuckle joint per piece for the master level, and changing all the DoN tinkering combines for expert and journeyman to not rquire any sort of PoInnovation drop. Knuckle Joints, Innovative Clockwork Gears, Innovative CLockwork bolts are all used in the expert and journeyman combines.

[Veremar]

Forgive my ignorance but what is the "Super trophy " "sort of"
that was mentioned ?

[Nolrog]

Forgive my ignorance but what is the "Super trophy " "sort of"
that was mentioned ?

Cut and pasted from the link above:

9) Tradeskill Super-trophy - New item (sort of) with the 8/5/2005 Update

Could we get some kind of super trophy for multi-tradeskill GM's? Here are some ideas on what could be done in this vein.

A tradeskill super-trophy is defined as a trophy you can only obtain once you have all seven tradeskill trophies (excluding alchemy, poison making, tinkering, and research), or one that requires 300 in all seven general tradeskills, or both.

One possibility is a combine that requires all seven trophies plus some other item, yielding back six normal trophies and one super-trophy with increased stats or abilities.

Another option is for a no-fail combine of all seven trophies in a quest container to yield the super-trophy.

Consensus seems to be that the super-trophy should give a skill bonus for all tradeskills. This is the preferred option. However, the developers have indicated that this may take a disproportionate amount of time to implement. An alterative would be to make the super-trophy with no tradeskill modifiers at all. A player would combine the super-trophy alone in a forge and it would return the super-trophy and a no-drop, no-rent, lore item with a bonus to smithing; it could be combined in a tailoring kit or loom to yield a tailoring-boosting item, and so on.

Another popular option is to have the super-trophy give a 10% bonus to tradeskills. A single item that has +10% to all tradeskills would be superb; alternately, each of the no-drop, no-rent, lore items discussed above could have the 10% mod.

Could the existing tradeskill trophies be adjusted so that each yields a unique 100% WR bag? Thus, a person with three trophys could get three different 100% WR bags that don't poof on logging. This was mentioned as being possible in the past.

Other than that, a Gnomish Army Knife was suggested in another thread. The only differences are:

1. A super-trophy is made from trophies in a no fail combine. A GAK is made from Geerloks in a high-trivial combine.

2. A GAK would be rare like a super-trophy, but tradable, at a high price.

3. A super-trophy would have STATS like the existing trophies. A GAK would be a pure skill mod, like existing Geerloks.

The purpose here is conserving bankspace by reducing the number of geerloks you need to keep on hand.

[Rawckett]

I very much disagree with number 2 The plight of Anizok in the list above. Anizok really does not need to be moved. Currently the difficulty of reaching him restricts the availability for using the Minimizing, Maximizing, and Necrotic Devining Devices as skillup recipes. This in turn keeps the prices for these items higher. A little risk in getting components results in a small profit. Further, having just recently gone through that trivial range in tinkering, there are plenty of other skillup paths. Perhaps making his steel casings stack is a reasonable compromise. With the new ability to control stack sizes this might be an item in which restricting stacks to say 5 or 10 is a good idea.

I agree with all points here. Live Anizok where he is, he told me he likes it there, surround by all of his creations! I know when I was using Base Prototypes and other such things to skill up, I used by then lvl 50 something bard to make the run to Anizok to buy the necessary items. I bought as many as I could before the robots caught up to me and then booked it on out of there, or died. Haha. I was actually able to resale a lot of the base prototypes in the bazaar for profit while doing this which enabled me to buy more tinkering parts to fuel the habit. Leaving Anizok where he is enables some classes to make some plat who normally wouldn't be able to, but taking the risk to get the parts. Making them stackable would be nice too, but not a big deal if they don't.

In my opinion a much more important problem is the use of geerloks as a skillup route. During the odd times when I am the only merchant in the bazaar selling a particular type of geerlok (extremely rare) it will easily sell for 2-4kpp. Given the essentially unlimited supply of geerloks these ussually sell for less than 100pp on many servers. I doubt the original intention when geerloks were introduced was to see them selling in the bazaar at such low prices.

Jeez, I could barely get rid of any geerloks for less than 10pp on my server. There are always a good amount for sale, but I stopped using these as a skillup route now.

[gotik]

#1 on my list

I am member of a leading guild on Zek, doing tradeskills for 5 1/2 years.

My #1 on the list of most wanted changes is that i am able to craft some stuff for my own high level toon. Its stupid to limit tradeskills to just produce pp and nothing else. This almost forces people to sell plat for real life cash.

I want to craft some NODROP armor or augments which are good enough for my COA equiped toon. Hell it cant be that difficult to add recipes which require very high level skill(maybe multiple high level skills) and use very expensive items to produce nodrop items for the smith, tailor, potter..... This items could be limited and balanced by level requirements and grow stronger when you get flags and keys for higher level zones.

Atm tradeskills are useless for higher level players, it produces twink stuff(well since DON it doesnt even compete with trash atuneable loot) and pp, every hour you waste for tradeskills is lost time.

I want nodrop stuff for my high level toon to make it worth continuing with tradeskills.

Gotik
(70 DE wiz)

300 baking, brewing, smithing, pottery, jc
282 fletching
272 tailoring

[Bumkus]

absolutely 100% agree with Gotik. Even if I would be not high enough to craft items very good items yet, I would agree with this. This would be a powerful reward (and motivator) to get more people involved with tradeskills (which are an important part of the EQ economy, by the way). Not all of us treat tradeskills as a moneymaker, and those that do have DoN augs and armor to work with.