Sunshard - blessing or curse?

[Tassrin]

Apart from the fact that mobs do not have levels over their names, and most mobs spawn with a range of levels, you cannot be entirely certain you are killing a specific mob of a specific level consistently in order to gauge whether it is a worthy mob to kill repeatedly for a drop.

As I mentioned originally, killing 50 or so mobs in Tier 2 POH which do have mobs that apparently fall within the required level range, I get on average 2 bricks of Sunshard Ore. At that rate, Sunshard Ore is not a viable camp when compared to other choices for a skill up path.

I am not denying Sunshard Ore is a great item for skilling up or that I can find it on mobs of the required level or that I can mortgage my house to buy some or that I can find some cheap on vendors. The whole point is about the viability of global drop tables for Tradeskillers finding materials to perform skill up runs.

Granted there's no level over their head but you do have other resources then just in game at your disposal. There are also plenty of mobs that have static levels when spawned. Sebillite Juggernauts I think are an example of a static level mob in the 55+ range.

Dragon Necropolis would probably be a good place for them as if I recall most mobs are right around 60 there. The Umbral plains barely slips below 55 for most of the mob spawns.

There are plenty of locations where the mobs stay right in the level range you need. Some are decent money camps too.

[Liwsa]

Wasn't part of the point in making "global" loot tables was that items would be looted as part of your "regular" exp'ing instead of "farming greenies"? A level 75 char having to bottom feed(kill 55-65's), doesn't that defeat the purpose?

Why were spider silks added to so many exp mobs? Because we asked for them to be on exp mobs instead of making us go "farm" silks from Upper Guk and East Karana.

The idea I believe was to get components for things as we leveled and fought regular exp giving mobs. Exp off level 55-65 mobs at level 75 pretty much stinks. Most people exp in zones where mobs are 70+.


An idea would be any mob over X level(minium level for the type of item like 45 for pebble?, 55 for Ore?) can drop any sunshard item.
Examples:
A level 50 mob could drop a dust or a pebble.
A level 73 mob could drop any of the three(dust, pebble or ore).

This would allow all 55+ level mobs to drop any of the sunshard stuff. Getting a dust off a level 76 mob would stink but at least it gives you a chance to get the Sunshard components off mobs you are currently fighting. This time was a dust next time might be an ore. Getting something is better then getting nothing.

[Dalmoth]

I've seen sunshard ore drop of mobs ranging from Dark Blue to 55 to Lt Blue to 75. I can't say that I've seen any drop off Dark Blue to 75 or not, I rarely solo in those areas and I never loot when I'm grouped.

[Fudapuda]

I always find it difficult to have any sympathy for anyone complaining about having MORE options for skilling up than previous "generations" did. Is the drop rate slow? Sure. Does SOE WANT you to PL/farm your way to 300? Hell no. This new "global" drop idea is pretty obviously designed to try to prevent just that....now, to skill up, you have to also exp. Yes, they are low level mobs to the 75s of the world, but it seems to me that the sunshard XXX model is that the tradeskiller develop their skills over time AT THE SAME TIME that they are leveling up. Get the dust at appropriate level, and use it to skill up as far as it will take you. Meanwhile, you've exped up to where you can kill pebble mobs, and you skill up some more. By the time you cap out, you've probably gotten to the Ore stage, and your exp is still climbing at the same time your skill is.

The problem as I see it is that you are looking at this as a powergamer, rather than as a character. My personal suspicion is that SOE is trying to discourage that.

Fudapuda
Bertox

[Catweazel]

In case there was any doubt, I am not looking for sympathy, I am not complaining about skilling up. I was simply asking whether global drop tables met the advertised claims (or my opinion of what those claims were) and what people's viewpoints were.

There are many ways to play the game -- each to his / her own. This is not about the good old days or the bad old days. Global drops are apparently the wave of the future. Is that good or bad?

[Liwsa]

Fudapuda writes:

Get the dust at appropriate level, and use it to skill up as far as it will take you. Meanwhile, you've exped up to where you can kill pebble mobs, and you skill up some more. By the time you cap out, you've probably gotten to the Ore stage, and your exp is still climbing at the same time your skill is.

Great sediment BUT the game is 9 yes 9 years old. To expect folks to skill up as they level is totally unreasonable because I can way out level a non-twinked newbie much faster then I can tradeskill them up using drops they get. Folks now-a-days level much faster, yes even non-twinked characters,so to expect them to be fighting dust dropping mobs long enough to skill up on those is a little bit unrealistic.

I think folks are missing the complaint. The drop rate is NOT what folks are complaining about it is the fact that once you get to a certain level and fight exp giving mobs for your level the drops STOP. There are a lot of level 75 folks still working tradeskills. They might not have started them when they were level 1 and worked them as the leveled BUT they want to work them now. All folks are asking for is to have the components drop off higher level mobs also. This was done for spider silks so why not for sunshard items. At least with the case of spider silks you could go "farm" the heck out of East Karana and get 100-200 silks a hour if you so chose. The sunshard items being a global drop are not realisticly farmable(1-2 drops a hour off ANY mob of a certain level is not what I call REALASTICLY farmable).

The idea of the global drops was to get them in your normal everyday exp/solo/duo however you exp, groups. At least that was my understanding of why they were done that way. This way there is no bottle neck of XXX-high level farmer is stealing newbie mobs from folks that are of level trying to exp at the same spot due to tradeskill drops. There was more then one time BACKKKKKKKKKKK in the day trying to exp yes exp in E. Karana where some high level was slaughtering the whole zone for tradeskill drops leaving no mobs you us young'em to kill. When I needed silks when I got to be that high level char I tried to make sure there was no young'em in the zone trying to get exp as to NOT take their mobs away. I hated that when I was there so I didn't want to do it to others.

[Gorse]

Fudapuda writes:


Great sentiment BUT the game is 9 yes 9 years old.

1999 to 2007 is only 8 years, just to clarify. The rest is subject to debate (which is obviously what this thread is about).

I think the real problem is limiting the amount coming into the game. If they dropped at 5% for all 75 EXP areas, then the game would be flooded with parts. Put, to put the drops on no EXP mobs also was a problem/complaint. So there needs to be a happy medium, which is what the current set up is designed to do.

However, before the new system is even fully implemented (thus without the ability to evaluate all the changes) we have people already pointing their percieved shortfalls with the system and attacking it. Once everything is in place is the time to figure out if the system is working or not, and then identify the problem and recommend changes. For now, I think we should wait the changes to happen and be pleased that the previous discrepancies are being addressed.



Gorse

[Gaell Stormracer]

I beg to differ -- the Sunshard drop system is a direct precursor. In fact, I dare say that I can even predict the mob level ranges for the lower tier armours -- being 55-65 for the "master" armour, 35-45 for the "expert", and 15-25 for the "journeyman" -- based on the recommended level +/-5 levels that seems to be the case for Sunshard.

The one glimmer of hope for me in this is that Ngreth said that specific types of drops come from particular creatures of the appropriate levels (eg silks from spiders, skins from wolves (and other animals?) -- and perhapse ore from tribal humanoids such as orcs, goblins and kobolds). Given that it isn't truly "global", to be spread thinly and evenly, a better drop rate for such items would seem to be fairer -- eg a 10-20% drop rate for silks from appropriate-level spiders -- with a smaller (1-2%) chance of a drop from "intelligent" humanoids that might collect such items for trade. (I refer here to the rec 60 armour components - I appreciate that the rec 69 components will "have" to be more rare).

[Gaell Stormracer]

The problem as I see it is that you are looking at this as a powergamer, rather than as a character. My personal suspicion is that SOE is trying to discourage that.

If someone wishes to be the best Smith or Tailor they can be, would they (a) Go off and do some job that pays well but has nothing to do with their passion, then use the funding to gather the materials for their craft, or (b) work hard at improving their craft, by directly gathering the materials to improve their abilities?

Option (a) might be the smarter one, but option (b) is the Roleplayer's route.

[Wymp]

Gaell's right, really. For the people who are intent on training up their skills, they will find the time to go where they need to in order to get what they need or will make the plat elsewhere to buy it from merchants or traders.

That's how it should work. It should be challenging, but not necessarily insanely difficult.

Global availability widens your options and alleviates camp-blocks and limited-spawns, so it's a good thing, imo.

While it may be "inconvenient" for some who want everything to drop off one mob so they don't have to go look for it, that's an unrealistic expectation to say the least, heh.

[utania]

So my perspective is as a level 75, going back and doing tradeskills.

I've used sunshard dust and pebbles to skill up jewelery craft, smithing and tailoring and have got on ok.

I set up a buyer and was trawling the bazaar on a regular basis since tbs came out.

I've been buying:
Dusts 1-2pp
Pebbles 20-30pp
Ores 500-800pp

In terms of time, its been very efficient, I spent entire nights attempting combines, rather than farming.

Dust was an easy and cheap way to skill up, however pebbles get more expensive

I spent 60K+ on pure copper, over the last couple of nights getting from 222 - 255 tailoring with sunshard pebbles.

If you have the money then this is probably a great way to skill up, if you need to spend the time farming sunshard, then you are probably better off farming the traditional components instead.

I also plan on trying out the sunshard ore combines to see how good they are for skill ups. Since I am still new to tradeskilling I am not sure if 1k per attempt is actually good or bad. Though 4 othmir furs would cost me 1.2k in the bazaar, so maybe it aint that bad.

Now, if I put my self in the shoes of somebody getting components as they go up levels, then I don't believe they will have the number of items or cash needed to make conduits to make it a viable path.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Global drops were meant as a way to easily spread drops onto APROPRIATE NPCs without affecting what they currently drop.

I may not have made the appropriate part clear before, but it was always there. (actually I do not remember making a very detailed statement about it.)

Global loots are a bit more of a "splatter" effect, I have a bit less control that I do with the NPC based drops, but there is still a definite level of control.

It is also a MAJOR time saver for me, giving me much more time to do other things. Without it, sunshard would have dropped in MANY less zones, and on less NPC's withing the zones.

Before I would have had to go to each NPC individually, and add a table. And unfortunately much of it is manual. If the NPC happened to have 8 tables already, I would not have been able to add anything to that NPC.

With this, I was able to make 12 database entries, and export every zone in the game (something that takes me 1 minute to set up and let it run unattended for about 5 hours... where I can go about my work while it is going... and we tend to do that at night anyway) and when we patched... viola, dropped. Took me all of an hour (most of that time planning, not implementing) while if I had to add it individually it would have probably taken me days, and would not be nearly as available.

The side effect, I can only restrict by race, level, texture, class, and zone that an NPC is in at this time. So if I choose to do level 5-10, yellow spiders in the burnt woods zone, I cannot exclude the one that is also a talking NPC that tells you what zone you will be entering when you leave the burnt woods. We are looking at a change that would allow specific NPC's to be excluded, but at this time we do not feel it is a high priority.

It was not appropriate to put the sunshard stuff on higher level NPC's, so I restricted it by level range. This was not to "punish" level 75's put put the drops where they are appropriate.,.. the drops are for level 60 (and lower) armor, so it was appropriate that it drop from NPC's around level 60.

This same model will be used in general for the cultural drops upcoming, with a bit of a difference. I want to keep the difference a surprise for now.

[Aetemius]

I was a little slow getting into the Sunshard tskilling path until last weekend. A JCer in the guild had skilled up creating silver conduit caps. He then gave me ~400 of them when he hit 300. In just over 1 hour I went from 275 to 289 using these caps. I sold the finished product to a vendor and then gave my friend the resulting PP. Now I'm buying up all the ore I can find so he can get his trophy to 15% and I can finish up smithing!

[Danedori]

It's true that sunshard ore probably isn't the most efficient way to mass farm for tradeskill materials. What I like about it though, is that I get a constant trickle of them. It's not anything that will get me to 300 JC, smithing and tailoring by the end of the week, but it will slowly allow me to build my skill with very little farming. I find a few every once in a while on vendors and I have guildmates holding onto them for me. In a couple months, I have about 40 of them. Since I didn't sit for hours and camp those, I consider them bonus combines. That's 120 combines that I wouldn't have had otherwise, and I didn't have to camp. I definitely consider them a positive.

Danedori

[maybeso1]

There is no one true way. That has been a truth in so many things.

Personally, yeah, using sunshard drops to skill up is a way to go.

To exclusively use a particular path, is going to require as much, or more effort than to use a scatter shot approach. The major difference is in the # of container spaces taken up by the bits n pieces.

Container space can be a major deciding factor.

The one thing that I like about sunshard combines is that one path yields multiple layers of potential skill up combines. Granted, I'm not JUST working on tailoring, JC, or smithing. As far as the expense of the iron, copper, or silver bars, spread out over 3 layers of combines, its actually quite small. Alas, unless merchant greed towards the end results is fairly high, you're not going to even come close to your investment.

With dozens or hundreds of people per server doing the combines, you're looking at a pretty depressed player market. Witness the Solstice Robes. Witness the studded acrylia masks. Heck, when those were NEW, they were a really nice wis caster face item. That you could frequently find on merchants for a pittance.

Maybe I'm saying it poorly, but......

A single facet does not make a jem something wonderous to behold.

It is a path that did not previously exist. It is a path that will undoubtedly provide in-expensive gear for lower level toons. /shrug It will provide said lower level range toons w/ the option of either storing the items, or selling them to gain pp w/ which to buy better gear. huh. A potentially workable enconomy model.

HOLD IT!

Someone's been thinking HERE!

Are SOE employees allowed to think?

Better be careful there Ngreth!

:P

TTFN,

Ramblin Thots R Us