skill up penalty?

[Shimazuul]

Just curious if anyone knows for sure what the best "color" recipe is to do skill ups with. In other words do you get penalized for using yellow or red recipes vs blue? Or perhaps do you actually get a bonus for using the harder ones?

[Aldier]

Skill up bonuses only apply to select items (cultural armor/symbols, some OoW augment combines for alchemy/poison). As far as a green vs. light blue vs. dark blue vs. yellow vs. red there is NO difference based on the color.

Your chance to skill up is greatest when you succeed. Depending on the skill, your highest stat wis/int (or secondary stat where applicable) increases the chance of a skill up on a failure up to but not to exceed the chance of a skill up on a success. By this logic, recipes closer to your skill are more likely to grant you a skill up. This is offset by the 95% rule. You can check the calculator for a particular skill and see how far above your current skill you have the 95% success chance at. Anything up to that skill will be the same chance to skill up based on success/failure rate. Mastery aa would come into play on this as well as you improve your chances to succeed, you improve your chances to skill up. However, the "gain" from the mastery aa goes down as you get higher in skill for this aspect of the aa's. They have other benefits at the higher end when dealing with very high trivials improving success rate.

The calculator also calculates the chance of skill up on success, failure, and overall that you can use to see the benefit of equipping a mod item or purchasing an AA.

[Aldier]

Just playing around with the calculator a little:

At any skill level below 180, the closer the trivial is to your raw skill, the better your chance of success is.
At 180 skill, is the first time when the trivial 2 above your skill is the same chance of success as the trivial 1 above your skill.

At 300, you ahve the same chance of success up to 345 trivial.

These are with no mod item.

If you add a mod item, you will increase the number of points above your raw skill that you can look at and still maintain that maximum chance to succeed. With a simple 5% mod item, you expand the range at 180 skill from 181-182 having a 95% success chance to 181-194 having 95% success rate.

[Shimazuul]

Thanks for the quick reply. I had forgotten about the calculator. I am working tailoring atm and my skill is 282. With my primary stat at 441 it seems that there is nothing I can really do to improve my chances for a skill up past a 3.94% chance. That was using everything from a trivial of 283 to 450, and with using mods up to 15%. Is that right or am I doing something stupid?

[Zayix]

Making cultural armor on the high end will improve your skillup rate. Lots of info on that around.

[Aldier]

Intricate, Elaborate, and Elegant armor or Sacred, Eminent, Exalted, and Sublime symbols have skill up bonuses. Note: not the templates, only the final items. These will improve your chances of a skill up, but other than those, you are correct. The %ages these give are in some other threads and have not been officially confirmed, but ngreth has confirmed they do exist.

The prime stat (wis/int stat) only helps to increase the chance of a skill up on a failure, and it cannot go above the chance of a skill up on a success.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Thanks for the quick reply. I had forgotten about the calculator. I am working tailoring atm and my skill is 282. With my primary stat at 441 it seems that there is nothing I can really do to improve my chances for a skill up past a 3.94% chance. That was using everything from a trivial of 283 to 450, and with using mods up to 15%. Is that right or am I doing something stupid?

yeah. For you, your prime stat is so high that there is no difference between a failure and a success... so, for non-bonus items, it does not matter much what you do. You will have the same chance.

Bonus items, as folks have mentioned, will help.

[Aldier]

The only benefit then to doing closer trivial combines is to try to ensure a success to have an item to sell to gain back some of your losses versus failing a very high trivial combine (but same skill up chance) and having nothing to show for it.