Tradeskill Mastery

[Kemie Dreamshadow]

What you may have lost is the ability to actually SKIP doing some work that I think you should have done (getting your skill to max) and while you had this you potentially had the ability to do LESS work than people without the AA... so you SAVED work... not worked more. You may have been able to do items with bonus skillups earlier and easier since you had the AA.

Well (and I do not mean this disrespectfully, Ngreth) for some of us who have been tradeskilling a long time, there has been no "saved" work. I had all of my tradeskills "maxed" at 250 shortly before the cap was raised to 300, and it took me literally years to catch up again to max them all. I still had smithing and tailoring and jewelcraft to finish up after I managed to purchase the AA's for max salvage. The smithing mastery AA's were the first I managed to purchase all levels for, and they still didn't help me max smithing nearly so much as first the changes with the addition of sunshard combines and secondly the changes to cultural recipes.

I STILL only have mastery AA's in smithing, tailoring and jewelcraft (not sure if I have maxed the latter or not).

For those of us who are heavily into tradeskills and have been for some time, AA's are not easy to come by, and it's always a real dilemma where to spend them if you want occasionally actually to fight.

Perhaps the issue really is that there are tradeskillers who have come to it only after max leveling, and who purchase the masteries and salvage BEFORE they ever raise skill. It seems logically there should be a way to prevent that, if you wish, simply by making it a requirement to reach a certain skill level before you can buy the AA, the same way you have previously required character levels. If the tradeskill vendors can check your skill before selling you or even showing you a book, then this should be possible.

To reiterate a bit, having spent years maxing my tradeskills and sacrificing hard-earned AA's to them, I feel like I deserve the few masteries I've purchased, so I'd hate to see them taken away from me even if they were to be refunded.

But... I HAVE seen a lot of players start a new tradeskill and max it recently in just a few days. AA's? Changes in skillup paths? Changes in the tradeskills? I'm sure there are a lot of factors involved.

If you feel the masteries are bad for tradeskilling because they make them too easy to "skip" work, then probably you are right that some do use them that way. But please do understand this is not true for everyone who has them, and perhaps consider a skill check prior to purchase as a solution.

Thanks.

Kemie

[Ngreth Thergn]

I would try to replace it with something... just something not quite as "broken" as the current AA.

The refund would be because I would not want to FORCE you take take the "new" AA and you could spend those refunded AA points on whatever you want, INCLUDING the possible replacement if that is what you wanted.

AND if I was to get rid of mastery AA's a large swath of the trivials would be readjusted so that you would not "need" them to make the combines.

None of this is anything though I have committed to doing. I have not committed to removing these AA's at this point, though I very much desire to do so. It is a large project because I have to go re-evaluate all those trivials so it would not be something that happened quickly.

[gildana]

Whether I agree with Ngreth or not. Sometimes I do, sometimes not. But I do extremely and gratefully appreciate him coming in here and communicating to the level that he has. I know it's not in the job description and I'm sure it takes extra time.

He does this AHEAD of making changes instead of f**kng it up many times and/or leaving it in place forever f**ked up. Too many examples of this to mention. He reasons it out, solicits opinion and then moves forward. There's some basis for decisions.

Like I said, I don't always agree, but he's in here plugging away for reasoned changes to all this and he doesn't deserve the hate and personal slams.

[KyrosKrane]

Ngreth, a random thought for you.

I know you would like to revamp the masteries, and I know you're working on revamping poison for some future date. Why not combine the two? Use poison as a test bed for how the new form of masteries will work.

Since the poison revamp will effectively make you rework all the trivials anyway, you can design a new form of the masteries, refund and remove the existing poison ones, then create all the new trivials with the new form of mastery in mind. That will give you a chance to evaluate the impact of the new form without totally breaking the game. And since poison gets re-designed from the get-go with this new mastery in mind, it doesn't suffer from the similar shortfalls and limitations that the current system engenders.

[Zolina]

Here's a thought: you could change the mastery AAs from successful combine to salvage everything when they go off.

The downside to the players would be that the success rate goes down somewhat, the retry would have the same failure rate as the first combine.

The upside to the players would be that they get more chances to skill up from the retry combines.

Here's one example, assume normal success rate is 50%, chance of mastery AA going off is 20%. Currently the success rate is 70%. Under the new system, for 100 combines, you'd get 50 success, 20 retries, and 30 failures. Of the 20 retries, you'd get 10 successes, 4 retries, and 6 failures. Of those 4 retries, you'd get 2 successes, 1 retry, and 1 failure, rounded off. Of that last 1 retry, round it off to 0.5 success. So we'd have about 50 + 10 + 2 + .5 = 62.5% success rate, or a 12.5% increase in success instead of a 20% increase.

The total success rate, if s is the standard success rate and m is the chance of mastery going off would change from (s + m) to s + s * m + s * m^2 + s * m^3 + ... = s / (1 - m). So in the example above, s = 0.5, m = 0.2, total success rate = 0.5 / 0.8 = 62.5% (whaddaya know, my two roundoffs cancelled each other out perfectly, heh). The net reduction in total success rate would be (s + m) - s / (1 - m) = m * (1 - s - m) / (1 - m) which is always greater than or equal to 0 (it's the chance of mastery going off * failure rate / chance of mastery not going off), 7.5% in the example. The average number of extra combines when all retries are taken to success or failure would be m + m^2 + m^3 + ... = m / (1 - m), 25% in the example.