How your tradeskill time is spent

[pennyrose]

The question about charging for combines sort of got me to wondering about how the time I spend doing tradeskills breaks down. The very rough breakdown of the time categories I came up with is (1) researching and collecting the raw materials; (2) doing subcombines; (3) doing the final combines that yield the skillups...we hope.

I'm not a number person at all, although I know many of you are. The best I can do is a gut feeling guess: (1) 65%; (2) 30%; (3) 5%.

Of course the time allocation is going to vary widely on different items and different skills, but how would you guess your time investment is distributed overall? I know many of you have been doing skills much longer and are much more skilled, not to mention much more organized, than I am.

Pennyrose - tailoring 196, smithing 190, fishing 200
Alouette - brewing 211
Runival - baking 232
Tazzia - pottery 233. fletching 174
Orphelia - tinkering 188
Wynsum - jewelry 200

[Lilosh]

95%
4%
1%

-Lilosh

[Verdandi]

Offhand I'd say probably 50%, 49%, 1%. That's doing mostly barbarian cultural armor and then just random things that come my way. Gathering usually consists of shopping in the Bazaar and mining vendors, because I try to keep a good stock of non-vendor ingredients as much as possible. When I compare that time plus the time on the bajillion subcombines, the actual combine takes no time at all.

[Liwsa]

depending on trade skill.

tailoring
90
5
5

brewing(mainly kadaim(sp) constitutionals)
30
50
20

pottery
20
40
40

jewelry
10
0
90

[Calabar]

The first thing I thought of was Halas Pies. I found I had very little trouble finding wolf and mammoth meat. The vast majority of my time was spend on sub combine after sub combine after sub combine. So for Halas Pies I’d guess something like:

1. 15%
2. 80%
3. 5%

[Phabos]

When I bake MTP: 25, 60, 15

Others, it depends. For pottery skillups on vials, I've been doing 95% looking for skins and 5% doing the actual vials.

Tailoring is pretty much the same.

Something like fletching or brewing, at least when I was skilling up to my current levels, were maybe 3% buying (at most) and 97%.

Overall, though, I would say I spend about 75 percent of my time vendor mining and looking for things to tradeskill with and the other 25 percent doing subcombines and combines.

Then again, I don't really pay too much attention to the clock. If I get bored vendor mining or combining, I quit and do something else.

Phabos
Drunken Paladin of Brell
Tarew Marr

[Luclingal]

time spent

Liwsa tagged tailoring pretty well hehe.

I'd say all my skills over all not making a distinction would be 40-50-10.
In general for me, I do a ton of subcombines...I make my own velium temper, so anyone that does that knows exactly what I mean. That is for blessed fishing rod which has a few more sub-combines aside of making temper. I do pottery which has a lot of subcombines, and I would also count distilling mana as a subcombine, which takes quite a nice chunk of time.

And jewelry really depends on saying everything *but PoP* because PoP JC is more like 95-0-5, waiting on winning/looting, or buying stuff.

And how about switching stuff around from character to character, account to account...I know that is probably ensconced in gathering, but heck I spend a lot of time doing that. I'll buy one thing here and one thing there when I see them on vendors, just with whatever character I see it with...so all that stuff eventually has to funnel to my tradeskiller.

[Obina]

Heh heh , or time searching through the expanded bank to figure out where I put those stacks of Iron Oxide. No that is Sarcof Fungus - looks the same - ooops and I confuse Permafrost crystals with Blessed Karana dust all the time. Hmm cheese or frosting?

Seriously, my guild doesn't understand the knowledge part - the creating a supply chain part. They seem amazed when I know the easiest and cheapest way to get everything I need. Tact: what I need when some keen young guildie runs half way across Norrath to give me one piece of Iron Oxide and I lob it into my stacks carelessly. Or how I tell them to stop giving me Zombie skins already!

My pottery is about 40/40/20 or so depends on what is for sale in the bazaar etc. And yes mana vials are precombines. Like chanting clay. No fail, but a real pest!

[OberonMiM]

A majority of my time is spent rubbing my wrist after all those painfull multi ingredient combines. My wrist sounded like a rusty gate after i finished doijng minotaur heros brew

[Sylphan]

Researching and gathering components are really two very different things. For one thing, much of the researching is done on web sites like this one, but gathering has to be in game. Gathering can include checking merchants, checking the bazaar, hunting, monitoring the bazaar channel, repeated trips to the bank. Also, let's not forget rearranging bag space and the amount of time it takes to sell all your finished product back to a merchant at a loss.

But I'd guess, in the end, about 94 - 4 - 2. Maybe that's an exaggeration. It varies between trades, but even with something storebought like early fletching or jewelry I tend to spend more time running between merchants than doing combines.

That wasn't always true. Smithing for example... back when ore, molds, and forges were in different zones it took just as much time to do the fine plate combines as it did to gather and make the paddings.

Or, before the bazaar opened, we used to spend a lot of time running to someplace to meet a customer to give him his order. Or when someone brings me the ingredients for cultural armor, it mostly takes time to teleport and run to my old hometown for the cultural forge. Go linkdead while zoning a few times and that can take an hour. Gathering the ingredients isn't done by me and the combine itself is just a click or two.

[Zopharr]

Probably about 65% gathering materials, 30% doing subcombines, maybe 5% doing final combines.

[Araon]

That's a tougher question to answer than I first thought. For my smithing it depends if anyone is helping get the sea temper together for me, whether I buy or farm the leather padding and so forth.

I also use my lovable kitty bard to farm mugs of sea foam from seafury cyclops but at the same time he is also working on his AA and getting some nice gems now and then, so it's hard to say what part of his time is spent on tradeskilling and what is spent on himself.

So the answer is - it depends and I don't know

[Delfontes]

Really depends on what I am making but...


76%
39%
28%

[Lilosh]

Really depends on what I am making but...


76%
39%
28%

2 + 2 = 5 ?

-Lilosh

[Phabos]

There are three types of people in this world:

Those that can count, and those that can't.

Phabos