Sickles or shadowscream Hell

[zandorian]

There are 15+ ppl on TM atm selling sickles with prices under 1kpp. I am getting real tired with farming and frustrated trying to finish off tailoring (241 and holding grr..)

What do people suggest Sickles (what kind of success rate to expect with 229+ geerlok ?) or go to farming shadowscream or posibly acrylia.

So close yet so far from 1750 club...


Zandorian

halfling .. so no cultural


250 Baking, Brewing, Pottery, JC, Fletching, 241 Tailoring , 229 Smithing

[Salitorn]

Most advice I have seen recommends doing just a variety of things. Personnaly I plan to do Cultural, shadowscream and a mix of sickles. That is of course if you have a good cultural smithing route.

In the end if your in a hurry and have a mother load of plat. And I mean a monster load go all out sickles.

Good Luck!

[StrommKlaatu]

While Stromm doesn't have quite the price problem you seem to, there are 5-6 people slashing at each other through skilling on them.

At 222 + Trophy, I made my first run at a batch of 20 yesterday. I had a 50% success rate, making 10 out of the 20, and had (1) skill-up.

[zandorian]

Humm 50% success is not bad... even at 1k per thats enought to cover cost.

[Tidiath]

Which is better?

Well, i personally am going to stick to shadowscream...here are my reasons.

1) It costs basically nothing, your getting close to 8k to make 20 combines of sickles.

2) If your like me and do absolutely all tradeskill required stuff like PL'ing a druid just to imbue gems, etc, etc..the time required to just get set up to make final sickle combines is about equal to farming that many combines x2 worth of swirling shadows

3) You live on a server that was already saturated with sickles sellers a year ago

4) Isn't it fun to see 50+ owlbears or sonic wolves all fall over at the feet of an ae'ing cleric? =)

The likelyhood of skill ups? Well, i've done 43 combines of sickles in total, i did't get any skill ups. In the last couple days i have done 61 combines of shadowscream bracer at 202 skill and have had 8 skill ups.

Total time i have invested in those 61 combines of shadowscream is about 4 days of farming approx 4 hrs per day...and i still have 139 humming orbs on an army of vah shir mules =)

[Cavel]

Shadowscream is definately the way to go for all the reasons listed above plus one more. I was stuck at 215 or so smithing a while back and was going through insane amounts of Plat trying to get one skill up. Then a friend dragged me kicking and screaming over to do the SS quests, got them done... Farmed the bears and Wolves and now I am at 225, on average I have seen one skill up every 20 or so combines.

On the HE cultural (Both old and new) I have made at least 3 full sets of both and have seen only 1 skill up off those.

It seems to me that the SS armor (worthless as it is as a real armor) is better for skill ups than the cultural or Acrylia Plate.

Just my take

[Monodon]

I did SS till about lvl 225 and then moved to sickles. But if the sickle market is messed up it may not be viable for you. When I did my early combines I was able to sel em for 2500pp and turn my first smithing profits, but then the market died. Thankefully I managed to get my smithing up before that.

At around 225 I was finding that I got about 8 sickels for every 20 combines and at 244 (252 after trophy) I still occasionally get only 8 per run of 20. This means that I must sell my sickles for a minimm of 1000 pp to break even. More often I can sell for 800 and break even these days though (but why bother since I dont REALLY need the skillups that bad). The peeps that are selling for under 1k are generally higher lvl people with pp that are skillling up for the aid grimel quest. Basically so long as they can recoup some of their exspences they are happy. Unfortunately that puts the little guy in a tight situation....

Ole MacDonald had a farm... EIEIO. And on his farm he has a sonic wolf..... EIEIO...

Well, you get the picture.

Goodluck with your skillups.

[Talanshar]

Sickles

My smith did sickles from around 230 to 248, then did the last two points on BD cultural. Once I hit 212, I started doing Acrylia, had good success rates, and managed to sell Acrylia for around 1kpp per sheet. Once I banked about 30kpp on the Acrylia, I started in on sickles. Because they were selling for 3kpp a piece, I turned a profit even if I fizzled eight of the ten combines. On average, I'd hit a 30 to 40 percent success rate through the 230's + geerlok. That was sufficient to finance the sickle skilling, make a few sets of BD cultural (when BDs were selling for 2kpp) and have 100kpp left over.

But that was well over a year ago, and the market has gone south from what I have seen (sorta retired). Figure that you'll spend around 330pp per combine, or 3300pp for ten combines. If you can sell a sickle for 1kpp and you succeed 30-percent of the time, you'll lose roughly 300pp per 10-combine run (I usually did 20 combine runs because I'm superstitious). That's not too bad of a loss for your skill level. Even doing 3-sheet "old" cultural you have a minimum of ~150pp on the line per combine, assuming you farmed everything yourself. And the old cultural doesn't even have a decent merchant sell-back rate. Even on a successful combine you will lose a substantial amount of your material cost when you sell back to a merchant. So long as the sickle market doesn't plunge too far, you could come close to breaking even on sickles.

I never did Shadowscream. But I was skilling when the war was broken, couldn't get anything to spawn, yadda yadda. If that issue has been resolved and shadowscream components are readily available, I'd consider that track.

[Chenier]

60 combines of sickles last night

Started at 230, ended at 233. Had 24-ish successful combines (trying to remember how many I stuffed into my seller mule's bank).

I'm happy with the run. Was nice to be able to do something different, just to break up monotony. If it was the only recipe to 250, the pre-combines would certainly get to be a drag, but I may do another big set or two of sickle combines before I'm done.

I'm trying to decide if sickles are ickier than solstice robes. I guess because I did way more robes than I've done sickles, it doesn't seem so yet (that and mass imbue spells weren't out yet and I made all my own CE's - I now buy as many as I can).

At least sickles don't require someone else (I had a 250 JCM enchanter make my robe chains).