Smithing Skill-up route

[Sopwith]

I've been looking at the Ornate recipes trying to find the cheapest way through them and this is what I've come up with:

[code:1]Skill item cost sell back
116 ornate veil 19.445 8
119 ornate gorget 18.395 8
122 ornate bracers 19.970 8
123 electrum veil 21.545 8
124 electrum gorget 20.495 8
128 electrum bracers 22.070 8
130 gold veil 29.420 8
132 gold gorget 28.370 8
135 gold bracers 29.945 8
139 electrum coif 44.655 12
142 gold sleeves 49.380 12
146 gold coif 52.530 12
148 electrum mail 63.040 20
155 gold mail 70.915 20
162 platinum mail 165.415
[/code:1]

It's cheapest to stay with 1 ring items and work through the more expensive metals since the rings are the most expensive thing. I haven't found this stuff to sell to players very well, so I just sell to vendors. My sell back costs are very rough estimates - if anyone has better data, please put it in.

This is not the path I have followed so far, but since I'm at 139 skill, I will up to 155 at least - I may switch to Fine Plate at that point since the cost for those is about 27pp per attempt, plus farming or buying the padding.

I've seen skill-ups come at about one to every 1-5 attemps in skills after skill level 100 up to about 160 or so. After skill 160 it seems to slow down to about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20. This is with wisdom at the 220ish level.

[Calabar]

What’s nice about ornate chain is you have the option to farm the ore for the rings, either from ore drops or from smelting fine steel weapons. I’ve never had much in the way of cash flow, so this is what I plan on doing next. Unfortunately, you have to buy the ore for fine steel plate. So I hope to put that off as long as possible.

[kiztent]

What’s nice about ornate chain is you have the option to farm the ore for the rings, either from ore drops or from smelting fine steel weapons. I’ve never had much in the way of cash flow, so this is what I plan on doing next. Unfortunately, you have to buy the ore for fine steel plate. So I hope to put that off as long as possible.

If you sell leather padding for 25pp each, selling one leather padding will get you a block of ore. You use the next leather padding for a combine.

[Sopwith]

Here's what the merchants will pay for a few of the items from the above list:

Electrum Coif - 12.381
Gold Bracelet - 14.524
Gold Sleeves - 19.524

[Naelia]

skill ups

Why do all ornate? Farm two stacks of padding, sell one. Use the proceeds to buy your MQ ore. (only 20pp per ore) In fact, buying with a bard in POK, materials for a FS veil are 25pp, and merchant sellback price is 25pp If you farm your own padding, you only have to finance your failures, which is easy to do by selling padding! wheee....

Went from 133-150 in two evenings via fine steel so far. (That includes the time spent farming for padding)

Ornate chain just seems... more expensive and difficult than necessary?

[Luminare]

These prices seem a bit high. A large brick of HQ ore costs 17.3pp give or take a couple gold. You get 2 HQ rings for each large brick. So a 1 ring piece of ornate costs 8.65pp for the ore (assuming no failures making the rings and you'll probably get 5% fails) plus the cost of the metal, water, and pattern. I don't have it in front of me right now and don't remember for sure, but is a chainmail bracer pattern really another 8 or 9pp? I don't think so.

[Reflan]

You'll get a 5% fail rate once something is trivial to you. You won't come anywhere near that when it's not trivial unless you get lucky.

Sometimes you won't get anywhere near that until the trivial level was passed 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 points ago!

On making your own ore -- you can buy ore for about the same money you would spend to smelt down weapons to make your own ore, so why knock yourself out? If you for whatever reason want to do smithing financed via FS weapons drops, just bank the cash and buy ore later at your convenience. Quicker to run back and kill more stuff and fill more backpacks with fresh FS than carry patterns around and waste lots of time(and maybe get some failures!!) making your own ore.

[Zeralenn]

Repeating your list:

116 ornate veil 19.445 8
119 ornate gorget 18.395 8
122 ornate bracers 19.970 8
123 electrum veil 21.545 8
124 electrum gorget 20.495 8
128 electrum bracers 22.070 8
130 gold veil 29.420 8
132 gold gorget 28.370 8
135 gold bracers 29.945 8
139 electrum coif 44.655 12
142 gold sleeves 49.380 12
146 gold coif 52.530 12
148 electrum mail 63.040 20
155 gold mail 70.915 20
162 platinum mail 165.415

While I also advocate using ornate chain as a PARTIAL bridge to fine plate, you can eliminate half your list or more by doing embroidering needles to 122 and cultural needles to 132. Cultural needles are SO profitable selling back to vendors that you can literally pay for all your previous smithing and come out money ahead in the end.

So that gets you to 132 -- remove all silver, one-ring electrum, and all one-ring gold except the bracers.

If you farm the ore (convert SOME fine steel weapons -- not all are profitable to convert) you can actually turn a small profit making ornate chain -- about 3pp - 3.5pp per item. However, I am also in the camp of "sell the fine steel and use the proceeds to buy ore" because although this is not entirely cost effective with all items, I value my time more than I value plat. In my case, I can use the time I didn't spend converting ore to make more money than I would save by farming ore.

Platinum ornate ANYTHING, put simply, is a hole into which you chuck cash. For the sake of a pricing spreadsheet I created to make my smithing guide (I expect to be submitting it to DenMother either today or early next week - !!!), I did a few platinum items, and here is one of the most cost-effective ones to make:

Platinum chain mask:
- with purchased ore, 116p 36 9s 4c per attempt
- with looted ore, 107p 6g 7c per attempt
- sells for 98p 4g 7s 4c
- loss to vendor sale with purchased ore, 17p 9g 2s
- loss to vendor sale with looted ore, 9p 1g 3s 3c

Let's recap. Each FAILURE will cost you anywhere from 107pp to 116pp of real cash, not to mention the loss of all your materials. Each SUCCESS will cost you 9pp - almost 18pp each for each item sold.

The problem is the platinum bars. These suckers cost 105pp EACH, which dramatically increases the number of failures you will get.

Plus, I recommend going straight from electrum helms to gold helms, for this reason: chainmail patterns are not cheap and they sell back for a bad price. From 139 to 146 you are not making a huge trivial jump, and your chances of success are good (from 139 to 146, chances of success range from 81-87% without a geerlok, 90-94% with one; you are, at BEST, increasing your odds of success by using sleeves as an intermediary by only 2% without a geerlok or 1% with one). For three skill points, how many sleeve patterns do you buy? 3? 6? A stack? It depends on the fickleness of the RNG.

I'd rather buy a stack of helm patterns and just go straight from gold bracers at 135 to gold helms at 136 and not have to worry about extra patterns. For the sake of simplicity, and not having too many extra patterns to sell back at a loss, and given the small bridge you need to worry about of only seven points, I'd stick with helms alone and forget the sleeves entirely.

...Zera

[Melrik]

Taking into fact that my CHR isnt at the highest to get the best prices but faction is amiable at least:

If you do Ornate armor, AND farm the FS weapons and/or the HQ Ore, heres what your spending:

Smithing Hammer - (which you should have anyway) 12pp
Chainmail Patterns - 0.56 - 8.58pp per pattern(gorget - tunic)
Water: you know that one =)
Bar of Metal - 0.54 - 10.8pp (Silver - Gold)

Total you spend about 1.5pp - 19.5pp per attempt (Silver Gorget - Gold Tunic, which is a skill of 119 for Silver Gorget - 155 Gold Tunic)

Fine Steel if you farm the Leather Padding:

Smithing Hammer - (which you should have anyway) 12pp
Plate Molds - 0.03 - 1.4pp (not sure which molds cost which)
MQ folded sheets - (this is where I might be wrong) to make a MQ FOLDED sheet you need a BLOCK of MQ ore( 55.75pp) which is 3 Large Bricks(18ppish x3 = 54ppish) or 9 Small Bricks(6.16pp x 9 =52ppish)

Total you spend about 52pp (if you make your sheets from small bricks) - 53.4pp(if you make your sheets from small bricks), which skills you up 163 - 188(Visor - BP).

Now I have seen MQ sheet metal on vendors and wasnt sure if you could use those, if you could, that would be great beacuse those are around 14ppish.

Also, for Ornate chain you use rings, which come 2 per block, and Fine Plate uses Sheets, which are 1 per block. Recipes call for 1, 2, or 3 for each, and rings would be more abundant per block, thus better.

So, if you want to save more money at the begining, I would go with the Ornate chain, but if your looking at faster less running around, Fine plate is the way. You will need to do FP to get skill up, so I would save those paddings for the later skill ups.

Just my 2 cp

Melrik
Bard of the Tribunal

[Jascenta]

Jesus 25pp per fur padding. It was a month or so ago I was getting it for 1-10 pp.

It seems those who do the farming make a killing off of people who don't know how to obtain certain components. Hell I bet I could sell celestial essence and people would buy it.

[kiztent]

It seems those who do the farming make a killing off of people who don't know how to obtain certain components. Hell I bet I could sell celestial essence and people would buy it.

Gets bought at 5pp pretty commonly, yes.

I sold bag'o'padding mark 1 (a hand made back pack) for 5k to a gentleman from one of our uberguilds while he was waiting for a rez into Vex Thal.

I expect son of bag'o'padding to sell for the same price. Just need to combine 32 more paddings, already have the parts.

[Calabar]

Last night was my first attempt at farming FS weapons and ore for making gold ornate chain. It was a learning experience. I spent about two hours in Sol A and after converting everything I ended up with a stack of 10 rings. As things turned out, it was just enough to go from 132, racial needle trivial, to 135, gold ornate bracer trivial. It was kind of fun because it was something a bit different, but it would be a major pain to have to do over and over again for what little I got from it. I’m going to chalk this up to a great idea on paper that doesn’t work so well in practice.

I really like the idea of selling padding to finance my fine steel combines. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy for me as for some. With the exception of two occasions since the bazaar opened, I haven’t been able to keep a vendor up for more than one or two hours before my cable connection crashes. This in spite of the fact that I can stay on 10 hours or more if I’m actually playing. So I can’t sell anything on my vendor unless someone buys it within the first hour or so I put my character in vendor mode. Still, it’s worth a shot.

And I’d just like to take this opportunity to vent a bit of frustration with something I keep hearing over and over again when it comes to farming supplies. A lot of people keep saying it’s not worth their time because they can just go earn some cash and then buy the supplies. The problem I have with that philosophy is that I’ve never been able to make money very easily. I can’t just log in and go off to earn cash for a couple of hours because I don’t know where to go to do it, other than over camped spots like ice giants and hill giants. Short of making padding, which I have problems selling anyway, is there some secret to farming money that I don’t know about? From my own experience it’s usually farm the items I need for combines or don’t do the combines at all.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion about the padding. I’ll give that a shot and see if I can talk my halfling vendor into stay at his post long enough to sell them.

[kiztent]

Short of making padding, which I have problems selling anyway, is there some secret to farming money that I don’t know about? From my own experience it’s usually farm the items I need for combines or don’t do the combines at all.

Yes, there is. And if we told you, it wouldn't be secret, but would instead turn into another noble camp in Highhold or another paludial caverns.

There are a lot of documented ways out there to get cash fast. But once they're documented, everyone does them, so you have to fight with 15 other people, which cuts down the cash flow rate.

The trick is to find a good cash camp, and then find a time when people aren't lined up 10 deep to get at it. Try looking at the old "hot camps" - miners in TM maybe.

But the biggest secret is "levels". At level 55 you earn more cash than at level 50. I don't care if you have all of Rathe Mountains to yourself.

[Lilosh]

Kiztent is correct.


If I *EVER* found a hunting spot that was AWESOME experience, or another Aqua Goblin-type camp (before the price adjustment), or An easy quest that resulted in exp/plat, you can be sure of one thing.


Nobody , save for myself, and maybe ONE other person in all of my server , would be told.

I tell 10 people, who tell their friends, post it in The Newbie Zone on the sony forums, where 600 people swarm, KS, and Suddenly absor notices it and says "Oh yeah, we never meant for that!", and it's gone.


Nosir. I wouldnt tell anyone.


-Lilosh

[Mahlig]

I *think* it was Pockets that gave a great tip for getting monies, but it was on the tailoring forum, iirc. Simply, hunt the grimling caves in TM for Windstones/Acrylia. The gems/runes all sell (some gems over 80pp, some runes over 9pp).

I went on a tip from a friend that does not hunt but was in a group once that got good cash loot in Grimling Forest from the grimlings in the tunnels on the way to AC. Most were green/light blue to my 54 paladin who could solo them all (including the foreman who HT'd me and hits in the 90s). There is also a "flat" place up on the wall between TM and the cave in GF that is a perfect pull locale. The first grimling I pulled dropped a black pearl and 4 runes that ranged in value (2-6pp).

A 60+ mage friend went to the LoY zones and was fighting on one of the "ships" (I assume it was Dulak). He was getting gem drops ever 5 or so kills of up to Blue Diamonds! Most Fire Emeralds and Fire Opals. That is serious cash.

My apologies in advance if I gave away anyones "secret cash cache", but my post was merely to inform and answer. Then again, I hunt the grol baku and cral ligi soldiers for acrylia, windstones and essence of wind. I get enough gems from them to pay my bills (and when I need a quick 100pp for KEI, I hit RM for 3-10 HGs).

All of these zones I mentioned are empty or close to it (save the grimling caves in TM) on about all servers that I have been on (Bristlebane, Druzzil Ro, Stormhammer, Maelin Starpyre), so I anticipate this is the case elsewhere (as Bristlebane is one of the higher, if not the highest populated server on most nights).

GL with the money hunt.