New to smithing, ikky shm looking for advice

[Eilderts]

I was just wondering how much money my lvl 34 iksar sham should farm before I start (I only have about 300pp cash atm) and what should i make for skills. My goal is to be able to make my cultural armor as I believe that there are no GM iksar smiths on MT.

[Barb_Smith_01]

Hunt around on this board for the "Economical Smithing Guide".
I hear its quite good.

One thing you have to ask yourself though.... is there going to be a market for Iksar Cultural armor?

The plate classes are probably going to have access to better armors with more AC/etc and not all pieces have +wis like the armor that the rest of the shaman race smiths can make.

Not trying to discourage you but as a Barbarian smith (one of the more popular shaman races) there is only a VERY small market for Barb shaman cultural.

Quite likely it'll take months and months to get to GM level. Time that could be better spent leveling up.

Also later on in the game, like once you are level 60 you'll probably have the friends to help you get a +10% smithing belt and then you can shortcut from skill 200 to 212 and then be on max mod skill at 230.
Not to mention you'll be able to pharm the stuff a lot better later on (level 61 pet owns $$).

Just a thought.

[Vruss Scalesmith]

Iksar Smithing

As the only 250 Iksar Smith I know of on CT i can definately say there isnt a huge market for Iksar Cultural but it sure as hell was nice to craft my own armor before my guild was ready to go to Kael/ToV. You also will have a market for making Sickles for the Solstice Earring, Cazic Thule Armor, PoP Armor Night Terror, Hurricane, Inferno etc etc ..
With the availability of Iksar Blood being upped (LoY) the cultural isn't as much of a pain to get. Good Luck if you decide to go this route.

[Cigarskunk]

Just took smithing up to 151 last night at a cost of 1250 being semi-ecconomical about it just to give you an idea of what you're looking at.

The 300p you've got right now will get you to the begining of ornate armor without question - after that you've got to chose your own root.

Can't say how good or bad iksar armor is as a sellable item right now, but just because it's useless today doesn't mean that one of the devs isn't going to suddenly start leveling an Iksar SK and descide that a good, solid Iksar armor should be put into the game that they can smith tomarrow.

/em thinks back to all of the tradeskills which he didn't skill up while they were cheap, easy and worthless before the nerfs came and they suddenly became useful but hard and expensive to skill up.

[Eilderts]

yeah, but remember, cultural armor isn't my only sellable thing. I want that for myself (2 or 3 peices are very nice). I could make tae ew stuff if I went down to CT. I hear its solo-able at high lvls with good equipment and the shield and armor are very nice for me.

[Barb_Smith_01]

CT is soloable at level 60 with Torpor.
It's a lot easier to split the mobs as well once you get your first PoP root spell (61 or 62?) or Virulent Paralysis AA.

Check the market for Tae Ew gear in your bazaar. Also check the price of Tae Ew Bloods and Iksar Bloods.
On some servers you can still make plat. On some the market is a bit cut-throat. And on some servers I hear its been totally trashed.

On Tribunal for instance, I buy Tae Ew Bloods for 1500pp each and Iksar for 500pp each. I can sell a Tae Ew Longsword/Daggers/2HS for 8kpp. Or a Shield for 6500pp. Now that ok as they only need 1 Tae Ew Blood and 1 Iksar.
However Tae Ew Chain BP/Legs prices are down to 8 or 9kpp as well and need two Tae Ew Bloods + 1 vial of distilled mana (330pp).
I tend to sell a couple of Tae Ew items a day (have a mule on a 2nd account going almost 24hrs/day).
Working off a roughly 90% success rate at max mod skill (252), that still turns a profit.

I can normally sell 1 Night terror plate legs for 15k-ish each week. PoP armors can be a pain to make (need help from a 250 Jewelery for 1 combine + need a raw diamond imbued) and some people like to overcharge for Temper components (of which plate needs LOTS).
Hurricane armor is nice and sells well but temper pieces are harder to get.
I sell a Hurricane plate BP for 45k every few weeks (drops of pure rain are hard to get and you need like 6 of them.... and some peeps try to charge 3k EACH.. bugger that just /auc to get them for cheaper or ask guildies who hunt in BoT).

Mistletoe sickle market is always in danger of crashing whenever a new smith skills up. Costs about 370pp per sickle attempt. Success rate at max skill is about 50%(?).
Someone dumped 50 sickles in the bazaar for 900pp last week. But otherwise you may be able to offload them for 1500pp each. Once again check your bazaar for a few days. Get a feel for how it is atm.

Also be aware that the situation will have changed in a few months from now when you are a high skill smith.

Having said all that.... it IS **** cool to make a piece of armor and wear it!!! I've replaced most of my gear with nodrop ssra/vt stuff but I still wear an Artificers ringmail bracer

[Reflan]

Without skill mod items like that 10% belt, which I can't seem to get people to commit to doing, skilling up in smithing is either extremely expensive or extremely time consuming OR both at once. I've had my usual extremely bad luck apply to smithing as well, so it has taken me hundreds of hours so far and a good chunk of change besides just to get to 215 smithing from 188, at 275 wisdom and above. I kid you not, luck can be very bad as well as very good.

Because of that, I would suggest that you prepare for smithing extremely thoroughly. As a shaman, you should be able to get your wisdom and strength maxed per level, but after a certain point you can get 10 extra points of wisdom per level with the innate enlightenment AA skill(cost of 3 AA points each level) and up to 5 per level with each buy of planar power(2 AA points per level). Each level you get adds on 5 possible points in wisdom, too.

Get your gear solid and pack on those AA's if you can. It will be well, well worth it in the amount of money and time it will save you. When people say it can cost 400k to take smithing from 188 to 240, the idea of spending some time doing some AA or leveling doesn't seem like quite so much of a sacrifice. It's not like it's time completely wasted anyway; it all goes to the benefit of your character. All the time and money you waste by farming and trying combines at a less than ideal stat level, though, buys you exactly nothing. You don't get any extra prizes for most combines attempted per skill-up. You just get stress and boredom and maybe a good measure of disappointment, or even some anger.

So fix up your stats, and then fix up your ability to make money, too. If you are trying brewing or something cheap, failing a lot doesn't mean too much to your pocketbook, and doesn't extend your route to mastery to mind-boggling proportions as far as time spent goes. Smithing takes a great deal of time and a fair amount of cash. If you want to dabble in Tae Ew, that will probably cost you. If you want to try some cultural along the way, that will likely cost money. Even if you want to do Fine Plate, there's a certain cost involved whether you buy OR farm your own padding.

So before you embark on the long hellish road of raising smithing skill, I would suggest you get set for it properly. Do the raiding necessary to increase your stats to their max per level. Find a way to generate income at a reasonable level(whatever that means to you) so that you can buy upgrades when raiding doesn't help as much as you would like, and also to just help fund your smithing. And get the levels and AA's if you can stomach it, because your first long run of combines without skill-ups will make all but the most stubborn wonder if it's not better to be adequately prepared than try to sneak by on the cheap and stack the odds against yourself when the odds are so very bad already.

It takes my 63 shaman WITH my 60 monk chipping in hours just to get enough for 20 combines of shadowscream, and I did 752 combines to get to 210 from 188. And we kill very fast. If you will go the shadowscream route later on, ask yourself how many 40-hour weeks you want to spend on it ....seriously. That's a good way to comprehend the amount of time necessary to get much of anywhere on it. Then, if you haven't maxed your stats before you start smithing, remember that number of 40 hour weeks you were thinking about, and ask yourself if you wouldn't like the chance of shaving some of that time away by gearing up and/or tossing in a few AA's to boot. None of that time, at least, would be wasted.

[Cavel]

At 34 wouldn't he actually get EXP doing portions of the HS war? Could that not be a fairly easy way for him to get smithing and exp at the same time... I must confess that I have not done the HS war even after the change but I understood it to be a fairly low level zone.

[Barb_Smith_01]

At 34 wouldn't he actually get EXP doing portions of the HS war?

He probably would get exp. Maybe he can load up on KEI and other buffs and solo the mobs maybe.

The thing is, you need A LOT of substances. Like hundreds and hundreds.
And the southern island owlbears/wolves dont drop them everytime.
So to easily get large volumes of substances, you ideally get a high level friend to help you AE them by the dozens. Cleric/Druid/Wizard/Mage spring to mind.
Shaman AE's hit only 4 targets max so aren't overly useful.

Alternatively, you are a high level pet class and mow everything down. Level 61 shaman pet is actually pretty **** good compared to the lower level ones.

Or find a bunch of level 30-ish friends and kill them that way. AEing is by far the easiest way to get LOTS of substances at once.

Also take into account that you need to be able to change the war every now and again to get the OTHER kind of substance. I imagine a single level 34 char would get owned if he tried to kill the defenders (by himself).

[Troodon]

The plate classes are probably going to have access to better armors with more AC/etc and not all pieces have +wis like the armor that the rest of the shaman race smiths can make.

Irrelevant what plate classes think of iksar cultural, hehe. Iksars can;t wear plate (well most of the time, are some exceptions, like Velious quested armor, but genrally, iksars can't wear plate). Iksar cultural is only wearable by iksars, and iksars can wear any other races' cultural.

Looking at the stats reall iksar culutral is only epsecially attractive to iksar shamans. Warriors and SKs can easily get better stats elsewhere. This means market is very limited. However if you have no competition you can still corner the market, limited as it is.

Note that iksars have no bridge between fine plate and blue diamond cultural, will make your post 188 life quite a pain. But it may be worth it.

An iksar decked out in full fearsome skyiron looks cool, too, hehe. Heck, they look good just in imbued Cabilis scale.