New PoP Smithing

[kiztent]

Re: hmm

So the uber guilds mop any ingredient drops for better than BD, and they never make it to non uber guild smiths?

Either that (for rare drops) or if the drops aren't rare, the uberguilds farm it fast enough to trash the market. Adding the BD armour to the game essentially enabled people to buy their way into gear that would serve them to NToV.

The only exception to this is if they (uberguild members) decide it's not worth their time ($$) to make - meaning there's no market for the armour. And if there's no market for the armour, it's not gonna be raid quality armour, which is what you are after.

So either Sony throws another round of shortcutting content in, which has the net effect of raising the overall quality of the gear and triggering a round of mudflation, or the armour sucks and no one will wear it. I don't see how it could possibly be to Sony's benefit to do either. The former shortens the repeatability of the game which cuts their income, the latter triggers another round of whining on the message boards, which I wouldn't want to see if I was putting my time into trying to make tradeskill items.

What you want may be reasonable and feasable for you at your level of the game, but you have to consider the whole of the game. And what you want probably won't help Sony make the game better.

On stormhammer, smiths don't really bother making BD armour for sale - it's not worth their time, the few pieces for sale are 1/3 the price (or less) of when it was introduced. I don't see how 40 AC legs for 13k is a good idea to repeat with higher AC and HP items. It pretty much finishes the market for dropped legs - there aren't any with higher AC and HP (aside from Elemental crafted and CT crafted of course). The next upgrade in terms of AC is Greaves of the deep sea from Lord Koi'Doken in NToV. For a HP ugrade you have to go to PoP ornate, some SSraeshza temple drops (Ivory Crystal Greaves from High Priest - same HP, 8 more AC) or Vex Thal drops.

[wombat]

hmm

ALL tradeskill items provide bought goods as an option to dropped, with the exception of a few special items. QED! Trading goods is part of the game so what is the problem with that? I know it undermines the concept of uberness for people to actually trade for items they didnt loot for themselves.

“I don't see how 40 AC legs for 13k is a good idea to repeat with higher AC and HP items. It pretty much finishes the market for dropped legs” – Kiz

Ahh so its about uber profit is it? I make gear for my guild for free if they bring me the ingredients, I and others enjoy the ability of our groups/raids to do well despite low numbers. Not all are in it for profit. I like the odd cash sale mind you, its just not the only reason I do trades. I do enjoy making useful things with my skill and an upwards progression, if possible, in what I can make. Currently I have hit a glass ceiling.

On your reasoning, the uber guilds would corner the dropped item market also, no room for anyone else!

Those who play 24/7 will get gear I will never see, that’s not a problem to me, I enjoy the game, not live it

Forcing the uber guilds through quests to PL 250 Smiths would appear to have been a very bad move.

Sony wants to raise mellee abilities in PoP, gear is part of this, they have flagged the changes, I simply want trades, and Smithing in particular, to be part of, and not a victim of, these changes.

Incidentally I would be quite happy to make droppable components for a no drop-no fail result, if this would help restrict oversupply, its one of the options. As the game evolves different items become less rare and expensive, the trick is to reduce twinking (level requirements) and prolong the usefulness of changes as long as possible (dropped ingredients not too common and limited success rates).

[kiztent]

Re: hmm

“I don't see how 40 AC legs for 13k is a good idea to repeat with higher AC and HP items. It pretty much finishes the market for dropped legs” – Kiz

Ahh so its about uber profit is it? I make gear for my guild for free if they bring me the ingredients, I and others enjoy the ability of our groups/raids to do well despite low numbers. Not all are in it for profit. I like the odd cash sale mind you, its just not the only reason I do trades. I do enjoy making useful things with my skill and an upwards progression, if possible, in what I can make. Currently I have hit a glass ceiling

You're doing it again. Just because YOU wouldn't do something, you assume no one else would and therefore it's ok to do.

Remeber Stromm server? Untwinked, fresh server, people could progress at their own rate without worrying about the uber guilds and all the politics. Ah, Heaven. Woops. Guess Cypher didn't buy into that vision of the game. 6 weeks after server live, they're clearing NToV ( http://wwwcypherguild.com/ ).

Judging from the tradeskill channel, den mom's children died a quiet peaceful death when people's vision of how they thought a server should be bumped up against the reality of how everyone else plays. At least I hardly ever see people from Stromm on, and the guildleader mostly talks from his old blue server characters.

Forcing the uber guilds through quests to PL 250 Smiths would appear to have been a very bad move.

I'll agree with that. It was, of course, inevitable once the BD armour was put in game, but Aid Grimel pretty much put the nail in the coffin for any new armour that's an upgrade to BD. There's too many people that can trash any market that's worth making. That leaves us with adding new recipies that are fine plate to ry'gorr drops - or requiring component drops that you already be at the top or near of the game to get your hands on. Either way, the non-uber smith loses, as we always will in a game where people have more time to play than we do.

[Boleslav]

It is impossible to separate the 'true high level smiths' from those who built up the skill for a quest or other reasons. There are many people with 250 smithing (and other skills). Creating a recipe that counts on requiring a highly skilled smith to make it in order to keep it rare is asking to have it mass produced very quickly.

So, the other alternative to allow good player crafted items into the game is to limit the drop rate of one or more of the components. It would seem odd to put items necessary to make very powerful items on low level mobs in accessible places though. Therefore, the items go on mobs in areas appropriate to the level of folks who SOE thinks should be using the finished item.

You can say that CT gear has been ruined due to high success rates. I prefer to think that it has been ruined by high Tae Ew Blood Vial drop rates. The high success rates haven't hurt Tae Ew Plate one bit. Drop rates for Tae Ew Plate items are too rare, but the blood vials drop too frequently. The gear is of excellent quality considering the level of folks it takes to successfully farm the components.

I guess my point is that you really can't expect to be able to make gear better than BD Cultural with items that can be easily farmed at 55th level or that can be bought in quantity in the bazaar. If that combination were possible, the market would already be flooded with the item. Any new item like this that was introduced would flood the market with stunning speed.

With all that in mind, I don't have a problem with the current PoP tradeskill recipes. I am sad that most of the recipes are beyond my ability to get components for, but if they weren't they would be too common. In my opinion, BD cultural is trivial to make compared to the time it would take to hunt comparable gear. The pendulum is already too far in our favor with BD cultural, so I would balk at doing anything to swing it further. The innocence is gone. The days when I, by sole virtue of spending tons of time smithing, could make raid quality gear with drops I could farm myself at 25th level (Dwarven Plate was pretty uber back in the day), and have the market mostly to myself, are over.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 61st Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny

[Fenadin]

I have been smithing for a year. I am a very casual player. It turned the corner to profitability about 6 months ago. Margins are low right now on Tae Ew (4500 on shields and 6500 on legs and tunics) and cultural (4,6,8)on Veeshan, but that's ok with me. I have made plenty of money and upgraded gear enough to have made it worth my while.

The reason I started smithing was so I could make gear for myself. At this point smithing has diminishing returns for me. I have bot most buyable upgrades for my character and twinked one or two. Most of my upgrades from here out will be NO DROP. I don't know that I will ever make another piece of armor I will use. That is a tad disapointing.

Why not start adding recipes that result in NO DROP Items. I love the idea of upgrading current player made items in the forge. Stick my Blessed Full Mithril BP in a cultural forge with a couple of PoP drops (emblems, bricks of some metal, whatever) and combine for a new, better bp. Make the trivial similar to current cultural. One side benefit could also be a better market for current cultural items. I.E. someone wants a new bp and rather than skill up to 250 they get to 220ish on rings and buy 10 bps to do the attempt.

Bottom line, I want to improve my character through tradeskills. Selling for money dosn't do that much any more. Let's recycle. Let's make most of the recycled items no drop. Then we can wear our smithed armor with pride again!!

[wombat]

hmm

“You're doing it again. Just because YOU wouldn't do something, you assume no one else would and therefore it's ok to do.” – Kiz

Sigh, of course other have different reasons for doing tradeskills, did I say they didn’t? Of course its ok to do what I do LOL! Are you saying it isn’t? You also don’t make sense, perhaps you can rewrite your sentence.

In fact what I think you are saying is that everything should be looted, not made and no drop when its looted (so no trading, thus no economy). You are also saying that uberguilds are ruining content for everyone else due to their ‘production line’ values. Its suspiciously like trolling to me, being so out of place on a trades board? Or are you simply being a devils advocate?

The bottom line is that Sony will be beefing up mellees for PoP activities (if you read what I said?) this will involve gear, it will either drop like rain or like drizzle, whichever is the case, there will be more of it. Thus Trades should be part of this ability for mellees to upgrade their gear. It will give more useful things for vocational high level smiths (and others tradeskillers), to do.

We have far more high level smiths in the works than we used to when I was one a few, skilling up on Fine Plate and dreaming of old Dwarf Culural. So it is true that any changes would result in faster access to made items, if the smiths are active, and I suspect that many are not.

The fun in smithing to me is the challenge of the hard road to skill up to my current 244/250 (with Trophy) and then making things that are useful to me and my peers in the game that we play, so we can progress in the game. I play off peak where cooperation is critical because of low numbers.

What we need is something between Tae Ew Plate and Chain, accessable to good groups of 55+ but not dropping like water and having 30% success rates. A recombination of the Engraved Vellious Armour (Jewelcraft) system might be worthwhile, increase the success rates if the item is no drop but have low success on droppable armour. So first combine = no drop (80% success), next combine = droppable (30% success).

In the end anything made or dropped becomes more common, make higher items level/class limited so the damage is lessened. The idea is to extend the usefulness of the game changes as long as possible while still providing useful pathways to extend your tradeskills along.

Upgrading existing BD armour etc will soak up a good deal of what is available now, this will push up the prices of components and the finished product, restricting what ends up with players. Of course the dropped gear, drop rates will have to be balanced too, otherwise being able to make a 45/40 sword for 14k or 10 hours hunting components, will be undermined with dropped equivalents being sold at 2k and hunted in 2 hours.

Incidentally if Sony simply pushes up Discs hugely to make mellees useful in PoP (Rogues against uber DS anyone? LOL) then equipment will be less relevant and people will just level (in safe camps) to 65 to gain access to the higher levels as gear will be devalued by comparison.

[kiztent]

Re: hmm

“You're doing it again. Just because YOU wouldn't do something, you assume no one else would and therefore it's ok to do.” – Kiz

Sigh, of course other have different reasons for doing tradeskills, did I say they didn’t? Of course its ok to do what I do LOL! Are you saying it isn’t? You also don’t make sense, perhaps you can rewrite your sentence.

Basically, you are taking an ego centric view of how the game should be designed. You look at your playtime, your motivation, your abilities, and balance things based on that.

So you think upgrades to BD armour that the components can be farmed by someone at your level are perfectly reasonable, since you want to equip yourself using smithing.

You think that if something is put in place that YOU won't abuse (you just want to make some nice stuff, maybe some stuff for your guild), it's ok to put in place because it can't be abused (or everyone will be like you and not abuse it).

This is wishful thinking. If you smithed last May 8, you know that BD armour was massively abused. PoP armour isn't viable because you can't collect the parts for it (which is the other upgrade scenario).

Either way, what you want isn't going to happen.

[Maegril]

The reason I started smithing was so I could make gear for myself. At this point smithing has diminishing returns for me. I have bot most buyable upgrades for my character and twinked one or two. Most of my upgrades from here out will be NO DROP. I don't know that I will ever make another piece of armor I will use. That is a tad disapointing.

Why not start adding recipes that result in NO DROP Items. I love the idea of upgrading current player made items in the forge.

What would really solve the problem is to change/improve tradeskills such that providing combines would be a service. For example: You group with another player and do a combine. The resultant item is created in the combine container, and is no drop. If the container closes it poofs. However, any person in the group may take the item out of the container. In this way they could provide decent upgrades, provide the service of smithing (at some inconvenience), and still not face the dual problem of either devaluing regular dropped gear or making smithing combined items (or any other tradeskill, really) worthless.

The problem is that's new technology. And while doable, it's a pretty large commitment in time/effort because you'd still need to upgrade recipes every expansion to maintain relevance.

Far better would be to add the ability for certain items to apply modifiers to current items. That ToV BP you have getting a little behind the times? No problem, find a smith who is high enough skill, and have him combine it with enchanted bloodmetal for a bloodmetal infused ToV BP. Bloodmetal infusion would add, say, 10% to HP, STR, and AC, subtract 10% from Wis/Int/Dex, or whatever.

Problems: More technology by far, and database explosion. (e.g. Golden leaf BP, Bloodmetal infused Golden Leaf BP, electrified copper infused Golden Leaf BP, etc.. etc..)

Really this is all about the limitations of the underlying game design, and how much work is required to code around it. In most cases it's a lot of work and the payoff probably isn't seen as adequate. I'm personally hoping EQ2 has a bit more intelligent design in a lot of places, including item storage and tradeskill implementation.

[Cavel]

I really Like your idea Maegril.

I personally would like to see items balanced more toward the risk needed to gather the components. As a smith I find the AC and Stat bonus on many of the 1rst Tier PoP armors to be laughable. Nightmare is one that I am intimately familiar with, the only people that have even asked me about nightmare chain tend to be either rogues or rangers.

Now compare a Nightmare Chain item to the CT items and most players will take the CT item, why? Because of the following:
1) it is easier to get the Blood needed for the CT Chain than to gather Fetid slime.
2) it only takes 2 blood and 2 saphires per attempt at a CT chain item, roughly 6 hours of CT entrance camping and 1k plat VS. countless hours of camping nightmare for 3 midnight stones, the risk to get back to the Mephits and slarghilugs

Lastly Lets compare stats, I am hoping that most people will agree that a group of level 55-60 could camp either CT entrance with no trouble or wandering MoBs in Nightmare with out issue. If we go by that and consider the bulk of the population that will use the chain items will be rangers the stats point to CT being better than nightmare for the trouble:

Night Terror Tunic
tunic AC 40, DEX 15, WIS 4, INT 4, AGI 12, HP 40, mana 35, sv magic 10, wt 6.5, medium

Tae Ew Chain:
AC 45, STR 5, DEX 5, STA 8, WIS 11, AGI 8, HP 50, mana 50, 5 to all saves, required level 51

While the Night Terror can be used by someone under 51 it is still not worth the risk reward in my opinion.

Just tossing my 2pp in here

[kiztent]

The reason I started smithing was so I could make gear for myself. At this point smithing has diminishing returns for me. I have bot most buyable upgrades for my character and twinked one or two. Most of my upgrades from here out will be NO DROP. I don't know that I will ever make another piece of armor I will use. That is a tad disapointing.

Why not start adding recipes that result in NO DROP Items. I love the idea of upgrading current player made items in the forge.

What would really solve the problem is to change/improve tradeskills such that providing combines would be a service. For example:

You get a drop on a raid that can be combined with a smithed item to make a nice no drop item?

It's already in game.

[slappig]

Re: Cap?

2 - it will not suck and be attainable by any level (like BD cultural - 'anyone' can farm BDs and tempers) -
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I beg to differ..at level 51 I am not 'farming' tae ew blood..neither is my Lev 11 shaman going to run around getting mineral salts and goblin brew in Nurga and Droga...much less killing any mob with blue diamond drops.
componenets and tempers are not farmable by 'any level'..regardless of my skill level in smithing, there are things I cannot do without buying components. *Slappig/Ayonae Ro

[wombat]

hmm

Kiz, sigh, its not egocentric to present my personal experience of “non uber guild” smithing, I presented it as an aid to understanding (which obviously failed). I have been smithing and levelling for 2 years btw and just started old cultural Dwarf Plate when BD came out.

You are saying any changes are broken before they start so I assume you have no constructive suggestions or solutions? If not, then you have run out of things to say?

Incidentally I can camp the ingredients for Nightmare and Hurricane, its just not worth my while to do it given that its not an upgrade on other pieces and in any case the drops are too rare to provide much interest in making them. Inferno and up would interest me but the drops are very rare and I am not into the game to endlessly camp a spawn to boredom for one or two drops a week. If I was into that I would be making Tae Ew Plate

Basically if you want better than BD, do the PoP quest armour, you will have a much better item and cuts trades out almost completely.

Kiz you keep missing the point that as mellees are going to be given a big boost to make them more relevant in PoP my post was looking at how to slot smithing into it and provide extra interest for smiths at the same time. If they just boost gear via drops, then we will get the Rygorr/Fine Plate fiasco again. Your attitude is “who cares as it is all broken anyway, and any changes will be broken”. I am looking at prolonging interest in the game for tradespeople.

Regarding the making of no drop items, this could be done by making 250+ skill subcombines then giving to the end user. The end user puts them into a forge for automatic success or fixed % fail combine. This should not mean lots of changes to game mechanics?

[kiztent]

Re: hmm

Kiz you keep missing the point that as mellees are going to be given a big boost to make them more relevant in PoP my post was looking at how to slot smithing into it and provide extra interest for smiths at the same time. If they just boost gear via drops, then we will get the Rygorr/Fine Plate fiasco again.

And instead you want a repeat of the BD cultural fiasco.

Given the way they have introduced tradeskill items into the game what you want would be a major change of direction. Argue all you want, I don't see it happening.

[Maegril]

The reason I started smithing was so I could make gear for myself. At this point smithing has diminishing returns for me. I have bot most buyable upgrades for my character and twinked one or two. Most of my upgrades from here out will be NO DROP. I don't know that I will ever make another piece of armor I will use. That is a tad disapointing.

Why not start adding recipes that result in NO DROP Items. I love the idea of upgrading current player made items in the forge.

What would really solve the problem is to change/improve tradeskills such that providing combines would be a service. For example:

You get a drop on a raid that can be combined with a smithed item to make a nice no drop item?

It's already in game.

Being in game and being widely distributed as the primary and viable outcome of a tradeskill are two entirely different things.

Additionally, there's a big difference between getting a smith to make you parts from drops for other combines, and generically having the ability to apply the skill to any item you already have. The latter would effectively make smithing viable at all levels of the game.

The former basically has the same problem as purely smithed items: You're making gear that will be outclassed at some future date.

[kiztent]

Additionally, there's a big difference between getting a smith to make you parts from drops for other combines, and generically having the ability to apply the skill to any item you already have. The latter would effectively make smithing viable at all levels of the game.

Yes, you are correct. Your method of providing incremental upgrades to armour would require reworking the entire item database. Unfortunately, however, it would end up having the same problem that any of the methods suggested here have. First off -- it would be a great way to twink if you could swap no drop items in a forge. Second, all the same objections to the ability of a lower level smith to obtain the ingredients to make an upgrade still apply - that is, if the upgrade is worth having a casual smith won't be able to get the parts. Because of Aid Grimel, smithing is a commodity service. There's no secret handshake for "real smiths" as opposed to "evil baby eaters from uberguilds" - a 250 smith is a 250 smith.