A Painful Dilemma

[tanarin]

I have a wood elf druid I have used for smithing for quite some time. He's up to 202 but the pain of farming shadowscream has become unbearable.

Today, my main character, a Human bard, came upon some of the guantlets of dark embers, a 15% blacksmithing mod item. His skill in smithing is a 1, from the PotC combine.

Now, would it be less time consuming to get the druid the rest of the way up, or to work with the bard, who has much simpler tradeskill routes? Any imput is appreciated, thank you for your time.

[Hibashira]

Why would your bard have a "simpler" tradeskill route? Cultural components aren't exactly easy to collect either.

[lionwind]

...

Not even a question in my mind. If your bard was a race other than human, I'd say maybe, but we have, without a doubt, the easiest cultural method and a lucrative market for our high end cultural (server depending).

With the gloves, you need to get to what, like 220 to be GM'd? Since you can buy your way to 188, we're talking 30 points.

Thats roughly (I assume 1 stack per skill up) 32-35 stacks of cultural combines, which all in all, isn't that bad. I'm a monk, it takes me forever to solo the seafurries, and I still have managed to work together about 20 stacks over the course of the month, and grinding from 58-61 in PoP, and I'm not playing hardcore or anything. I'd imagine that a VT bard could round up enough seafoams through farming and buying to have their 30 stacks of tempers in less than a month.

I personally think your bard could get 1-220 in a month or two. It would cost of course and obviously you didn't mention your cash flow, but if it took a whimpy monk roughly three months of sporadic smithing and soloing to get 0-215, I'd imagine you could third that at least and then youre right in max skill range.

My two cents.
Lionwind, 61 monk of Tholuxe Paells

[mulleteer]

The bard no question.

I raised my sk de to 252 from 21 in a few weeks. With not that much plat. (15k)

Did banded tell it was trivial.

Then i did ornate tell it was trivial. With the 15% item you fail alot less when skilling up so you get a substantial amount of plat back on resale of the armor to vendors.

Next i did fine steel until 188.

Next I got 4 points doing old scholl cultural to get my self to 192. ( made a decent profit on this) (note this only works if you have the 15% item because the trival is 212 but the required skill is a modified 220)

Then it was easy I did ee rings from 192 to 212 this took like 3 hours. There is even a decent market for ee rings and ee sheets with the increae in ornates droping.

Last I spammed sickels from 212 220 . and congratz you have a modified 252 skill.

Mulleteer Combovoer

[Hethral]

Human Bard, no question. It'll be easier to go 1-220 on him than 202-240 on the druid.

[Cavel]

Human Bard as well here... Then get your WE druid 6AA points to get tailoring and Fletching over 200

[Taraddar]

The bard definitely would have a pretty easy time of it. Do normal routes up to fs plate triving out. Then you need to do 1 or 2 points the hard way and then you can jump on the easy road and start doing ethereal rings till you hit 212. Once you've hit 212 smithing you've got an effective skill of 244 which is pretty much in the good enough category. I'd then start doing cultural combines. Since your bards a human you can probably still sell a fair amount of the fierce armor and probably still manage to sell some of the marr, luminous?, to the froggy twinks. Mix in the CT chain bps, legs and shield and mistletoe sickles depending on your servers market and you'll eventually get your skill up to 250 modified or even raw and make money in the process.

Only catch is you'll need a 220+ brewer to make the tempers for the ethereal stuff and a fair number of bricks. With the skill mod you have and the way cultural is set I'd definitely go with your bard. Just make sure to get his str up as high as you can.

[tanarin]

Thanks for your opinions all. Once I got out of Vex Thal (I posted from inside at the start of an 11 hour raid lol) I went on a smithing frenzy, already up to 87. The druid is a 190 brewer as well, may just finish that one out to use him for that.

[Cavel]

Getting the brewer up to above 220 modified would help you out as a smith.

[Reflan]

Tempers for the cultural armor("blue diamond" or BD armor as it's also called a lot here) use up a blue diamond in the brewing, and some use other difficult or expensive components -- such as essence of sunlight for you, I think, which is expensive and a pain to get, but lets you make the just about the best traditionally tradeskilled warrior armor in the game(I think only barbarian cultural is better).

Anyway, brewing failures will be very expensive and disappointing to you, so get yourself a modified skill of MAX skill. Brewing is extremely easy and quick to raise, and dirt cheap.

And yes, do your bard on the smithing. One of the best things by far is how many points you can get on the ethereal bricks. That will save you oodles of plat and/or tons and tons of time. It took my smith 756 combines to go from 188 to 195 in smithing off shadowscream, which took him a horrible number of hours to camp(swirling shadows needed for that were 1512, at 20 to 30 per hour. Think about it....

So even at the "lower" levels of serious smithing, it can be painfully slow. Get the bricks from your guildies and friends or buy them, whatever. Getting through fine plate is a walk in the park. You can then go from the 190's to what, 212 in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. And from there you have almost no ground to cover till your 15% mod item puts you to max skill.

It's almost obscene how incredibly easy smithing is with a mod item like that. As a 250 smith, believe me, I would love to have those literally hundreds of hours it took me to max skill BACK, without the strain and boredom and frustration that filled them.

Take the gloves and run! I'd say good luck, but I guess you already had that in spades; now all that's left is to enjoy it.

Ah, what the heck -- good luck anyway! Get back to smithing one day on your non-gloved toon if you're feeling especially perverse or insane. Otherwise, your somewhat perversely easy ride to smithing uberdom! You could do 250 in a week.

[tanarin]

End of night 2, up to 188. You guys were definately right

I'm making fast progress and losing little money, failures nearly nonexistant, even on skill-up combines.

The brewing is a pain, got about 6 points on it as well, but still, bleh.