Specific Question: Those of you that used Sickle's to level

[eqdoctress]

sickles

I do sickles occasionally for skill ups and also to help friends get their sickles for the Earring of solstice quest.

I started trying at skill 197 and usually get one sickle and one skillup.

My basic skilling up route is Shadowscream armor.

My recent run of sickles ( 20 tries ) was zero skill up but 4 successes at skill 203. Made 4 guildmates very happy

I wouldnt recommend using sickles as a skilling up route though, if only farming shadowscream wasnt so tiresome.

[TheGiantOne]

Hmm...

I don't consider myself a CASH COW LOL but...I went from 188 to GM making sickles. I tried shadowscream armor but 1 skill up out of 100 just didn't do it for me. BAD RNG..BAD RNG.

I did it with 1432 attempts. Yeaa I know some of you are saying but that would be around 429k at 300pp cost for each.

Let me give you the number of attempts so you have a true picture of what it takes.

(22 skill ups) 188 - 210 = 1000 attempts / Ratio: 1 skill up every 46 attempts.
(29 skill ups) 211 - 240 + trophy = 432 attempts / 1 skill up every 15 attempts.

I made a profit of about 30k. You will need a bank of at least 100k - 150k to try this as you will go in the hole first before you get some of it back. I used my GM in Fletching to sell a few uber bows to provide plat for this. Once you get past 210 you will find you will be hitting a ratio of 1 sickle per every 4 attempts. So what happens is the following:

Starting at 210 these were the results.

Every 100 attempts
Cost: 30,000pp
25 sickles made
25 Sickles sold at 1500pp each = 37,500pp
37,500pp - 30,000pp = 7,500pp NP

By the time I reached close to GM it was more like 1 : 2.5 ratio so a much larger profit.

And included in the costs I payed others to make imbued emeralds and celestial essence and blessed dust of Tunare. Not because I am lazy but it freed up a lot of time for me to actually work on skill up points.

You could lower your costs by making your own sub combines and this would be approximate cost for you.

Per attempt:
Sapphire and Ruby and Emerald = 237pp
Celestial Essence = 6pp
Imbued Emerald = 14pp (for emerald) and a very good friend
Jar of Acid = 1pp
Molds = 13pp
Mistletoe Temper = 4pp

Total Costs = 275pp

Savings of 25pp per attempt so overall would save you 35,800pp which would be a nice savings.

However let me caution you about something. Be wary you DO NOT CRASH the sickle market doing this. I did not flood the market with 100 sickles in a day either. If you do so you will undercut yourself forcing the price down below 1000pp each.

Be patient and try and sell your sickles during a time period when hardly anyone else has a large amount for sale.

GM Smith as of 2 days ago
AKA Sickle King for a while

[wyrmbane_]

save time / money

I expect you are at skill 188.

Mistletoe sickles from 188 to 201. 23 attempts, which I believe you have that amount made.

Once you get to 201, buy a geerlock. Buy every brick of ethereal energy you can find. Make rings with the geerlok until you hit 211. Then, take off the geerlock and make rings until 221.

Much faster and easier on the wrist / pocketbook.

wyrmbane

[Kittyda]

Ethereal Rings

It was my understanding that the rings were a level restricted combine, at 220. A Geerlock only gives you a 5% boost, so you'd have to have a 210 skill with a geerlock before you could even attempt this combine. Since is reportedly trivials at 212, you could only get 2 points out of it.

Correct?

[Laearya Lifeblood]

Re: Ethereal Rings

It was my understanding that the rings were a level restricted combine, at 220. A Geerlock only gives you a 5% boost, so you'd have to have a 210 skill with a geerlock before you could even attempt this combine. Since is reportedly trivials at 212, you could only get 2 points out of it.
Correct?

Correct, feasibly with a geerlok, you can only get the 2 points. Now if I could snag a 15% hammer, I'd be very happy, lol.

I expect you are at skill 188.

Actually, I'm at 204 atm Haven't made any combines yet, have most of the parts ready for them now, but hot weather/raiding makes it a bit longer to get to

[aamedorpo]

well supposing a 1 skill per 20 combines average rate and considering that you will fail most sickles before 225 giving you a generious 50% success rate on the total run, before sell back you are talking 325,000pp from 200-250 supposing you were able to sell your 50% of successes for cost, its only 162,500pp mileage may vary but thats a rough Idea of the cost of MTS's. I tried them from 213 and quickly ran through half of my saved 70k bank account for 5 points. not worth it considering how easy SS is to farm

Aamedor Armonius
65 cleric
Vaz
228 smithing (thanks aid grimel)
Edit: math was way off was calculating if each sicle was 6.5k instead of a stack

[Taushar]

Ok, tried a stack last night and will continue to try. I am at 216 atm, wisdom of 320 when combining and have my trophy already. I did a run of 19, after 1 failure on sub combine, and got 4 sickles and zero skill up. I am still hopeful that I can get a point per stack in the long run. Assumptions are 300pp per attempt, 1 skill up per 30 combines on worst cast or 265pps (what I actually spent) per attemp and 1 skill up per 20 combines for best case. If that is the case the I am expecting to spend anywhere from 180kpp to 306kpp for the total run. From that, if I can make average of 6-8 sickles per stack of attemp, then I would expect to recoup about 6k to 8kpp per stack (Xev price seems to be about 1kpp per sickle) or 204kpp to 272kpp for the run. so at worst case, I can get there spending about 100kpp.

One thing I didn't like is spending time making sub components. I am trying to buy all mistletoe tempers and blessed dust of tunare for the run so my cost would be on the higher end. That would leave me with only 3 sub combines to do. Using my boxed mule to hold items, I think I can go through about 2-3 stacks per night. I would expect that I can do this for about 150kpp. Will keep you posted.

Taushar

[Eidolon Faer]

Actually, the reason I said not to bother with Sickles is that below 220 or so your success rate with them is gonna SUCK.

You get FAR more frequent skillups with items you mostly-always succeed at (but are still nontrivial, of course) than you do when dealing with items that rarely succeed.

Aside from the major expense involved, working with lower-trivial combines will get you closer to that (IMO overly-optimistic) 1 for 20 rate that's being thrown around here.

Sickles are GREAT for chipping away those last few points to 250, but they are really not practical for the 200-220 range.

[Ndaara]

I do a combination of acrylia, sickles, high elf cultural, and shadow scream for skilling up.

At 224 skill now. my most recent run was a stack of sickles and a whopping 3 successes, but i got a point !

For sickles: i started sickles at 203 skill (which i got to on fine steel bracers before the changes went through a year ago, yay me). worst case 0 out of 20 success, best case 6 out of 20 at skill 223.

I buy ALL the essence, mistletoe temper, and blessed dust of tunare because failing those low-trivial combines makes me want to throw my computer out the window, so my actual cost for combines is generally closer to 450 per. Doing the math here, i am not breaking even on the sickles by any stretch, but they do sell slowly. I just stock up on the dust, temper, and essence as i see them priced reasonably in the bazaar, and when i have 4 stacks of each i go make a stack of attempts.

I never put more than a few on my trader at a time, unlike most of the other new smiths on my server /sigh I never undercut either, i won't go below 1500 for sickles. I wish i'd had the plat to do smithing sooner when everyone agreed to stick to 2000 for the sickles. i still wouldn't make any money on them but at least i wouldn't be losing so much :P

[Reflan]

I started sickles at 209. Didn't make many sickles, but considering the value of my time, it wasn't too much worse than shadowscream for long.

[Loralin]

I used sickles to skill up from 240 to 250.

In the low 200s I found sickles to have a horrible skill up rate, once past 230'ish the skill up rate was much better.

My own advice would be to do shadowscream to the mid-late 230s and then switch over to sickles.

[sumamael]

I used sickles to skill up from 200-ish to 238 with my human smith just right after last year's may patch (when the trivials changed), I got very rich from it (made more cash on sickles than on cultural armor even with the sucky success rate).

Hate me yet? :P

However this isn't true anymore due to the market being saturated and the up and coming smiths pushing the shickle prices below the actual cost.

PS: yea, the skill up rate making shickles gets much better after 220-230ish or so

[Cavel]

Sumamael I do not hate you... But could you loan me a few 100K plat LOL