Solstice Robes

[Woody TM]

OK i'm above the 200 mark now. No more rockhpper (Studded), unless I wanted to spend the 2-300pp per pelt on my server for flawless. So I've been looking though a ton of choices and it seems like EVERYONE goes for the Solstice robes.

OK roughly (I prolly butchered some prices n stuff but just to get the idea.) You need a 250 skill in JC or a good friend that does (I have never seen them being sold in bazaar). for the chain which run about 250pp to make, and hope you fail so that you can use it again.

Silk, and a friend that can imbue the emeralds for you (thanks new mass spells).

...and a ton of free slots in your bags for subcombines etc.

I just want to ask people, how often do these fail. I dont mind all the subcombines etc (welcome to 200+ tailoring). Is going though the effort of making everything, farming the silk etc. worth it?

It just seems like Wyvern masks or something would be a ton easier.

Does anyone have any tricks to make the prosses of robe combines easier?

[Myrron]

I think my fail rate was around 90% past 200, got 3/20 on my last run when my skill was 212. No geerlok, of course.

If you are looking for cheap, the problems with arctic wyvern hides are that you need four coldain velium tempers per 2 studs (about 100pp if you buy them, about 50pp if you make them), and you need to farm velium and wyvern hides. With solstice robes, the only farming involved is spider silk, which is much faster than the velium and hides. Robes save you time farming. If cost is no problem though, just buy all your stuff from the bazaar. The other benefit to robes over masks is that on *some* servers, the robes sell well to others, masks are pretty much vendor fodder. On Vaz, robes were selling for around 2k as recently as a few weeks ago and are around 600pp+ now. Masks...well, let's just say you'll never get 600pp for a wyvern mask. Other servers, the robe market is dead, however.

Tips making them? I tend to grab supplies for 6-8 stacks of celestial essences and go off making those and imbuing emeralds while foraging for useful rare forages. It's a thought if you can forage.

--Myrron

[Iumiena]

I did a run recently of 10 stacks of robes. with 250 JC and JCM 2 I never failed a chain (I'm so happy about that). I ended up with roughly 120 stacks of subcombines to do, 20 robes at the end and 6 points in tailoring (from 213 to 219). Now the problem on my server is that robes sell for 150pp so I'm out quite a lot of money.

[Jaasper]

I keep hoping that somone will write a comprehensive guide to tailoring just like the one that was done for smithing but it has not materalized.. So I have looked at most skill up paths and here is what I have found:

Acrylia/rockhopper :
The Good: Cheap to do and the bits are easy to farm for a L65 solo.
The Bad: You will not find the flawless pelts in mass quantity. If you farm them you will get about 1 stack in 4 hrs < as a bonus you will also get a stack of High and supurb pelts which can be sold for a nice chunk of change > Acrylia can be farmed at about the same rate. But that is 8hrs camping per stack of combines. You can buy the pelts and acrylia but man are they expensive and are not avalible in mass quantities.

Wyvern/velium :
The Good : Farming wyvern hides and velium can easily be done at L65.
The Bad : The drop rates are even lower than for hoppers. BUT as a bonus both these camps are good cash farms so you make a good chunk of change while gathering pelts. On one rare night when I had Cobold Scar to myself, I never had to wait for respawn I got about 4 pets per hour and made 500PP/hr in gems.

The real problem with velium is making the studs. Each stud requires 16 celestial essences. I got a smokin deal on 4 stacks of hides ( 1500 for 80 pelts) this required me to make 1280 essences ouch.

Again your not going to be able to make these in bulk, the hides that do get to the bazaar are expensive.

Robes:
The Good: The only part that needs to be farmed for these robes is spider silk. Spider silk can always be purchased in bulk in the bazaar. To buy and make 4 stacks of robes in an afternoon is easy.

The Bad : $$$ these are expensive to make. I make the cost to be 87pp for each falure ( this is buying spider silk at 6pp each ) and 330 for each robe (ok I should say it costs 588 due to the 50% fail rate on the chains).

Now the robes seem to be really expensive until you look at the cost of buying hopper and wyvern hides they are not so expensive any more. which is why I have tried a few alternatives but been coming back to the robes each time.

Things I have not tried: Othmir .. Just cant bring myslf to killing the cute little otters with their fez caps.. someone else can fill in the details here.

Racial robes : Im a Halfer, what do I know about these. Except the ribbons were great way to 188. And after 3 weeks on the market I finally sold off the last of them (at break even price).

Hafer specific stuff : Misty acornes are just too darn hard to get to waste on level ups. I have a stack which I am saving for halfersacks which is going to be my ultimate goal of this madness.

Final words : sell back.. As a general rule if an item is good for skill ups you will not be able to sell it in the bazaar. Even if it is a good item you and everyone else has made 20000 of them and want to dump them on the market as fast as they can. Solstice robes especialy noticable because of the high cost. There will always be somone buying these robes ( the earing is one of the best twink money you can spend ) but every trade skiller is making these things. The only thing that holds this market up at all is that we are all trying our hardest to fail on each combine.

Note: This is how I see it.. none of it is presented as facts.

[drtyaty]

Jaasper,

I would agree with your post for the most part. However, I do not believe that your comment about wyvern hides being expensive is at all accurate. I have several stacks (20+ stacks) of wyvern hides which I have accumulated. Many of these hides were just given to me by farmers killing the wyverns for exp and gems when I would ask for them in /ooc while fishing for cod, which I might add is by far the most time consuming aspect of making wyvern armor. The others not given to me I have bought in the bazaar or from pc's usually at 15-20pp/hide; I refuse to pay more. I also disagree with your assessment of the drop rate on wyvern hides (seem to drop fairly regularly to me, much more regularly than a flawless rockhopper hide).

I do agree that the most costly aspect of this whole process is the coldain temper. I simply buy mine now, mostly due to the fact that the normal price of celestial essence in the bazaar is 4pp/essence, which as you have mentioneed requires 4 essence/combine. That's 16pp right there just for the essence, if you make your own tempers. In addition to the 16 pp just for the essence, you are going to need to buy the other material. I have just found that by the time I purchase all my material, I am not saving that much by making my own coldain temper. Additionally, I figure I am saving myself a ton of time by not making my tempers and also from having to have carpal tunnel surgery by not having to make all those combines (and, if you have made your own, you know exactly what it is I am talking about). At any rate, I simply buy my tempers now.

Wyvern hides are the way to go after robes in my opinion. Yes, you are going to lose lots of money by pursuing this route, but I personally believe my time is better spent than farming hours for one stack of rockhopper hides. I can easily make several K or gain a gob of exp in the amount of time it would take me to farm a stack of rockhopper hides.

As for robes, I leveled a chanter to level eight, just so he could enchant silver (which I will also be using in Erudite cultural). I also have someone in my guild who is more than happy to imbue emeralds for me, and I further believe I have someone willing to make chains for me. Therefore, I have cut down tremendously on my cost of making the chains.

This is just me talking though.

Sincerely,

[Jaasper]

Too bad your not on E.Marr or we could do a hide for fish swap. Fish is not that big a deal for me because I have a fisher mule perma camped in CS. During raids I load up the fisher mule on the second computer and fish/forage (well until that dam shark comes along).

You may be right on the cost of the hides. I read your message and went to the bazaar to see. Most of the hides were in the 50-60 range but somone had a stack at 20 each (so I bought them).

Oh and as an addendum to my previous message I have this bit of advice:

Flemick tells you "No matter which way you choose to go it is going to suck" It is up to you to find the one that sucks the least.

[WallieDruid]

On Othmir fur..

My 2 cp on making othmir fur (caps) for skill ups.

while BELOW 200 tailoring,it seemed like i was succeeding better then half the time... without a geerlock

Othmir fur drops rarely (maybe 1 a quad on average) but you can gather money by vendoring the gems and the Crusty (ie crustation shell) armour that drops. Also they are almost all DBlue to me at 58

The hard (?) part is trying to keep clear mana is stock... but my friend has a 'chanter who droped 1k on all the mass spells, so that has evened out.

The bad news?

On Prexus (at least) it is next to impossible to Bazaar the caps, even at 30pp each they dont move. AND they are not vendor sellable.

To date i think i have ended up giving about 40-50 caps away in noob zones (mostly GFay)

Also, while i used to carry patterns and mana with me to combine when they drop it seemed like i rarely got many skill ups.

[OberonMiM]

if you are doing solstice robes. Find a chanter with jcm2 or higher.

I had a guild chanter easily go 10/10 on a set of gem studded chains

As far as the subcombines. The "blessed dust" combine in the kiln seemed to have a 2.5% fail rate (at 250 skill, out of several batches i ended up with an average of 195 out of 200 successes)

As far as the silk swatches id say 95% success (granted your tailoring isn't as high as that point)

I did them to 207 where i did a batch of 60 cyclone swatches then did ethereal swatches up to 212

[Sylphan]

different way

The raving about Solstise robes started last year when they were the cheap way to skill up -- the selling price was good enough to actually make a profit if your skill was high enough. People still like them when they don't care about tailoring and have no interest in learning the recipes... they just do 1000 of the same combine in a row. But real tailors have better options.

Today cultural robes are clearly best, for those six races. And they sell too... not for enough to be worth the effort, but it's something. But for other races...

Under 200 Solstice robes are competing with Acrylia Studded and LoY Ribbons. Acrylia is just as farmable, and there's a market for it. LoY Ribbons get expensive once you get to the platinum ones, but they're much easier and faster. Either way, Solstise doesn't look so good.

Close to 200 those are trivial but Solstise robes are still failing almost every time, so they start to look good. Some people still prefer to sell Acrylia Reinforced though (especially if they saved the flawless hides from earlier farming), it won't fail too much at this point. The hides look expensive, but if you can sell some tunics/gloves/leggings/sleeves they might pay for themselves. Also it's not too early to make Arctic Wyvern Masks -- it doesn't matter if they always fail.

When you get past, oh, 225 or so, you'll absolutely hate solstice robes because they succeed too often. Then you will want to look for Velious recipes, which also start to succeed more often. Wyvern and othmir are fine... but if you make Black Panther, Haze Panther, Ice Silk Caps, Cobalt Drake Belts, and a few other pieces you can find a steady market and maybe even make a profit on skillups.

Solstice robes still have a niche around 200, but it's entirely possible (and reasonable) to skip them altogether.

[Suva]

I did the solstice robes until somewher ein the 230's before I switched to arctic wyvern masks. I found with the increased robe success rate plus the cost of materials, I could make the arctic wyvern cheaper. The robe market on brell is pretty much dead anyway.

What I did was go fish in CS and auction in the zone to buy the hides from the people exp'ing there. I would get a decent amount a night doing it that way and could get my fish too. I paid the average bazaar price, so it helped the people there not have to set up in the bazaar with em. I kept the bazaar mostly cleaned out and bought velium whenever it was decently priced. It worked out pretty well and I got some cobaly drake hides and othmir fur in the process as well.

Four hides in an hour seems rather low. There were times CS was empty and I would AE the zone and I remember getting more than 4 hides per a clearing.

[drtyaty]

Same

That's exactly the way I obtained most of my wyvern hides. I would just do an ooc while fishing asking for wyvern hides; often times people would just give them to me, other times I paid at the most 20 pp/hide. My experience has been that you can obtain far more hides than you can cobalt.

I also watch for hides in the bazaar, never paying more than 20 pp/hide. I do the same with pieces of velium, also never paying more than 20 pp/piece.

Clestial essence, I wll never pay more than 5 pp/essence, often refusing to pay more than 4 pp/essence, unless supplies are limited; I bought 400+ last night.

[Gryfalia]

My plan is to do Solstice up until I hit 210, then get my 2 free points and burn whatever Solstice I have left.

Then start Acrylia/Velious until I go loopy..

Gryfalia

[drtyaty]

Same

Originally posted by Gryfalia
My plan is to do Solstice up until I hit 210, then get my 2 free points and burn whatever Solstice I have left.

Then start Acrylia/Velious until I go loopy..

Gryfalia

Same!!!!!

[Chenier]

Acrylia vs. Wyvern

Hide
rockhoppers are higher lvls and drop several different qualities of hide, so you chance of getting superb is pretty low

wyverns only drop one kind and the only people who want the hides are tailors for skill ups (exchange for other crap, buy off merchants/bazaar fairly cheap)

Boning
acrylia can be found many places, but it takes forever to gather it. mobs are a bit higher level.

velium is also found many places, but there are many mobs who are pretty low level. Hi. AE the 5th floor of TOFS. /nod nod
and bring a mule to hold weapons and crap for cash farming.

Tannin
well, acrylia has the easy one since it's components are vendor purchasable, but you're gonna be in CS anyway farming hides. med at the beach, fishing, or set up a mule to fish for you. or buy the oil

and then velium temper. well, yeah, this sorta sucks, but if you make it, it is cheaper.

***
For me, the farming that was required for reinf. acrylia just sucked too much - too little amount of combines for the time spent farming. Wyvern, however, was fun farming (nothing like trouncing mobs) and then some clicking.

The unavoidable robes - well, buy the silk, farm the silk, farm the cash, beg a GM jeweler with JM3 to make chains, imbue, sub-combine, sub-combine, sub-combine, combine, combine, combine, spend a fortune and then have a thing that you can't resell even for the cost of the chain? /sigh

At least with Wyvern masks, you get out of WK, the bazaar and PoK.

[drtyaty]

Originally posted by Chenier
Acrylia vs. Wyvern

and then velium temper. well, yeah, this sorta sucks, but if you make it, it is cheaper.

Just wanted to say that I don't believe it is much cheaper, because of the required 4 celestial tempers, and by purchasing your temper from a NPC, you are saving yourself a butload of combines (not worth it in my opinion).

Other than that, couldn't agree with your post more.