Art's Tailoring Quest Ideas

[arturio emerys]

My thread on Tradeskill Improvements...

Please reference the above thread before reading this. Here are my thoughts on how specifically this methodology would apply to tailoring.

First of all, if this method were instituted we would need a method to increase tailoring via quests involving farming items and tradeskill combines to 200. I know something like this has been implemented on a limited basis (to 50 or so) in GoD, but I haven't looked up the details. I envision something like this. Four tailoring quests that each increase your tailoring skill by 50 points each and must be done in order. I would think 20 hours spent on all aspects of these quests would be sufficient time sink per tradeskill. The quest would go something like this.

Hail, Grandmaster Tailor John Weaver.

Well, hello Arturio, interested in [Tailoring]?

I am interested in tailoring.

Well that is good to hear, it is always nice to have someone join the craft. Tailoring allows us to create clothing that is stylish and serviceable. Arturio, I can [teach the basic] tailoring skills to you.

Please teach the basic tailoring skills to me.

Alright, but in exchange I will need you to do some leg work, both to gather some of the raw materials and to compensate me for my time. Are you willing to [gather raw materials]?

Yes, I will gather raw materials.

Excellent. First of all, please take this tailoring kit that you will use. Also, you will need to gather 80 spider silks. Once you have them, bring them to me and I will give you special heady kiolas to cure the spider silk.

You have received an apprentice tailoring kit! [lore, no drop]

You give John Weaver 80 spider silks.

You have received 80 spider silks and 40 Weaver's Kiolas.

Now, Arturio, please combine two spider silks in the kit with a single Kiola to produce a cured silk bolt.

Now, the spider silks should drop in a nearby newbie zone. For low enough level chars, these will give exp, but not a lot. The spider silks should be no drop. The goal of these quests is to learn tailoring, not make farmers rich. I would match the drop rate and skill up rate so that it takes on average 5 hours to gather enough silk and combine them and get 50 tailoring skill ups. Whenever you run out of silk, go gather 80 more, give them to John Weaver and get 40 Kiolas and continue combining. The trivial for this recipe will be 50. The tailoring kit for this point is only good to make these formulas. Once you get to 200, you destroy it.

The next step would be to learn to cut cloth to a pattern.

Hail, Grandmaster Tailor John Weaver.

Hello Arturio, good to see you again. Now that you are an Apprentice Tailor, are you [interested in learning more]?

Yes, I am interested in learning more.

Excellent, now you will need to learn to accurately cut cloth following patterns. I need some tunics made, and if you would cut them it would be beneficial to me and you would learn this important skill. Get some kobald tunic patterns and give them to me and I’ll provide you with the cloth. Combine the cloth, a pattern and the shears in your kit to cut each piece. In Steamfont mountains the kobald runtlings are known to have the patterns you need.

You have received Apprentice Cutting Shears! [lore, no drop]

You give John Weaver 80 kobald tunic patterns.

You receive 80 kobald tunic patterns.
You receive 80 bolts of plain cloth.

Go combine the shears, cloth, and pattern in the apprentice tailoring kit. When you run out of items, buy 80 more patterns and give them to John Weaver for more cloth and continue until you hit 100 tailoring skill. You can sell the tunics you made to John for a tiny bit of money. Again, the amount of time needed to do this part should be about 5 hours to farm the patterns and do the combines on average. Trivial for this stage is 100.

Hail, Grandmaster Tailor John Weaver.

Hello Arturio, good to see you again. I must say your progress is excellent, a little more work and you will become a [journeyman tailor].

How do I become a journeyman tailor?

You have received an apprentice tailoring needle.

Well, it will not be easy. Now you must learn to reinforce leather armor pieces. To do this you must sew the reinforcing pieces to the armor to increase its strength. I would hate to waste precious forged pieces on your training. The gnoll smiths of blackburrows produce gnoll forged boning. Go gather a supply of them and show them to me.

You give John Weaver 80 Gnoll Forged Boning pieces to John Weaver.

You have received 80 Gnoll Forged Boning Pieces!
You have received 80 Leather Practice Tunics!

Excellent, combine the boning with the tunics I gave you. They are for practice only so don’t worry about messing them up, but you will need thread to sew the boning to the tunic using the needle I gave you.

Buy some thread from John Weaver and combine in the apprentice tailoring kit the boning, tunics, needle and thread. Trivial for this recipe will be 150. When you run out of combines, go gather more Gnoll Forged Boning Pieces and continue as before. You can sell back what you produce to John Weaver for a tiny amount of cash. As before, it should take about 5 hours to farm the Gnoll Forged Boning Pieces and do the combines to hit 150 skill level.

Hail, Grandmaster Tailor John Weaver.


Hello again Arturio. Your progress is quite remarkable. I have only 1 skill left to teach you, that of adorning the tunic. Are you [interested]?

I am interested.

Wonderful. No piece of clothing is truly complete without some adornment. The Avaik Young in Butcherblock Mountains can be used to gather Avaik Tail Feathers. Those will make adequate training pieces. Show them to me when you have gathered some.

You give John Weaver 80 Aviak Tail Feathers.

You have received 80 Aviak Tail Feathers
You have received 80 Reinforced Practice Tunics.

Excellent! Combine the apprentice needle, thread, feathers and tunics in your apprentice tailoring kit.

Buy the thread and combine the 4 items in the tailoring kit. When you run out of supplies, gather more feathers and give them to John Weaver and buy more thread. Continue until you reach a skill level of 200.

Hail, Grandmaster Tailor John Weaver.

Arturio, I am pleased to see you! Congratulations on your new status of Master Tailor! Truthfully, this is just the beginning of your career as a tailor, there is much to learn yet. Please take this treatise on tailoring. It has much information about hides, curing agents and tanning agents as well as different forms of reinforcement and adornment to clothing. Please know that there are many things even the Grandmaster Tailors don’t know, there are many tannins and reinforcements and adornments we are unfamiliar with. These come from exotic locations and can be quite dangerous to obtain. However, the rewards for crafting pieces using them will be quite obvious.

You have received a Tailoring Recipe Treatise.

And that at long last is my idea for how I think the tradeskill quests should work. Please read the thread at the top for my ideas on how I think tradeskills should work past the quest stage.

Let me know what you think.

Art

[Heartsong_Steelsoul]

As I just commented to someone else - this is NOT a forum for talking to EQ developers, though they have been known to post rarely. You may want to consider posting in the expanded version of SOE's forums.

[Pootle]

all this will do is give Aid Grimmel tradeskillers a simple way of getting tailoring up to 200.

Your idea gives young players a nice way of collecting stuff for tradeskills, but seriously, I could kill every gnoll in BB in about 5 mins just by running round, agroing them all and one cast of an AOE. by the time i had looted every corpse i should imagine they would have respawned.

The 0 to 50 quests are a nice way of introducing people to tradeskills, but any further than that would make them a joke.

A nice idea, but i am one of the people who think tradeskills should be hard. And to be honest i much prefered it when a multi tradeskill player was a rare sight on any server, not every other high level guild member buying their way up to the AG Earing.

<sigh> those were the days!

[Galain]

This would make a high Tailoring skill worthless since everyone could be a 200 tailor in no time with minimal effort. While we are at it, I think the trivial on the Abysmal quests should be 1 and that no trade should have completely vendor buyable ingredients. Every skill should be as difficult as Tailoring and Smithing.

[arturio emerys]

other thread on my tradeskill ideas

What I see, is a system that has 7 major tradeskills (baking, brewing, fletching, jewelcraft, pottery, smithing and tailoring) and 4 minor ones (research, poisonmaking, tinkering and alchemy). Now research, if what I hear is correct, you can buy it all the way to 200. Jewelcraft is storebought to 250, brewing is storebought to 248, baking is storebought to 191, Fletching to 202, pottery to 199 and smithing and tailoring are storebought up to about 100 or so. Tailoring and smithing require multiple farmed items per combine and other than patterns or molds all recipe items are farmed. Also, the tempers are farmed as are various sub combine items for tailoring. The result, people spend hundred of thousands of plat GMing Tailoring and Smithing or spend many hundreds if not thousands of actual hours farming the items to GM them. Is this what is fun about tradeskills?

What I would think would be fun would be a system where the acquiring of the skill is not the goal, the products produced with the skill is. Set up the system where players can make items that are good useful items. Once they get the skill that I am calling master level, 200, they can then begin attempting to make custom armor for themselves and others that as final products would be good useable gear. Every tradeskill armor or weapon would be a sort of tradeskill quest like a miniversion of the 8th shawl or aid grimel. The fun part would be the experimenting to figure out what the tradeskill "augments" do and designing a combination of them that yield armor or weapons that fill the needs of who is going to use them. Once you do that, hunting down the creatures that drop the tradeskill items to make them would be fun too. Make the creatures and drop rate rare enough that making the item is still an achievement. Also, since it is a multistep system, peoples armor would continue to get better as they work on it, but people wouldn't really feel the need to throw something out that they spent so much time working on.

Under the system I am invisioning, going from 200 to 250 would be quite a chore. All of the good useful items would trivial from 200 to 300, depending on how good the item was. Skilling up would solely happen when you suceed on a combine. To be able attempt a combine in that range, you would have to farm the items and that would be the trick. If someone wanted to have a piece of custom armor they could farm the items themselves and have a tradeskiller attempt the combine for them, if it fails the tradeskill augments would be lost, but not the unaugmented item.

Again, remember, I am not necessarily advocating this as a replacement for the EQ system, the amount of work would be prohibative. But EQII or perhaps even some other game company might see this discussion and take the spirit behind it if not the specific details and use them as the founding principles of their tradeskill system in a new game.

Art

[Niellya]

Just . . . No.

[arturio emerys]

Would you care to elaborate? Exactly what part of these ideas did you not like? I am attempting to develop a system that would be an improvement over the flawed system we have now. Bear in mind the tailoring tradeskill quest I proposed is just the first part of a larger system that would allow people to produce custom armor that is as good as nearly all drops in a game.

In case you didn't read the other thread, Ill summarize it.

New process for making armor

Step one Combine Hide or Skin and pattern with shears in a kit trivial varies depending on what armor piece you are making, but is in the 150 - 180 range.
This produces armor with 4 tradeskill augment slots...tanning or curing agent, reinforcement slot, adornment slot and imbuing slot. The type of hide or skin and quality determines base stats.

Step two Combine that piece of armor in a kit with a tanning or curing agent that is either a mob dropped item or crafted in brewing or alchemy. The type and quality of curing agent or tannin determines the stats added by the curing agent augment. Item is still droppable. Trivial for this step is 180 to 210 depending on armor type.

Step three Combine the piece of armor in a kit with a reinforcement augment. The reinforcement augment can be made from smithing or from mob drops. The type of reinforcement augment determines what stats are added to the piece. Item is still droppable. Trivial for this range will be 210 to 250 depending on piece made and type of augment.

Step four Combine the piece of armor in a kit with an adornment augment. The adornment augment can be embroidery, mob tokens or jewelcraft fashioned broaches. The type of adornment augment determines the stats added to the piece. Item is still droppable. Trivial for this range will be 250 to 300 depending on the type of adornment augment and armor piece.

Step five By completing quests similar to LDON, you can have in effect purchase imbueing augment items. These can be focus effects, FTII, Regeneration, Vengeance, Drones of Doom, Savage Roots, etc. The better the imbue augment, the more points it will take to earn them. This one will be a no fail combine, and the final product would be no drop. Also, the imbuing augments themselves would be no drop.

Gear augmented to this level would be on par with drop items from most boss mobs. I do see that most people would scream if the best loot in the game was tradeskill made (I'm not sure why, I don't understand this mindset).

This same type of structure could be done to smithing for making weapons. You may think this makes tradeskills too easy, I see it making them useful. Now, what does having a 250 in tailoring buy you? A few recipies that are useful and marketable. Very few. The reward isn't worth the investment of time to get to 250. Under this system I am proposing, the skill number wouldn't be the goal, what you make would be. The skill would just determine how sucessful you will be in making items.

What could make it interesting is the augments can be made using other tradeskills from mob dropped items or some of the augments could be mob dropped themselves. The rarity of the augment would determine just how much it improves the armor piece. I envision a wide variety of augments and augment recipies of varying quality. The number of combinations people could have for their armor would be nearly limitless. Also, gear that people have worked hard to make and improve over the levels would be less likely to be thrown away when an upgrade drops.

Again, I am explaining this in terms of Everquest because that is the frame of reference we all have, but this could just as easily apply to another game or a game that doesn't exist yet. From that standpoint, would a tradeskill system that worked in this fashion appeal to you, and if not, why not? I can always tweak the idea, because that really is all it is, an idea.

thanks

Art

[bazil]

This would take away what all the current 250 tailors have earned. All the grandmaster tailors that have put in the hours to attain their status would be the ones who would be nerfed so to speak in this instance. I would not like to see this happen! Try selling anything when the market is flooded with them?