Frustrations of POP Leather Tailoring -- Tempers and Smiths

[Quaras]

I have to admit that I am very frustrated with high end POP tailoring. Perhaps this is SOE's revenge on tailors after having relatively nice high end Velious items. Perhaps, its just a boon to the smithing community; however, I am at a loss as to how anyone is making high end leather armor in POP.

The main reason for my frustration is the inability to find ingredients for tempers. Any metallic substance or magma crystals are sensibly being routed to high level smiths for inferno armor. Similarly all of the elemental leathers are dependent on such tempers. I am not shocked that as of this date no one has made a firehide cap.

This is not intended as a rant, but I am curious to see whether folks are making POP leathers or have instead abandoned such pursuits for POP silks and other tailored items.

[munwin]

If people want PoP leathers stuff made they can get into xp groups and farm the matereals. If the bing me the stuff i'll click combine. Simple as that. I refuse to farm all that crap to make leather, when im not going to be using it. But since Elemental Leather patterns drop like candy for us and a few slots are already rotting, not much demand for it.

Munwin

[Sylphan]

The PoP recipes were just not well balanced. The tempers are generally the rare ingredient. But tempers are also needed for each step of the subcombines: bits, studs, sheets, etc. The result is that leather and plate armors use up a ton of tempers in subcombines... you can make more chainmail per temper than the others.

A similar problem happened with tae ew... all the smiths prefer chainmail because the leather and plate use up more rare ingredients.

If the tempers were common and the metal was the rare ingredient it might be more balanced. Or if water could be used for some subcombines instead of the tempers.

As an active smith I gave up on making anything but chainmail within a few weeks after PoP was released. There wasn't a huge amount of complaining because cultural platemail is still pretty good... we just do cultural plate and PoP chain.

[Lilosh]

If people want PoP leathers stuff made they can get into xp groups and farm the matereals. If the bing me the stuff i'll click combine. Simple as that. I refuse to farm all that crap to make leather, when im not going to be using it. But since Elemental Leather patterns drop like candy for us and a few slots are already rotting, not much demand for it.

Munwin

:-(

Stop making me cry, Cleric.

-Lilosh

[Karanthal]

Its a shame the elemental molds/patterns are nodrop. I guess they dont want everyone eventually wearing top end armour.

[Taraddar]

Sylphan and munwin hit the 2 big reasons I think.

1) planar leather seems to be fairly common and most guilds have less monks/druids/bst than most other classes. These 2 factors usually lead to early saturation of elemental armor for those classes.

2) Leather armors use alot more tempers which are the limiting part for the combines than chain armor does. So you can get alot more chain armor made for the same amount of tempers than you can leather. The same is also true of the plate. This results in the chain being the most appealing to make for the amount of results.

[Delores Mulva]

Re: Taraddar

You're off a little on both points.

1) Elemental leather armour is about as likely as any other armour type, assuming you're killing all mobs equally. What really makes it overabundant is the number of leather classes, and members of that class, in the average elemental raid guild. There's only three leather classes (vs. 3 chain, 4 silk, and 5 plate), and there's almost no members of one of the classes (BST) due to the newness of the class. So just like you pointed out, those classes get saturated quickly and don't require tradeskill-produced items to fill gaps. There's also many drops available better than tradeskill items for leather classes (the hat in Air, the Aura of Daring pants from Water), and the first elemental god a guild can usually kill drops the leather-class tunic. The other classes, especially plate, don't have these intermediate drops and require tradeskill items to fill in the gap.

2) Tempers has nothing to do with it. For leather, a bracer takes 1 temper, cap and sleeves take 1.5, leggings, gloves, and boots take 2 tempers, a tunic takes 2.5. For chain, bracers take 1.5 tempers, coif, sleeves, gloves, and boots take 2 tempers, and leggings and tunic take 2.5 tempers. Chain takes as many or more tempers than leather.

Delores Mulva
Lotus Cult
Quellious

[Idana Phoenixfyre]

Its a shame the elemental molds/patterns are nodrop. I guess they dont want everyone eventually wearing top end armour.

I'm pretty sure the patterns/molds are dropable, as I have seen them for sale on vendors in the bazaar. It's the made item itself that is no drop. You can get the pattern (if you have enough pp), you just have to do the combine yourself.

I have to agree with the original point of this post though... The tailor made armor for PoP is way too hard to gather materials to make. Even in XP groups, if you are lucky you get a 1:6 chance to random on any temper component drops and when you get one drop in four or five hours it makes for a frustrating situation. To boot, with PoTC and the Aid Grimmel quest, there are way more people with GM tradeskills competing for drops. I've got stacks of all kinds of hides and silks that I have no hope of ever using, even WITH XP groups in the target zones. To add insult to injury, only high end guilds are able to be flagged for some of the zones and they are keeping the drops in house to make armor for their own characters (and fair enough) so the components aren't to be had in the bazaar, for any price.

I'm not sure what point there was in making these items so impossible to create, but I'm not going to worry about it. A few expansions down the line no one will want this armor either. :?

Lol tradeskilling is really a thankless pursuit but I doubt most folks do it for the glory.

I

EDITED for typos

[Suva]

The ornate molds are dropable, the elemental ones are not.

[Idana Phoenixfyre]

Ahhhh =/ Well that's cruddy.

[Aluaeia]

You can still buy elemental patterns, it's just more of a pain.

I paid 100k for my elemental boots.

[Reflan]

Wish I knew what you were talking about on buying elemental. I'm assuming you must be flagged for elemental planes, in which case, why not just go earn the darn things yourself.

Nice price, btw.

Ornate chain is generally 200k on my server. Cheapest I've ever seen is 160k. The tunic has 50 more HP and 7 more raw AC than my COV(dragon quest) velious tunic, and less wisdom and mana. In other words, not worth 160k or 200k or anything even close, if anything at all.

[Daethaan]

What's further frustrating is that we not only have to compete with smiths for materials but also potters and fletchers:

Liquefied Earth
Air Arachnid Silk
Slarghilug Kelp Strand

And after failing 2 out of 7 elemental curing agents at 250 brewing, PoP tailoring just isn't worth the effort.

[Saleani]

Ornate molds and patterns are droppable on regular servers, finished product is no-drop.
Elemental molds and patterns are no-drop on regular servers, finished product is no-drop.

If elemental molds were droppable, I believe that they would be selling for less than ornate, because more elementals drop than ornates.

The reason certain slots for ornates are so dang rare, is that the named who used to drop them, were nerfed long ago. For example, the named wraith in tactics can drop a wrist pattern or mold, and now its like the 1 in 1000 drop. Who drops the hand patterns or molds? Almost no one knows.