Coiled springs

[Bushnell]

I am 257, and many of the things I need to make to get to 300 take coiled springs. As we all know, the springs only drop in one zone, and with fewer people playing, and those mostly off in the new DoN zones, coiled springs are getting harder to get. I am only level 57, so can't solo there, and am having a harder time finding a group. I am running into a very frustrating wall with the springs. I make my living solely by selling tinkered things, so this lack of coiled springs will negatively affect my livelihood soon. My buddy Saranas came up with a most excellent idea - they should put the coiled springs on the same vendor in PoI that sells the steel casings. That way they don't have to worry about newbie tinkers having too easy a skill path, but we master tinkers can still ply our trade. Saranas and I sent feedback on Fennin Ro - I would encourage the rest of you to do the same on your servers.

Bushnell of Fennin Ro

[GrimwoodCT]

things, so this lack of coiled springs will negatively affect my livelihood soon. My buddy Saranas came up with a most excellent idea - they should put the coiled springs on the same vendor in PoI that sells the steel casings. That way they don't have to worry about newbie tinkers having too easy a skill path, but we master tinkers can still ply our trade. Saranas and I sent feedback on Fennin Ro - I would encourage the rest of you to do the same on your servers.

Bushnell of Fennin Ro

If you are strong enough to fight to the PoI vendor, you are strong enough to fight in PoI. You just want an easy path for the sake of ease, not for any semblance of balance.

[Evram2]

That way they don't have to worry about newbie tinkers having too easy a skill path

Are you kidding???
One could easily hire a rogue to walk to the vendor to shop for you. I used to actually have a monk friend that I paid to "flop" to the vendor in the early days of PoP, when SoS rogues were hard to find. They could buy several bags full of springs, and collapsed containers would take you straight to 242 skill.
If you don't think that making stacks and stacks of collapsed is an easy skill up route, you should revisit the recipies.

Collapsed Sewing Kit:
226 trivial, cost: 3.609pp + coiled spring

Collapsed Toolkit:
242 trivial, cost: 6.293pp + coiled spring

Currently, the best vendor skill up route is to 262 on Gauze Presses at 153.403pp. Now, also note that the steel casings from the vendor in PoI are NOT stackable, thus further limiting the number that can be carried away from him at any time. Coiled springs are stackable, thus, one could theoretically walk away with 1600 springs on one toon in one walk into PoI.
Now thats what I call unbalancing.

[Druegar]

Currently, the best vendor skill up route is to 262 on Gauze Presses at 153.403pp.

I don't understand what you mean by "vendor skill up route". Are you referring to the price at which vendors purchase goods from us or were you referring to an item that can be made with wholly vendor-purchasable items? If the latter, please tell me what vendor sells Pinions and Steel Ball Bearings.

[Kakg]

Currently, the best vendor skill up route is to 262 on Gauze Presses at 153.403pp.

As has been pointed out you still have to get the pinions and ball bearins which are not vendor sold. IMHO using coiled springs for skillups is a mugs game. Save them for high margin items and use the cash to pay for other combines. I don;t know your server but on mine there just isn't enough market to use Anizok's for skilling and still turn a profit and the thought that someone might be dumping such an item to a vendor just makes me want to cry. Such a waste of a good spring.

Spend some time chatting with high end players who use Plane of Fire for AA grinding. Offer them 10-15pp per brick of molten ore with the option of getting some molten bow cams and they will be very happy. The ore only sells to vendors at 7pp so any higher offer will be welcome especially if they think they are helping someone who will do bow cam combines for them later.

Then make good freinds with ranger who wants to improve their fletching. Group with them in PoI and ask them to let you have the grease they forage. Make them the offer of some of the bow cams you are making and they will probably have a wide grin on their faces.

And result? No more than 15 to 20pp per combine and your name well spread about for tinkering jobs later.

[Evram2]

If the latter, please tell me what vendor sells Pinions and Steel Ball Bearings.

I don't know about any of your servers, but I have these things coming out of my eyeballs. I have so many of them, and they drop so often, and NO ONE wants them, that I don't even consider the fact that they are a mob drop. I guarantee that I could walk the vendors in PoTranq and PoK right now, and net at a minimum, 1.5 stacks of each. I have gotten as many as 5 stacks of each just by farming the vendors in those two zones at one time. I'd be willing to bet that the drop rate of each of them is at least triple that of the springs, possibly higher.

But yes, technically, the anit-grav unit is the last thing that you can make purely from NPC vendor sold items.

[Ixiola]

Are you kidding???
Collapsed Toolkit:
242 trivial, cost: 6.293pp + coiled spring

Wish it was. Recently the price of small bricks of high quality ore from a vendor went from 6ish plat each to 18+! Change happened since the release of DoN. I actually don't skill up on these anymore, but do sell them from time to time in the bazaar.

[Evram2]

Whoa, anyone know why they jacked the price up so much on them?

[Brodybeard]

Whoa, anyone know why they jacked the price up so much on them?

I suspect (haven't checked) that the price change was made to match the cost of the other new vendor-purchased cultural armor metals.

[Sanadila]

I don't know about any of your servers, but I have these things coming out of my eyeballs.

Count yourself extremely lucky. On lowere population servers that don't have a lot of mid-level toons, finding these on vendors is extremely hard. I'm lucky to get a stack a month if I vendor dive religiously.

[Bushnell]

Molten cams take clockwork grease, also dropped in PoI. I am glad you are so lucky as to have a fletcher ranger friend at exactly the right moment in their skill-up path to be willing to get grease for you, but I don't. Please tell me how I would go about finding such a person, especially when there is NO ONE at all hunting PoI when I go there now? As I mentioned in my first post, I am 57 - I do not hunt my way to the vendor, because I can't survive PoI alone - a guildie rogue shops for me.

You guys are fiddling while Rome burns. It is getting really scarey. I have not seen anyone selling coiled springs in the Bazaar for over a week, and the only clockwork grease is going for 500pp. Yes, I can prolly beg a group of guildies to hunt PoI with me (everyone wants to hunt the fabled stuff and DoN right now, but they would prolly do it as a favor). However, when I have hunted there, I am lucky to get one coiled spring an hour. I work 10-hour days, and have to do my errands etc on weekends, leaving me very few hours to play. Up till now, I have usually sold at least one item that takes a coiled spring a night on my trader char (collapsed tradeskill kit, meteorological rocket, or one of the devices). There used to be a steady supply of coiled springs for sale in the Bazaar, or I could run up to PoI and yell I was buying and get a bunch from the tons of people who were hunting there. In my available hunting time, assuming guildies will hunt there with me every weekend (which they won't, nice as they are), I could get one or two a week. Bye bye collapsed tradeskill kits on Fennin Ro, since Saranas and I are the ONLY people who sell them, and he is having the same problem I am. Forget about being worried about skilling up: I am giving up on that, to conserve my precious supply of coiled springs (BTW, I was skilling up with Chierometric Lockpick Devices). I am now worried about making a living as a tinker.

You guys think Saranas's idea is so terrible; please propose a better one for fixing this, and one that is possible for people from medium-sized family guilds on servers with half the players gone. I don't really care HOW it gets fixed: I just care that it IS fixed, or there will be no more minimizers or maximizers, no more collapsed tradeskill kits, no more planar bows. None of these are life and death, but they all make playing easier and more fun, and with WoW stealing players every day, I think it's a really bad idea to make playing less easy and less fun.

Bushnell of Fennin Ro

[Fulminate]

If they put coiled springs on the PoI vendor, odds are that they will reset the vendor sale price on them to 100p or more per, just to keep the skill up options (mucho plat vs mucho time) the same.

And vendors selling coiled springs at 100p+ would screw people like me, who get springs by watching vendor stocks.

[Kakg]

You guys are fiddling while Rome burns.

Fiddling, Tinkering, Pottering........ all amounts to the same thing.

I think you're missing the point of your own argument. The problem is not that coiled springs are hard to get but that server populations have dropped and those which are left are not grinding in PoI. This is not a problem confined to just your server or to just tinkering, it affects all of the tradeskillers. This week I've noticed how slow the vendors in PoT have been to fill up with trash because so few people are in the Planes just now while DoN is fresh and the Fableds are dropping. The only realistic solution for this is to transfer to a server with higher populations of lower level characters..... not a particulary good solution I'll admit.

I really would not welcome springs being sold by any vendor as part of their normal stock. Yes they are hard to get just now, they were never easy to get before though. But to make them vendor sold would wipe out the margins we make on them. They are high value items just now specifically because the springs are hard to come by, make it easy and the collapsibles will be selling for cost just like geerloks do.

As for the ranger.............. OK you caught me, I'll admit to cheating there, I two box mine.

[Bushnell]

Fulminate, I shop carefully all the time too. I have not seen a coiled spring on a vendor in WEEKS on my server (please see above as well), so that option is not working anymore either. Again I am not wedded to the coiled spring on a vendor idea, which was not even my idea, and would be glad to hear any other practical ideas people have for fixing this problem.

Bushnell of Fennin Ro

[Evram2]

Remember also, you imply that this is a TINKERING problem. It is not. Look at bakers for instance. The new recipies that have come out in the last three expansions haven't been big boons to them, like us, their expansion was PoP. With the massive drop in the number of people in PoP, they are having the same sort of issues that we are with tradeskill drops. So, should we start selling Jord meat, mephit meat, and Reruga crab on NPC vendors? Frankly, we all know it is not a plausible solution, nor is it one SOE will even consider. Your biggest arguement seems to be the difficulty in "making a living" at tinkering. If this is your major goal, then you are tinkering for the wrong reasons. You are spoiled by the Tinkering glory brought about by the PoP expansion.
Anyone who was a Tinker before PoP tinkered to tinker. It was one of the few RP tradeskills. It was prestigious. It was fun. It wasn't terribly useful in the real world. It used to be so fun finding a warrior or a rogue gnome, that you would make them some clockwork haste arms just for fun. You wouldn't even charge them, you were just happy to find a fellow gnome that could use them. Hell, after our Cultural Clockworks went into place, I outfitted the only two gnome plate classes I knew in full suits of it, just for fun.

SoE has long ingored the plight of the people trying to "make a living" on any tradeskill. Thus, my advice would be, learn a tradeskil with more available items, and try to make your living there; although, if your playtime is as limited as you say it is, I can't understand why you so desperately need to make plat anyway. Frankly, I play daily, and I don't leave a trader up anymore, its just not worth my time and effort to sqeeze a few platinum pieces out of the globabl economy. I'll just continue grinding, and sell and split for a bit of pocket cash, and continue having fun playing.