Let me get this straight....

[Kalavas]

So, I go through the trouble of raising tinkering long long ago, in PoP days. Admittedly this was before the nerf to PoI drop rates. With the coming of DoN theres this great armor I can make that uses the tinkering skill I have to make very nice armor, as far as droppables go. Go I get my stuff together, bolts, knuckle joints, MDS etc and get ready to make a set of boots for this nice shiny new Last Blood aug I have.

Thems the breaks!

It seems I need to have a smithing skill of around 210 to have a decent chance of converting the MDS into a servolinked bronze bar.

I want to believe this is an oversight on my part, but I really can't find another recipe for the stupid thing.

So, am I stuck learning smithing?

[Chakua]

The answer you seek is...

...not necessarily.

If you want to do it yourself then you need to raise your smithing skill. The only other alternative is to find someone to do it for you since the bars are tradeable.

[Bobaten]

You can get smithing to 215(95% point) quickly (and fairly cheap). You don't have to worry about shadowscream or sickles yet, so your hard work tinkering pays off. Tailoring (to make the caster armor) is a bit harder to get to 215, but even so its much easier than taking it to 300. But in any case you will be unable to make the symbols for the armor with tinkering, so you will probably have to find someone else for that part.

[filobeto]

But the point of the original poster is correct, they now need to take up smithing, OR, they need to find another gnome that has smithing to do it.
Which really doesn't seem right, as no other race has to learn another skill just to do their Racial Armor combines

But then again, no other race that I know of has this alternative skill to make the armor.

I was pretty put off by this at first, but after I thought it over for awhile, I'm only somewhat put off now.

[Aldier]

Gnomes have the alternative to use Tinkering to craft their DoN cultural armor.

Every other race has to raise either smithing OR tailoring (or both) to make its cultural armor and symbols.

If you just forgot about tinkering and went and did smithing to make the bricks and then smithed the items would you complain they did not include tinkering?

The Clockwork armor also is another example where the final armor combine is a tinkering recipe yet it requires small fine plate armor pieces (a smithing combine.) This is not the big slap in the face that you are making it out to be. Would it have been nice for gnomes to be able to create the armor for DoN cultural 100% through tinkering? yes, but the fact that the option to tinker (as I would suspect many gnomes tinker) is available improves the chances of the gnome succeeding in the combine not to mention adds recipes to the fairly meager tinkering list of high end (250+) combines.

[Kahmon]

Getting smithing to 222 is not that difficult anymore. When I had to learn smithing on my gnome in order to do the subs I was able to get him to 165 or so very easily going from banded to needles to ornate chain. At that point I made masters scales til 182 since I was skilling up Tinkering with Masters armors anyway. After that was EVBs which are very easy to farm for very quickly until 222. That left me with a high enough success rate on GM scales since they are trivial 242 or so. Any further skill-ups are just by accident.

[Bobaten]

All in all, smithing and tailoring to 215, and tinkering to 300 is easier than smithing and tailoring to 300. So it really is a bonus.

[MedailMeadmezzer-eci]

All in all, smithing and tailoring to 215, and tinkering to 300 is easier than smithing and tailoring to 300. So it really is a bonus.

ermm dunno about you, but i find that getting tinkering to 300, and then smithing and taloring to 215 is quite assine, well not the smithing. since well for tinkering you have a full 0 vendor bought paths to 300, as you have 2 in smithing, and at least 10 differeant ways to "easy farm" to 300 taloring that are highly trafficed in in the bazaar. tinkering on the other hand has mabey 8 ish skill up paths that are able to be "commonly" found in the zar.

[Wyvernwill]

*shrugs* they could have made it so Gnomes were like everyone else and their armor was only made via Smithing and Tailoring, nothing else. Count your blessings that you weren't forced to do 2 very costly paths to 300, only one.

And to be honest, anyone that complains about smithing pre 222... really needs to take a look at how easy smithing is to that point especially.