Templates without smithing?

[Berg]

Seeing that cultural armor for gnomes was possible thru tinkering, I decided to give it a try. Previously, I'd dismissed the idea as it seemed to require a quest in order to get a few patterns, and I'd have to repeat the quest in order to replenish the patterns... too much trouble when I was facing hundreds of combines in order to max out skill, and there seemed to be no customers for the lower end finished products. Further, the (non ore) drops for the higher end combines are selling in bazaar for thousands of pp, and drop infrequently, so this isn't practical for a skillup/trophy maxing path anyway.

Reading elsewhere on the site, though, I found that making the templates that would be used to make the actual armor did NOT require any quested parts, just ore drop and storebought materials, fairly cheap ones at that, and could be sold to vendor or tributed, so cash spent wasn't just going down the rathole of the Destroy button.

Well I gathered the materials together for a "test of concept" combine, pop them in my toolkit, and... can't combine those materials. I check the list again, puzzled, and then notice that I'm supposed to be doing this in a forge. The smithy hammer makes a little more sense then.

Of course I'm no smith, I'm a tinker (159 skill versus 300 skill). Lets see, no toolkit recipe listed, but there's a later one thats similar, the principle difference being that the smith one takes a smithy hammer, the tinker one takes a gnomish heat source. Cool, I'll swap that in. Still no good.

On reflection, it looks like in order to make gnome cultural armor via tinkering, I still need to have a 300ish skill in smithing (or tailoring), in order to make the templates. And of course if I were a 300 smith, I wouldn't need to be a tinker in order to make use of those templates.

Either I'm missing the recipe for template making, or the whole idea of tinkering cultural seems to be pointless to me.

[Akenta]

You're missing something, but I can't remember what. I know when the cultural first came out my rogue tinkered one piece and one symbol since it was cheaper than smithing.

I also think at the start there might have been a bug in the recipe list, cause I was able to see silk items that could be tinkered.

At least I thought I did it all with tinkering, but maybe I made the template with smithing, since both skills were the same.

[Ngreth Thergn]

You are welcome to view it as pointless, that is your option.

Smithing has always been important for tinkering, and that is nothing new.

The templates require smithing or tailoring. The option to tinker the final component is up to you. Of course the symbols do not require a template so you can directly make them with tinkering, not requiring a smithing or tailoring sub-combine.

[Aldier]

My main character is a 300smith/tailor.

My tinkerer is an alt that only is doing tinkering.

I can make templates on 1 character and give/trade/sell them to the tinkerer for use in making the armor through tinkering.

Considering that you get for the armor, 20 patterns/molds per slot (40 wrists) that is 160 combines PER scribing of the quest book (which is very easy to obtain) and you can scribe from the book 10 times before it will fade out. So 1600 combines potentially from this quest book for armor.

In the begining of cultrual, tinkering could only make armor. They could not make symbols. When they revamped the cultural, they changed to the template system and added tinkered symbols. So tinkerers could make both final items but still would rely on smithing (which I think close to half of the tinkering recipes at the high end rely on smithing) to make the templates for the armor.

[Orelli Virbonus]

Since templates are a good skillup path for smithing, people often make them in bulk and then dump them on the nearest vendor. I would keep an eye on the merchants in PoK situated near forges and see if you can't get templates that way. Before the last patch there were hundreds of rhenium/cobalt templates available on my server.

Also, this method is cheaper than making them yourself since vendors ask a lot less than you're likely to find the ore used to make them in the bazaar.

[Aldier]

Also try the bazaar. The merchant that sells the smithing coals and template molds and also the one right between the 2 forges down in the tradeskill container room.

[Canyar]

Maybe not quite on topic but you can also make the metalofiber silk armour in your toolkit.

So you get the benefit of doing both the final tailoring or smithing combines dor cultural armour. That is a unique benefit to gnomes that other races can only dream of.