The Ultimate EQ Tradeskill Guide

[Aanuvane]

The two guides are actually different with different authors, though I'm sure some if not most of the recommendations on paths are the same.

[Derriere]

RE Draught of the Craftsman idea

[/QUOTE]Draught of the Craftsman
The last item to note in this section is that there is a potion available for purchase in the Station Store. Normal price is 1000 station cash, and it is occasionally on sale. This potion will last for 2 hours and increase your salvage rate to 100%. It does not make it impossible to fail combines, but instead returns all your materials to you when you do fail. It is best used when you are planning to perform a large number of very epxpensive combines. For instance I used one when I made several complete sets of cultural armor with symbols to match. If you can plan for it have more combines ready to use up the remaining time. Knowing you will not lose any materials means again you can plan and collect the exact number you will need.

Currently there is no way in game for 1 person to make a gift of station cash or items in the store. I really dislike this. I would like to offer customers the option of either buying a potion for me to use or paying a larger uncertain amount in platinum due to failures. I would urge anyone who agrees with me to do feedback to SOE on this. I don't understand why they wouldn't want to do this, as it would mean more station store business for them in allowing gifting of all types of items.[/QUOTE]

What I would love to see is other versions of the potion...for example a purchasable/tradable 1 combine guaranteed token/potion. So for a price I could simply buy an item to guarantee mine or someone else's combine success. They could even make multiples ..1 guaranteed combine =$X, 5 combines +$X etc...as opposed to a 2 hr potion which I NEVER buy because 1/ I have to save up too many combines to make it worth the $ to buy a 2 hr potion(and this means I cant spontaneously make something when I am in the mood and excited to do a click) and 2/ If I was to buy and click the 2 hr potion...I am stuck in baz/pok/guildhall on this char indefinitely...in order not to waste my money/timer on potion (unless I just go* buggar it* and leave the non bufftimer countdown zones which I ultimately would ..because the purpose of trades is to to travel explore kill collect make sell buy trade INTERACT...not stand in a zone afraid to leave so I can make something every now and then and protect my very expensive 2 hr potion!)
- I think they would sell a lot of this kind of token/potion if they made them a reasonable price, but that is just my 2cents!

[Grizabelle]

Draught of the Craftsman
I am stuck in baz/pok/guildhall on this char indefinitely...in order not to waste my money/timer on potion (unless I just go* buggar it* and leave the non bufftimer countdown zones which I ultimately would ..)
- I think they would sell a lot of this kind of token/potion if they made them a reasonable price, but that is just my 2cents![/QUOTE]

Except that this buff counts down even in non bufftime countdown zones now.

[tatanka7th]

I just wanted to make a quick comment on the Baking roadmap. I see that Misty Thicket Picnics are no longer mentioned as a possible path, and I wanted to suggest that they may still be the best way to go.

I know that people don't like subcombines, but my main criteria is what takes the least time. The fishing recipes take a LONG time to catch the fish you need (at least 6 hours of fishing). The MTPs are almost totally store bought, and the subs can be completed in MUCH less than 4 hours.

As an example, to get from 252 (where tuna/crab recipes run out) to 300 takes 1151 combines, per the advanced calculator in this site. So that would be 1151 fish to be caught. You'd be hard pressed to do that in less than 6 hours. To do 1151 MTP combines, here's what you'd need to farm: 1 basilisk egg, 12 brownie parts, and 16 fruits. Everything else is store bought.

The total # of sub-combines for your final 1151 combines? 1275. Using the advanced TS window, you can do about 10 combines per minute, so that's about 2 hours of sub-combines. An hour to get the farmed mats, and that's three hours, which is half of the 6 hours to fish up what you need. And the cost is minimal.

So if you're leveling baking, consider MTPs for the run from 252-300.

Tat

PS - First post here in years. Holy cow, my sig is out of date

[Aanuvane]

Hi Tat! This is just one of several guides. MTPs are still listed as an alternative on the slightly older, but still relevant guide here. I personally still prefer Broiled Raxil Fish, Dream or Minotaur Meat recipes and Brell's Bounty recipes just because I really hate having to organize for so many ingredients/subcombines. But to each his own!

[Sukrasisx]

quick thoughts on basic topics

Hi, I want to thank you for this handy reference as I have recently decided to scale Mount Twenty-one Hundred. I have up till now spread my 300-level tradeskills out, one per character, but it appears some recent recipes can only be acquired/scribed by having 7x300 on a single character, so my main is playing catch-up.

My main long ago learned 300 Brewing; as a monk I mostly wanted the weight-reduction bags summoned by the trophy, and I felt Brewing offered the easiest path to 300 at the time, given my budget. I then did 300 Tailoring on my first alt, who I made a halfling specifically so I could make Leatherfoot Haversacks. (And I made her a druid to more easily collect remote ingredients.) The new cultural recipes, as you describe, offered a much simpler path now as I've repeated 300 Tailoring on my monk, and 295 Smithing before running out of materials in my last run.

Meanwhile, I've been saving up various types of gems that drop for me, and decided I had enough that it was time to come see what your guide suggests for Jewelcrafting. (Many of the gems I've been collecting can be bought from vendors, but selling them and buying them back means taking a 10% loss, so I stockpile the more expensive ones.) I started by taking a look at this intro article, and had a few thoughts for you to consider folding into the article.

[_] 06. Tradeskills are not cheap. You cannot go into this without the realization that you will have to spend LOTS of money. Vendors alone often charge fortunes for purchased materials, especially at high skill levels. You can do things to keep costs down like farming materials yourself, but you can only take it so far. Certain tradeskills are much cheaper overall (like Baking and Brewing) compared to others. If you are a first character playing this game you should probably put off the urge to do any serious tradeskilling until later. Anyone who wants to works seriously with tradeskills should figure out first how to create a larger and consistant income stream.

I've learned people have different definitions for "LOTS of money", so some actual numbers might be useful. Although economies may differ from server to server, I'd say as a ballpark that bringing a tradeskill to 300 costs thousands of plat even if you're willing to farm a lot of ingredients yourself, and if you add in the plat you could make by selling your farmed materials at Bazaar prices (something you touch on in item 09), or equivalently if you buy those materials in the Bazaar, you could easily be into six digits. And speaking of item 09:

[_] 09. Using the Bazaar. Many people think that they should not buy in the bazaar. They think that if they farm the materials themselves that it will not cost them anything. Nothing could be further from the truth. All items have a value, either what you pay for them, or what you did not earn from not selling them. Your time is worth money, and this translates to what your materials are worth. If you spend 20 hours farming materials and compare that to the cost to either buy or sell in the bazaar you can begin to see what I am talking about. Often times you can find great deals on what you want in the bazaar, where people have priced items far less than their true worth. Maybe you cannot farm the items you need as easily as another class or level might. Maybe you can earn far more by farming something else to sell for more money than the amount lost farming materials yourself. Tradeskill materials are often needed in such large quantities that you might drive your self crazy trying to collect them all yourself. It is obvious you should watch prices for some period of time to get the best buys and save yourself a small fortune at the same time. You should also start looking for what you know you will need as far in advance as you can.

All excellent advice, particularly the last item. The calculators at EQ Traders are pretty good (see item 01) at estimating how many combines and thus how much material you'll need for skilling up -- though of course there's no safety against the Random Number Generator (see item 08) -- so if you plan ahead you can find out you'll need (say) 550 Tungsten Ore and can start stockpiling early. Watch the prices in the Bazaar and decide whether you're willing to buy 550 at the "going rate". If not, watch for occasional bargains; they do show up. Better still, set up a Buyer (/buyer) on the "blue" side of the Bazaar. Check /barter to see what other people's buyers are offering and set your price accordingly. It's usually much less than the asking price on the "red" side, so you can save quite a lot buying it that way. If nobody else's buyer has an offer up, I've found a good starting offer is around 10-20% of the typical selling price.

I have two accounts, so I put my seller on my main account and my buyer -- often off-line -- on the second. When I'm playing my main, I sell my buyer any of my loot that he's interested in, so that my buyer's remaining order keeps track of how much more I still need.

[_] 12. Vendor Windows. If you have portable combine containers you can work at a vendor, with his buy/sell window open. This will allow you to buy single or small quantities of materials and combine them without needing to close the vendor window.

This also works in some locations where there are stationary looms, forges, etc. close enough to the vendor, such as the loom in the Short Bank in PoK. And speaking of that...

[_] 14. Tradeskill Zones. Abysmal Sea is pretty much a tradeskill only zone. Nearly every trradeskill will have materials and quests that can only be done here. At times it may be best to travel here and plan to stay until a certain milestone has been reached. For all other times I leave one non-playing character camped here,so can quickly buy certain needed materials and drop them in the shared bank bags. Later Crescent Reach was added to the game and it has almost all tradeskill materials that Abysmal Sea has. You may find the need to visit each zone occasionally as they both have different tradeskill quests.

Those are still both very good (probably the best) zones for tradeskills, but recently a bunch of tradeskill vendors got added to PoK, especially around the Short Bank, such that it's got nearly as complete an assortment. As always, check EQTC's vendor lists to see who sells what you need!

[Sukrasisx]

evolving trophies to final result

Once you have become a Master (skill 300) you can begin to work on the final leg of your trophy. The chart below will show you what to expect with each different tradeskill. The number represents the how many successful and non-trivial combines are needed to earn 1% experience (failures do not count). Multiply it x100 will show the grand total 0 to 100%. We can't say exactly how many total attempts are needed, because we don't know what recipe you will use and it's failure rate. Generally it will be about a 10% failure rate. If you can find a recipe that is only a few points higher than 300 the failure rate will be quite low. If you use a recipe that has a trivial of 400 to 500+ the failure rate will get to be something like 15% to 50%. In actuality the number can vary by a small amount, very low trivials above 300 take slightly more successes, and high trivials take less. This number is not much though, and high trivials fail much more often anyway.

Tailoring : 5.0
Smithing : 7.5
Brewing : 10.0
Baking : 10.0
Jewelcraft : 7.5
Pottery : 10.0 to 11.5
Fletching : 4.5
Alchemy : 10.0 (I think)
Research : 4.5
Tinkering : 7.5 to 8.0
Poison Making : (unknown)

I just finished evolving my Smithing trophy and kept track of how many combines it took per 1% increase for different parts of the process. I started at 5% (left over from when I used up my remaining mats after reaching 300), and used Tungsten and Cobalt Chain Gloves Templates throughout. I started with the Tungsten, and the number of successful combines per 1% increase went 8, 8, 9, 8, 9, 8, 8, 9, 8, ..., leading me to an estimate of 8.4 per 1% increase instead of the 7.5 shown above. I had 357 successful combines and they took me from 5% to 47%. When I switched to Cobalt, though, that did indeed give 1% per 7.5 combines on average; 394 successful combines took me to 100%.

Later I went back over my logs and confirmed these averages were maintained throughout. Each successful Tungsten combine added 1/840 and each Cobalt added 1/750. My final count starting from when the trophy first reached stage 6 was 379 Tungsten + 412 Cobalt = 379/840 + 412/750 = 100.052%. I conjecture that higher-triv recipes evolve the trophy faster, at least for stage 7. Of course, higher triv means more failures, and failures don't evolve the trophy at all, but the difference in failure rates for those two recipes was actually quite small compared to the number of combines involved. (I failed 19 Tungsten and 25 Cobalt.)

[Grizabelle]

Having done tailoring multiple time recently I really really like the hilt wrap path to 282. requires 1 animal pelt and hickory shears:
trivial pelt
62 sullied
112 rough
184 fine
222 superb
242 flawless
255 exquisite
268 immaculate
282 fantastic, exotic, befouled

I tend to save most of my befouled and exotics for bag making but otherwise it's a really easy path with only 2 pieces using pelts which are normally a lot cheaper.

-Griz

[Manouk]

For pottery, I found that unfired crucibles of escape were a fairly reasonable bridge between 216 and 290. They are trivial at 236
Heavy clay (from muddites only in beholders maze),
the spell lesser succor which sells for under 2p (in the secret druid place in shadowhaven),
celestial essence (thank goodness for scent of marr),
water, sculpting tools and bowl sketch.
I have found the spawns in beholders are often enough that you can run around and find them all and keep going, about 2 out of 5 will drop 1 heavy clay. In about an our you can usually walk away with a stack of 20 for a good session.

[Scrollis]

wow a loooot of informaion! Thank you!!!

[Grizabelle]

Its worth nothing that any class can now use the binding powder path for Spell Research. I recently used it on my pally with my casters providing the needed essences.