I originally wrote this post in response to a thread at The Newbie Zone, but I think it holds more relevance for us here. The poster of that thread does inadvertently raise a good point, though. Simply put, tradeskillers' abilities to craft items have not improved in proportion to, say, combat classes' abilities to defeat mobs.
Let's take a Fleeting Quiver as an example -- hardly an uber item by any measure, yet still a crafted item in strong demand. It takes one ungodly rare component (the High Quality Lion Skin), plus a few semi-rarish components. The trivial for this item is 222. Although the recipe has existed since the first day of EQ, the quiver wasn't actually makable in-game until around the Velious era, if memory serves. So for the purposes of this discussion, I will consider it a Velious-era item.
Let's look at what improvements a tradeskiller has gotten since then. In Velious, your maximum possible tailoring skill was 250. Today, it's still 250.
In Velious, you didn't have geerloks (which are items that give a 5% bonus to a skill in your tradeskill). I believe they were introduced around Luclin, though I could be wrong. However, the benefit of them is minimal since your maximum modified skill in a tradeskill is still capped at 252. In addition, to the best of our current knowledge ("our" referring to the folks who post at the EQTraders message boards), there is a "soft cap" of sorts on how high your skill should be to get the maximum chance of success on a combine. Simply put, once you are above that cap, you chance to succeed is identical, whether you're one point over or 100 points over.
There are other improvements tradeskillers have gotten (such as New Tanaan Crafting Mastery, which allows you to increase more than one tradeskill over 200), but only one has actually improved the chance of success on combines -- Jewel Crafting Mastery. That's an enchanter-only class AA that requires a cumulative minimum of level 59 and 18 AA points spent on prerequisites, plus an additional 18 points to earn three ranks in this skill. For a total of 36AA, enchanters get a 50% reduction in fail rates for JC combines only. No other class gets this ability, or anything remotely similar, so it doesn't count as a generally available improvement.
Barring this one exception (JCM), there is nothing in the game that makes tradeskill combines more likely to succeed. A 250-skill tailor in the Velious era has precisely the same chance to make a Fleeting Quiver as does a 250-skill tailor today.
Contrast that with equipment you might earn while going on raids. As of the Velious era, the top warrior breastplate (as ranked by the default Allakhazam search) you could earn was:
Breastplate of Eradication
AC: +55
HP: +100
Str: +10 Dex: +15 Sta: +20 Cha: +10 Agi: +15
FR: +8 DR: +8 CR: +8 MR: +8 PR: +8
As of today's era, the top warrior breastplate would probably be:
Raex's Chestplate of Destruction
AC: +100
HP: +250
Str: +30 Dex: +25 Sta: +30 Agi: +25
FR: +20 DR: +20 CR: +20 MR: +20 PR: +20
The AC has almost doubled, the HP has gone up by 150%, resists have gone up by a similar amount ... The difference is immeasurable. This same difference is evident not only in armor, but in weapons (increase in damage and hate generation and maintenance), in levels (five extra levels with their commensurate power boost), in AA's (tremendous new offensive and defensive abilities), and in the ability to earn and obtain experience and items more easily (older mobs become trivially easy to kill).
Now, compare the Breastplate of Eradication to a widely-available twink item (and a tradeskilled one, to boot):
Fierce Heraldic Breastplate
AC: +51
HP: +80
Str: +10 Dex: +5 Sta: +5
That Fierce Heraldic Breastplate is looking kind of close to the Breastplate of Eradication, if you discount the saves. Not the same by any means, but consider that the Fierce Heraldic is an item you can acquire just by strolling into the bazaar, while the Eradication used to require being in one of the top raiding guilds on your server.
What did tradeskillers get during this same time shift? Well ... not much.
We got geerloks and other skill-increasing items (such as tradeskill trophies, or a few rare items that offer 10% or 15% skill boost), but the fact is, none of these items is significantly better than a geerlok to a 250 tradeskiller. They're of benefit to people skilling up, sure -- a 15% bonus in your skill makes it MUCH easier and cheaper to raise your skill, both by allowing some skill-restricted combines earlier and by reducing fail rates. However, once you've reached 240 skill, any skill mod would do just fine, since 240 + 5% > 252, which is the hard cap on tradeskills.
We got NTCM, as mentioned before, but that doesn't really affect the potential to succeed on making an item; rather, it just gives you a realistic possibility (NOT a probability) of succeeding on an otherwise-impossible combine (if you had already exceeded 200 skill in another tradeskill). In other words, it only gives you a shot at the item; it doesn't make it more probable you will succeed at that item.
We got new items and skill-up routes -- but again, the worthwhile items are almost all trivial over 250, and success rates appear to be at best around 50% at maximum skill. Items with trivials under 250 (and with correspondingly higher success rates) fall into one or more of a few categories. Either it's a skill-up item (as with shadowscream armor), or it's a low- to mid-level twink item (as with LDoN armors, though they are also popular for skill-ups), or else it's largely useless save for RP flavor (as with almost all non-stat baking and brewing).
Again, my chance to succeed at a baking or smithing or pottery combine that was introduced in Velious is identical to my chance of success now, given equal skill then and now. Shouldn't I have learned something in terms of how to NOT burn my bread in the oven since then?
I guess the point is that tradeskillers need ways to improve just as much as raid tanks or nuking wizzies or healing clerics or what have you. Maybe in the next expansion, we could get an option to raise a tradeskill to 300, or 350, or higher -- though this would require a commensurate recoding to ensure that the chance of success always increases as your skill goes up, no matter whether the item you are making is trivial or not. Maybe we will get skills (or even items) that modify success and fail rates directly, regardless of skill -- sort of JCM-on-a-stick, if you will. =) I don't know what would work out best, but the point remains. Tradeskillers need power increases too.
Let's take a Fleeting Quiver as an example -- hardly an uber item by any measure, yet still a crafted item in strong demand. It takes one ungodly rare component (the High Quality Lion Skin), plus a few semi-rarish components. The trivial for this item is 222. Although the recipe has existed since the first day of EQ, the quiver wasn't actually makable in-game until around the Velious era, if memory serves. So for the purposes of this discussion, I will consider it a Velious-era item.
Let's look at what improvements a tradeskiller has gotten since then. In Velious, your maximum possible tailoring skill was 250. Today, it's still 250.
In Velious, you didn't have geerloks (which are items that give a 5% bonus to a skill in your tradeskill). I believe they were introduced around Luclin, though I could be wrong. However, the benefit of them is minimal since your maximum modified skill in a tradeskill is still capped at 252. In addition, to the best of our current knowledge ("our" referring to the folks who post at the EQTraders message boards), there is a "soft cap" of sorts on how high your skill should be to get the maximum chance of success on a combine. Simply put, once you are above that cap, you chance to succeed is identical, whether you're one point over or 100 points over.
There are other improvements tradeskillers have gotten (such as New Tanaan Crafting Mastery, which allows you to increase more than one tradeskill over 200), but only one has actually improved the chance of success on combines -- Jewel Crafting Mastery. That's an enchanter-only class AA that requires a cumulative minimum of level 59 and 18 AA points spent on prerequisites, plus an additional 18 points to earn three ranks in this skill. For a total of 36AA, enchanters get a 50% reduction in fail rates for JC combines only. No other class gets this ability, or anything remotely similar, so it doesn't count as a generally available improvement.
Barring this one exception (JCM), there is nothing in the game that makes tradeskill combines more likely to succeed. A 250-skill tailor in the Velious era has precisely the same chance to make a Fleeting Quiver as does a 250-skill tailor today.
Contrast that with equipment you might earn while going on raids. As of the Velious era, the top warrior breastplate (as ranked by the default Allakhazam search) you could earn was:
Breastplate of Eradication
AC: +55
HP: +100
Str: +10 Dex: +15 Sta: +20 Cha: +10 Agi: +15
FR: +8 DR: +8 CR: +8 MR: +8 PR: +8
As of today's era, the top warrior breastplate would probably be:
Raex's Chestplate of Destruction
AC: +100
HP: +250
Str: +30 Dex: +25 Sta: +30 Agi: +25
FR: +20 DR: +20 CR: +20 MR: +20 PR: +20
The AC has almost doubled, the HP has gone up by 150%, resists have gone up by a similar amount ... The difference is immeasurable. This same difference is evident not only in armor, but in weapons (increase in damage and hate generation and maintenance), in levels (five extra levels with their commensurate power boost), in AA's (tremendous new offensive and defensive abilities), and in the ability to earn and obtain experience and items more easily (older mobs become trivially easy to kill).
Now, compare the Breastplate of Eradication to a widely-available twink item (and a tradeskilled one, to boot):
Fierce Heraldic Breastplate
AC: +51
HP: +80
Str: +10 Dex: +5 Sta: +5
That Fierce Heraldic Breastplate is looking kind of close to the Breastplate of Eradication, if you discount the saves. Not the same by any means, but consider that the Fierce Heraldic is an item you can acquire just by strolling into the bazaar, while the Eradication used to require being in one of the top raiding guilds on your server.
What did tradeskillers get during this same time shift? Well ... not much.
We got geerloks and other skill-increasing items (such as tradeskill trophies, or a few rare items that offer 10% or 15% skill boost), but the fact is, none of these items is significantly better than a geerlok to a 250 tradeskiller. They're of benefit to people skilling up, sure -- a 15% bonus in your skill makes it MUCH easier and cheaper to raise your skill, both by allowing some skill-restricted combines earlier and by reducing fail rates. However, once you've reached 240 skill, any skill mod would do just fine, since 240 + 5% > 252, which is the hard cap on tradeskills.
We got NTCM, as mentioned before, but that doesn't really affect the potential to succeed on making an item; rather, it just gives you a realistic possibility (NOT a probability) of succeeding on an otherwise-impossible combine (if you had already exceeded 200 skill in another tradeskill). In other words, it only gives you a shot at the item; it doesn't make it more probable you will succeed at that item.
We got new items and skill-up routes -- but again, the worthwhile items are almost all trivial over 250, and success rates appear to be at best around 50% at maximum skill. Items with trivials under 250 (and with correspondingly higher success rates) fall into one or more of a few categories. Either it's a skill-up item (as with shadowscream armor), or it's a low- to mid-level twink item (as with LDoN armors, though they are also popular for skill-ups), or else it's largely useless save for RP flavor (as with almost all non-stat baking and brewing).
Again, my chance to succeed at a baking or smithing or pottery combine that was introduced in Velious is identical to my chance of success now, given equal skill then and now. Shouldn't I have learned something in terms of how to NOT burn my bread in the oven since then?
I guess the point is that tradeskillers need ways to improve just as much as raid tanks or nuking wizzies or healing clerics or what have you. Maybe in the next expansion, we could get an option to raise a tradeskill to 300, or 350, or higher -- though this would require a commensurate recoding to ensure that the chance of success always increases as your skill goes up, no matter whether the item you are making is trivial or not. Maybe we will get skills (or even items) that modify success and fail rates directly, regardless of skill -- sort of JCM-on-a-stick, if you will. =) I don't know what would work out best, but the point remains. Tradeskillers need power increases too.
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