Fan Faire June 2005 Write-up (Plus Tanker handout)

[Astroshak]

Aside from the difficulty factor, which Ngreth already pointed out, it's also very rare to find a person with 400 WIS or INT. Only certain classes with a bucketload of AA and high-end gear can get their primary stat that high. Most tradeskillers will have a primary stat in the 200-300 range, which will have a profound impact on the formula.

With all of the stat augs available (from OoW and DoN) it is very easy for someone with some combination of levels over 60 and Planar Power/Discordant Potential to get strength high enough for a Wunshi's Focusing to take it over 400.

However, only casters who have the int/wis cap increasing AA's can hope to bring int/wis over 375 - unless there's some buff I'm not aware of that raises the cap on int and wis, talking 355 maxed at 70 with full PP/CP AA's, + 10 for the Gimblax, and plus another 10 for tribute for any melee/hybrid.

However, most casters who want an int/wis that high don't have much trouble after the investment of levels/AA with the ease of obtaining stat augs.

[Lofwyr44]

Hm im not sure it would be so hard. Im not worried about success or skillup chance. The formula makes a graph, calculus should be able to determine the area under the graph. Without actually choosing any recipies. That area is an average number of combines assuming average recipes, which is an average to look at and compare with. Thats all.

Because theres 2 formulas the average can change based on the first if Im reading that right, but thats easy multiplication that can be done at the end. Its just been too long for me to do the calculus part.

[Maevenniia]

Considering that research was, until resently, a purchasable skill, I'm not impressed with the idea of a trophy. Perhaps once we get the rest straightened out.
No one-shot scrolls or other new items planned at the moment. I do need to talk to Rytan a bit about researching other spells, tho.
For the most part skill gaps will be filled when then second (or third, I forget which) part of the revamp is done. When that will be I still don't know. Sorry.

A

Until recently Posion making was a purchasable skill (yes you could buy skillups at a trainer!) and Poison Making has had a trophy for a long time now.

Plus, when the skill cap was raised to 300 and the ability to purchase points was removed, the reasoning behind this was SPECIFCCALLY stated that the skills that were affected (research being one of them) could now be allowed to make "decent stats items". Poison making got augments, where's the love for Spell Research? We can't even SKILL UP past 227 right now!!!

Maddoc-the-Wayfarer (after Feb 15th patch)]
There were actually a few random goodies for you guys in the update last night.

Alchemy, Poison Making, Research, and Tinkering are no longer level capped (if the ever were), though you will still need to be the appropriate level to "learn" the skill.


General - All tradeskills are now able to progress to 300.
General - You are no longer able to train any tradeskill beyond the basic steps at any guildmaster. Ok, so this isn't so much a goody, but... It lets me treat these skills as actual skills from here on out, even letting you guys make some decent stat items.


The information above may not be 100% accurate, so be nice to me The expansion launch has exhausted me and it's late at night... I do know, however, that I made lots of changes to skills and skill caps for the tradeskills.

-- Maddoc

[Neebat]

Hm im not sure it would be so hard. Im not worried about success or skillup chance. The formula makes a graph, calculus should be able to determine the area under the graph. Without actually choosing any recipies. That area is an average number of combines assuming average recipes, which is an average to look at and compare with. Thats all.

Because theres 2 formulas the average can change based on the first if Im reading that right, but thats easy multiplication that can be done at the end. Its just been too long for me to do the calculus part.

The first formula is highly dependent on the recipe you use. The best graph assumes the first formula always succeeds. There are no "average recipes". There are many different paths unique to each tradeskill and depending on which path you take, the area under the curve will vary immensely.

For instance, if you attack blacksmithing (from 0 skill) exclusively with Mistletoe sickles, you'll do many, many more combines than someone who goes stepwise including metal bits.

Now it would be possible to take one of the popular guides, assume you followed it to the letter and tally the total average combines. You would still need to make an assumption about wis/int. This is descrete math, so you don't even need calculus to do that, just sum a lot of numbers.

[Maevenniia]

Actually, the 8 slot bags aren't no drop. Take the patterns out and it becomes a very droppable regular backpack :P

I know what you mean though on the patterns in general. It just means we get to stack em higher instead of them being spread out :/

Why not add 4 more bank slots. That would pretty much even everything out. Heck, make it a lvl 51 AA that has four levels to add more room.

Stacking them higher won't save space unless for some reason you make the same patterns/molds more than once, before running out of the first batch...

It's not as if patterns for sleeves stack with patterns for leggings...or stack with the patterns for the symbols of corresponding armor slots.....thus you still use up the same # of inventory spaces (except perhaps that you can stack the bracer patterns/molds together with increased stack size)


Like I said, increasing stack sizes for OTHER stuff would be a bigger help. My specific example of Celestial Essences is a prime candidate.

[Wyvernwill]

I know what you mean though on the patterns in general. It just means we get to stack em higher instead of them being spread out :/

Hi! I'm a dork.

Now that that's aside, I knew what you meant on stacking them higher however in my vicodin induced frame of mind (tore some muscles seriously bad over the weekend), I appeared to have lost my train of thought midsentence. Should have been stated along the lines of "but they are still spread out"

Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

[Amaruk]

I code in vb mostly and would have set the pass 1 calc equal to a double so it wouldn't have made any difference for me, but I see how it would in C or the like with floats. Are you saying that basically you only need to take the pass 1 chance to 1 digit past the decimal because you're multiplying it by 10 and comparing it to a /random 1000 to see if it passes?

So while your calculated chance of passing is 52.833333%, your actual chance of skillup due to the calc being compared to a random int between 1-1000 is 52.8%? I knew you guys were shaving little points somewhere :P

If I remember correctly from C 10.0 tells it do to a floating point divide, it does not give a result limited to 1 decimal it keeps all the digits out to the limit of the floating point format. So the result kept would be 52.833333 or so. Close enough for the use to which it is being put.

[YurienStonebow]

Stacking them higher won't save space unless for some reason you make the same patterns/molds more than once, before running out of the first batch...

It's not as if patterns for sleeves stack with patterns for leggings...or stack with the patterns for the symbols of corresponding armor slots.....thus you still use up the same # of inventory spaces (except perhaps that you can stack the bracer patterns/molds together with increased stack size)


Like I said, increasing stack sizes for OTHER stuff would be a bigger help. My specific example of Celestial Essences is a prime candidate.

what i want to know is if you can buy eboan/radient crystals in stacks of like 200 why not on CE? the coding is already in palce for i know two items why not just change a few liens? i'm no programmer by any means but it seems like it would be easy enough to do. also.....




Quote:
Originally Posted by Neebat
4 = Alchemy (Tanker)
3 = Baking (Suani)
3 = Brewing (Suani)
4 = Fletching (Tanker) - effective stat not reduced by 15
4 = Jewelcraft (Suani)
2 = Poison Making (Tanker) - effective stat not reduced by 15
4 = Pottery (Suani)
2 = Smithing (Tanker) - effective stat not reduced by 15
2 = Tailoring (Tanker)
2 = Tinkering (Tanker)


how in the hell is baking/brewing HARDER then smithing and tailoring?!?!?! the others don't sound too far out of palce but this isn't making any sense. unless 1 is impossible and 5 is a cakewalk

[Neebat]

how in the hell is baking/brewing HARDER then smithing and tailoring?!?!?! the others don't sound too far out of palce but this isn't making any sense. unless 1 is impossible and 5 is a cakewalk

Please do not interpret "4" as "hard" and "2" as easy. A lower number here does NOT mean the skill is easier! These numbers have little correlation to how much folks will struggle in the skill. This has been confusing a lot of folks.

In general these numbers compensate for the difficulty of gathering components for the combines. Hard skills reward rare components with more skillups per combine. In fact, the easiest general tradeskill to get to 202 is fletching, and that's why fletching has the slowest skill up rate in terms of Average Combines per Skillup. (It's still wrong that this same penalty is applied to uber-fletching where the components are insanely rare.)

Smithing and tailoring are both HARD. The number "2" just shows that under some conditions, a smithing combine is twice as likely to yield a skillup as one of the skills with a "4". Before you get to that skillup, you have to gather components, which is much more than twice as hard for smithing as it is for some other skills.

If you want to label them,
2: You'll work hard for every combine, so they'd better count
3: Combine some, skill up some
4: You'll have to do a lot of combines to ever skill up, so they better be easy
28: You'll be begging a long time before you get a skill up, but it's free.

The result is almost exactly backwards of how you might first interpret the numbers in isolation.

[Xodar]

Hehe, baking was easy largely because it required minimal farming. I did 220-250 in one session of about 500 cragbeast souffles. Smithing skill ups seem to come more frequently but combines are harder to come by. With my poor bank 100 combines worth of shadowscream stuff is about all I can hold at a time before making a run, and that takes me ~10 hours to get if I farm the shadows as well.

[mewkus]

Those numbers refer to how likely it is to get a skillup on a generic combine. They do not reflect how hard it is to get/make the components to do a combine.

[YurienStonebow]

If you want to label them,
2: You won't be doing many combines, so they'd better count
3: Combine some, skill up some
4: You'll have to do a lot of combines to ever skill up, so they better be easy
28: You'll be begging a long time before you get a skill up, but it's free.

The result is almost exactly backwards of how you might first interpret the numbers in isolation.

won't be doing a lot fo combines?? i lsot count how many tailoring combines i did jsut to get to 177. if i can't manage to get those akhevan shears i'm gonna go broke and/or insane trying to farm everything. DenMom......what's the name of your straightjacket tailor? i wanna palce an order

[KyrosKrane]

The reason I suggested making molds and patterns stack to 200 is for a very specific reason. I get people who want breastplates and chest augs more than all other slots combined. I don't want to lose the extras of the other slots, but saving them would take up an extra bank slot for each stack I want to keep. Making them stack to 200 is the quick-and-dirty fix to the situation.

Having said that, I do agree that DoN tradeskills in general need some work on bank space, hence my questions and suggestions on the topic.

[Maevenniia]

Considering all the Oow armor quest components, and all the new forages/drops in DoN, and with a new expansion will come yet more drops and forages....

...so, allowing more than just armor molds & patterns to stack to 200 (or 100, whatever) would be more than just a "quick and dirty" fix....to me it seems an absolute necessity at this point, given that they can't (or won't) increase bank space.

[Konjure]

Very hard to skillup past 294?

From my own and two friends experience it seems A LOT harder to get the final points to 300 now, (Might be our bad luck with JC, Pottery and Alchemy too.)

I've seen the code/algorithms for lots of random number generators, everything from "Quick and Dirty" to "Cryptographically strong" but I have never seen one who procuces floating point numbers, and I was wondering if that "truncating effect" could cause the intended/unintended side effect of lowering skillups dramatically?

Pass 2 formula: % = 12.5 - ((10 / 125.0) * (raw skill - 175))
Would yield:
- 293 = 3,06%
- 294 = 2,98%
....
- 299 = 2,58%

But if the random number generator returns a whole number from 1 to 100, you will never see it return 2.1 or 2.2 so at skill 294+ only 2 values out of 100 (or 2.00%) will get you past this check.

Simulating a Shaman with 260 Wisdom who tries to skillup in Alchemy (4) at skill 294 we start with asking the excellent calculator by Ngreth and get:
On success: 1.83% (over all 1,78)

If we use truncated numbers in pass 2 (to simulate integer random), and the standard formula for pass 1 (cleaned up for presentation):
(PrimaryStat - 15) / 4.0 = % For a successful combine.
(PrimaryStat - 15) / 8.0 = % For a failed combine.

Dropping fractions in both pass 1 and pass 2 would give us 61% chance (from 61.25) to make it past pass 1 on a successful combine, and 2% chance to then make pass 2.

Using a 260 Wisdom shammy to skillup from 294 to 295 in Alchemy we would get the following -

Truncating Theory: Random returns 1 to 100, and chance to skillup is 1.22% for successful and 0.6% for a failed combine.

Wishful Thinking Theroy: Random returns floating point (a weird random like that could explain its streakiness ) a successful combine would have 1.82525% chance (similar to Ngreth's calculator) if successful and 0.912625% if combine failed.

My programming experience makes me really doubt the "wishful Thinking Theory" is true and it's probably lower, but does it conform to the "Truncating Theory" or something in between?

Personally I think there should be a cap of 4% at pass 2... and voila! As you reach skill 269 it will be harder than before when the cap was 5% and considering the components are just extremely more expensive and rare at that level you don't really need to make "the evil" pass 2 stage any harder than that. It will still hurt plenty!

I still consider the Tradeskill changes a sever nerf. Because even if they are correct when they say the total number of combines have gone down with 15%, the total cost have gone up by a lot more. High end combines is way more expensive and those have increased a lot.