The Question Gnome Returns

[Nelenerap]

ok, so I've jumped into tradeskilling with both feet, and I'm findin' myself with new questions every day and here's my new one.

I got a skill up in Tinkering today 18/385. I open my persona window and I see 18/395.

My questions are: Where's this +10 coming from? Is it cause I'm a Gnome? What benifet is it to me since it doesn't let me scribe higher recipies earlier?

[Prrasha]

It's because you're a gnome.

Your base skill is really 8/385, raised to 18/395 by your gnomishness. But, just like using an offensive stance to raise your slashing skill won't let you wield a higher-level sword, being a gnome to tinker better (or getting the +25 tradeskilling buff from an Insight event) won't let you scribe higher-level recipes.

All it gives you is a bonus on the actual tradeskilling process... you'll get fewer "critical failure" and "failure" ticks and more "success" and "critical success" ticks.

Edit: There's a post on the official forums here that shows all the racial abilities. Gnomes are listed as having an innate +10 tinkering, and using less power when tinkering.

[Nelenerap]

Thanks bunches!

[Lordebon]

Hmm. You should have gotten the update as being 8/385 not 18/385 -- the skill update message should not include any bonuses (at least, they didnt use to) hehe.

[Nelenerap]

YAY!!!!!

I'm FINALLY out of T1 tinkering. Anyone have a breakdown of each lvl of tinkering by tier? i.e. 1-49 is T1, 50-? is T2, etc...

[Lordebon]

Yep, every 50 points is a tier (since every 5 skill = 1 level so 50 skill = 10 levels = 1 tier) but sometimes you'll find recipes from the previous tier (T7 is full of stuff from T6, since the T6-ish stuff is the tinkered crafting tools and so it's most fair to keep them all using the same materials).

[Nelenerap]

Cool,

So @ 100 I'll move to T3, 150 - T4, 200 - T5, 250 - T6, 300 - T7, 350 - T8?

[Lordebon]

Yep.

[foodcity]

about how much exp is normal for tinkering? is it supposed to give just 1 tinkering skill per item?

[Therendil]

Well, Tinkering doesn't go by XP, so the question is really how often to expect a skillup. I have run a Tinker up to 450 and I'm working on another one, so I have enough data to count. Generally speaking, if you grind blueprints that are even-con or harder, you can expect a skillup about 60% of the time. Another way to say that is that I expect to do 20-25 combines to get 10 skillups. I am pretty confident in that number because I have done literally thousands of combines.

One thing I don't know is whether buffs actually hurt your skillup chance by making things easier. I'll be able to answer that better after Fiddlewidget gets his Cloak of Clockwork Dreams this Tinkerfest and I can compare results. Didn't think to check that with Therendil.

FWIW, Adorning seems to run about the same percentages. When I do the daily Adorning tasks, I can usually get 5 skillups out of 11 combines.

[Rothrandir]

What will help the most is to have the Blessed Coldain Prayer Shawl and have the Conservation of Mass AA maxed out. The higher you get, the crazier the loam requirements per item get (I think it maxes out at 20 per craft). The proc from those two things can save you a fair bit of harvesting time in the long run. Unless you've already got 500-1,000+ loams in each of the higher tiers just sitting around, but its still nice to avoid using as much as possible

[Therendil]

If I can point to one thing that happened to me as a result of all that Tinkering, it is that I stopped complaining when I hit an ore node and got loam.

I'm afraid I don't have any of the advanced goodies like the Prayer Shawl. I do make sure to push every combine to Pristine to get back as much material as possible.

In any case, you do want to have plenty of materials in stock when you start to grind a tier. Of course this is true for any crafting. *The* reason I crawled over hot coals to get Gryphons Keep leveled up was to have a guild hall with a harvest depot. I was really grateful for the 'excessive' quantities of loam, etc. in the depot when Therendil was grinding Tinkering.