Thoughts On EQ Tradeskills, 2016Follow

Some thoughts on tradeskills, spurred by the two posts (quoted at bottom) from the Artisan's quest thread .

-Tradeskills in EQ have always been sadistic in design, despite some advancements in the systems (Abysmal Sea Quests, Crescent Reach, "new" interface with recipies, auto combine, etc.) --but don't forget the taking away of being able to spend GM points in tradeskills, which was cut back significantly (especially recall this for research).
-Tradeskills in EQ seldom give a reward at the level as you level... so there is a lot of timesink for no real reason
-The failure rate on trivial recipes has always been ridiculous.... you are 200+ points beyond mastery of something you should extremely rarely fail to make it.
-tradeskills could be more fun, for more players if some tweaks were made.

I do believe tradeskills can reflect the difficulty in-era on a progression server, but I believe that said progression should be retroactively altered in a couple of ways.

1. For Kunark-LDoN era more combines need to be added to make useful things in the era, at the level. This can be existing in-era items, or even Kunark items from drops become tradeskillable in Velious and so on. This precedent could carry forward up to present era... and would mean lots for tradeskillers to do in every era. I don't mean highest-end raiding stuff (Though you could do that 3-4 expacs later really...) just useful content that providing an alternate route to would add some fun.

2. GoD gave us the Abysmal Sea "Freebies", which if you have ever done them are a bit of a timesink, but at least you know you will get your skill ups without having to farm mats too. In my view, GoD's freebie should of happened in Luclin, but it didn't. However, add in a 100 level skill, 150 level skill, 200 level skill and rework the TSS freebie to take you to 250 skill. This puts you in the territory of having good reason to pursue the rest of the skilling up.

3. If #2 is too hard to swallow, Add simple (in design) tradeskill daily tasks that you can do the task for (example) for a brewing merchant in PoK to collect some brewing items (old zones, not sadistic low drop rates either) to get +10 skill ups for doing the task. The tasks would rotate, and basically add in the benefit of teaching people where to farm their mats. 20 days of straight farming the brewing task to get 200 skill is not a game-destroying easymode.


What other tradeskill comments do all of you have?

I won't argue that (the numbers) as you are likely totally right. Too many combine fails when within range, at trivial level and when beyond would be my point.


Also, to my suggestion of new combines in old content: for the Classic to PoP era this can even be colour variations of existing things. For example, Gnome Skin Armor is black. Make recipes for it, but also for it in other colours with the same stats. That does not upset Velious item progression (someone farming ToFS for the black set vs. someone having to farm a level 35-50 zone for gnome skins... and yes they may have to add a tradeskill mat drop to a few places to make this all work).


It would also be nice to be able to do quests, maybe based on city factions, to learn new recipes from NPC of particular tradeskills. So if you max ally all the Freeport factions you have 60% of the known recipes in the world by visiting the NPC scattered in the town. Special recipes could require some travel like Cabilis, Katta Castellum, etc.

On your point about failures on trivial combines, I disagree generally. I think there should always be a chance at failure, because that's how it is IRL. I didn't know the failure rate is hard-coded at 5% in such cases, as someone said above. That seems a little simplistic to me. I think it the chance to fail a trivial combine should be on a bell curve from 1-10% with an adjustment downwards related to the difference between the trivial value and the player's skill level.

Maybe I use Draughts too much and don't notice but I really don't experience a remarkable level of failures on such combines, nothing that makes me think it's unrealistic or intolerable. Plus there are AA's now which guarantee a 50% component recovery rate on failures and you don't have to spend RL$ on Draughts to salvage your mats using these AA's. I think there are a lot more aspects of trade skills they should fix before tinkering with the trivial failure rate. Plus I'd love to see more recipes for items that could actually be sold to other players. I've made 10s of millions of pps from my trade skill Bazaar vendors but it's always been from a small handful of marketable items and as an expansion ages and demand wanes this volume decays considerably.

I have to admit, though, the Artisan Quest is a good sign that DBG is showing respect to trade skill devotes and giving all players a reason to "tinker" with trades, pardon the gnomish pun,
'

To prove a point, I trotted our a second shaman I have, a level 91 troll named Septikk Phever. This was one of my earliest toons, born in 2000, but not being a big fan of the shaman class, I haven't done much with him in years. (His gear is deplorable, but it dates back a decade, prolly. And it wasn't great back then!)

His Alchemy skill started at 1, the default for shaman.

I bought the recipe for Ancient Hedgewizard Brew and scribed it. This cost like 1pp. Trivial is 482. Yes you can try to make these from Level 1 and, amazingly, while you fail "most" of the time, you can actually succeed rarely. My fifth attempt succeeded, among many to follow.

I bought 400 each of the vendor components, Jar of Acid from Gerta in PoK, and Alchemical Poison Vial, Blackwort and Echinacea from Alchemist Redsa in the same area, outside the "small bank."

Total expenditure for these mats was about 86k.

The only dropped item required is Relic Fragments. This is a common drop in whatever expansion it was introduced and as I tend to store any trade skill mats I acquire. I had over 500 on various toons. I transferred 400 to Septikk. If I had to buy these, plenty in the Bazaar for 900-1000pp.

Septikk has ~9000 Station Cash on his account. This is all from the 500SC free monthly credit so I didn't need to buy any. Anyone playing regularly with an All Access account probably piles up more free SC than they can use so spending this "money" is essentially getting stuff for free. Using 2000 of this SC I bought two Draughts of the Craftsman, each of which provides 100% salvage of components for 2 hours.

I drank the potion and settled down in my guild hall to do some auto-combines.

So what happened?

In 2 hours I went from Alchemy 1 to Alchemy 246. Made 102 successful combines. In the second 2 hours I went from 246 to 296. Didn't quite ding 300. Made another 106 combines without failure. Total successful combines: 208. Failures: 4,287.

The combines went fairly quickly, to my mind. No, they're not instant but as I mentioned in another post you want to see slowness make a hot key for Forage or Fishing. And THIS process is automatic. I just sat there and watched TV since my understanding is you're not supposed to allow your toons do anything "automated" without being at the keyboard. Fair enough. I could also chat with my guild, browse the Bazaar and almost anything else short of casting spells and fighting.

The Ancient Hedgewizard Brews add 6500 damage to spellcasts so they're a decent potion and the asking price in the Bazaar on FV runs about 4000pp each. The Relic Fragments sell for 900-1000 apiece. So in theory you can even make a substantial profit levelling your Alchemy here, EVEN IF you need to buy your Relic Fragments. In truth it might be hard to move this many Brews quickly but there are plenty of similar recipes for other alchemical potions which provide benefits like healing and others so you could mix it up a bit and increase the chance for quickly recovering your investment and maybe even make some plat.

This is pretty dumb-downed and care-bearish for levelling a trade skill, IMO. It's hard to imagine EQ making it much easier short of a giant "Alchemy 300" hot button on every shaman's UI. I failed 4287 times and only preserved the components (market value about 5 million pp) because of the Draught. Imagine the massive investment of trade skillers back before this and the Salvage AA's. It doesn't bear thinking about the efforts made by these early players to master all the then-available trade skills!

/hat off

The key is to find a high-triv (400-500+) recipe which requires only vendor components save for the inevitable one drop, and ensure that the one drop is easily acquired. I've already found some for Smithing and I'm going to check for all the other skills when I have time. If you don't want to spend RL$10 on a Draught then go All-Access and with the monthly 500SC credits you can get a free Draught every 2 months. Plus they have occasional sales where these can be had for half-price, IIRC.





Edited, Sep 1st 2016 1:48pm by Sippin

Of course it's easier to make plat at 105, especially on FV. The marketable trade skill drops alone you can pharm while levelling can make u a ton of plat. Now if you max out trade skills that's another area which can make you plat. If you play the Bazaar well and keep mules up all night when you're not playing, another source of plat. Plus as a 6-boxer I don't have to share drops with anyone else. My 6 accounts are all All-Access so I see 3000 SC a month from them all, and I do view that as free money from EQ. Not to mention my toons are all at maximum velocity for Loyalty tokens. You can use those to buy the bags of plat which can be cashed in for substantial amounts of plat. You kinda have to do it since if you cap out your velocity at 5760 you don't get anymore until you spend it down.This thread reminded me I have toons capped at the 5760. Spending that down in bags of platinum pieces will clear you 200kpp. Per toon. (Note: This used to be crazy profitable till they nerfed. Those bags now cash in for 15kpp. They used to be worth 180kpp apiece. I remember when they warned that a nerf was coming. Everybody in my guild rushed down to the Loyalty vendor in PoK to cash in. One of my friends was away for the weekend and boy was he annoyed when he came back post-nerf and discovered he had lost effectively something like 2millionpp.)

Not bragging here, just saying, yes, spending PP does hasten the process of levelling up trade skills. But look at this way, even if you don't buy Draughts, if you have to use up valuable mats to earn skillups, you ARE spending money since those mats could have been sold for plat. Either way everybody PAYS to raise their trade skill abilities. Nothing is free in life nor in EQ.


Edited, Sep 1st 2016 3:31pm by Sippin

Fair 'nuff. No need to agree on everything!

Honestly, my biggest beef with tradeskills is the bizarre requirement to basically toss out everything old and replace it with a whole new set of mats and recipes every single expansion. Ok, maybe not "replace", but it seems like each expansion brings a completely different new set of mats, with new recipes that use those mats. I would much rather they just build on the existing infrastructure. Take each tradeskill and break it down into different broad types of things you are doing, with broad types of materials needed for each category. Maintain these common mats, making them drop in similar rates in future expansions. Then, break those broad categories into sub categories and then into specific recipes for specific things. That way, everything that's in categoryX, and subcategoryY, will use the same materials, which are broadly and globally available, with only maybe one or two unique mats needed for the final combine.

Basically, build on things over time, but use the same common ingredients. What we have now does use subcombines (which is fine), but those requires mats that only drop in this expansion, then another subcombine that uses mats that only drop in another expansion, then you combine them with yet more mats that only drop in whatever expansion the recipe came from. IMO, we don't really need yet another form of spider silk that differs only by name because we came out with a new expansion. Or a new/different blue rock, or new/different type of hide, or skin, or water, or whatever. Just use the same mats.

Do it this way and the skills themselves would follow a certain kind of logic. If I'm making a form of plate armor, I'm going to know what 90% of the materials are because of that fact. It's in the "armor" category, and the "plate" subcategory". All that remains is whatever specific stuff is needed for the specific plate armor I'm making. More importantly, I don't have to scour all over the place for mats. The same mats will work for everything that I'm doing. I just need to go farm or buy stuff that drops in the expansion that the recipe came from to do the final bits.

This would also make it much much easier on people who don't do tradeskills but might maybe want to sell them. I have no freaking way to know if that random mat that just dropped is really worth anything. This kind of system would mean that if I'm leveling up a character in an older expansion, the mats I pick up are actually sellable. Which also means more mats available for the 90% of the tradeskill recipe that's just building up combines. Which makes it much easier on everyone IMO.

The current system is just so random and so arbitrary that it's not just bewildering to a new starting trade skiller, but to everyone else as well.

Aye, so true. I absolutely love tradeskills because they're relaxing for me. I can sit there all day and do it, but I also realize it's not for everyone. I find grinding xp to be monotonous and within 30 minutes, I want to gauge my eyes out and scream for mercy. =P

Tradeskills + actual questing = omg, so fun. =)

I'm looking at your FV server example Sippin and I see how that works (especially if one has been subbed steadily).

Move that situation to Vox server and it gets a lot uglier, even if willing to spend the station cash.


I agree with gbaji's point that "expansion lock" need only be a single item. Example: suppose in Empires of Kunark a new drop of "Shiny Red Diamonds" used to make level 110 Curscale armor. The rest of the mats drop around Cabilis in Kunark era. An absolute ton of tradeskill depth and utility could be added across eras with such a thoughtful system.

I'd see it as a range of things, tiers if you will:

-"basic" tradeskill made items of an expac would use a drop (or vendor) from the early content of the expac and older stuff.
-"medium" tradeskill tier could be a mix (say 4 old, 2 new... or banded mail + a new ingredient or two, etc.).
-"elite" tradeskill would be obtainable in-era following group and raid progression, "the higher, the fewer"*


*with the caveat that the high end content would scale to usable as future group content (rather than being unused) and/or one expac's elite drops for tradeskills become the next expacs medium drops/vendor accessable items.


The more old stuff that is reused (without creating bottleneck camps) the more robust the game economy is. Even if it just encourages some to play a lower level alt for XP while getting mats for other uses.

Absolutely true for drops, quests and tradeskill items... and probably more like 98% for vendor items.

Ironically, in this age of less devs with less time to develop content... there is such an easy opportunity here, in that they could take any of these old things and add new purpose.

Example: otherwise useless food recipe from Kunark becomes the one quest hand-in a new NPC in Plane of Health wants. Reward is something useful such as slightly below first tier group quality from previous expac.

Note that this is a bit of an extreme example, but we do have nearly 20 years worth of dead-ends to build from. There is precedent for this being done before (Earring of the Solstice, the PoK "museum" quests, the long-overdue extension of the Coldain Prayer shawl quest and so on).


Getting back to tradeskills specifically, making old recipes a subcombine in a new (but useful for the era it is made active) recipe is good too. Simple is okay... banded + "Orc Slime" creates the new Slime Banded set of armor --with a trivial matching it's era/level usefulness. {as a fake example}

From a progression standpoint, I still think there is opportunity to retroactively tweak some things to smooth out eras.

I'm not sure that's a great direction though. They have done that in some cases and it's usually one of the annoying blocks to newer quests. So suddenly, in order to finish this new thing, I have to go back to some 10 year old content and farm there because no one hunts there anymore, so the ingredients I need aren't available in the bazaar.

Now, if they consolidated on common mats, this wouldn't be a problem at all. Making use of an "old" recipe isn't a problem because most of the stuff I need to complete it drops in current content. Maybe there's that one thing I need to go look for, but that's manageable to complete a quest. And frankly, that does add a bit of flavor (I've got to go to some specific place to get the rare whatever flower to add into my brew to make the final thing I need to hand in). That's fine. Making me farm for hours and hours for a whole set of 4-5 specific mats (out of dozens that can randomly drop in that zone) to make an attempt at a combine that's needed to make a quest turnin is not fun at all.

I'm less interested in finding uses for old things that don't have a use as I am with just eliminating old things and making everything useful for all content. That way you trim the number of "things" you have to manage by a couple orders of magnitude, and don't get turned off from doing what could otherwise be fun quests and tasks.





Yeah. But I think they're missing out on potential customers that way. I suppose it's a balancing act, but at some point people are just going to decide to stop playing entirely rather than spend the money on each new expansion just to make sure they can use the 50th type of silk, or the 400th type of pelt, etc, etc, purely because those new versions are needed for some new recipes that produce a slightly better product. More to the point, there's a ton of people who might otherwise be interested in doing trade skills in EQ, but are totally turned off by the process itself. What's funny is that it's not really about the number of combines for me. There are times when I'm fine with just sitting around doing combines while watching TV or something. For me, it's gathering the materials that is a pain. What few trade skill stuff I've done has only be accomplished by finding recipes that use vendor buyable stuff, that I can use to make skill increases. And even that's only been done in cases where I needed some specific thing for a quest that I was working on.

I'm not asking them to make it so easy you just click a button and you're done. But making it less of a hassle to even get started might be a really smart move on their part. I think that once people get into the process of doing trade skills they tend to stick with it and have fun with it. But the current system is so daunting to someone new to trade skills that most people will just skip it entirely.

Correct. So plain old "spider silk" would drop from all varieties of spiders in all expansions (with quantity changing as you suggested), and would be used in any recipe in any expansion where spider silk would be an appropriate material for the combine. What has happened instead is that each expansion has created a new version of spider silk, and used it exclusively in its recipes. Same deal with hides, and ores, and well, everything. That's what I think was a mistake and is still a mistake. It makes trade skills incredibly complex and provides no real benefit IMO. Oh. So in this recipe, I need to get silk from a Draknid and hide from a gorilla (but only a Kunark gorilla and not any other kind), and some kind of ore that only varies from other kinds because it's named different and only drops in Kunark zones. That's just nutty, but that's the current process.

If they cleaned that up and trimmed the common mats down to just a basic set that is reused over and over in all sorts of recipes in all expansions, then they could add just a small number of unique mats that are for the final combine for something you're making that is specific to an expansion. You'd still have to go farm (or buy) those unique mats, but that would be less of an issue IMO since they're for the final combine. You should never have to go to an old expansion to get mats for a recipe from the current expansion. Even sub combines should not require unique mats. They should be made entirely from common mats instead. Which, of course, means that you'd need to have a stable of common combines that don't require any unique mats that are intended specifically to be used as materials for subsequent combines.

That would result in a much more logical and usable trade skill system IMO. You'd still utilize the same basic methodology that's currently in place, but eliminate the really annoying and often arbitrary hunting for materials that were not intended to be rare or difficult to get, but now are because the content is so old that no one utilizes it anymore.