Seiffil I agree with your post except for one thing, the reason why I want to be able to refine stacks at a time has nothing to do with the rares or what is created. I want to refine stacks at a time to provide an efficient means to deal with the large influx of mats coming in that is more useful than the destroy button. Simple as that, whether that makes a stack of slag, a stack of refined commons, a stack of rares a stack of pure rares I don't really care. you take 20,000 harvests and refine them one at a time and come back and tell me it was worth the 20 points you spent on it. It has nothing to do with greed and everything to do with efficiency.
That is my thought exactly Avianna. The destroy button is just so much easier than the return you get from anything in Refining currently except the low raw to rare. As I suggested I like the idea of a common raw to a purified common, would allow you to get bonuses to Handcrafted armor if you cannot afford Mastercrafted that would really help new players get some gear to then get the money for Mastercrafted armor. Right now Refining is too tedious for me (click wise) and I get more reward out of harvesting rares myself or hunting collectables for the broker.
I guess it's more because of all the posts complaining about how people can't get a decent (in their mind) rate of return on refining common materials into purified rares which makes me skeptical when I see people asking for the ability to do anything in mass quantities.
No, it's people complaining about what the description of the ability states it will do, what it actually did do in the pre-nerf, and what it (doesn't) do currently. That's what most people are complaining about. That and ridiculously vague descriptions. There's no reason why the vast majority of other items and abilities that have a "chance" to do something/anything provide a statistical number of what that chance is, but a handful of abilities don't provide any kind of concise information. That small addition of a number would completely eliminate BOTH sides of the "it's broken!" and "It's not broken, it's working as intended!" issue of "people can't get a decent (in their mind) rate of return". Yeah, decent in their mind. Which, without a specific percentage to go off of, is JUST AS VALID as what YOU consider a "decent" rate of return to be. Eliminate subjectivity! Provide actual numbers.
A few weeks from now, I should poke around and find how many people picked Refining as their TS Prestige endline. Objective data > forum superstition.
7,739 characters have spent 5 points in Refining. 8,656 characters have spent at least 1 point in Refining.
fyi, I chose refining only because I wanted the goblin and realizing I won't have enough points left to really start another tree. I'd say refining commons is useless at this point in the game, offering that ability to a beginning tradeskiller would be a better idea since it's an easy (albeit time consuming) way to make some golds. As for refining rares, I'd like something more definite, like being to turn 2 rares into 1 refined rare @ 100% rate, or 1 rare + 1 high quality slag (make use of these) = 1 refined rare.
These numbers lie ... I am sure many people has all three specs on AA mirrors and swap to whatever they need at the time.
technically no. Regardless if they keep them on all the time or store them in a mirror they are still using the refining skill on those tabulated charaters.
I picked refining for myself but removed all the points spent on the Goblin and put them into the Crafting Stations. I can Manually Harvest 20-30 times the amount of rares that the Goblin might get in the same amount of time. I do refine my harvested rares to make better Mastercrafted gear which I then trade to my Carpenter to get Experimented on. This is for my own use amongst my Toons. I've never made gear to sell. I'd rather just put the rare pelt or whatever up for sale, much bigger market. Although, I seldom put rares up for sale cause it seems I'm always needing them for something.
While you can create furniture, spells, bags, boxes, ammo, etc with refined rares, they provide no bonus. They should! As an example, Bags, could gain slots, or weight reduction, or.. something.