Tradeskills past 300

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by bobokatt, Jul 11, 2021.

  1. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    I think that this gets at my main problem, which I did state already. That the huge time and trouble investment in gaining skill past 300 can only be justified in any way, shape, or form in light of the Artisan's Prize. Without the AP, there really is no way I can imagine all but the most obsessive completionists being willing to do it.

    Once I saw how the system worked on my return to the game in 2017, not long after EoK came out, and had gotten to 300 in all my skills, I didn't do much to try it. I mostly just started hoarding materials and setting up buy lines, but I was fairly passive with it for a long time. When I did start going for it (both raising skill and working toward the AP), I was doing it bits at a time, rather than trying to grind straight through it. Even so, I would get burned out on it and set the project aside for months before picking it back up. That was especially true with PoP flagging, by the way. Needing to do Aid Grimel in order to do the Artisan's Prize is another gripe of mine. That quest requires multiple raid flags from PoP, with their 3 or 6 day spawn timers. I've never been a raider, so that was really an obnoxious requirement. I did finally finish Aid Grimel, but I can't say that I enjoyed much of it. I last got burned out about 2/3 of the way through Eron's Jewelry. That quest line isn't overly difficult, but I was just tired of running around grey con content at that point and needed a break.
  2. Nennius Curmudgeon

    Very well put. As a paladin, I pushed every tradeskill to 350 except research to max my Artisan's Prize. My research is at 336 or something like that. Eventually I will probably max it but it will be a few years in the doing. For me, the Timesink vs. Reward equation to max my A.P. made it worth it. For others it does not (based upon numerous comments I have read). It really is a personal decision.
    OlavSkullcrusher likes this.
  3. Waring_McMarrin Augur


    Because gaining skills became impossible at a certain point? What is hard to understand about that? From what I remember when they made it possible to go above 300 they mentioned this problem. If it is impossible to gain skills through skill ups to 350 what do you expect them to do? They could have either not increased the skill cap, rewritten how tradeskills work or do what they did.

    In the end you got a higher skill cap because they found a way to get around the limitations on how far you could raise your skill. You can be convinced all you want but when the tradeskill dev comes out and tells us something is impossible we should at least listen to them.
    Yinla and Nennius like this.
  4. Gialana Augur

    I disagree with the statement that getting trade skills close to 350 is only worthwhile for the Artisan's Prize, though that may be somewhat true for raiders.

    With the current expansion and the previous two, the best group gear has been the trade skill gear. Yes, you can buy it in the bazaar, but it's usually a lot cheaper to make it yourself. I currently have a base jewel craft skill of 345. There's a large difference in my success rate when cutting gems. At more than 5k an attempt (when the cleaning solution isn't salvaged), the savings add up now that I fail far less often.

    As for the AA cost being so high, my thoughts were that it matched the enormous AA cost increase for EoK AAs. The one-time AA rewards for EoK progression are also big, but probably not enough to buy all of the trade skill AAs.
  5. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    When looked at cost/benefit-wise, I think it only makes sense to pursue 350 (other than maxing AP, of course), if you do a LOT of tradeskilling.

    I used the calculator on EQTraders (which, in the past I've found to be highly accurate). For JC, with a 315 skill (easy to reach) and a 15% trophy, and Mastery at level 3 (has to be, to raise skill past 300), on a 523 trivial combine (about as high as they go), you have a 59% success chance. Now, with a 350 skill, it's 77%. So, yes, you have an 18% better chance for success, but if I lose out on 5kpp of mats 18% of the time, that's 900pp, on average (ignoring salvage). How long does it take me to make 900pp, vs. the slog to get to 350? Now, JC's not all that bad, but for the ones which are a real pain to raise, I'll roll the dice and maybe pay some more plat, which will take way less time to recover than the time to raise the skills. Like Olav has mentioned, it's just not fun (for many of us) to grind them up to 350.

    Now, obviously, if you are making a LOT of expensive combines, then yes, that extra 18% makes a big difference. I don't do enough expensive combines to worry about it.
    OlavSkullcrusher likes this.
  6. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    Uh, I am questioning whether it really was "impossible" to gain skill ups after 300 through combines. I would need to know a lot more about how the formulas and skill up process works to judge this, but I'm just really skeptical of this argument, even if it really did come from the devs. Why would the number 300 be an unavoidable inflection point in the process that couldn't be changed by changing the math of the formulas? Especially when there are no other skills that had that kind of problem when levels increased and thus the caps did. Just how different is the skill up process for tradeskills that it would work this way?
  7. Waring_McMarrin Augur


    Why would the devs lie about it? It should be easy to see that making the skill raise based on a number of recipes known by tradeskill is going to be more work than just increasing the cap. If it wasn't an issue why would they have just increased the cap instead of doing a bunch of extra work? I would think raising the skill on other skills is just increasing the max cap.

    Though you are right 300 itself wasn't the cap but if I remember right it wasn't a lot higher and you would hit it before you got to 350.
  8. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    I think the issue was, as you leveled the tradeskills, the chances of a skillup for a given combine got smaller and smaller. To go from 299 to 300, you had maybe a 2% chance for a skillup, and looking at the rate of change of that chance as you skilled up, by 310, it would have been less than 1%, and by 320, very small indeed.

    So, they either had to monkey with the formula, or come up with a different approach. Frankly, as much as I hated the "do tons of combines and hope for skillups", I think I like the current approach to skilling to 350 better!
    Velisaris_MS likes this.
  9. Svann2 The Magnificent

    My issue with current system is that it seems like a dead end. Where do you go after you have required players to learn almost every single recipe? The rest? Theres only a few left. How does TS go forward now?
    Velisaris_MS and Elyssanda like this.
  10. Rondor Augur

    For developer-details as to why standard combine-change skillups post-300 using the existing formulas are not appropriate for post-300 skillups (as skillups become increasingly rarer and pracically impossible a little while after 300 skill), please see this year-2005 thread on the EQTraders forum that talks about the changes made to the tradeskills skillups formula(s) in 2005:

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

    http://mboards.eqtraders.com/eq/for...-faire-june-2005-write-up-plus-tanker-handout

    [ archive.org link as backup - https://web.archive.org/web/2020092...-faire-june-2005-write-up-plus-tanker-handout ]

    The first post of the thread has some detailed graphs/formulas including information presented by former EQ developer "Tanker". Then some posts later we see comments from current EQ developer Ngreth who was interpreting the first post, and note that Ngreth was not an EQ developer at the time of that thread.

    I only read the first few posts in the thread, so please check it all in case there are more hidden nuggets of into!

    Here is the gist of it is as I understood the first few posts:

    The tradeskills cap was raised from 250 to 300 for the DoN expansion in 2005, and the developers felt that the old skillup formula was too stagnant past 190 or so, not making it a big "challenge" to skillup from 250 to 300, and even from 190 to 250 was too linear of a skillup rate (average number of combines per skillup).

    They felt it should resemble more of a parabolic curve, getting slightly harder to reach 300 over time, in the sense of "Average Combines per Skillup" going up on a curve that looks a little more parabolic than a straight sloped line.

    The curve they chose in 2005 gets you to 300 with something like 40-ish combines per skillup on average when you're near 298 skill, and then goes up quite dramatically if it were extended past 300.

    Presumably one way around this is to mess with the curve some more by adding a discontinuity or inflection point at 300: if current skill < 300, use the existing skillup formula, else (skill is >= 300), use some other skillup formula than the existing one that ends up requiring thousands and millions of combines per point as you go slowly past 300. This would require more dev research time to make it just right, so perhaps this just was chosen not to be done when the 301-350 path was decided upon for the EoK expansion.
    nitrocutter likes this.
  11. Bigstomp Augur

    For recipes, after you are all sorted on the books from the Township Rebellion website which is great, check out: http://eqrecipes.free.fr/

    Lets you export your recipe list via /outputfile, tells you which you are missing, and is an excellent starting point to doing the hard work from 300+

    I also suggest sorting by difficulty and picking a more modern (generally higher trivial) set to start with. You likely have the components in your bags/bank instead of trying to farm ancient content.
  12. Moege Augur

    Like the amount of kills needed for the TBL evolving items (which is rare drops, lets not forget the insane requirements on those either) or the Rallos earring, I am leaning toward the treadmill theory.
  13. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Honestly, I don't think it does. I think where we are now is where it will stay til the franchise closes down.
  14. Moege Augur

    Oh I can think of a few.
    You need this item to unlock 360, it need 10000000 kills to evolve it, this super rare item drops combine with this almost non existent success rate for the final unlock.

    Think of what would be the most miserable experience add some ideas from your worst enemy and there you go.
  15. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    More AAs, increase in the number of recipes needed. More and more recipes are being added each expansion from when the 350 max was added so they could increase the max if they really wanted.
  16. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    1 - They've already added more recipes, and not changed the amount needed to reach 350
    2 - No, they won't change that amount needed. If they did, they'd have to program in exceptions for people who've hit 350 now, but wouldn't under the new requirement. And, do they take away their maxed AP, or let them be grandfathered? Won't happen.
  17. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Correct, but those suggestions I made could be used to take it beyond 350, not keep it at 350. So you keep the current requirements for 350 but increase the number of recioes required if they want to take it higher.

    AP I don't expect to increase if they upped the tradeskil cap, but they could add something new.
  18. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Thanks, I was misreading what you wrote. Yes, that would be one way to bring them up past 350.
    Yinla likes this.
  19. Coagagin Guild house cat

    I just clicked over to EQTraders with the common resource needed, say Orphic Card and did all the Orphic Card research, reran my output and went on to the next series. Really didn't require much effort at all.
    nitrocutter and Velisaris_MS like this.