So, I've finished baking, brewing, fishing, tailoring, fletching and jewelry making to 350 and decided to start on research next as I won't have to farm much if anything at all due to having been hoarding parchments, powders, and hides for years now. I dinged research 314 when I hit 300 and am currently at 316 after making all of the quills, powders, thickeners, and inks. I've done all scribing of books etc.. What I'm looking for is what 'systems" you folks used. There's still 1839 ish recipes I need to make. With fletching and JM I set up my bags with the components and would do full runs of certain combines. For instance I would put drake spikes, or girplan feathers in my bags along with each nock and shaft type and knock all of those out at once (Class 1-7). With JM I did all the "cut" recipes like pear, oval, trillion, square of each harmongate, taaflite, staurolite, etc along with the mold cuts for each metal type and run through the whole line. Is there something similar with research I can do? I don't see anything that works as well so for the moment I'm going buy trivial level, cleaning each hide/parchment and making everything that those combine into.
There are so many things to buy. It was slow but I stood at the vendors and bought for each recipe. If you want to dump all your stuff and have 4 or 5 bags of stuff you can buy stacks of everything but I chose not to do that. You can also spend the time to sort the excel list on each item and figure out how many of each you need if you want to be really organized. I put tradeskill container in the first slot so as I bought things they went there. closed trader window unstack anything that stacked hit combine put item away. Open trader and repeat. Also found this was easier than trying to find stuff in bags that all looked similar. I did buy stacks of some items when I filtered my spreadsheet and found I would need a lot of an item to prep papers. Plus I just got on when I could did 50-100 recipes and went away for a bit. Kept me from burning out trying to do 500-1000 at a time.
I only got Research to 320 before pausing to focus on new expansion content. What I found best to do was get about 3-4 bags of 32-40+ size and get every quill, ink, thickener, additive in alphabetical order in various bags so I could quickly go through combines. From there I would select a single level range of spells like level 61 spells, go to EQTraders figure out how many combines there are for that level, make the parchments, then go through each spell in that level range. Generally I've found each level range is a single trivial (this may not hold through all levels). For example level 61 spell are all 231 trivial (the only exception is one of the enchanter bar enchant ability scrolls). So you can check your learned recipes by searching combines 231 to 231 in the tradeskill window in game, and skip whatever combines you naturally learned before your grind for whatever reason. Once I finish evolving the ToV Ear and TBL Chase items I may get back to Research 320-350. It is just a huge amount of clicking. 40+ combines per skill up is rough. Also it is an enormous money pit with how expensive the parchment solutions are.
I'm basically doing what each of you are. I've got a stack of 200 for each thickener, quill, ink, etc and premade a lot of other things. I did dump everything not research related off onto my mule. I guess it's just slogging through it now. I've got 100+ of each hide/spell scroll from all the farming over the years. Honestly smithing is the one I'm saving for last. It seems to be the one that is going to frustrate me the most.
Ha! I know but I'll have to farm for smithing and I'm tired of farming. Pottery will be easy and I just did two easy ones with fletching and JM. I did almost 2 hundred combines last night and saw like 1 skill up. I'm just glad I dinged 315 when I finished up 300. I have no idea how unless it figured in all of the old school research combines I did back in the day before PoK was a thing and before all of the spells were available there. I'm still using plat I made selling RGC.
fishing is the easiest at like 4 recipes per skill up, research is the hardest for sheer # of recipes at 54. baking is next hardest I would say for the psychotic number of subcombines. I'd still do smithing before research. max it out and you won't have to get all of the way to 350 on research to have a maxed artisan's prize.
Research takes the most combines, but it's definitely easier to setup than the other large number (20+ per point) tradeskills. Assuming you have the hides/parchments/scrolls. I don't recommend trying to do this as you get a few scrolls at each level ... you really need to have enough to do a spell level before attempting IMO. It's also pretty pricey, especially if you keep the spells for alts. Darchon's method was the method I used. As important of getting the bags of stuff on yourself and working each spell level, you really need a second monitor/computer so that on one screen you are combining while on the other you have gone through EQTraders and opened a tab for every spell/tome for that level. And then you just go through it one by one. After a pretty short time, you'll develop muscle memory as to where things are so it's actually pretty fast to do a single combine. And while the shapes are the same for each type, you get really good at color matching to ingredients listed. I'd recommend setting aside a hour or so a night and try to get through a few levels at a time. And it's definitely better to commit to finishing rather than once a week deal. All in all, it's pretty much a great test to see how comfortable you are with monotony. I passed with flying colors.
Having saved TS materials for years its really not difficult but boring to do so I do 20 or so recipes at a time, particularly while waiting for raids to form up. I have nothing better to do but chat anyway. As far as spells go, I do all my prep work for a particular sheet first. For example "grimy fine vellum... whatever". If this sheet is used for 52 recipes I make up 53 sheets, buy the other expendables for two or three spells and hump my butt to the table, placing exactly what I need one ingredient at a time, rarely failing or mixing up recipes. Sell. Rinse and repeat. Its slow but uses less room than trying to outfit a toon with half a dozen ingredients. In the mean time I keep plunking along. Not like hitting 350 is going to change much of anything at all from 339. - Coag
So, what I've done is have all the inks, thickeners, quills, etc in my bags in alpha order using quills to separate between Ink of and Ink of the. I sent everything to myself via parcel to get them in alpha order quickly. I then sort the list from EQRecipes to trivial level, get the hide from the bank, buy the solution, and then make every recipe from the hide as well as make enough to do the spells from each "cleaned" version of the hide or scroll. And, yes, as mentioned muscle memory and color recognition is kicking in as I go along. There's probably a very convoluted but far better organization method like pairing conjuring thickener with quills of the Arch Lich and Arch Convoker but I'm not gonna do all that right now.
Caster spells and melee tomes use different quills inks etc so I did all tomes then went to work on spells just to reduce amount of different items i would need to have in inventory.
I might end up doing that. I think I can get rid of some of the inks and thickeners that way as well.
So... I've done this on several characters..... #1 I use a house. I put stacks of inks, quills, solutions, thickeners, etc in a house, sorts alpha, super easy to find. #2 Do binding powders first. It gets you a fair number of combines, not too expensive/time intensive. #3 Make all the inks, quills, thickeners, all the basic recipes like orphic cards or Battle diagrams for combines as well. #4 I worked low trivial to higher trivial to keep the cost down IIRC I really only needed to make all the available spells, tomes, etc. through ~71sh?
Blacksmithing was not overly difficult. You do want to have farmed/bought a ridiculous amount of the rare materials from the Planes. Pottery was *much* less painful than i thought it would be. Knock out all the vials you can (the rare animal pelts for the lined vials i mostly skipped), and then set yourself up to do all the power sources and charms and you're already almost there. i mention those two, because they aren't on your list of finished skills. i'm at 345 pottery and 350 everything else except research, and the artisan's prize is at 292 AC or so. i don't anticipate having to do too much research as that seems to be the toughest slog.
If you opt to use the house to store/pull ingredients from, I also strongly suggest putting your research container in your first slot - the ingredients just drop into it then and all you have to do is unstack items if there is more than one in the recipe. Don't bother putting a spell research table on the plot - that actually makes it harder.
Get the tradeskill up to 300. Max the trophy. Go and read&scribe every recipebook you can find. Check http://eqrecipes.free.fr/index.php for the recipes you are still missing. Crossreference with https://www.eqtraders.com/. Do the basic recipes first and those that have a system. Have lots of time & plat ready. Try not to get crazy. Good luck! But once you have mastered (grand-mastered?) everything you can get the Artisan's earring-augment and the Earring of Rallos Zek etc.
A guild member of mine did an excel spreadsheet with every Reasearch Recipe and all the components in an excel list so you dont need to search eqtraders or allas. You can sort by parchment type, trivial or any ingredient this way making it much easier. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b3cDOTabN8PtwYyzuGrLrMWxxsTQZ_y5/view?usp=sharing is where I have is saved so guild members could get it. Anybody else that wants can grab it.
