It is high time to increase OoW/GoD TS mat drops

OoW and GoD TS mat drops have been horrible since the expansions were released. I am out farming stuff to work my AP to max, and spending days to get one or two drops of something is absurd. Sure, I can probably skip some of it, but not all of it. I mean, I, for the first time since coming back in EoK have looted a Tanned Pristine Bazu Hide last night (it wasn't in my loot filter). This is ridiculous. Heck, this is something even TLPs can rally behind, and we all know if TLPs want it, it will happen.

If you are on Live and have a max level character available to you, there is no reason to farm the hard to get TS items in GoD/OoW, especially the ones that are just duplicate versions leading to the same finished product like a Tanned Pristine Bazu Hide. We're now 5 or 6 expansions out from the introduction of the AP and the number of recipes available for all tradeskill categories, but especially blacksmithing and tailoring, make any of the harder to get materials simply unnecessary to attempt to collect for maxing the AP. I did a couple of max APs when first introduced and just did one recently. The difficulty now is ... well, there really isn't one. It's just time to make the stuff. Collecting is so easy to get to max.

And if you are not, there's still no reason to farm the "harder" ingredient version when you can just use the easier one, especially on TLPs.

Would I like a better drop rate on these as a philosophical discussion? Sure. But it's about #84 on the list of things I'd like to better improve EQ tradeskills. And since the developers remind us covertly (and sometimes overtly) daily on how little time they have to do the "little things", this is not where I'd want the time spent on tradeskills.

I'd agree with you, but there was a time that I got the devs to look at the aneiuk eye, which only dropped off of one mob in the entire game with a 2% drop rate. They added a mob in RSS and upped the drop rate to 20%. While I understand that they would probably have to go through each mob and increase the drop rates, it is doable (though, without being a dev, maybe there is a global table that they could tweak to increase the drop rates). Sure, there are a million things that need to be fixed beforehand, but it would be a nice QoL to the game.

Loot tables add up to 100%, and I think maybe they have said something about using blank slots. Unless there are blank slots in a loot table, increasing the drop of 1 item will decrease the drop of other item(s). It wouldn't be "global" as that term means something in game, but if they use a "table ID" that is used between different mobs, not sure on that part if they share loot tables or just attach the same data to different mobs.

I think there are blank spots being used because you can do a full clear of say, dragorn, and not get anything off of a good percent of them.

There's also the roll for the loot table if the drop is rolled. Totally making up values because I don't know the chances or if the loot table is shared. Say it's a 4% chance the Hide table is rolled, and its 25% for tanned and 75% for regular on that table. You'd just see any hide drop 4% of the kills, with only getting a tanned 1% of the kills. If tanned is on its own table (if you can find both drops off the same kill), then it could be adjusted without affecting any other drops.

So I guess in the example above they could increase the roll on the table which would increase all drops, instead of changing the balance of drop rolls. Depends if they would decide that more of that table drops, or just tanned more frequently, so I guess there is that just depends what all is in the table and what balance they want for ingress into the economy.

Do the devs need to meet you at high noon in the streets next to the saloon?

Increase the drop rates or add the items to Overseer, either would work. Option 2 wouldn't effect TLPs in era.

Yes.

I'd be looking at the Bazu bone as being the worst offender drop to get. I have a halfling ranger that I finally had to come up with a plan to max the fletching trophy. I used Drewinette's parser and started making all the bows, arrows, furniture and whatever else drops were available on hand to make stuff with. Spent a few days in Skylance for the Druzzil's drops and a few days in DSH and LP getting the drops from the horses. I still have a list of arrows to make and about 34 bazu bones needed. The Bazu bones are notoriously rare. I used the ones I already have and I think one of them was a vendor dumped item that was rescued.

The guildmate that thought halfling rangers are an abomination was long gone but I had to prove that it could be done without doing the Karana worshipper fletching recipes as the grind path to max trophy.

OoW drops were horrible to farm, worst expansion for tradeskills in terms of actually farming materials, though the design of the recipes was actually really good I thought, spoiled by the extreme low drop rates on many items, it's like the devs only expected 0.001% of players to do the tradeskills & 500% (as in 5x the amount of players who were even playing then) to be farming/selling them.

Just a head's up for those bazu drops...the ones in Korafax drop the tradeskill mats WAY more often then the ones in GoD/OoW. That's where I collected most of my bazu parts for various recipes. In that circular back section, there's like a dozen or so that pop consistently. The repop is fast enough that you don't have to wait too long for them. You can also forage up a TON of sundered blade shards that you'll need (via tinkering) to make various bow recipes.

I think it's fine as-is. Not everything should be easy to farm

Yea drops are pretty bad only got decent in Korafax i was getting 1-4 per cycle but were times when i got none. There's like 10-12 that spawn.

Don't forget to set up a buyer for all the rarer tradeskill items, and offer a good chunk of plat. You'd be surprised what random people farm across the timezones on your server. Great way to feed money down to the newer players too.

Recipes to learn for Skill Points from AAs.

That said, the GoD and OoW TS items are not that bad, aside from the ones that drop from the Riftseekers.

DoN is also horrifically terrible for those purposes.

Welcome to the Nest, please enjoy a week of hating life for every copy of anything that only drops from next drakes

Yeah, its the "good amount of plat" part thats the rub. Lightning cores spent ~3 years sitting at the plat cap for purchase, Nest Dragon stuff has hit 1kr each a few times.

The cost of the last few skillups of each tradeskill (not you, brewing) is hanging out at "more plat than converting to krono and being able to pay for 6 accounts for the rest of the games life"

i guess everyone's mileage may vary. Or, in this game, it's how you pray to the different RNG gods. When i was farming Nest Drake stuff in The Nest, it was on the more difficult/rarer side of the spectrum but very far from the most difficult to farm stuff.

Some items people just don't farm or just don't sell, no matter what. In those cases the price you put up is irrelevant or may take much longer to get a buy hit than you anticipate. i've had my tradeskill materials buyer up for at least a decade, with frequent updates. i may have purchased 3 lightning cores in all that time, always at the highest price offered. Some things you just gotta farm, or ignore. Turns out i did not need the lightning core combines to max that tradeskill. i'll still get to them, eventually, but completing every recipe in the game was not my short term goal.

In the last 2 days I have killed over a thousand fire side mobs in RSS for the Pyrilen Flame needed for the Smithing Supplies quest. Dozens of clears.
1 has dropped. One.
You need 4 to attempt the combine.
This is not a "challenge." This is not "fun." This is stupid.

You know the two pyrilen that guard the staircase to their floor in RSS? One time, no joke, I killed just those two, and they each dropped a flame. RNG can be pretty cool sometimes.