It's been awhile since I leveled up tradeskills/trophies on another character. With Overseer and certain items now being vendor purchaseable (which I didn't have originally), it's definitely easier. My question is this: If I have a Beginner trophy, but choose raise the skill to 300 (by doing high triv recipes because I have access to way more materials than lower triv recipes), bypassing the "within 100 points" restriction at each trophy level, will the trophy kick in with its catch-up mechanic once I hit 300 and continue to do non-trivial combines? Or am I forced to do each trophy level with the "within 100 points" restriction?
Doesn't matter the trophy level, the 100 difference is only your skill vs the trivial at whatever your current skill is. Anything over 350 triv is counted as 350, so effectively the last time you have to worry about it is 250 (unmodified) skill. The catch up kicks in if triv within 100 and trophy rank is less than ts rank, you don't have to wait to 300. If you delay it like that, the catch up does go fast, but you'll require more high triv combines than if you just went through whatever mats you have at lower trivial within the 100 triv. And 6/7 trophy eeaaaattsss up mats.
As an example, beginner trophy and you immediately do high triv combines (like people that use a ts potion), expect the trophy to be somewhere in the low/mid 5/7 when you hit 300, so you have an "extra" level still to go.
Well, I've been using OS for the last couple of years to get stat food materials, so I literally have thousands of things like silks, ores, lumber, and hides. Honestly, it's just much, much easier to do the high triv combines than it is doing it bit by bit. I just buy a few 1k stacks of whatever vendor materials I need, stand at the container in the GH, hit auto combine, and watch a game.
I think leveling up the trophy as you go makes more sense. In any case, I highly recommend to everyone that they stop at 300, including not buying any AAs allow you to go beyond 300, until you maximize your trophy. The reason is that there are some recipes who's trivial is just over 300 that you would want to use to maximize it. It gets very difficult to do so otherwise. The sheer amount of combines to maximize a trophy means that without the 'simpler' ones you will find it hard to find materials to do so.
In the back of my mind I seem to recall the trophy evolves quicker if your skill is above the level the trophy thinks it should be (less combines to level)
This is correct. If you were to do this, and no reason not to if it works for you, as soon as your skill hits 250, you trophy should evolve through all the levels up to 5/7 very quickly, BUT you are effectively spending combines that could be counting towards 5/7 to get to 5/7.... I've personally done it both ways and I prefer to stair step through a few recipes to raise my skill than to just head straight for a high trivial recipe.
Yeah, I tried it yesterday with tailoring. My toons's trophy was at 2/7. I had some of the pelts from ToV (nearly 400) in the bank, so I just made those combines. Naturally, the trophy wasn't evolving because of the high trivial. As soon as I hit 200, I did a few combines of something in the 100-point range, and it only took about a dozen successes for it to catch-up and hit 4/7. So, to answer my own question I guess, in theory, if I had I hadn't switched to another recipe and gone on to raise the skill to 250, the trophy probably would have kicked in and caught up and hit 5/7.
Either way, but trophy will exp at 4/7 while you are in the 200-249 skill range if you keep the trivial within 100, and stop exping at 5/7 until you get over the 250 skill minimum. It'll put you closer to Master by 300 than if you leave a trophy Beginner or Apprentice until 250 skill, which may still be a level behind by the time you get to 300 even with the catch up (low/mid Expert instead of Master). Beginner = 1/7, exp min 50, and higher skill Apprentice = 2/7, exp min 100, and higher skill Freshman = 3/7, exp min 150, and higher skill Journeyman = 4/7, exp min 200, and higher skill Expert = 5/7, exp min 250, and higher skill Master = 6/7, exp min 300, and higher skill Grandmaster = 7/7
Once you hit 250, the 100 point restriction is out the window...you can use whatever non-trivial combines you want. I've leveled 5 trophies in the last week and just made the high trivial (400+) recipes because I had plenty of materials once I hit 250 and got the last 2 levels on the trophy. My question was could I just skip all the sub-300 recipes, leave the trophy at Beginner level, and have the trophy automatically start catching up once I hit a certain skill point. The answer to that is yes, as I found out. I wasn't sure it would, but now I know.
Stair step it except for a few exceptions. I used Broiled Raxil Fish for baking. It's very easy to fish for the Raxil and the rest is from a vendor. Baking is one that it can be worth just fishing a bunch of fish and then just making a ton of combines. Most of the other trades take a lot rarer materials and rushing on the front end could make for a rough go on the back end.
