Hi all: Just started playing the game a couple of months ago. My priest (Fury) is now 38 and my Tailoring is at 39. The best results I get from tailoring at this level with woven gear is around +20 wis and +sta. The rewards I get from quests in Butcherblock Mountains and Zek are around +39. Am I doing something wrong or does tailoring stay like this for the rest of the game? I really don't want to waste all this time harvesting/crafting if all it is is a horrible time sink. Thanks.
Are you making mastercrafted pieces? But yeah, in some tiers, the quested gear is better than what can be crafted. In some other tiers, the crafted gear is just as good or better. In fact, I am wearing at least four level 100 mastercrafted pieces I made for myself (a tailor makes stuff for Wardens) that have been better than any quested or dropped armor from PQ, Solo, or Advanced Solo zones so far. It's the "Bloody Tooth" pieces here: http://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/863289273747 If memory serves, to make all the pieces needed for say level 32, your tailoring needs to be at least 39 or something. So when you hit 42 adventuring, your tradeskill needs to be 49 to make all the pieces for the 42nd level. I've been 100 for a long time so I'm not sure if I'm remembering the break downs.
Thanks for your advice Mysstie, just started doing some research on mastercrafting stuff. Gonna take me a while but I'll get there.
This is going to sound weird, but its because the older content gets the more devs make changes that they really don't care about balancing. Itemization is just going to be weird until you hit 100. Let me give you some examples. Handcrafted: is always going to be unusable junk...until you hit 90. At 90 you'll want a full set of the handcrafted you can make. Strange as it sounds, its going to be way better than other gear you'll get from Odus or Velious content. However, by the time you hit 92 the Master Crafted gear at that level is easy to replace with drops from Skyshrine. It really isn't worth making. At 95 you might consider making yourself a full set of Phantom gear. By the time you can wear it, Tranquil and the MC gear from that expansion isn't worth making. Instead at 100 you'll want to get your hands on a set of Twark (handcrafted) or Bloody Tooth (MC from the current expansion). This also completely skips all of ToT's crafted gear since it became obsolete when KA was released. The main benefit to crafting it yourself is being able to immediately change from last tier's armor to something better. You might not wear the crafted gear for very long, but its makes it faster to do the quests in even slightly better gear. Also the worst piece of handcrafted gear is better than some amazing piece of gear you got 20 levels ago. As long as you are leveling finding a full set of gear isn't going to happen before you out level and have to gear up for a new tier. Crafting gets you ahead of that curve so you aren't stuck with really weak dated gear in a few slots.
This is because they upgraded gear drops in the Faydwer zones by a massive amount ( Gfay, Lfay, Butcherblock, Steamfont, Loping Plains etc) for the TLE server when then Echoes of Faydwer expansion released for them. They did not bother to upgrade the crafted items at this time nor the gear that drops in most of the older 1-50 zones. So from 25ish until you get to 60+ crafted wearables are kind of awful in comparison to dropped things from expansion zones. When you get 60+ (that would have been the KOS expansion) the devs actually remembered to hit the crafted items with the upgrade wand when KOS released for the TLE server. Now unfortunately, they also neglected to make any upgrades to gear from expansions the TLE server does not have yet, so you end up with some pretty ridiculous inconsistencies on the regular servers. I think the KOS (60-70s stuff) is still superior statwise to the things from Sentinal's Fate (80-90) for example due to the changes they made to stat progression & the way they are introducing them. Contrary to what other posters have stated, handcrafted gear is perfectly usable for the majority of the game (been there done that on several characters on servers that aren't my primary server). It's not like content is actually super difficult in most parts of the game. It's not the best, but it's handcrafted from common materials so one would expect to to be something you would need to upgrade eventually as you play. For further crafting information you might want to dig around on EQ2Traders. Niami runs a good site full of plenty of useful crafter information.
