I just watched an EQ2 YouTube video and while hasn't talking about crafting in the video he was crafting while making the video. I noticed that he would only use his crafting icons/keys to counter a Pop-Up Icon. Crafting goes so much faster when you keep hitting the "Progress" keys (usually 4,5,6 on your keypad). When I craft, I will hit 6 pause for a half a second, hit 5 & pause, and hit 4 pause and repeat! If you start to lose durability I will do; 6, 5, 1 or 6, 2, 1 to get the durability back up. If durability really drops, just switch to 3, 2, 1 & repeat! Yes, sometimes doing it this way will increase your chances of hitting the right counter, but you will be able to recover!
Experimenting isn't regular tradeskill crafting. It's a whole 'nuther thing. And missing one reaction can be recovered from, even in experimenting. There's a good explanation of how to do Experimentation on the wiki. For the discussion here, it's enough to know that you can't willy-nilly spam keys while experimenting.
I use the DarqUI tradeskill window to avoid missing reactions. It helpfully shows a visual square in which the lighting changes as the crafting cycle proceeds, and the same square shows any adverse event. There's no guessing about when you have enough time to squeeze in one more crafting button. My buttons are set up such that 1, 2, 3 are durability, 4, 5, 6 are progress. I usually spam 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 at the start of a combine, then use 4, 5, 6 over and over until done, countering adverse events as they occur.
I know, just seems either I hit one the first time through, or after running a couple alts through and getting complacent
I have played this game off and on since beta... and I never knew you could do that until a couple weeks ago when I saw a streamer doing it. I could swear I tried it a couple times over the years and it never seemed to speed things up, but now it does. Plus, I don't have failures any more
Oh yeah! I found that out the hard way in the first year or two of EQ2, I was failing all of the time, just doing counters, one time I thought @#%$ IT and spammed them all all of the time and got results! This was around the time of the Plague in EQ2 I do however swap out the keys I use to where I had them when they had to be on the hot-bars, rather than the built in ones; Progress 1,5 with durability on 2,4 with 3(durability) and 5(progress) being the ones that cost power.
While I agree with using skills to push crafting forward I've never found it to be particularly slow. Also having done crafting in videos myself it's easier sometimes to not be spamming actions and just hit the counters while talking about different things. Even just doing just counters I can easily finish a rush order write in far less than half the allocated time. If there was a bonus for finishing them even quicker I'd be all over rapid fire crafting but sadly that isn't a thing.
Using all three buttons rather than just countering detriments substantially increases the amount of progress or durability. I find crafting much faster than when just countering.
Ah, then you haven't sat and crafted a few hundred combines at one time, or gotten to end game tradeskill lines and missions, where a single combine can take three to five minutes even with spamming buttons.
Yup. Hit as many as you can each tick but take care not to roll over into the next one to avoid mis-countering. Another helpful hint is to arrange the buttons in order: 1,2,3 for one set (ie. Progress or Durability) and then the other set in the same order on 4,5,and 6. That way you can use the numpad and it's Enter key... much quicker and easier on the hands when doing multiples. Hitting Enter twice restarts the recipe. I like putting Progress on 1,2,3 since it is what I use more often with an occasional tap one row up for a boost in Durability. About Durability: think of it as healing. If you do too much healing and not enough damage you die. Same in crafting. Also if you get behind it can help to counter with a Durability. Successful counters often give more. Oh, and taking Tinkering/Adorning/TS Apprentice items past the first bar is useless. I keep one of each relevant Simple crafting station (the cheap ones that only have the top bar) for doing Apprentice work and a Simple Work Bench for the daily Tinker/Adorn writ: (Enter, Enter, 1 ) X 10 and done. Sorry to the lefties with a right-handed numpad...
You said a few hundred combines and it reminded me of the days when we had sub-combines from different professions that we had to put together to make our final combine and get a usable item. The old days, the good old days, its days like this that I miss the good old days and long to return to the sub-combine times. Sometimes I think it would be great that once you hit 100 or 110 in your chosen tradeskill that you could take like a "Mastery or Specialization" class, where you had to do the old timey sub-combines in an entire questline and get a special shiny title and maybe a recipe book for shiny items only someone that had actually completed the "Mastery or Specialization" line could scribe and make, maybe the mats for these items could only be seen and harvested by the "graduate". You could not buy a bauble or anything to get credit and every character would have to do the "Mastery or Specialization" line on their own, no freebies for one character on the account doing it. Oh and the "Mastery or Specialization" questline would not be in an instance with lethal monsters running around, I personally would utilize the tradeskill missions from Mara and make the "tests" take place in those. Sorry, sometimes my lefthanded Irishness takes over and I look for something utilizing what we had and have now with systems that are already in place in the game to make something new and fresh for crafters. *ducks behind a tree to avoid being pelted by rocks being thrown by crafters that hated the sub-combines* *shouts from behind the tree* We could even have the forge of death return!!
Okay, so there's three of you (you, Cyrrena, and Lera) that want those ghastly wastes of time and materials rearing their fugly heads again. No. As for the buttons, I got taught this a loooong time ago, back when things were lethal all the time if you weren't careful, and there was no happy-dappy "here's your buttons!" row in the actual crafting window. If you didn't know exactly where each button went, what each did, which level you needed at any given moment (gods help you if you were crafting in a different Tier suddenly, for whatever reason), and didn't have enough room in your Hot Bar for them, you were doomed. :-/ What I'll do while crafting (and yeah, I get Rush Writs done blazingly fast, if I have everything I need) is wait for the first "kick-off," the first bit of Progress bar showing, then I'll do 1, 2, 3 (or 3, 2, 1, whatever, you get the idea ;->) then hold off until the next bit of Progress bar, then lather, rinse, repeat. If a complication arises, I'll usually hit the appropriate one in the first set of three buttons, unless it starts eating away at my Durability bar, then I'll do the second set. If they start flinging complications at your head, usually it takes about four seconds between, from what I vaguely remember (by now, it's just reflex). ;-> Do be careful of your personal Power bar, though; keep an eye on it, for if you spend it all just trying to get through the tediousness of crafting grinds quickly, you might run low->out. Even if I usually don't use Drinks, I'll take a swig of something before settling in on a long session, just so I can be assured of some Power replenishment. You also get some back for successfully countering a complication. If I'm really paranoid about something, like a potentially lethal mess-up or a level 2 crafter of mine is trying a level 30 Frostfell recipe, for example (gotta love that XP boost!), I'll generally be nice and slow and patient about things, and only start hitting buttons in response to a complication. I don't want to hit the wrong thing at the wrong time and mess something up, especially not my currently worn equipment. ;-> Uwk
Oh, man! Sub-combines! I do miss them. I had a "shop" in my Baubbleshire one room making subs on a forge for clients. It was a lot of fun, but I had to stay organized and efficient, keep an eye on stock and broker prices... It sure messed up that dynamic when anyone could suddenly make subs with Geomancy, then later the vendor prices plummeted to cost of fuel. Rares stopped being rare and the risk of loosing them by dropping the combine left the game too. Sigh the old days...!
