How do you guys like it? I've tried it three times now. Two times on newbie items and once on a lvl 91 item. One of the times, I misclicked and the item got ruined in the end. The other two times I got all counters right but the items still got ruined. On the 3rd and thr 4th stages respectively. If our real life skills in countering doesn't matter while we are crafting, why even bother having the creation process? Since it's only luck-based gambling, the experimentation could just be done like a transmuting. But with a chance of fail. You click and either it succeed or it fails. The experimentation is so incredibly slow and that seems completely pointless if our skills don't count in the end anyway.
My thoughts from beta (haven't tried on live so might have changed) You get slightly better results if you hit the 4-5-6 buttons (on default) as 4-5 up duration and 6 ups progress without destroying durability. Default round gives -10 durability +58 progress. With 4-5 clicked it goes up to "1". Another problem I got in beta was that the Innovator's Insight didn't gave any noticeable buff and that I got an amazing amount of failures and even critical failures after countering it. In my opinion, countering an insight should 1/ ensure no failure on the round and 2/ should give a durability boost on the tick of +100 to give more chances at succeeding the craft in the end.
Just tried it last night on a level 90's imbued chest and got it all the way up to ingenious only to fail on trying again. I didn't miss any counters on the last try and the quality bar seems to have a mind of it's own. I just focused on countering conditions. I was going to look for some tips for success. It takes a huge amount of time to upgrade something 5 times only to fail in the end but I do like the improvements in the armor. I was just thinking wow it's gonna take me a week to make a full set of armor.
Last thing that Omougi said on the arts in beta was the following: It might help to give some more feedback on the topic (mine is "up the arts some more or add a significant durability boost to insights and insure they can't trigger a critical failure").
That last thing from Omougi was several days before Beta ended, and either the changes did not go in, or the mechanics are so different from normal crafting that comparing the two is impossible. I posted and /feedbacked several times in beta asking if what we were getting was bugged or if that was how it was supposed to work, with comparisons to the basic crafting results. You want to make it luck based with almost zero impact from modifications like countering events, drinking potions or wearing tradeskill gear? Fine. Just please come out and say so so players know what their expectations should be
I think the change had gone through as the counters do work even if they're ridiculously ineffective. Without durability counter, you get -10 durability on an unmodified round. hitting the +10 durability and +10% durability, gives +10 and +1, so +11 and puts you at a total of +1 durability which I find ridiculous BUT working properly. My best round was a +17 durability which means that if you have a streak of failures (typically -38 iirc) or critical failures, there's absolutely no way of saving the recipe.
Me too. As a carpenter I don't have need for stat increases on my items, and definitely not to create 5 times. Experimentation is the only thing I have a use of of those three trees and that only works if I buy items others have crafted since I can't use it on loot. That is a letdown because carpenters are a bit left out from this content, just like sages.
Experimentation once or twice on an item should be slow, but relatively do-able (I do a lot of 3-4-5, with some 2 and 6 thrown in now and then). Once you get to a third, fourth or fifth experiment on the same item, the luck factor kicks in more, and you're NOT meant to always succeed. It is supposed to be risky and difficult since you're going for a better-than-normal reward. That having been said, I suspect the insight buff is still a bit askew, and there are times that I truly want to pull my hair out. (The frustrating part seems to be intended - those multi-experiments are for the ones with nerves of steel, or lots of rares to blow up - the insight bit may still be buggy.) On any of my own reactant gear, 2 experiments per is about all I, personally, am going to risk for my own stuff. On mastercrafted, I *may* push it further once I rebuild my rare stockpile. On beta, after a couple hours of experimenting on lesser stuff, I tried 10 attempts to go to the 5th experiment on an item: failed once on the third, failed once on the fourth, and once on the fifth (so managed to keep 7 items). That seemed to be a bit better odds than he'd expected (Omougi was with me in the guildhall at the time), but I also tend to be a bit ahead of the curve on such things, just from the volume of crafting/testing that I do. Translation: you should be able to succeed on your first experiment on an item if you've mastered the reaction arts and don't miss counters. After that, *expect* to fail on some no matter what you do, and the more experiments that you do on an item, the more likely you are to have it go boom. You can get some pretty impressive gear upgrades out of this, but it is meant to be extremely risky, especially if you get greedy. I'm just the interpreter on this one, not the decision maker, but just in case ... {hides behind an asbestos wall}
If you don't adventure at all, yes, you may find experimentation isn't for you. Otherwise, it is a great way to give your crafted gear some "oomph" before you go out to adventure/harvest. Salvaging and refining might not do much for you, either, unless you have other crafters, and you're the centrallized refinery. However, if you're a decorating carpenter (or actively supplying decorators) you should find mass production for tiles, walls and the like a useful thing, and since (unless you're someone like Jazabelle) you won't need 100 at a time, you can spend a few less points on it, and have enough to get the gathering goblin summon time down.
OK, my report. Observations on the item and its improvement via Experimentation: I used this item as my testbed. (Imbued Spotted Gi - Mastercrafted - L82 MC, +44 STR/STA, +5 Defense, +9 Weapon Skills, 4.8% crit bonus). I could not add a visual effect as it's not a weapon. No biggie there. As I wanted to get an idea of both the possible types of upgrades, I tried the proc first. I tried the "Augmented Smite" effect, and was successful. It added a proc that at my level (92) displayed thusly: - Applies Augmented Smite when Equipped. - When any damage is received this spell has a 10% chance to cast Augmented Smite on target's attacker. Last for 5.0 seconds. - Inflicts 1000 divine damage on target instantly and every second. - Cannot be modified except by direct means. - On any combat or spell hit this spell may cast Augmented Smite on target of attack. Lasts for 5.0 seconds. Triggers about 2.0 times per minute. - Inflicts 1000 divine damage on target instantly and every second. - Cannot be modified except by direct means. I then put it back in the cooker and tried four successive times, adding Crit Bonus each time. After 4 more successes, the item had gained a total of 0.9% Crit Bonus total, for a final item Crit Bonus of 5.7%. Observations on the mechanics of creation: Each attempt took approximately 4-5 minutes to conduct, and was difficult to succeed at. Tradeskill potions obtained from your TS Apprentice do not improve performance that I could see. The penalties for Counter-failure are much worse than the rewards for Counter-success. More than perhaps 2 or 3 Counter-failures, and you're likely to fail the whole attempt, and lose your item. Durability goes down quite easily, and up very slowly. The usual linking of timers on buttons 1-4, 2-5, and 3-6 are not in effect -- each of the 6 Counters are on independent timers and can be used successively. Counters 2 and 4 both degrade Durability and considering how long it takes to complete a try on an item, should probably be avoided. In normal tradeskilling, you seem to be able to get progressively more 'ahead' of your counter timers if you jump right on them the second they light up. Not so with the Experimentation counters, they refresh almost perfectly in sync with the item's normal success/failure cycle. Opinions: The item I improved didn't really impress me in the end. I know it was lower than my level, but a low-probability proc and 0.9% CB gain didn't really impress me, considering the near 30 minutes I had to put into working on this item. It made me feel like I was back in the young days of EQ2, with killer forges and making parts to make parts to make the final item...when Tradeskilling was seriously a job. Even if I was a person of substantial means, I would be very hesitant to try Experimentation on an item of any serious value like a Skyshrine Fabled-Mastercrafted Raid-Grade item. I'm not ready to write it totally off, as it was only one item and only one set of bonuses. It might be better or worse on another item and other stats.
Further observation: The final item is indeed called a "Visionary Imbued Spotted Gi" when it's in my inventory, but when put on the broker it reverts to the name 'Imbued Spotted Gi' in both my sales crate view and an item search for "spotted gi", yet when moused over, the tooltip displays as 'Visionary Imbued Spotted Gi' correctly. And if anyone would like to buy it, that will be 10p on the broker on Antonia Bayle server.
do the buttons move ? From reading the posts, we have Whilhelmia say that '4-5 ups duration'. Denmother says she does '3-4-5, with some 2 and 6 thrown in now and then.' So those two posts are in general agreement on whats best (4 and 5), whats good (2,3,6) and whats bad (1) but we then have wirewhisker say 'Counters 2 and 4 both degrade Durability'. Its hard to see why two major tradeskillers (i say major since i recognise their names - especially denmother) are going for '4', while a third player says its wrong. I woudl assume wireswhisker make a mistake, and pressing '4' is good. But if the buttons move around, then that could explain things, ie if the button to increase durability is norrmally 4th from the left, but it may change to be 1st or 3rd when you do another experiment. This means that you need to look for the symbols, and not the positions coming up to the weekend, and I should be able to practice on experimentation to see whats going on. Currently I'm playing around with refining, and words cannot describe what I felt when I refined a metal rare, and ended up with a pure loam (is only the first tier stuff, so its not big loss)..Looking forward to seeing what I refining a root could give.
actually, the 4-5-6 i said are 2-3-5 on my computer as I don't use default. I assumed Mum used default in her preview and named the buttons after her crafting window... but I did link the image above to be on the safe side, so 4-5-6 are the 4-5-6 of the above window. Yes, the numbers change. Up to RoK, we didn't have a crafting window with auto-populating skills and had to drag the items on hotkeys. Domino changed that, but by that time, a whole bunch of tradeskillers were used to our specific order. The ability to drag skills around was added to the window so we could retain our specific order. For my part I have them grouped by type: durability vs power, progress vs power, durability vs success, progress vs success, durability vs progress, progress vs durability. Anyway, here are the skills description from beta with 5 points: I use augment, then calibrate then tweak.
On my system, the order from 1-6 is Calibrate, Enhance, Revise, Edit, Augment, Tweak. I use default UI and have not moved any keys that I am aware of. So 2 and 4, i.e. Enhance and Edit, degrade Durability.
^^^ -- THIS is a problem... Does anyone know if there is a fix in the works for it? It's bad enough going through the whole experimentation process to add that little extra bonus to an item, risking the product going "poof!" through no fault of your own but the game's angry rng gods and/or bad luck, then to offer your creation on the broker and it gets lumped in with the plethora of other un-experimented items for everyone and their dog to undercut?! It also appears as though item linking is bugged with experimented items as well. I crafted some refined tungsten gloves and put a couple of experiment mods on. I then linked the item to answer a guildie's question regarding the difference between the two items. The experimented item showed up as identical to the base item for everyone in chat, only the item name that they clicked on was different......
The broker display and the item linking issues are known to the devs and are somewhere in the queue to be worked on. I got the idea that it wasn't as simple as a fix as we might think, and that it may take a bit before it can be fixed.
Yay!.. they finally fixed linking for Experimented items. I see that there haven't been any posts in a while, so I'll add my 2c. On my machine (ProfitUI) the order of the counter arts is: Calibrate Revise Enhance Edit Tweak Augment I tried to make a chart, but the editor ignores spaces, and while I could probably figure out how to insert an HTML table, I don't want to. I printed out my own table of all the reaction arts, nice and large in landscape with all the numbers, and keep it to remind me what's what. Sometimes I go a week or more between Experimenting, and the chart helps a lot. One thing I noticed is that Augment doesn't say '%' for its numbers. Not sure if this is a typo or if those are straight numbers added instead of percents. Augment is also the only art that uses power: If you miss a couple counters, you could end up drained of power, so you'll want to skip Augment until you get it back. For my strat, I stick to alternating between Progress and Durability, picking the arts that will max each. Calibrate plus Augment gives the best +Durability, and I throw in Revise for the success chance. If Durability is dangerously low, I'll spam those three whenever possible(*see below). Doing so has saved my item many times. For Progress, I use Enhance and Tweak, then add Edit for the Success chance IF Durability is okay. If not, I either leave it at that or sacrifice some of the progress with Revise. For countering events, if you pay attention you can keep maximizing Progress or Durability. Just hit whichever reaction you need, then the others that go with it, if you have time. If a counter comes up and its one of the ones you just hit last round (still greyed out), you may want to just hit that one counter this round. I usually hit three arts per round, as I said above. Timing is everything, though, and if a counter comes up that you've just used, you have to be careful. If its the first one I hit in the round before, there's probably plenty of time and I just treat it as a normal round,hit the right counter, then hit two more. If its the second one from the previous round, I usually just hit the counter to stay safe, or one more if I'm feeling lucky. If its the third one, I don't take a chance. Just hit that one and pray I don't get it again. You can hit four counters in a round, if you're brave (or desperate), but I don't recommend doing it too often. Even the tiniest lag will cause that last one to hit in the next round, and you know what that means. Distractions will cause you to lose your item, especially when first starting out. Lock up the pets (cat on the keyboard is not a good thing..lol), tell your kids to play outside, and turn off the phone. Remember, if it can happen, it will. * I've noticed that hitting the same three counters over and over (desperately trying to get durability back!) seems to get less and less effective, and eventually go negative on me. Maybe its my imagination, but in any case, after a few rounds, even if Durability is low, I'll switch it up for one round (assuming counter events haven't done it for me). It seems to help.. YMMV...
