I have been playing this game since launch, I have 14 level 95 tradeskillers with 2 more on the way. My point, I know how to craft. I've fully geared my tradeskillers with every imaginable peice of ts gear. I make sure to save my success pots as well, make sure I use the statue, any conceivable TS bonus just in case. Last night I attemtped to make a level 30 peice into a "visionary" item. (Keep in mind Im 95 with all this gear and pots running) Thats the highest you can modify the item. On the last combine I lost my item, not once, but four times in a row. 95 mastered and geared with pots and failed 4x. Each combination process takes roughly 15 minutes and thats if your focused and nor does it include fetching the rare. Consider now the amount of items that you need to modify in order to be full geared in addition to the ridiculous combination and success rate it should take me somewhere around 24-36 hours of crapshooting my way to a full set of LEVEL 30 gear. The repeated failure makes it so unimaginably frustrating. I didn't play this long and pay this much to have such a horrible time trying to make relatively trivial low end items. It's beyond 'not fun'. The amount of time it takes to have fabled, m/c gear for my level 30 toon, it will far exceed the time it will take me to level to 40. If it were a level 95 peice then ok, but a level 30 peice being made by a mastered, geared and "potted" level 95 tradeskiller should in no way as hard as making a level 95 peice. Please for the love of this game fix this unbalanced system.
I'm sorry you don't understand the game well enough to experiment. However, many of us can do this with a near 100% success rate. Once I bothered to read all the abilities and understand how the mechanics work, I've only lost one item, and that was due to my packet loss with the server jumping over 30 packets and nearly going LD during the combine. The mechanic is intended to be exacting and require both concentration and full understanding of the mechanics involved. To be regularly successful at the process, you must have full understanding and the ability of the player to min/max within those mechanics.
There is only 1 piece of tradeskill gear that affects experimenting, That is The Hand of the Maker from the Cobalt Scar TS quest line. There are no potions that help with it, so don't waste them.
OP you do really have to read all the abilities etc and watch it without distraction. 1 missed reaction generally costs you the item, so don't try and 'guess', wait for them. But I too can do everything right and still get smacked with -25% durability having properly countered and having all numbers in the green and then lose the item. Especially when you get that 4 times in a row. It's enough to make you believe there actually is a 'hidden' luck ability in the data. The cost of lost parts makes it a useless skill.
I'd suggest reading several of the various experimentation guides that have been made. You can't treat experimentation like regular crafting. You need to understand what each of the counters will do. You need to realize that the counters take longer to refresh than the duration of each tick. You need to constantly modify your rotation to account for this and events. You need to hit every event with the proper counter. You need to be 100% focused on crafting while experimenting. Yes, its hard. Its meant to be hard. The reward is small, but significant. Generally speaking, its worth the trouble in a few cases. A lot of us have mastered this process and we can guarantee an over 90% success rate. I've only failed 2 items. The very first one I made, and one to a double critical failure. Visionary is very risky. Every time you experiment on an item the overall durability gets reduced. That means every failure takes a larger percentage of a bar of durability. It gets easier to fail as you continue. You need to accept that and determine if your willing to put up with that risk. The only real way to counter that risk is to practice. Make sure your crafting somewhere the local environment won't hurt you. I wouldn't try to experiment in a busy zone. There are some guilds that have so many items in them they give me load issues, I wouldn't craft in them either. Other than that just keep experimenting on items your willing to loose until you can make 10 out of 10 items visionary. If your looking for something to practice on try some 90 handcrafted armor. Someone would probably use that for a few levels and its cheap.
I've actually made over 10 complete sets of visionary gear. Of all of those sets I have had two failures. I only craft in my solo GH to avoid lag spikes, distractions, etc. Meirril I do appreciate you taking the time to explain the process in detail, however I realize that experimenting is quite different from TS. I also realize that TS gear has no actual benefit to experimenting but I will suit up anyway, leaving nothing to chance. To avoid misconceptions about my knowledge of experimenting, let me be more specific about my problem. If you are a mastered craftsmen and you are making a level 30 item (visionary or not) it should never be as difficult as making level 95 items. The process should be made to represent the level of experience you have versus the level of the item being produced. It is unbalanced when it comes to experimentation. The curve needs to be set. It should not take longer to make the armor for your level than it takes to make it to the next tier. Failing 4x in a row with this scenario is unacceptable.
Experimentation is level and class agnostic. It should remain that way. I think if they had to do it over again, regular crafting might be the same way and the items produced would be better than they are and we might even have better questing and reward options. If you introduce some kind of curve or experience variable, you're setting up the process to be trivialized in the same way as regular crafting.
In general I agree with the notion that if I'm a level 95 tradeskill type person and I'm making level 20 gear, I should be able to do so much faster (order of magnitude of at least 4x) than making something of current level, so I would agree the same should hold true for experimenting on items that based upon level is trivial to your TS level. But that is just part of an overall difference of opinion I have on the design of the tradeskilling overall, I don't see these types of things changing in a dead game, but instead its something to consider on the next one.
EQ1 didn't become static when EQ2 became the flagship game for SoE. With EQ2 loosing that position I think it will continue to develop slowly over time. Considering how the game has developed, that isn't a real change from how it has been for the last 5 years.
I'm sure they'll continue to make expansions, but I don't see them adding any new mechanics or functionality.
You state that you know how to tradeskill yet you failed on the item four times in a row. Those don't add up. I've made MANY visionary items and never once failed. I've come close before, but always changed which buttons I was clicking to stymie the loss.
Since EQ1 hit its 10 year mark, they added several new mechanics, including achievements, quest tracking, collectibles and housing. Anything is still possible here, but I'm certainly not holding my breath for a revamp to the crafting system. Getting back to level-based vs. level agnostic, I have two questions. How do you like the state of the weekly quest? Do you enjoy having to pop a potion just to shave a few minutes off craft time or having to endure the whole length of time if you don't have the right potions or forget it? This is where the level-based system has led us. That first tree of AAs didn't help either. Crafting was trivialized so much that it's not worth giving out any kind of big reward without making it a punishing process. Experimentation brought some value back, as it's something not everyone is comfortable doing. That's the way things should be. Artisan crafting is also the worst thing they ever did. People should have just jumped into whatever craft and not had anything to do with any other craft.
The problem is experimentation didn't bring value back, for the most part. Like the weekly, it is a long, tedious process, but not actually hard. It isn't even something you could call risky unless you have a bad internet connection, though if you did happen to lose a raid drop, yeah, that would suck. It isn't fun. It isn't really rewarding. It is just tedium being used as "balance". Mind you, I agree with you that crafting is pretty trivial overall and that that introduces a variety of problems. But introducing mechanics that try to bore the user into not wanting to use them isn't the answer. Nor, for that matter, is giving a group of people a relatively rare reward only to potentially yank it out from under their nose. Neither makes for happy players.
Experimenting is significantly different than the rest of crafting. With regular crafting once you hit level 40 you almost can't fail a combine. The lethal quest crafting only means you have to pay attention to what events pop up. You really don't even have to use counters to push progress or durability on those. With experimentation you have to really understand the process or your going to fail, and fail a lot. Even when you do understand it you won't have a 100% success rate. As for rewarding, what are you measuring it against? While the improvements your allowed to make aren't huge, they are significant. When experimenting was introduced it turned several raid-crafting items from mediocre to best in slot or near best in slot items. The crafted items introduced with Cobalt Scar were only worth crafting if you experimented them up to visionary. Without that those items were easily out performed by easily obtainable legendary drops. With the next expansion? Who knows. Hopefully dev actually introduces a few fabled crafted items that are sought after. If a new set of reactant gear shows up its very likely that experimentation will be in high demand. As for "just tedium", that is the weekly crafting quests in VI. The only difference between a normal craft and the mega combine for the quest is the quest combine needs about ten times as much progress. That is exactly what your describing, not experimentation.
That is a bad example of level based crafting. Honestly level doesn't changed anything about crafting after 40. Once your counters fully mature its cruise control on easy mode. 50-95 crafted recipes share the same difficulty level. The combines your talking about are the exception, not the rule. It isn't level based either, its just an alteration of the amount of progress needed with no other changes made to crafting. Something that breaks with progression shouldn't be held up as an example of how things are developing. Until we see a lot more of that its just an anomaly used for a quest. Even if more quests used it, that would just be an alteration to quest crafting, not to actually making items.
