Use your counters EVERY round, even when it doesn't call for one. I use 2-3 depending upon how laggy the guild hall is. If you do that and don't press the wrong one when you're supposed to activate a counter, you should pretty much have a 0% chance of failing. I leveled an alt to 50 Sage last night and not *once* did I fail on a combine. If anything I only had to use the counters 3-4 times with each successful combine.
I just decided to level up crafting on my new instant 100. I totally forgot that half of the old recipes were changed into the new format where you get half the progress on the first tick. As long as you aren't doing stackable items or spells you'll be doing the new style combines. Rush orders for those are super easy, even at 20. If you are a provisioner, sorry you are stuck doing the old style "hard" combines. If you are a carpenter welcome to the easy life. Honestly I do not like the inconsistency between crafting recipes. It makes some crafting classes harder than others. Its especially maddening when one tier of rush orders are all super easy, and then you get one that has 1 or 2 of the slower combines. Also at 16-20, spending the Tradeskill AA makes a humongous difference. After you put points into durability, progress and success the only reason you'd have trouble crafting is because you are doing it wrong. RNG isn't going to hurt an experienced crafter that understands the process.
If your crafting bar is set 1-6, left to right 1 2 3 are +durability reactions, 4 5 6 are +progress reactions. Generally there are 2 methods of crafting, no matter the crafting class. Both methods are seemingly constant spam of reactions, but not really. You hit the reactions in order in a set of 3 and then hit them again as they come off cooldown. Generally they will be off cooldown just when the crafting tick happens. You will only ever get a counter on a crafting tick. Getting the timing down will take a little bit of practice if you're new(ish) to EQ2 crafting. Once you do it is all incredibly easy. Method 1: ideally used pre-30 and generally a must for before getting your Tradeskill AAs flushed out. Starting set is 3 4 5. This gives you 1 Durability boost, 2 Progress boost. Watch your Durability bar like a hawk. If that bar starts to dip adjust your set to 2 3 4 or all the way down to 1 2 3, at least until it's stable again. Make sure you do the counters as they pop. Use corresponding icon from the set you're using and just hit the other two in the set afterwards. You really should never miss a counter or get off timing. Method 2: ideally post-30, with full Tradeskill AAs. Starting set is 4 5 6. This is full Progress boost. At this point you should not be losing much durability if any at all unless you miss counters (again with the flow and timing you really shouldn't). If you somehow have miraculously horrible luck and get failures or critical failures then drop down to 3 4 5 until you're stable. In majority of cases you should never have to go lower than 3 4 5 on a combine. Only if you are catastrophically failing it do you drop to 2 3 4 or 1 2 3. I impart the above knowledge as someone who has played EQ2 since 2006 and have some 30ish max level crafters spread across servers both current and deleted. I would like to add one sort of addendum to the above. If you experience lag, have a higher latency (I play with 200-330 typically) than I do, have packet loss situations or computer limitations that can cause the game to momentarily "freeze" ie graphics lag. Then I would suggest shortening the set from 3 reactions to 2. So Method 1 would be Starting Set 3 4 instead of 3 4 5. Method 2 Starting set would be 4 5 instead of 5 6. That is so the lag, be it network or graphical, doesn't cause you to hit the wrong reaction when the counter pops.
