Latest (and last) update: 8,800 rhenium ore (44 stacks of 200) 8,689 low quality slag 159 high quality slag 3 purified tungsten ore 0.00034 or 0.034% chance to refine a common into a purified. Barring the use of a macro-enabled keyboard or keypad (against the EULA), every single person in my guild has already dropped refining, and everything else offered in that tree with the exception of Seasoned Harvesting. The only person who kept it was my roomie, and even she's finally thrown in the towel. Refining is not worth the Repetitive Motion injuries, and the Gathering Gobin is completely useless. In the time it takes to swap toons and gather the goblin's harvests then select the tier to gather next, any given toon can zone to a t10 zone and harvest more rares than the goblin brings back in the same amount of time (the time to camp, the seconds to summon him, the seconds to hail and gather harvests, the seconds to tell him what to harvest next, and the time to camp to the next alt). Even my level 20 adventurer/95 tradeskiller alts have better luck facing the mobs of WL than the goblin has of bringing back a rare nowadays. And to be honest, Id rather pay the mender repair bills for them than waste the 5 prestiege points any longer. Hello increased food and drink duration! Anyway, with the combined 30+ pages between the goblin and refining post-nerf debate, and 100% lack of any kind of developer feeback anywhere in this forum, I'm going to play this game with the assumption that these two tradeskill prestiege abilities are not going to be modified. If I happen to read differently in the patch notes in the future, I may give them a try once again. But for now and in the foreseeable future, I consider those prestiege abilities, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. Good luck to all of you out there (on both sides of the debate) in your tradeskill adventures.
Refining commons is not. Refining rares is (rather, it's few enough clicks that it won't cause RSI.) Just make the common harvests sell to a vendor for [tier] copper pieces each and be done with it, and make refining only apply to rares. And make it stop converting ebon clusters into "purified fused loam," and other useless-purified-loam stupidity. (Note that you can't use refining on loams directly; they're only produced by refining metals, and they are 100% useless as spells have no blue/green equipment stats.) Even with "but, it's maaaagic", it's a bit silly that someone can convert amber to diamonds, gold to palladium, belladonna to dandelions, bear pelts to lizard skins, and maple logs to animal bones with the same process, anyway...
Here are my results for refining rares (I don't refine common mats) since the patch on the 4th: 113 Rares (I realize it's entirely too small a sample to be useful, but found it interesting myself) Successes: 21/113 == 18.584% -- Critical Successes: 5 == 23.81% -- Total Refined Rares: 26 == 23.01% Failures: 92/113 == 81.426% All refines were done upon acquistion of each rare. After comparing my results with others in my guild, I seem to have incurred the wrath of the RNG.
At least this skill allowed me to do something with the "unprocessed" rares I still had around since... the days when rares dropped in chests. They were no value and didn't seem to be accepted for anything else.
I can't believe there's been 9 pages of crying over this. This right here should have ended the discussion.
Ehh, until they fix the game to add the Refined bonuses correctly, it's kind of moot. See: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/index.php?threads/refined-mastercrafted-weapon-stats-broken.2120/
I'm perfectly fine with the current raw refining percentages under one condition: Please let us refine whole stacks!
No, refining raws shouldn't be a way to get purified rares. If they want to leave it in for those people who are willing to refine one raw at a time, fine, but in no way should they ever allow it to be done by the stack.
Just because it ruins your market doesn't make it a bad idea, at the current rate you'd have to refine about 15-20 stacks to get one rare. Apart from that I'd even be fine with it resulting in a regular rare, as long as it would be a viable (as in not RSI inducing) way to do something with the myriad of raws we're recieving.
