So, I picked this game up again after lots of years not playing (I played when the level cap was 90). I play since a few weeks again, focussed on all the tradeskill timelines so far. Now I gained this Shadow Prospecting skill. I have googled a lot of information, but it is vague, lots seemed outdated and there is no clear information that seems to cover everything. I have harvested with the staff already, got some shadow harvests. But still I have questions. Can someone explain to me: In which zones can I harvest shadow nodes? What is the skill level of Shadow Propespecting? What can I actually craft with those materials? And in which recipe books can I find those?
Okay, so Blood of Luclin and Reign of Shadows tried something new with tradeskills by introducing Rare-Beyond-Rare Harvest materials in the form of Shadow Rares. You do the signature questline for the staff, and when you use it, you gain a buff that allows you the possibility of harvesting shadow rares for a short time. The shadow rares were necessary for crafting things like mount barding and other gear for those two expansions. You could only raise up the shadow prospecting skill to a specific point before you would need to rely on mount gear that further boosted your chances of finding harvests. However, when Visions of Vetrovia was released last year, the entire mechanic was ditched because it wasn't thematically appropriate and mechanically complex and unnecessary. My suggestion is to not bother with this now outdated game mechanic.
Ok thanks. Seems like a lot of garbage was added to tradeskilling that just makes it overly complex now. E.g. all the spell upgrading. Before Adept spells dropped and you have your advanced books to craft Experts. Now you have tons of different recipe books with weird names (I play Sage) and I don't know anymore what is going on.
That is still the case. The adept recipes are for ascension spells. Those are outside the normal spell crafting construct. For those you have to scribe each tier of spell before scribing the next. They made the drops somewhat rare, and after a number of ways to fill the gaps gave the crafting of those to Sages in the Chaos DEscending expansion. Prior to that there were special dropped 1 use recipes that any class could scribe but took 10 pages to craft instead of 1.
All in all tradeskilling today just feels like a time sink. Just a forced way to spend hours pointlessly trying to getting hands on recipes, patterns, certain rares or spells so you can upgrade them tier by tier. I started to play the game when they had still pre-products in tradeskilling. Meaning, you could not just craft a sword. You needed to craft a pummel, a shaft, a blade and then put it all together. It was a mess. But to be honest: I'd rather would do this than what is now regarded as "tradeskill" - I feel it is just unfun. Ontop of that: After several years most players had so much time in basically maxing 9 toons with tradeskilling, there is hardly a need to craft something for someone. It is not only a time sink but also a money sink. When I stopped playing years ago, I have played PvP on Nagafen and there tradeskillers were always needed because most people focussed on PvPing, not crafting. But now on the standard sever? Useless. And tons of crappy daily and weekly missions to waste time just to get a certain currency or the chance for a recipe drop. And they butchered Tinkering as well. Basically Tinkering and Adorning is now identical. Both produce stuff to enhance gear.
They ran out of ideas to keep tinkering innovative, since they created an item that basically has some form of essential functionality in one way or another long before the game reached level 100. Now everything is just temp adorning, and Adorning itself is strictly held by a meta that players have to stick to in order to stay current in groups and raids. OH, and it needs to be said that the three Outfitter classes are useless. Don't both playing a tailor, armorsmith, or weaponsmith anymore unless someone is looking for a specific type of armor to put into their wardrobe tab for appearances. They no longer serve any function in the equipment progression at the release of each new expansion. Renewal of Ro gave them *some* functionality back by allowing them to create mastercrafted gear that had enough resolve to gap between solo and heroic 1 difficulty, but the recipes to get them were so rare that by the time most of the server had enough people to make the MC armor, most of the server was already at H1 or higher.
