Thoughts after a 2.5 year break

Discussion in 'Tradeskills' started by IcterusGalbula, Feb 19, 2018.

  1. IcterusGalbula Active Member

    I played quite a bit the last 10 days after not playing for 2.5 years. Here are a few thoughts on the changes I saw or my new experiences. When I last played I had nine level 100 crafters, one of each class. All were low-level adventures. Mostly I did tradeskill quests the last 10 days. So, I decided to post this here.

    Tradeskillers are now adventures. It used to be that the adventuring quests for tradeskillers were optional. I get the impression now you do not have a choice. You simply have to resign yourself to running through lots of high level adventure zones and dying a lot. You also appear to have little choice but to raise faction with various towns and cities to access spell books. My main toon is a tier 7 warden. He spent his time raising faction with the underground dwarfs and then with the goblins and elfs in the new KoA zones. Tomorrow he will get a new potted plant that I guess returns rare items and I guess he will become an ally of the goblins, which seems as if Frodo decided to become an ally of the orcs. Despite doing an enormous number of tradeskill quests he is still a level 100 sage. Once he got books from the goblins he could do level 100 rush order writs to gain tradeskill level 101. I do not know what happens after that.

    There are only four 'traditional' servers now and no pvp servers. 95% of my toons were on pvp servers. They got moved to a new server and several had their name changed with 'z' or 'zz' or 'zzz' added at the end. Some of these toons were 10 years old and I put a lot of thought into their names. So, seeing this change was disturbing. If you spend station cash you can change their names with a potion to get rid of the 'z''s.

    The economy on the four 'traditional' servers is very different from that on Nagafen (sp?). Whereas gold was the standard currency, now it is platinum. In other words, many things cost 1000 times more than they did before. Maybe pve servers have always been like that, but I kind of doubt it. I get the impression that this reflects an older, more established player base, where everyone has accumulated so much money the price of everything just goes up and up. I created two new toons, one each on a different server to force them to live on their own without help from alts. Both are more-or-less adventure level 5 and level 20 sages. In one week both made approximiately 200 plat, an insane amount of money when I started. In fact, on my main server, my entire stable of toons only had about 5000 plat in the bank when I started about 10 days ago. Now they have approximately 7500 plat. In other words, in a little more than a week I made 50% as much as I made in years of playing on a pvp server. Sell one tier two mob drop and you can buy a nice horse (if it is the right mob drop and the right horse). I have several items on the broker listed for 2000 or more plat. I sold one recipe book for 500 plat and it did not appear to have anything special in it: a few vases and an armor display case.

    The standard spell level now seems to be grandmaster, instead of expert with a few grandmasters. I put some jum jum pie on the broker and after a week it is still there. Food nodes now drop rare items and I guess everybody now eats grandmaster level food made from these rares. Mobs now drop grandmaster recipe books which I guess sell for 2000 plat. (Although, you can make your own using apprentices, which I did years ago). Some fish nodes now drop collectables and pack ponies now collect rare holiday items. I did not check, but I suspect I could make 5000 - 10,000 plat from one pack pony harvest excursion.

    Years ago you could go on the broker and buy 2000 raw elm for 2 cents each. Now, that does not exist. I was able to buy a bunch of raw harvested frog legs for maybe 2 - 5 silver each. That was the cheapest I could find. I think this is due to the Abandoned Island quest recipes. I do not recall what those recipes used before, but now you need 2000 raw tier 1 items for one Blessing spell that has one charge. So, as the pack pony makes harvesting trivial, (new?) recipes are soaking up all the harvested items.

    Raising a tinkerer is pretty easy now and pretty cheap. Raising a tinkerer used to be very time consuming and expensive. I do not know when that change was made, but I did not notice it until the last week or so. You can get 7- 10 skill points a day for basically nothing

    I did not notice new classes or races. Maybe there are some.

    One toon went to the Planes of Magic, but I have no idea where to get level 101 - 110 recipe books. I read you cannot even see them until you reach level 101. I will worry about that if and when I get to level 101. I also read something that implies a level 2 toon cannot become a level 110 crafter or at least cannot enter a zone with max level crafting equipment.

    These are the biggest changes I noticed. Basically, crafters have to die a lot (or maybe have alts obtain books for them) and stuff costs 1000 times more than it did before (maybe a sever effect rather than a time effect?). And pvp is gone.
    Pengana and Carynn like this.
  2. Borthday New Member

    /rename should let you change the name without station cash for those merged characters.
    Rosyposy likes this.
  3. Dannni Active Member

    You should rename this 'Observations after a 2.5 year break' would be more accurate.
  4. IcterusGalbula Active Member

    Thank you.
  5. IcterusGalbula Active Member


    I fail to see the difference.

    I guess your comment is that I described differences that I noticed without providing my opinion on those changes. If so, I suppose that is a fair point. Since I have not posted in so long I thought I would refrain from expressing strong opinions right off the bat.
  6. IcterusGalbula Active Member

    Got around to doing some non-tradeskill quests with my level 63 warden (level 103 sage) using tradeskill equipment. My plan was to do some easy quests to get them out of the quest book. However, this toon had already done most of the easy quests. So, the quests in his book were yellow, or heroic / epic or a combination.

    Eventually he grabbed a faction quest from the priest guild and went to Loping Plains. Wardens are great for solo adventuring, but their spells take a long time to cast. So, I decided to call my mercenary. I assumed it was the merc he usually uses from Qeynos Harbor. However, I noticed almost immediately that the merc was one-shot or two-shotting the open country yelloe mobs on the guild writ. So, I took a look and saw that he was actually using the gardening goblin, which I had forgotten about. Eventually I realized I could just walk through the Loping Plains harvesting collectables while the gardening goblin killed any mobs that happened to notice me.

    That got me thinking I could go into the castle catacombs and try to solo some of the yellow heroic quests in my quest book. So, that I what I did. The gardening goblin was easily able to kill blue heroic mobs, then I noticed he was able to easy kill yellow heroic mobs. Eventually I made my way into the lower level of the castle (actually the upper level of the catacombs). There I discovered a bunch of rooms I had never been to before and found that the gardening goblin was able to kill 'everything', even orange named toons. I might have gotten 2 AA in that area and I already had about 296 AA on this toon. Eventually I got so careless I would wander into any room without even looking, run around the room until every mob was attacking me and let the gardening goblin kill them all.

    However, I did end up getting killed twice when a couple of groups of level 67 red heroics spawned and I was stunned and unable to heal the goblin.

    Then I mentored down to level 35 and went into Runnyeye and let the gardening goblin kill everything in there that I could find without a map. Left there with three masters and some boarfiend lore and legends parts.

    Then I went into the open country zone next to the Fens and tried my hand at killing a non-heroic level 78 toon (15 levels higher than me). The gardening goblin was able to kill the toon. It took quite a while and I had to keep healing him, but ultimately it was not even close.

    So, I suppose the next thing to do is to see whether I can solo an epic quest with the gardening goblin. In the past my warden has mentored down and I think managed to solo a couple of epic x 2 mobs as part of the Speak as a Dragon quest. However, I have never soloed an epic quest to completion.

    My recommendation is to turn in your gathering goblin if you have one, and get the plant instead. Then hire the gathering goblin as a gardening goblin mercenary. As powerful as that merc is you might be able to solo everything in the game except raid quests. Although, it kind of makes adventure questing a little boring.

    After two weeks the only crafted items I have sold on the broker are two tier 1 white teas and two tier 1 jum jum pies. Although I have not been trying to sell much crafted stuff. I have also seen one NPC selling stuff for 100,000 plat I think. If people have enough plat to spend 100,000 plat on one item, I guess I can understand why they would pay 10 plat for a striped moth from a starter zone.

    Edit: Actually I have sold some tinkered items on the broker.
  7. Seni Active Member

    The economy went to Hell in a handbasket when we had some bad 'uns pulling exploits. It hasn't recovered.. also the prices of Krono keep rising and you can now sell one for 1 million+ plat on the broker. I remember being happy when I got 1700p for one.

    As for your warden, a little secret: you don't need to use the spells. Wardens get a combat ability for nearly every spell, and they cast faster and do tons more damage. You just need to be in melee range. I was over level 90 when I realized my Warden could DPS (and this was before mercs came out) using the combat abilities. I've thought of raising one on Fallen Gate since leveling would be a ton less painful than what I initially went through since I could use those CA's. They don't have mercs there yet.

    You get either a rename potion in your bags or the ability to use /rename on any character whose name has been changed. Try for the original name if you like - there was a name purge recently on characters who had not logged in for over 5 years. Those character's names were made available by making the character have an x on the end of theirs - but if nobody has taken that name since then, it will be available for you to rename to. I hope that made sense.

    In any case, welcome back ;)
  8. IcterusGalbula Active Member

    Thanks for the reply. I will look into selling a Krono. I probably have some piled up somewhere. Unless I must buy them with real money... ...I have forgotten, but can look it up. I have no clue what I would do with 1 million plat. When I started this game years ago buying a horse for 10 or 20 plat was a long-term goal. The idea of suddenly having 1 million plat seems unfathomable. The idea of being able to buy a horse after selling one moth seems ridiculous. Although, I get free mounts as veteran rewards now too.

    I do have the melee version of the warden spells and do use them. They are significantly faster than the spells. Sometimes I play an assassin. When I commented on the slow speed of the warden spells I was comparing it to my assassin. I enjoyed taking him for a spin on the PVP server. That was fun. The assassin was my favorite scout because he had to be right behind the victim, giving the guy a chance to spot me.
    Seni likes this.
  9. IcterusGalbula Active Member

    Well, I got my warden up to a level 110 sage. He finished the PoM questline (not the dailies or weeklys, just the first five or so sealing off the portal of time). Harvest skills are now mostly 600 with gear. Sold a rare harvest from an golden node for $7000 plat, more than doubling how much was in the bank when I returned about 2 weeks ago.

    Saw someone in chat trying to sell a charm for $2.5 million plat. Saw items on the broker for $100 million plat. One item was listed for $1 billion plat, but that might have been somebody just joking around.

    I did not really enjoy dying dozens of times doing those tradeskill quests. Not sure whether I will try to raise my other 8 level 100 crafters to level 110.