The Hidden Forest

edited for content. Info is outdated. will reuse thread for future issue/question

i agree with you here i went from skill 270 to 275 with 135 fails between each skill up point in blacksmithing and have been trying to farm velium which why it may not sound like much means long hours in CrystalCavrens or Upper Velks lab with a,well seems like, 4% chance to get any weapons or blocks, bricks, pieces of velium and thats just for tailoring... afriad to try the rest of them b/c skill ups have been very few and far between on everything else. but will do them soon im sure.

Its been awhile since I did BS but I believe the velium could be broken down.
Of course I could be thinking about another emu server but I do believe I did that here.
Farmed a lot of the ore in velks and use smithing with a chisel to break it all into lesser ore.

Looking at the write up I did for myself on tradeskills I see that I was averaging 3 types of combine per tradeskills. Trained all to 21 then made one item to the 100 range, made another to the 220ish range and used the final item to 300. So far 3 skills used the AISW but two of the skills were so linked it was good to raise them together.

Edited for content, information outdated.
Will reuse for Tinkering related info

I vote velium on merchants or something to give us more toptions like grey said there are recipes that we cant get stuff for to help raid our TS up...we can give list of supplies if needed to help it out? not sure if it would be easier to put on merchant or make drops avilable thou...

Tinkering
Between skill 200 and 250 there is 36 recipes found.
This is the largest chunk of recipes that even work. There can probably be found more working recipes in this block range then all of 1-199 and 251-500. Of course this requires a metric ton of sub combines that require farmed items and have high trivial levels.

Main source of frustration is the sheer number of combines required to get one skill up.
Add in this example and multiply times 3.
Skill 210 trivial, Anizok's Maximizing Device. Requires 2 items made with another combine.
Perpetual Air Pump and Base Prototype.
Ok so second one requires 2 items that only drop in PoI. The zone is meaner then it should be, would love to see some aspiring solo player(re: not wearing VP tier of gear like me) try to raise tinkering and come here to farm items. I manage to get killed here often. Drop rate is low, loot table is clogged with needless stuff.
Back to the first sub combine. One item only sold in poi but I have yet to get that Nitram to talk to me. This one requires 2 more items only drop in POI and the drop rate is just had. 3 hours in CT I can farm enough material to do 200-250 combines on tae ew bags. 3 hours in poi and I had enough items to do 2 tinkering combines. Woo.... I am so not excited.

None of the clockwork watchman line of armor can be made. At all. Which also disables 16 of the 18 300+ recipes.

At this point in time its difficult to raise the skill past 215. One of the issues is stacking. Majority of the ore in the game only stacks to 20 in brick format but was updated in the past to stack to 100 in pieces. Most tinker components have never been looked at by others and so are default values which for most is 20.

Try having to do 2 combines before you can even do the combine to skill up. Now knowing you will need a couple hundred combines for just a point or two of skill you have to make several hundred of the required sub combines. Stacking issues raises its ugly head about now and starts to laugh at you.

Tinkering
Skill 251-300
22 recipes found
18 do not work
Leaves you Anizok's gauze press, Azimuth Indicative cuirass (hello 750pp component), Cheirometric lockpick device, Crab cracker

Skill 301+
18 recipes found
16 do not work
Leaves you, gnomish vanishing device, wok
Vanishing device requires haze panther eyes. 4hours in WL now running around and I have a grand total of 25 eyes. Did the math, I'll need in the ballpark of 5400 of them.
Wok isnt so bad if the poi drop would actually shows its ugly face.

--
Myself if the poi items were vendor sold for appropriate prices I would gladly drop 200k into mastering this skill. A lot of tinkering requires several combines to be compleated first, most of the stuff has no to very little sell back value while several skills require tens of thousands of PP worth of vendor sold item(s).
While other skills like JC, Blacksmithing, brewing, fletching, tailoring... oh wait all of them, have several methods to skill up and one or two really good paths to master it, tinkering just bends you over and gives it to you raw.
Rough guess this skill has a total of 20 working recipies, maybe as high as 35. It has 145 listed. Kind of bad news when over 100 of the listed 145 recipes do not work.

Hell blacksmithing has 2971 recipes listed in the clone and I have about 80 saved to my favorite. Kind of wow that this tradeskill I personally use often enough to make them favorite, twice as many recipies as all the working ones in tinkering.

I was told the other day to shush, polite way of being told to bugger off. Well I refuse.
I spent about 80 hours of nonstop combines to raise all tradeskills to 300. By all I mean the primary 6. Why should I be forced to spend easily another 80 hours just to raise tinkering the last 100 points?

This is another attempt by me to get tinkering reviewed. I did the math and the average time to go from zero to 300 in tradeskills was 13.11 hours. Already I am over 30 hours working on tinkering. Below I list 2 items which would need to be added to a vendor which would allow 30 of the broken recipes to finally work, of which 16 are the ones above 300.

The Wakening Lands spawn groups 7/9/10/43
7 is a 25% chance for a haze panther. Two spawn pts
9 is a 25% chance for a haze panther. One spawn pt
10 is a 50% chance for a haze panther. Four spawn pts
43 is a 50% chance for a haze panther. Six spawn pts.
You have 13 total possible spawn points on a 10min 40sec respawn timer. I have averaged 4 up each cycle.
The loot table is 3 items with 55% chance and multiplier of 4. I have spent 6 hours total farming panthers and have looted roughly 30 eyes. This is an average of 5 eyes per hour.

The Plane of Innovation
Item in question for the other working 302 trivial item is the Clockwork Carapace, id=29761
which is listed as dropping from 13 NPC. I have not yet pulled spawn group info, however I have completed 9 rounds of the zone killing everything in the zone minus the factory and 3 spawn groups behind closed doors which can not drop this item. The total time for these 9 rounds is roughly 252 minutes which does not include another time I was semi afk killing a cluster of 15 NPC which lasted roughly 3 hours. Total number of items looted is roughly 34. If I am generous and do not count the 180 minutes this breaks down to 1 per 7.41 minutes.

The Plane of Valor comparison
In one hour in pov I loot on average 350 Air infused spring waters.

Being that the average is a number between 83 and 100 combines per skill up we can see why other skills, IE blacksmithing only required 13.11 hours for me to master.
Where as if I was to use only haze panther eyes at the rate of 5 per hour I would require on the low side, ~5976 haze panther eyes which would take in the range of 800-1100 hours to farm.

Items to add to vendor
Infused gears: id=65430
Small plate boot mold: id=22020

** would also want to add the other small plate molds in which has the benefit of giving another route of skill up while doing blacksmithing which is a required skill to even do tinkering. **

If you look at the recipes requiring it that I am interested in, trivial 302, id=351
Rough guess is this item would cost 500-750pp PER attempt.
It also requires you to farm the living crap out of animal pelts which I have covered via alts, tailor yourself some Leather padding and create a lower triv tinkering item. Buy up some black sapphire and get your pocket cleric to imbue then brew yourself some Metallic Temper which requires you to farm some minotaur blood.

As you can see this is in no way easy or trivial. ALSO you can not just click on "favorite" and hit combine while reading a book unless you are a gnome with tinkering as a racial ability. Something I am not.
All the rest of us have to manually move each item to the toolbox and click combine.
I believe all these factors alone is sufficient reason and cause to take the assrape out of this tradeskill.

Ideal changes:
(1) Minotaur Blood - put on a vendor in akanon
(2) Infused Gears - put on vendor in plane of innovation
(3) add Small Plate XXX Mold to blacksmithing vendor(s) in PoK

***This one tradeskill recipe actually breaks down as follows
(1) Farm hundreds of animal pelt/skin
(2) Farm hundreds of spiders for spiderling silk
(3) Tailor combine the silks
(4) Tailor combine the hides down to LQ
(5) Tailor combine - Leather Padding
(6) Farm mino blood
(7) Brew Metallic Temper
(8) Blacksmith Small Fine Plate Boots
(9) farming WL for Faun Hoof
(10) Tinker Clockwork watchman boots - triv 231
(11) Farm/buy Black Sapphire
(12) Imbue Black Sapphire with cleric
(13) Taa Daa! you can now attempt the recipe you are using to skill up. ***

Nice info gathered Grey. Thanks for taking the time to compile it. Sounds like the next step could be to suggest a recipe that could fill the void. Clockwork shovel? Using some of those gear drops from innvation, mino blood for coloring and sticking to gnome hatred of the foul beasts, and some other item vendor sold to make the shaft like stave material. Gots to be plenty of ideas that can work and reduce the number of subcombines.

well the funny thing is the sub combines are not really that bad. Its the primary items horrible drop rate or the fact that several key items are not even available to the players.
If a few items just got placed on tradeskills you could reach 300 in this skill in about 20 hours using 2 characters to farm the supplies and about 150k pp in the bank.
Add maybe another 5 or 10 hours if you need to farm gems/pp to buy gems.
Thanks to all the work I have been doing on tradeskills I have found some pretty amazing places to farm.

My goal has been to bring this tradeskill in line with the others. I feel like I am being ignored and its frustrating but I refuse to give up.
I remember a time when all anyone had to do was say "waaaa item X should be placed on the tradeskill vendor so I dont have to leave this zone to master skill Y" and *poof* the item in question was added to the vendor.
Do people remember what it was like with almost nothing stacked above the eq default from classic? Go read the threads and you will see all the requests to have an item stack to 100 and *poof* it was done.

All of that was in the name of making the lifes of the players on this server easier. I have no idea why the idea of making tinkering a little less painful (I could have mastered 2.5 tradeskills on another character by now) is such a subject that it needs to be avoided.

Since I have had limited luck with tinkering I shall now campaign to nerf all the other tradeskills as obviously they are way to easy to master.
All air infused spring recipes need to be changed to triv out in the 150 range similiar to the one used in tinkering. (webtools/recipe.php?id=10165)
Finally the fletching custom recipe which requires blacksmithed items should triv at about 200.
Would only make it fair to remove from the other skills their 1-2 punch skill up from zero to hero.

would love to see some of Greys suggestions be looked at thinks he makes some solid points!

check it out devs! if anyone is to talk to here about tradeskills its Grey, the crazy mofo!