Smithing T2 augs - Glowing Yclistinite

lynnettell

Dalayan Elder
Okay, so by far & away this is the worst aug to try to make. Jeweling augs. Oh, hey, get some diamonds, make molten cores, boom, done. Tailoring, oh, it's hard, so just swap furs, you're golden, make great augs!

Smithing. See those molten cores? Still need them. Mine Deepmetal at 2% rate. Oh, wait, there's more! Now you have to do the Murk quest (not required for others), buy THAT stuff. Now, go farm BQ.

This is so out of whack I can't even begin to figure out why it is so much more costly and time consuming than the others. Other than the fact someone hates smiths. In theory, it's great. Best T2 aug shouldn't be easy. But comparing it to other tradeskills, it's just... broken.

Ideas. First off, fix mining rates. 7-8 % on ghost/warp is horrible, start there. Bump it up. No other TS requires you to mindlessly tap a key and watch for macro tests (except fishing, and let's face it, that's just for money or gear). Then bump Deepmetal accordingly. Let's say 20-30% rate on ghost/warp, 10-15% on DM. Not asking for it to be *easy*, just better.

Quit making people farm BQ for hours on end. Put in groundspawns (Wiki is wrong. I have explored every inch of BQ, they are *not* there, if they were, not anymore). Up the drop rate from the miners that you have to kill, getting 5 or 6 killing 50 miners is just wrong.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this frustration.
 
Not to mention smithing in general is one of the hardest skills to skill up simply because every skillpoint requires an insane number of intricate clicks on peoples poor wrists. Nobody even wants to skill up a smith, making these augs even rarer in the community.
 
The cost of making these augs is also well above the average, just on vendor price alone much less gatherable materials.
 
Exactly. Not only do you need the same molten cores with liquid gold, then you also have the wax, another what, almost 300pp on top, and need two of them? I know limestone & coal are cheap, but that stuff adds up.

T2 - Deepmetal (horrible to mine), molten core (liquid gold, lava dust, essence of fire), coal, limestone, murk wax (yay, annoying quest!), raw yclistinite. Now do that twice. Toss in a platinum bar...
T3 - Regular aug (rare crystal dust, platinum bar), then diamondine tool, so glass, super cheap, diamond, molten core (see above).
T5 - Furs. Plat thread. Blue ointments (tangleweed, greymoss, giant blood, glass vial).

See a bit of disparity here?
 
Never liked that you could make diamondine tool with diamond and molten core, but I was told that the other way exclusively was too restrictive...
Also it is sad that Raw Yclistinite Chunks can not actually be mined in BQ. The iksar slaves have no issues doing so, why can't ours? I was never able to get an answer to that question.
 
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Wanted to echo what was already posted here. Haven't seen many people willing to farm the components and sell these augs.
 
I still rarely make them. I do for certain people, listed some at 10k & they sold. But people still working on charms, etc., simply can't afford them. Vendor cost alone is 1.2k, then add in the components.
 
So. DM still hanging around 2%. I'm honestly baffled that the mining rates haven't been looked at. This tradeskill is beyond broken due to .. mining. I'm not sure what a minor bum (Ghost/Warp to 20-30, DM to 10) considering the absolute insanity of farming this tradeskill needs compared to other tradeskills to max. 10k bone chips, 5k ecto.

Smiths need some love.
 
I was just doing some rough math on what is needed to max out blacksmithing and if you have 2 miners leveling to max you end up with the ores you need until you get to Obsidian (blacksmith skill up to around 175). After maxing out 2 miners you still need to sit and mine for approximately 40 hours straight on 2 miners to get enough ore to go from 175 - 250, and that is without taking into consideration the other farmed components you need (10k bone chips and 5k ecto).

Below is a chart of what I estimated as ore requirements to get to 250 blacksmith:

NeedsMetal Type
775Iron
472.5Copper
425Silver
712.5Dalium
892.5Mithril
1510Obsidian
2475Warpmetal / Ghostmetal
 
Really agree with the points above. I do not have a smith amongst my characters, but I am a maxed out tailor, and the burden for making the two augs is not even close to comparable. For starters, the mine rate, as Kero mentioned, is ridiculously low for deepmetal. That could be boosted. Further, the yclistinite chunks should absolutely be able to be mined in BQ in addition to being farmed by killing minders. Third, and this was something that I raised in an earlier post about Windstone, I think deepmetal or other rare ores could be added as a rare drop to the elementals at the start of the zone to improve the horrific quality of loot there, and provide a bit of a relief valve for this tradeskill. Before people say that this will end up eternally on farm status, I'd venture that if we made deepmetal a rare drop on white or yellow con mobs (only a handfull on each clear) a clear might yield 1-3 pieces. That kind of loot, while nice, is not going to be be more efficient than just mining while you are at work, and the rest of the loot in windstone is not enough of a draw to see it frequently cleared - so the risk of it tanking the deepmetal economy (lol) is close to zero.

Regardless of the cost, just the rarity of the components for this aug is completely out of proportion compared to what tailors and JCers go through and some measures to adjust it are long overdue.
 
Third, and this was something that I raised in an earlier post about Windstone, I think deepmetal or other rare ores could be added as a rare drop to the elementals at the start of the zone to improve the horrific quality of loot there, and provide a bit of a relief valve for this tradeskill.

Normal mined ore shouldn't drop. I understand the mining aspect of it. Putting in more mining spots for deepmetal than FR makes sense. There's a list on the Wiki that I updated with Wiz info *years* ago that says ore was never put in.

Mining rates, due to declining server population and anyone insane enough to max smithing, really need adjusted.
 
I'm not giving up on this. Mining rates are entirely too low. I realize I have major ADD and can mine for hours when I have time, but FFS, not everyone does.

I'm not asking for 100% mining rate if you have the skill. I'm asking to up the percentage. It's honestly a QOL change, and really needs to happen. I spent semi AFK hours tonight and got... 9 warpmetal.

Please.
 
I agree. Also its another year and I am still hoping some rogue dev will delete yclistinite exposure from the spell base.
 
I'm working up two seasonal miners and it seems like some changes have been made to actually make mining considerably harder. In the past you'd get skill ups after 20 swings, now it's taking over 50 in the 160-180 skill range. The wiki suggests it takes about 11 hours of dedicated mining to get to 250, well, I've got a little over 24 hours of play time almost entirely devoted to mining and I'm at 177.

Also if memory serves, you used to be able to skill up on any ore but now it appears you have to be mining for ore at your skill level in order to increase. I can totally understand this change but I don't see that any of this was announced anywhere.

If it's going to be that much harder to level up the skill, I think it makes sense to get at least a tiny bit more juice from the squeeze.
 
I'm working up two seasonal miners and it seems like some changes have been made to actually make mining considerably harder. In the past you'd get skill ups after 20 swings, now it's taking over 50 in the 160-180 skill range. The wiki suggests it takes about 11 hours of dedicated mining to get to 250, well, I've got a little over 24 hours of play time almost entirely devoted to mining and I'm at 177.

Also if memory serves, you used to be able to skill up on any ore but now it appears you have to be mining for ore at your skill level in order to increase. I can totally understand this change but I don't see that any of this was announced anywhere.

If it's going to be that much harder to level up the skill, I think it makes sense to get at least a tiny bit more juice from the squeeze.
I think you can skill on any ore. My last miner pre-seasons I leveled to ghost/warp on iron, then moved to those for augs because I had zero use for any lower ores. And my current is at 96 and has never left pocket plane mining iron. Whoever put that 11 hour crap in there is way off, I could have told you that it is impossible. I think they just did maths and came up with oh, 8 seconds x 20 swings, 160 seconds, so you should get a skill point every 3 minutes and ran with it.

It does goes up in number of swings. Always has. When whoever edited it in January, they were way off base and just again, pulled numbers out of various orifices, and went with the number of swings you need the first 20ish? levels (Not looking through logs to see when it changes, it's up to 33 by level 96).*

*Source - currently working on my fifth 250 miner.
 
I have been following this post. I recently looked into mining because I wanted to know how it works. More work to follow.
 
Not sure if it's helpful in any way but here's some numbers from my miners' logs. Both use the mastercrafted pick and the prospector's satchel for a total of +8 mining. Also not going through sorting between each skill up but it took 100 attempts to go from skill 180 to 181.

Miner #1 - Skill 182 - 6,256 attempts
453 iron
406 copper
169 silver
196 dalium
178 mithril
27 carbonite (didn't feel like clearing gemathians...)
3,366 rocks
1,461 ruined ore

Miner #2 - Skill 147 - 4,231 attempts
419 iron
180 copper
156 silver
143 dalium
1,983 rocks
1,350 ruined ore
 
The OP is spot on. Let's also add the fact that you must quest for gruplok faction and complete the highly enigmatic gruplok tradeskill quests before you can access the vendor necessary to make the best T2 augs. None of the other tradeskills require similar gatekeeping for access to make the top tier augs.

I just completed all those quests this AM, and was fully stoked to make my first top tier T2 aug! I put all the ingredients in the forge, equipped my +7 blacksmithing hammer, and...
1660484612843.png

Ouch! Salt on an open wound.
 
Ghostmetal had at best a 8.6% day (639 rock/60 ore) for me, but an overall average of 6.7% is still terrible. That means for a stack of ore, I need to spend ~2 hours of straight mining focused with one miner. I also wish I had logged all my deepmetal attempts, as the only one I did came out at 2.8% (546 rock / 16 ore).

Additionally to make the top T2 augs, I still need to spend ~850p per attempt if I've farmed everything else I can.

Compared to Tailoring:

I used to farm Brood of Talin for pristine hides for the T5 aug. Average drop rate for pristine hide was ~27%. Bunnies in FotF are even easier for the average player, but I don't know their drop rate. Hour and a half of farming Broods and I have enough materials to make ~7 T5 augs. As far as the blue ointment? Easy to farm for. One gorge, sirens lower area, and DN rats clear and bam, plenty of ointment. Now all I have to do is spend 55p per attempt for plat thread and the rest is pure profit.

Compared to Jewelcrafting:

The hard part is finding diamonds.
 
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