|
|
|
EQ2 Gold: Crude, Shaped, Pristine? (Choosing the Materials)
| When you first start tradeskilling, things can be quite confusing. The first thing to note is that each separate station uses a different set of artisan skills. Each skill used for that station has a different effect on both your durability and progress as well as costing a different amount of power to use. Durability is the green bar you watch fall away starting from the top level and working its way down. When it reaches the end of a level you will loose the ability to craft that level of item. This, quite simply, sucks. Fortunately there are tools at your disposal to deal with such situations. I'll cover them below. |
| |
| Before you start though, you should be aware of a few other things. First, the amount of progress required to advance a level is not always the same so don't get discouraged if the first bar is a bit difficult to achieve; it will get easier. For instance, it may take 200 progress to advance the first level but only 100 progress to advance through levels 2 - 4. The amount of progress required also depends on the type of item you are crafting. Finished products for final use generally require more progress to complete. Second, you should be aware that each station requires a different set of tradeskill abilities. It would be worth your while to either create new hotbars for each type of tradeskill OR you can arrange them in your tradeskill book so that like skills are near each other. Lastly, the movement of progress and durability happens in cycles. Most tradeskill abilities will only last for one cycle, which a couple may last up to 30 seconds. At the end of each cycle you will see two numbers drift up from your workstation. The first, and usually smaller negative number, is the movement of your durability. The second number is the movement of your progress. A normal, unaffected cycle that succeeds will show -10, +50. This means that you have lost 10 durability but you have gained 50 progress. A complete failure, which is very disheartening and often times very frustrating, may show something like -50, -100. That is brutal but you can recover and still craft a level 4 item! I'll show you how. |
| |
| Once you have started the crafting process your main priority should be correcting any abnormalities that occur. When this happens, an icon will appear below the active progress and durability meters at the start of a cycle. These icons will have varying names but there will always be at least one matching icon within your tradeskill set. Once the icon appears, you will have until the end of the cycle to click one of the matching icons or else suffer a health loss and dramatically increased failure rate. Should you click the correct icon in time, it does not mean you get a bonus. It just means you've avoided a disaster. You are however, not limited to only using your skills during times of distress. At any time you can use any skill, as long as it pertains to that particular table and item type. You should read each of the descriptions of your tradeskill abilities carefully and understand what type of impact they will have on your crafting. For instance, some may increase your progress by a large amount but decrease your success rate. If you are crafting something equal to your level, this skill would generally be a bad choice. Unless, and this is where it gets interesting, you combine multiple abilities in one cycle. As fast as you can cast, you can stack abilities. For instance, at Alchemy table, you can combine two abilities that cost you a bit of progress but add to your durability. These would actually allow you to reverse the direction of your durability and allow you to gain rather than loose. If you sub-crafting items which are extremely easy to you then you can afford to start using high progress gain, success rate loosing abilities liberally since your rate of failure is so small to begin with. |
| |
| You should take time now to experiment around with stacking different abilities for different situations. While the resources are cheap and you have nothing to loose this is the time to do it. An added bonus is that fact that every time you use your tradeskill ability you have a chance of progressing through your tradeskill skill level (i.e. every time you use chemistry abilities your chemistry skill level may go up). Just watch your power to make sure you don't run out and make sure not to be pressing random icons at the beginning of a cycle. If you do, you may end up responding to a negative reaction by choosing the wrong counter action. That's where the pain comes in again. |
| |
| Next: What Did I get? (Multiples and Types) |
|
 |
|
|
