terrycloth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
terrycloth) wrote2005-06-02 10:02 am
terrycloth) wrote2005-06-02 10:02 am
The other side of life...
Apparently, I haven't give up on EQ2 yet. I decided to work on crafting last night after work, so after looking up the recipes I'd need in a more understandable format (a tree showing everything I'd need to do to get to the end result) I went and gathered two entire zones worth of raw materials so I'd have something to work with. Used up most of them, too.
The general merchants sell what look like harvesting tools -- a fishing rod, a gathering knife, a mining pick, and so on -- but as far as I can tell they don't do anything. I bought a set halfway through the gathering run and it made no difference whatsoever... but took up valuable inventory slots that I needed when I was actually crafting, so I eventually sold them back.
So, crafting. Crafing the Chloro Oil and Wash and Resin went well, although I only got a few vials of 'pristine' whatever. Crafting the actual ink went substantially less well. The way crafting works is that you can never do better at step n+1 than you did at step n, and to do 'just as good' is always the same difficulty -- so if you screw up at any step, you have to work just as hard to get a crappier end product.
And scribing even the basic scrolls has a looooong chain of primary ingredients. raw inorganic -> Isonoid Reagent -> Sepia Dye -> Sepia Ink -> spell scroll. Compare this to making a backpack or a suit of armor, where it goes pelt -> stretch of leather -> leather plate -> backpack. By the time I ran out of raw materials, I'd made one 'shaped' (second crappiest quality) backpack, and one vial of 'shaped' sepia ink, but I only ever got crude spell scrolls, which aren't any use to me.
But I managed to sell them back for a net profit (of one silver, woo!), even after the purchase of Artisan Essentials 4-7.
There was a broker in the crafting society, so I checked on the prices of buying spell scrolls from other people. There was a grand total of one spell for sale that I could use... for five gold. Five gold == 500 silver == 50,000 copper, and I'm still counting coppers here.
After that I went out on the commonlands to do some quests, and got stuck in combat mode a few more times, although solo I just needed to kill any random wandering critter to get back to normal, so it was a lot less frustrating. This time it started happening after I had to run away from a huge group of 'heroic' orcs that spawned on top of a treasure chest I was trying to loot from the previous owners of that location. Grr.
The general merchants sell what look like harvesting tools -- a fishing rod, a gathering knife, a mining pick, and so on -- but as far as I can tell they don't do anything. I bought a set halfway through the gathering run and it made no difference whatsoever... but took up valuable inventory slots that I needed when I was actually crafting, so I eventually sold them back.
So, crafting. Crafing the Chloro Oil and Wash and Resin went well, although I only got a few vials of 'pristine' whatever. Crafting the actual ink went substantially less well. The way crafting works is that you can never do better at step n+1 than you did at step n, and to do 'just as good' is always the same difficulty -- so if you screw up at any step, you have to work just as hard to get a crappier end product.
And scribing even the basic scrolls has a looooong chain of primary ingredients. raw inorganic -> Isonoid Reagent -> Sepia Dye -> Sepia Ink -> spell scroll. Compare this to making a backpack or a suit of armor, where it goes pelt -> stretch of leather -> leather plate -> backpack. By the time I ran out of raw materials, I'd made one 'shaped' (second crappiest quality) backpack, and one vial of 'shaped' sepia ink, but I only ever got crude spell scrolls, which aren't any use to me.
But I managed to sell them back for a net profit (of one silver, woo!), even after the purchase of Artisan Essentials 4-7.
There was a broker in the crafting society, so I checked on the prices of buying spell scrolls from other people. There was a grand total of one spell for sale that I could use... for five gold. Five gold == 500 silver == 50,000 copper, and I'm still counting coppers here.
After that I went out on the commonlands to do some quests, and got stuck in combat mode a few more times, although solo I just needed to kill any random wandering critter to get back to normal, so it was a lot less frustrating. This time it started happening after I had to run away from a huge group of 'heroic' orcs that spawned on top of a treasure chest I was trying to loot from the previous owners of that location. Grr.