Frustration with Tradeskills

[Chris1479]

I swear I'm so sick of getting cockblocked by the timeline. I level up blacksmithing to 242 - oh wait! Fine plate ain't even in the game yet.

Woohoo, Fine Plate is here! Oh, no one wants to buy it because it's already irrelevant by the time it comes out. Oh well. I'll do cultural armour instead.

Woohoo, I can make cultural armour! Oh wait, it requires Blue Diamonds/Jacinths which are 1000pp each and rarer than hen's teeth, so rare that even after dungeon-crawling the whole of sebilis for 6 hours I didn't find a single one. No problem. Guess I'll just wait until the reagent requirement is removed in the Warrens patch.

Ok let's do Tailoring instead! Velious was great for tailoring, right? Ok so I farm Crystal Spiders for 2 solid days. Level up my Tailoring to 151. Oh boy, can't wait to start making Wu's armor so I can level up to 242 finally.

OH WAIT WU'S ARMOR ISN'T IN THE GAME YET EITHER. The only high-end Velious tailoring 200+ stuff requires you to fish cod out of CS (about as rare as Blue Diamonds, a guildie tried for hours yesterday and found only 1) or forage Yew Leaves (less rare but you better believe no one is levelling from 150 tailoring to 250 with black panther skin face masks).

Basically there's no point tailoring jack s--t until Warrens finally comes out, by which time the majority of the cultural armour is completely superseded by Velious drops - and that's not to even mention the "regular" high-end crafted stuff e.g. Elven Chainmail and the like.

Blacksmithing/Tailoring is essentially unfinished until 2+ years after Classic. Frustrating beyond belief.

Is there legit any point to this stuff? I love the look of cultural and was able to make some for a very wealthy guildie but god damn, levelling up the tradeskills is hard enough, but there's nothing at the end of the rainbow for years after release.

Edit: One final thing. I am trying to do Nature's Defender quest (Tunare-only Paladin 2hs that is nearly as good as the epic). So I get the Corrupted Unicorn skin with a small raid force, the Corrupted Faun skin with a trio, and get lucky with the Corrupted Panther skin rotting at zone line. WOOHOO! Now all I gotta get is the Fleshless Skull from Hate... no problem, my guild raids hate all the time.

OH WAIT THE FLESHLESS SKULL ISNT IN THE GAME UNTIL OCTOBER WHEN HATE 2.0 REVAMP DROPS. WITH THE WARRENS PATCH. Seriously why tf is this half-finished stuff in game, it is infuriating.

[bobjonesp99]

i think most people would agree when they say for the most part, trade skills were definitely half baked in the game. the thing is, it is how the game was during classic release. its like when people complain that iksar monks are superior in every way to human monks (except exp penalty which gets later removed).... they are right, but that's how the devs made the game... its 20 years old, you might as well try screaming at the sky for being blue, nothing is changing at this point.

you are also looking at a game that is being played in a non-classic way. people werent permacamping top tier loot drops 24/7 from release. people werent doing regular planar clears with ease during classic. people werent killing all the 7 day targets on day 1 of kunark. people werent in TOV day 1 in velious. zones were more populated and loot was more scare. so when the game was originally released, the gear saturation was lower, and this was more/less another option for getting gear.

for what its worth the cultural stuff is still relevant in the game. i think in a month or two some of the reagents (like blue diamonds for dark elf armor) get removed from the enchants for the cultural stuff. the stats on those armor sets are still good in many cases, and like you said look awesome. min/maxing isnt required and people like to deck out their alts with cool cultural sets.

so look on the bright side, once you get that full set of imbued koada`dal mithril with nature's defender you gonna look dope af!

[Danth]

Is there legit any point to this stuff?

If nothing else it serves some use for the Thurgadin tradeskill quests (shawl particularly). Otherwise, P99's admins implemented it on the timeline they did because it's classic, for better or worse. Unfortunately the one thing here that isn't classic is the relatively stable P99 population. Stuff like fine plate (or later on, Wu's) sold pretty well because the original game still had lots of new players joining in 2001. That's not the case here on P99, so as you point out, that stuff doesn't have any demand by the time it's added.

Do tradeskills in this game if you enjoy doing it. If you can make money off it, great, but don't treat profit as a primary motivator.

its like when people complain that iksar monks are superior in every way to human monks (except exp penalty which gets later removed)....

Off-topic, but a correction: Only class penalties get removed on P1999. Racial penalties remain in place and get made self-only, meaning the Iksar always levels quite a bit slower than his human equivalent even if both types of monk level a little faster than they did during the class penalty era.

Danth

[Chris1479]

i think most people would agree when they say for the most part, trade skills were definitely half baked in the game. the thing is, it is how the game was during classic release. its like when people complain that iksar monks are superior in every way to human monks (except exp penalty which gets later removed).... they are right, but that's how the devs made the game... its 20 years old, you might as well try screaming at the sky for being blue, nothing is changing at this point.

you are also looking at a game that is being played in a non-classic way. people werent permacamping top tier loot drops 24/7 from release. people werent doing regular planar clears with ease during classic. people werent killing all the 7 day targets on day 1 of kunark. people werent in TOV day 1 in velious. zones were more populated and loot was more scare. so when the game was originally released, the gear saturation was lower, and this was more/less another option for getting gear.

for what its worth the cultural stuff is still relevant in the game. i think in a month or two some of the reagents (like blue diamonds for dark elf armor) get removed from the enchants for the cultural stuff. the stats on those armor sets are still good in many cases, and like you said look awesome. min/maxing isnt required and people like to deck out their alts with cool cultural sets.

so look on the bright side, once you get that full set of imbued koada`dal mithril with nature's defender you gonna look dope af!

Thanks for the positive vibes man, I've been prepping to be the best tailor/blacksmith on the server for like 9 months already and I'm just frustrated at this point. You're damn right though, a full suit of my own home-made Koada'dal and a Nature's Defender is exactly what I had in mind when I started my nightmarish journey into tradeskilling EQ.

[Baler]

Others and myself have gone through the trouble of making tradeskilling as easy to understand as currently possible.

https://wiki.project1999.com/Tradeskill

Make sure you take note of the STATS for each skill and try to raise them as high as possible. This will help your chances of getting a skill gain but will not affect success of the craft.

tl/dr: most tradeskills are simply a plat sink.