Research advice.

[Iccanui]

Hey everyone, i have just dinged 20 on my enchanter and have realized i need to start working on my research. I went to my trainer and leveled up to 25 and have just found my tome for combines. I did a search for " research " on the forum and nothing came up, even though on the second page there is a post about it.

Im a little confused on what i should be doing so i was hoping to find some advice here. So i come to ask directly.

What should i do to skill up? What do i need ? Im confused cause im seeing live data on how to make spells, which is very different from kunark era it seems.

Is using bind powders still the best method ?
Where is it best to find drops for your spells ?

Really, just anything that comes to mind, even if not direct answers to those questions will be useful. Thank you ever so much for your time.

[Nagash]

The wiki has a pretty good entry on research, including the concordance of research "quest" used to level the skill up. Good luck.

http://wiki.project1999.org/Spell_Research

This should cover all your basic needs :)

Nagash

[Phinger]

Nagash is right with his info...i never used the quest thing to raise my skill, just put points into as i could with the trainer and practiced on spell combines.

If you collect the pages i don't mind doing the combines for you.

[Iccanui]

Awesome, thanks a lot. Its amazing this has become like a EQ portal. Who needs ZAM anymore ? :)

[Iccanui]

Nagash is right with his info...i never used the quest thing to raise my skill, just put points into as i could with the trainer and practiced on spell combines.

If you collect the pages i don't mind doing the combines for you.

Epic, i dont mind taking you up on that for now. I forgot how hard it can be to get things in this game sometimes. I was looking at that goblin ring for right click invis and saw people talking about a 30 hour camp, so i dont wanna fail a combine.

Good thing i learned to check the vendors, i already found half of what i need for tepid deeds :)


Thank you again, im sure you will be hearing from me ;)

[Estu]

Personally I just trained up my research to 200 as I leveled. It's expensive (a few kpp) but I made enough money as I was leveling to fund it.

[Swish]

Personally I just trained up my research to 200 as I leveled. It's expensive (a few kpp) but I made enough money as I was leveling to fund it.

Sadly they patched it (as with live) to stop people doing that.

The day after the patch my 120 research dropped to 90 or 91 or something, not permanently but until I got a few more levels.

Now you either have to mine the vendors for words or do the horrific thing of gathering rare drop items for the practice runes :(

[Estu]

Sadly they patched it (as with live) to stop people doing that.

The day after the patch my 120 research dropped to 90 or 91 or something, not permanently but until I got a few more levels.

Now you either have to mine the vendors for words or do the horrific thing of gathering rare drop items for the practice runes :(

So you're saying it's level-capped? I don't quite understand. I know it's level-capped; that doesn't stop anyone from training Research to 200 (it just needs to be done gradually as you level).

[Swish]

So you're saying it's level-capped? I don't quite understand. I know it's level-capped; that doesn't stop anyone from training Research to 200 (it just needs to be done gradually as you level).

I don't know if its now capped as with something like a weapon skill, but after that patch I had a red number in my skills section that said "91" even though my research was around 120. Skill never dropped below the 120 however, but I don't know if it affected my combines or not :/

One thing is for definite, you can't take however many thousand plat and just offload it on the trainer in return for an insta-200 like you could before.

[Estu]

I don't know if its now capped as with something like a weapon skill, but after that patch I had a red number in my skills section that said "91" even though my research was around 120. Skill never dropped below the 120 however, but I don't know if it affected my combines or not :/

One thing is for definite, you can't take however many thousand plat and just offload it on the trainer in return for an insta-200 like you could before.

OK, right, so here's the thing. I wasn't talking about getting an insta-200, I was talking about training it to 200 as you level, taking into account the level cap. Doing combines to skill it up isn't going to bring you above the level cap, so it's not like it's going to get you up higher than a trainer. The red number you saw was exactly the level cap - it meant that your skill was 91 at your level, but once you leveled up it would increase.

[Swish]

I think what threw me was...

It's expensive (a few kpp) but I made enough money as I was leveling to fund it.

Its not expensive at all if you're collecting words as you go and doing a bit of thrifting through vendors at relevant places. I thought you must have meant just dumping 200 points at the trainer, I thought wrongly? :)

What I was getting at was, can a Level 30 hit a skill of 200 in your opinion? Or does the level cap prevent it from going past a certain point as with some other tradeskills (alchemy that I know of for sure).

[Estu]

I think what threw me was...



Its not expensive at all if you're collecting words as you go and doing a bit of thrifting through vendors at relevant places. I thought you must have meant just dumping 200 points at the trainer, I thought wrongly? :)

What I was getting at was, can a Level 30 hit a skill of 200 in your opinion? Or does the level cap prevent it from going past a certain point as with some other tradeskills (alchemy that I know of for sure).

Sorry, I really don't understand the confusion here. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just can't seem to parse what the issue is. Here's the situation I'm describing:

I am a level 1 wizard (or other INT class). I level to 16 and get my research skill. I read on the wiki that "Research is a level restricted skill. As such, your max skill is: (Level - 15) x 5 When you train Research at level 16, it starts your skill at Skill 16, far above the maximum possible by this formula. As such you cannot increase your skill any higher until level 19." - so at level 19 I put a few points into the skill until it's capped. Then at level 20 I put five more points into the skill until it's capped again. And I keep doing this every level (more realistically, every time I hit a new spell level and have a need to research spells, I first train up the skill to its cap). Now, note, whether or not the trainer lets me train the skill past the cap, the skill will still be capped, i.e. it won't be any better at my level. However, if I train it all the way to 184 at level 16 (assuming I have the money and the trainer lets me do it), then I'll be done training it for good, since every time I level up it will re-cap to the next value. I won't actually have a skill of 184 until I hit the level where that is below the cap, but I will always have the highest possible skill at my level.

The point is, all of the skill points I'm getting in Research are coming directly from the trainer, not from combines. I'm not going around to every vendor in the rune finding runes to combine for skill-ups, I'm not grinding the ingredients for the practice runes with the concordance of research, I'm just using the trainer.

The upside to this is that it is fast and easy. Go to a trainer every time you hit a new spell level and need to make spells and cap out your skill so that you're in the best possible position to make that spell successfully. The downside is that it is expensive - over the wizard's entire career, getting that skill up to the maximum trivial (184) will cost a few thousand plat total. However, as the wizard levels and collects and sells loot, and gets tips for porting people around, he will make more than enough money to afford this.

[Swish]

Sorry, I really don't understand the confusion here. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just can't seem to parse what the issue is.

Its okay, just trying to help... but have we moved beyond you not knowing what you need to know? What are you actually asking?

1. You can't dump training points past 26 or whatever low cap the trainer has. You could before one of the 2012 patches, but you can't anymore. I'd double check this but my researcher is an iksar necromancer and getting back to Cabilis just to be 110% sure is a drag :p

Therefore...

2. To skillup you need to do it the hard way or the harder way.

a) The Hard Way: Gather relevant runes however you want to go about it and combine them.

b) The Harder Way: Use the "Concordance of Research" to combine things like "shark meat", "ice giant toes" and stuff that is a pain to collect to make practice runes to then combine for chances at skillups that way.

Unless something has changed again in a recent patch, you can't use the trainer to "buy" points in the 30's, 50's and 100's. If you've done so, please say...because that's good news :)

[Estu]

Unless something has changed again in a recent patch, you can't use the trainer to "buy" points in the 30's, 50's and 100's. If you've done so, please say...because that's good news :)

I have done so, but it wasn't super-recent, so I don't know if it's still possible. Can anyone confirm?

[Castigate]

I can confirm that until it became too expensive for me, (around 120 research skill) I was still able to buy skillups from the trainer. This was only a few days ago.

[Swish]

Well I finally went back for my 49 spells (at level 48) and managed to train up to 165 skill.

I can only think my interpretation of the patch changes was skewed because I had maxed my research for the level at the time. Still not too useful however, as my 49 spells go trivial at 180ish :/

[Swish]

Well I finally went back for my 49 spells (at level 48) and managed to train up to 165 skill...so that's awesome compared to having to do it manually.

I can only think my interpretation of the patch changes was skewed because I had maxed my research for the level at the time. Still not too useful however, as my 49 spells go trivial at 180ish :/

[kaos057]

How are you so confused? This isn't rocket science. You add 5 skill points to research every time you level. There is never a need to do a combine for anything other than the spell you need. The trivials are fine. If you were never supposed to fail this would be wow not eq. I leveled my research with only skill points and made every research only spell when I got to that level and only failed one time on DMF. Luckilly I had doubles of those words and got a successful combine right after.