grats!

What a load of BS. Grats Loramin!

Is this a big deal? I think I recall it only involves smithing subs and leather padding?

Congrats, always feels good accomplishing something that's so distant or otherwise feels unobtainable.

Thanks!

Each leather padding requires a spiderling silk thread (made from two spiderling silks) and a low quality animal hide. Even if you use a skinning knife (to convert HQ/MQ pelts) and stick to Stonebrunt (the animals there are around level 30, so they take longer to kill, but they drop pelts about 75% of the time) those hides are going to take awhile..

Lets say you spend several hours and have four stacks. You also need spiderling silk, so you go to the secret crypt in Field of Bone for roughly the same amount of time (spiderlings die faster, but don't always drop silks, and even in the crypt you'll run out of them and have to wait for respawn).

Carpal tunnel time: you need to downgrade all your pelts to LQ, combine all the silks into threads, and combine the two into a padding ... over and over again. By the time you finish you've done nothing but kill greens and hurt your wrists for five hours ... but you're ready to get skill-ups, right?

Oh no: you need folded MQ sheets of metal, which can only be made by combining two MQ ores and a water. At first you only need one of these per padding, but as your skill grows you start needing two and eventually three of them per combine (and I won't even talk about the plat you have to waste on all this, because it's the least painful part of the story).

Now you've got your four stacks of paddings and 4-12 stacks of sheets. You run over to the vendor who sells the fine plate molds (in both Freeport and Qeynos that vendor is in a different zone from the MQ ore vendor), buy as many as you can (remember you're full of paddings, sheets, flasks of water, a blacksmithing hammer, a skinning knife, and whatever non-tradeskill gear you carry) and you can finally start combining.

If you somehow didn't have carpal tunnel before, having to put 5-7 individual items (1-3 sheets, padding, mold, water, blacksmithing hammer) into the forge for every single combine will definitely give it to you ... but you press on and combine four stacks of paddings (in-between running around to get the water/metal/molds you couldn't fit in your pack). You get .... maybe one skill-up per stack of paddings, if your Strength or Wisdom is maxed (sometimes not even that: the RNG is a cruel mistress).

Fine plate starts at trivial 175, and goes to 242, which means you need to repeat all of the above for roughly 67 stacks of paddings and 30 stacks of MQ sheets ... that's 670 fine plate combines (with 5-7 items each), 670 spiderling silk combines (2 items), 670 padding combines (2 items), maybe 200 skinning knife combines (2 items), and maybe 4000 MQ sheet combines (3 items).

Try doing even a fraction of those combines and I think you'll appreciate why I felt "max" Blacksmithing was harder than getting my Magician his epic.

Great, Lor.

Haven't people gone into intensive detail about how many un-classic changes there are on p99? I don't remember them personally off hand, but I do remember over the years many posts about how many non-classic changes there are. I think there needs to be a better argument that just "Not Classic", when there are already a lot of non-classic aspects of this server.

But I know this will more than likely fall on deaf ears.

What?

IIRC, you can become a 255 skill grandmaster, but only as a Dwarf as I think their cultural is the only one to go to 255. At least if the wiki is accurate and from what I remember.