Maybe things were different when Clise was doing it. She mentioned keeping one set with decent stats, then forging another set to see if you could beat those stats. If you did, you smelt the original set and keep the better set.

what a waste of time and comms.

I don't know if this was answered yet or not, but shears reduce the cost of mending, make the original item sewn last longer, and allow you to SHEAR to recoup some lost commodities.

The amount sheared is usually like 1/4 of the amount of the original materials or something.

Nope. Afaik, Ildy has one set with over 115 on cutting, one with over 115 on blunt and one "balanced" set. It's useful for combat.

Nah I had 3 suits of fullplate, 1 gruesome and 2 of the ones I was forging, I then kept 2 suits of fullplate, 1 with high cutting, one with high blunt. So unless it is a recent change, then you can have as many fullplates as you want, but are only allowed to be worn by the forger.

Ok I got my armor repair to 100 on armstats last night, tested with it today, 1 session of bashing 25 mobs dropped it back to 95, this I think is a bit quick. I can understand wanting to make the armor need repair, but repairing it after killing 25 things is a bit quick.

100=perfect
95=slightly worn

Just for those who didnt know.

What were you fighting? I spent one hour in the UV and my plate didn't go down from 90. Or it might be that it slows down as it wears off more.

elementals, and yeah last time it was 95 I bashed for 2 days and probably about 300-500 mobs (astral mainly) and it never went down from 95. It is the 100-95 that is way to quick, the 95 (aka slightly worn, doesnt seem to go down quick)

Armour damage is a great step in the right direction for Lusternia. Now we just need to implement this wonderful idea and we'll be set.

All well. Maybe this will make warrior vs warrior easier.

It's an interesting change, I'll give it that.

My concerns are fairly simple.

Forging as a tradeskill has its problems with demand, as I mentioned some time ago in another thread, largely curtailed to warriors. Now, there is further incentive for all warriors to take forging as their tradeskill, limiting the demand still further, and further reducing forging's viability. While people may well go 'Well, this is just the same for bookbinders/artisans etc', this is a fallacy - the forging skill is about crafting armour and weapons. The only comparable skill to this is tailoring, where armour is also crafted - it's just that with tailoring, you have essentially a market of 3/4, or actually 4/5 of the game (with the introduction of the monks), where few people have an incentive to take tailoring over other skills. Smiths, however, now have to compete with the fact that most of their market is going to also be in the market as sellers themselves, which makes the Forging skillset still less viable.

Also, where the non-decay element of fullplate is mentioned, it's crucial to bear the following in mind. I have one of the few all-metal fullplate designs, I believe, in a private cartel, as Ildaudid has mentioned (I do know of at least one other, though). This is actually the cheapest way to get good fullplate.

Those of you who have any uncertainty about forging, listen up, because here's how it works. My design requires 200 iron and 25 silver, and I know of another that needs 235 iron. Iron is running at around 200 per with 14 available, silver at 235 with 98 available in Magnagora, for a cost of 45,875 or 47,000 gold (if you can get those quantities at that price, which you can't, because buying comms at that level leads to price increases). Celest has, by comparison, about 194 iron in its commodity shop. You then have your metals. You go to the forge, and forge for approximately five minutes to get one fullplate out (I think the actual time is longer, but am not sure). To actually get decent fullplate, such as my set, I have about 120 forgings on record. This equates to ten hours of forging. Here's the catch. If you have non-metal commodities in your fullplate, you lose them on each reforge. Some fullplates incorporate gems, animal parts, and so on, and each time you reforge, you have to replace those. This doesn't sound bad on the surface, but neglects to mention that as well as armour, a knight at the level in the game that requires fullplate also has weapons that need to be made through a similar process, frequently taking even longer to manufacture to a grade even half useful. And this as well neglects to mention that I am talking about forging with a 400cr artifact, which halves the time needed - double it for those poor souls who don't have one.

I can't be bothered to hop on alts right now (zMUD still hates me), but I've never been without access to an all metal fullplate design. They aren't rare.

For starters, with a hammer, the forging time for one round of fullplate is 2 minutes, 30 seconds. Without, 5 minutes even.

I'll be replying inline to this silliness.


Warriors demand very good stats because without very good stats, you get smushed like a bug on the windshield of a tractor-trailer pulling 300 mph. Not to mention enchanters and tailors DO produce massive numbers of robes to get some "good" ones and usually either give the rest away or sell them at a ridiculous discount because all the fighters will shun the horrid quality. If you were to make it so that an item had to "cool down" before being reforged, people would pay for you to make 10 sets and cycle through them until you made what they wanted. In summary, terrible idea.


Option means necessity in the combat market. Adding in commloss regardless of comm type will only make it even worse than it is. People already shove hundreds of comms at me to make them a "nice looking design" that requires combustibles, but then also has good stats. All this suggestion would do is squeeze the last dregs out of an already starved metal market. The reason redos are not available to other tradeskills are in the following list.

Herbs: A plant is a plant.
Bookbinding: Ditto for books.
Enchanting: Other than robes, all enchantments are of the same quality.
Poisons: Poisons kill you whether or not there are little fleshy bits mixed in.
Tailoring: With the exception of robes/splendours, all clothes are of equal quality.
Jewelry: No difference in quality from item to item, only in how it looks.
Artisan: Same as all the res
Cooking: Food is as food is.

Do you see a trend here? What's missing?

The point is, Tailoring and Forging are the ONLY tradeskills that produce variable quality goods. If you HONESTLY wanted to put all the tradeskills "on par" with each other, as you claim, all leather armour would be 20/20, all scalemail would be 40/40, all chainmail would be 60/60, all fieldplate would be 80/80, and all fullplate would be 100/100. All damage-centric weapons would be 180/100/180 or 360/220/180.... you get the idea. I will add that those ARE the EXPECTED stats on a sellable item, and have a less than 5% chance of being produced in a given forging run. But the LAST thing you would do is ONLY look at comms. I'll forward you to Caedryn for the current percentages on ACTUALLY getting any of these stats because he is insane, awesome, and actually calculated all of them, both with Hammer and without.

The REAL frustration with forging is the insane amounts of time that it takes to produce a sellable item, but that point will be re-raised later in this post so we will leave it for the end.




This is a true point and will concede it to you.

In addition to Caedryn's post, I would also like to add that metals are only produced from three different villages. Two compete for metal production quite fiercely, and there is a quest, however long or troublesome it is, to cause all the miners to go to one or the other. This effectively starves the other organizations who either a.) don't have angkrag and thus can't use undead miners or b.) don't have a miners village or c.) have the village without the crowned dwarf monarch of all metal production. As such, commodities in Celest run from steel at 300 to gold at 400. Not to mention there is barely enough in the comms store to produce ONE weapon or suit of armour. Forgers more or less are forced to either demand that the comms be brought to them or stock up big time. For reference, I have AT LEAST 500 of all metals in my rift. I got something like 600 steel and 800 goldbars just because I bought tons of them when prices were good. There is also a hidden cost of one coal per forging session. I have 400 coal bits in my rift because coal prices are also steadily rising. Then, for those forgers who do not use a script (which insofar as I am aware is the only feasable way to do it without developing severe carpal tunnel syndrome) the merest typo can shatter a group of unforged commodities or cause an incompletely forged item to crumble, causing the hapless smith to lose many thousands of gold worth in destroyed commodities. Heavens know I've broken my fair share of stuff even WITH a script.

I will also comment that I have a custom-designed masterarmour pattern in a private cartel.
Commodities: steel 60 platinum 50 silver 50 iron 35 gold 35
They're diffused out across all five metal categories because getting more than 60 of any given metal has become nigh impossible.

With regards to making money, I must warn you that I am very bitter on this point. Per unit time, I think smiths make the LEAST amount of money out of any tradeskill, mostly because nobody in their right mind would pay a smith the same per unit time as they would an herbalist. Why? The totals would come out to millions of gold. Forging nonstop for a RL week will net you MAYBE 25cr if your patron is VERY VERY generous. This also assumes that you are lucky and make said item within that time window. In the same time, an herbalist harvesting nonstop would make easily twice that, if not more, even selling at the "amazingly discounted" price of 8 gold per herb. The math comes out to, with 2 second balance loss on herbs (it's only 1 second with Gloves if I recall correctly) 302400 herbs.

So even at that discount price, you'll be getting a shade over 2 million gold, divide by 5k per credit (rather generous in the current market), and you're at a little over 483 credits. Is anyone going to pay that for a suit of plate or a weapon? Didn't think so. For fairness to the herbalists, let's even assume they spend half their time replanting, You're still at 240 credits earnings.

So that we aren't picking on a single tradeskill, enchanters charge 5000 gold for enchanting a cube assuming powerstones are provided. I'll leave the math to you all. Charging up jewelry tends to run about 25 gold per charge as well. Poisonists charge anywhere from 50 to 200 gold per extraction, though I'm sure that the only reason they can charge at all is because there is next to no competition. Jewellers get something like 4000 to 4500 per cluster of 100 cut gems, 1000 to 1500 for a powerstone. I don't have any experience in dealing with the other tradeskills so I'll leave them alone.


EDIT @ Xavius: That's because you can always go design one if you want one
EDITEDIT: The cake is a lie. Also, I don't like the new forum smile faces. They disturb me, even moreso than my avatar.

EDITEDITEDIT: I found where all the metal comms are.... Hell, where ALL the comm in the whole damned BASIN are.... and people said that Glomdoring has an inactive playerbase.

Chandestri is awesome.

can we steal her?

Tervic is right, but if you do not agree with him, mail him a dead orca to show your concerns!

Back to the original point - you cannot blame the divine for how long it takes to reforge. If you choose to keep reforging, then you take the blame on yourself. You should be happy that it is an option for you, not complaining that you have to do it and it takes so long. Nothing forces you to reforge after the first set except your own choice.

@Tervic - I am not going to quote your entire post, just address a couple of things. In enchanting and tailoring, you grant two 'exceptions' - I would be perfectly happy if those exceptions were made so that they could be redone with no (or very little) commodity cost. With all this complaining about fullplate, you should try splendor robes. I cannot forge a second set. If my first set isn't good, I can either borrow shears and get 1/4 of the commodities back, or, without an artifact, I get absolutely nothing back. I simply have to make another set, and keep paying over and over until I get stats I like. All of this complaining about reforging confuses me - I would be happy if I even had the ability to re-make my tailoring robes, even if I lost a few commodities in the process. I doubt there are many fullplate designs where you lose 3/4 of the commodities when you smelt it.

The point is, it's not that bad. You choose to spend a ton of time reforging to get optimal stats - that's great, it will be worth it in the end, but it is still your choice. The requirement to reforge is not built into the skill, it is what you want to do. I think caedryn has a valid point about supply and demand, but these complaints about having to reforge make absolutely no sense when compared with other trade skills (those exceptions you noted for enchanting/tailoring, to be specific).

I am a little confused about this choose to reforge thing.

You can call it a choice, but when you end up with fullplate that costs more comms that fieldplate and has worse stats. I would consider that having to reforge. Sure everyone can forge it one time and end up with say 60/70 fieldplate or 75/90 fullplate. But no one will buy that set OR if you were to use it, you would be getting your butt handed to you by knights over and over.

I think it is more of a HAVE to forge to keep up with IG standards of combat.

While I do agree with tailoring, those shears should get you back at least 1/2 or 2/3's the comms. 1/4 back is ridiculous for an artifact that costs 300crds

Magic Tailor Shears: 300 credits
- Must be wielded.
- Allows tailors to SHEAR garments to recoup some commodities.
- Reduces balance on sewing by 1/2.
- Increases prestige on sewn items.
- Reduces cost of mending by 1/2.
- Reduces cost of proofing by 1/2.
- Reduces cost of batting by 1/4.

Well, maybe not, could someone explain to me what prestige is? How much mending costs? How much proofing costs? ANd what is batting?

If those things are truly good things, then maybe 1/4 comms are ok, if not.... maybe make the shears cost 400cr and give 2/3 comm or 1/2 comm back?

I'm not sure if anyone else has said this, but perfect = perfect. If its damaged at all, it's slightly worn. Currently the values round down to the nearest 5, so 99.9 = 95, which is why you see it drop to 95 so fast, and see it stay there for so long.

I think the shears increase time that the clothes last, so possibly that's prestige. Either that, or fewer clothing items make you look like royalty.

Mending costs 1100 for greatrobes, I think. Not sure about anything else.

Batting is putting a crap load of silk (100?) into leather armor, allowing them to be proofed.

Prestige is points towards looking like royalty.