Honestly Forgers always complain about the time it takes for forging, have you ever asked it to be streamlined like every other trade? I know in another IRE game they changed it so you do one action to forge it and then you temper it for one stat and you're done.

But remember the other games have specific stats for armor, well Imperian at least, where you can buy artie armor, and the stats are fixed, there isn't much room for getting killer pieces of eq.

I guess they could make it so you could buy artie armor, but that would put tailors and forgers out of buisness I think.

Oh no, see, the reason I granted tailoring and enchanting for greatrobes an exception is because I agree 100% with you that they are also as if not more ridiculous than forging for fullplate. Pointing out the streamlined nature of all the OTHER tradeskills was to make a point that there is one subset of professions that is at a MAJOR disadvantage because it is POSSIBLE to do better. So please stop using tailoring as the only example of why forging ought to be changed to commsburnage pain in the soul.



Yes we have. Multiple times.
In my opinion, it'd all be better if it took flat amount of time to create a weapon or armour, or even enchant robes, and you were GUARANTEED a certain set of stats. Heck, we could even make it more time = better stats, but it should be a LINEAR INCREASE, not RANDOM the way it is now. Of course, there should still be a cap on the max possible.

@Ildaudid: I'm going to harm you so bad if I receive another dead orca in the mail.

I didn't send it, your wife probably did, she is a meanie.

It came from the Magnagoran post office

Anyways, some brilliant ideas and comparisons I came up with while I was eating lunch. These are by no means comprehensive or perfect, but are merely to illustrate how annoying forging can be:

If we wanted to put the other tradeskills (aside from making greatrobes because that is silly too) into the perspective of forging:
Artisans would have to spend half an hour constructing a piece of furniture and making measurements, and the slightest mistake would cause a "You screwed up and the piece crumbles to dust. Haha!"
Jewelers would spend 3 hours making a ring, only to find out that there is a minor flaw in the crystals causing it to be not enchantable.
Bookbinders would slave over the printing press for hours, only to find that they accidentally forgot glue for the binding, several reams of paper, or somesuch, causing it to only have one page's worth of writing capacity.
Alchemists already have sugaring so I'm not going to pick on them.
Chefs would cook food only to have the consumer find that it was made with bad ingredients and suffer 50% of their max HP in damage from vomiting.
Enchanters would suddenly find that upon completing an enchantment session, they misspoke one syllable causing only about 50% of the charging to go through.
Tailors would produce "tawdry" clothing 95.5% of the time, but would find that their shears work far better than advertised and that they can now recover 100% of silk and cloth. Everything else burns though.
Herbalists wouldn't actually harvest ANYTHING 95.5% of the time but rather waste that balance "Searching for herbs fit for consumption"

Now, to finish up my ideas on how to fix forging and greatrobes:
It's fairly apparent to me that all other tradeskills are at least fairly linear: Time spent doing tradeskill is directly proportional to money made. We're not going to get into supply and demand here for simplicity's sake, but do keep in mind that S&D is also an issue for many, namely forging, bookbinding, chefs, and artisans. However, forging and greatrobes are RANDOM. Time spent doing tradeskill MAY OR MAY NOT produce a product that will fetch any reasonable price for the time spent crafting it. You could spend 72 RL hours forging for the 280 speed rapier (people won't buy anything lower than 275 for a speed rapier in my experience, and they only take 275 because I tell them there is little to no difference from 280, which is true, but they pay about half the payoff I would get otherwise) and NOT GET IT AT ALL. Bam, 72 hours wasted, whereas for the "linear" tradeskills as I shall call them, if you spent 72 hours crafting furniture (near impossible in the market I know, but remember that we are ignoring supply and demand for arguments sake) harvesting herbs, producing NORMAL NOT GREATROBES CLOTHING, food, whatever, time equals money and the more time you shove into doing what you do, the more money you'll get out of it.

For my proposed solution:
Eliminate the random factor. Keep the +2/+4 to a stat per strike so that it still takes TIME to make a weapon, and more time = better quality, to keep it inline with the other tradeskills. However, make it so that it is POSSIBLE to reach the more or less currently accepted values of 70/100/280, 180/100/180, 65/235/160, and the x2/x2.2/x1 2-handed equivalents. Or make the caps higher and keep the temper skill for preparing to add greatrunes, these values are just a suggestion. Then, rebalance armour caps in the same way. All leather armour: 20/20. All scale armour: 40/40. All chainmail, 60/60. All fieldplate, 80/80. All masterarmour, 100/100. All kite shields, 20/20. All greatshields, 40/40. All greathelms, 85/85 (I think that's the value... I haven't checked). Then, not only will a marketable good be produced 100% of the time given enough time, but frustration over spending RL weeks forging will be all but eliminated because it WILL NOT HAPPEN. Keep the current decay rates, including nodecay masterarmour.

Now, to fix greatrobes, do the same thing, but set the armour values to whatever they should be. 50/50 I think is good, but feel free to correct me on that. Then also make splendours nodecay. HOWEVER, and this is important, add armour status to greatrobes and splendours and make mending restore armour status instead of reset decay time. Also eliminate the gold cost for mending. Then equalize the decay times between forged armour and greatrobes.

Lastly, since I think trans skills do deserve perks, the nodecay armours should be always repairable to 100% armour status. I'm not totally certain how repairing armour status works but I'm praying Roark replies to my PM soon so that we can be certain. Insofar as I can see, fullplate is always restorable to 100%, greathelms are not.

And I got another dead orca in the mail, this time from Glomdoring. I hate you all.

EDIT: This is probably wishful thinking, but in the name of all that is good-looking, can we make gems recoverable from forging too? I mean... jewellers melt stuff down into gem components, so why can't forgers?

Except that the requirement to reforge *is* built in if you want to use it as a tradeskill.

Very few warriors are willing to buy the inferior junk.

Most trade skills are worth nothing as actual trade skills. Why should forging be different?

Why not focus on the positive and make everything useful?

Most tradeskills don't require the massive time investment that forging (and herbs) do. Maybe we should make all of them require a massive amount of time so that they're not different?

It will now take 2.5 minutes to make a book, and there's only a 5% chance of it being properly bound. You'll have to tear it apart and start over to get it right. Similar concept with scrolls! The magic words don't stick to the page if the page isn't made *exactly* right. Woo! How fun...

Or not.

Again, forging does not take long at all, unless you choose to reforge over and over. Forging a single suit doesn't take too long at all. You might get crappy stats and have to sell it for cheap, but then you just face what tailors and enchanters have to face all the time anyway, and I haven't heard many complain about it.

So I take it you're just ignoring the whole "You pretty much can't sell it for cheap" bit?

There's not really a choice. If you want to sell the items, you have to forge repeatedly. Just like if you want to make money as an herbalist, you have to actually go out and spend multiple hours picking herbs. If you select forging, you go into it with the understanding that it will take a long time to craft anything worthwhile. Period.

Though that does matter less now, as most warriors seem pretty much forced to take forging and can thus just make their own stuff. Nothing like a dead market, eh?

I must be missing something.

As a tailor, I have many times sold sub-par robes. Why? Because there's no other choice; I have to. I can't destroy them and re-do them. I sell them very cheap to near-novices, usually for a net loss. There is no reason forgers couldn't do the same thing. Instead, the choose to forge more to make better money. You just have to remember that it is a choice - forging could function just like tailoring if you really wanted it to. You could spend a lot less time at it, make less money, and have less control. The fact that it takes a long time is actually a major benefit. You can keep doing it over so that you make something worthwhile and don't have to take a net loss. When you decide to forge something, you might not know how long it will take, but you are guaranteed that in the end you will have a worthwhile produc that can be sold. That is something you should all be happy about instead of complaining about it.

Yes, there is a reason forgers can't do the same thing.

It's called "scalemail." Much cheaper, far fewer commodities. You can sell weaker robes as training robes because there really is no choice-- leather's just ineffective. Poor robes are a good step into the "big world" for a novice.

For warriors, though: You get a cheaper set of armour that you use. You gather up the commodities and gold for your own set of plate, and then... you expect it to be good, because you already HAVE gone through your "training armour" set.

In addition, lets remember how large the market is for robes, and how large the market is for leather/chain/scale/fieldplate.

I siad it before, I say it again- I like reforging. It makes it unique, makes it more of an art. And it should be, given how incredibly niched the thing is! Your whole market is other warriors, many of whom are forgers themselves.

I get the feeling that some people won't be happy until forging is just tailoring, but with more and different comms, and an impossibly small market. That would be dull. If I wanted tailoring, I'd take it.

The saving grace for the forger is that even other forgers aren't always willing to sit there and perfect a piece of gear. Reforging is what makes the time-bonus on the hammer arti actually valuable. Forging is not tailoring, for the reasons outlined in my previous post, and others. They don't need to be made equivalent any more than warriors need three-hit kata moves with their weapons to be like monks.

I don't care about it so much as it was. I think they're relatively balanced as tradeskills, pre-armour-repair-change. Now? I don't see why plate was singled out for this change. It makes every bit as much sense for robes that are degraded by mending of all things to also similarly take some damage from much larger piercing items such as two-handed swords slashing through them.

I'd prefer it just not be necessary for either, but it really should be balanced both ways, either way.

What you are missing is the vastly different markets that the tradeskills sell to. Forgers sell to warriors. Tailors sell to everyone else. Forgers must make top of the line equipment because a.) they can and b.) if they don't, customers will just find someone else who will. Tailors, on the other hand, are in MUCH more limited supply in comparison to the demand. Economics state that the greater the demand, the more sub-par goods you can sell at higher price. So it's not so much you HAVE to sell shitty robes, it's that you CAN sell them and people WILL buy them. If people stopped buying your "sub-par" robes, you'd just get shears, shear and remake until you got "sellable" quality robes. Further, we DO take a net loss on time. I'll just reference you to my prior posts instead of spelling all the math out again. Also keep in mind that as a tailor, robe-making is NOT. Repeat NOT. your sole source of income. Many tailors just sell unenchanted robes and leave the enchanting to the consumer. You can also make money on normal clothing, packs, whatever. Forgers, on the other hand, can ONLY produce highly variable quality goods. That is our SINGLE source of income as a tradeskill.

Actually, people buy subpar robes because the cost of getting good robes is just so much higher than the cost of getting good plate, requires two tradespeople, and takes just as much time. If the opportunity cost was the same, there'd be more people with good robes.

That's also true.

Make everything decay and wear. Armour, weapons becoming dull, clothes getting damaged not only when mended, stones crumling, cities and walls falling apart, forests decaying, roads overgrowing with grass, mountains eroding and sliding down, and environment being messed up global warming and last but not least, people dying from old age.
We want real? Why not go really real right away?!

Reality for the the People of the Basin!

You do have a valid point here. There is still a market in other forgers, though. You could still choose to just stop after one set, and sell that armor to other forgers with more free time. They would then smelt it and make a better suit for a profit. In either case, you're not forced to put all of that time in.



You've clearly never been a tailor. This is like me saying that you could make money off of leather armor. Clothes are only a good source of money if you have a shop; without a shop, you will never sell anything but robes. Robes are my sole source of income as a tailor, and I have to sell them whether they're good or not. I will repeat again, I would love to be able to shear robes to get the majority of the materials back (let's say all cloth comms?) and re-sew them for better stats. I would love the choice that forgers constantly complain about. Unfortunately that is not an option for me.

@Enero - if you do a little searching on the forums, you'll see that people have actually asked for similar things, complaining that there was no demand for forgers and they should get some sort of maintenance skill. The divine said they've been planning this from the beginning, but it was also something that players have been asking for.