yeah, forget bookbinding permanently then skillchoice select it.

I love skillflex. But at the same time it's disappointing. When the "essence shop for demigod" idea came up and multiple tradeskills were discussed, that seemed really interesting in ways that skillflex can't come close to matching, simply because tradeskills are treated the same as guild skills, despite the huge disparity in what it means to switch one or the other. Switching around guildskills too fast is imbalancing, unfair, and counterproductive; but switching tradeskills is far less impactful.

If it costs 100 lessons to switch to another tradeskill temporarily, then that comes to (at a very conservative estimate) 100,000 gold cost. (100 lessons = 17 credits = 113,000 gold at current market prices.) There's just no way you can ever justify that. What that means is the only reason to switch tradeskills is to get the trans item. Actually practicing the trade is completely impossible to justify this way. You'd have to make impossible amounts of profit before switching back just to break even.

Please re-examine the idea that there should be the same costs and limits on changing a guild skill, and changing a tradeskill. Make it so changing tradeskills isn't free, but is at least possible to justify if you work at it -- for instance, maybe tradeskills cost 10 lessons instead of 50, or maybe give everyone one tradeskill-activate per day free (with any after that still costing 50 lessons), or something like that.

I just want to note that this was done as something Estarra's been pondering for a bit - and has nothing to do with the 'essence shop for demigod' idea and multiple trade skills. If (big if) we include that, it would come in with the demigod revision changes.

Though I'd mildly note the skillflex system makes it easier to do such (just allow you to have two active tradeskills instead of just one!).

Not to touch on the rest of what you're talking about, as it's a bit outside of my realm of 'oh look, shinies'.

Unless there's something in the upcoming Ascendant review that makes this irrelevant, I fully support this.

No, that's my point. We've talked about second-tradeskill ideas before, via the essence shop and others, but now, all of those ideas are buried because as far as the Powers That Be are concerned, "we already did that". But you didn't. Skillflex only seems to make multiple tradeskills possible. But outside of the trans items, it really doesn't. So what it actually does is not only not give us a way to do multiple tradeskills, by appearing to already provide that, it instantly dead-ends any further suggestions or ideas about multiple tradeskills. It doesn't just not do it, it also prevents it forever.

The bright side, however, is that with a very small tweak that would probably be very easy to code, and that would have negligible to no impact on combat balance, skillflex would really, indeed, give us a way to do multiple tradeskills, at a cost that's neither too high nor too low. Hence, this post: to try to get the Powers That Be realize that it hasn't yet been done (your post seems to suggest you think it has!), but that it'd be very easy to take the last step.

Hope that makes more sense.

No, I think you're missing my point. We haven't gotten the endgame review stuff ('essence shop' etc) coded and released yet, so I think it's too early to declare it 'buried' - and we're not declaring it as 'we already did that'.

I'm just saying that skillflex wasn't our answer to it - it's something else entirely. That's all.

I have 0 to no opinion on if the cost is high or low or blue or bright pink. It's all vaguely negligible to me.

Approaching this from an OOC standpoint, it takes 9 credits to change a skill. That seems pretty...negligable.

Hmmm... I suppose it's still possible that that stuff will include some second way of addressing the multiple-tradeskills need, but if so, that would seem kind of wasteful since skillflex is already 95% of the way to getting there, so doing it two different ways would be unexpected. But I suppose it's possible.

(Of course, if someone wanted to implement "multiple tradeskills as a perk of endgame" without duplicating a lot of skillflex's effort, one easy way would be to make it so you could flex tradeskills (only!) by spending essence instead of lessons. That would tie both of these ideas up in a pretty little bow.)

Obviously should just make a demigod essence shop power to make tradeskills cost less to skillflex. Boom solved.

Sure. From now on my charge to do any trade is 9cr plus 1000 gold per item. I'm sure that you'll be happy to pay the negligible cost.

I'd love it if every IG year or IRL month or something, you got a free skillflex (and probably capped so you can't stash a bunch over time and then swap a lot). You could pay the 'negligable' cost to do it faster, or just wait it out if you were patient.

Or just split tradeskills and other skills up and let you pick a tradeskill & a normal skill every day.

Then, at that point, the costs for activating tradeskills can also be reviewed as they're now two disparate entities.

But then I can't slowly swap back and forth between tertiaries.

I feel that a cost for swapping between full guild skills actually should be significant (and never costless), because that is a "combat balance" issue. Skillflex makes it much less costly than forgetting and relearning, which is great, but it should never be free to swap.

I just don't think that tradeskills need to cost the same, because... they don't have the same impact, and the more people who can do trades the better imo.

That's much less then 300 or so credits.

You're silly if you're thinking 8cr or so for a hop for a tradeskill is justifiable for when someone needs the occasional Artisan for a throne as opposed to something more in demand like Enchanting or Herbs. Cause I know people don't make the gold necessary for jumping to Artisan to make them the throne as they would when sticking with the latter two.

I wouldn't mind any bit of consideration to alleviate the cost from tradeskills. Tertiaries are combative and I don't mind the 50 lesson cost and limitation there, but everyday trades seems to suffer.

I wouldn't mind at all having the option of using some of my demi essence to reactivate a tradeskill instead of lessons.