Blacksmithing costs.

[Vega]

Originally Posted by cubiczar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm not real sure what these people are doing to skill up but in my experience the cost to get to the 150-160 skill range (whenever the 1 and 2 sheet banded runs out) is around 150-250p. This assumes you follow a blacksmithing guide based on cost (I mostly followed this one Eqtraders old guide but skpped the sewing kits) and a decent int/wis or str (120+) and good faction/cha for the vendor you are working with. Now from 168+ (where banded trivials out) you are looking at higher cost but it depends on how much you are willing to do to source materials. Leather padding is a low skill combine for tailoring and just requires getting pelts and a skinning knife (if memory serves). Ore for fine plate can be farmed in a couple spots and if you are really into sourcing stuff some of the racial smithing has combines that go quite high and don't require the enchant metal spells.

Either way though if you are burning more than 500p getting to 168 you are probably not doing a very efficient set of combines to level up your smithing. Once you hit that lvl much of the cost is dependent on how much time you want to spend farming materials rather than buying them.

All that being said, I'm not sure I'd bother lvl'ing up smithing past the banded trivial at this point. As others have said the end level cultural combines are very cost prohibitive at the moment (at least 1 jacnith/blue diamond per piece some upto 3 I think). Once velious is out for a few months there is a patch that removes the gem component of the enchant spells making the armor actually worth making. Until then your cost in materials for a piece would almost certainly be better spent buying something else.

This information is all on point. Getting to 168 is pretty easy. And, in opposition to what the wiki says, you should do fine plate to go higher if you want. Ornate is slow to farm the ore, and very heavy to haul back to town. If you decide to buy the ore off the vendor, you will lose around 40 plat a combine. Leather padding can be slow to farm (but easier than high quality ore), but can also be bought for decent prices (on blue anyhow) if you look around. I found a supplier at one point and was able to take a smith from 168 to 205 for a little over 1k if I remember right.

[cubiczar]

Originally Posted by Estu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

When I was skilling up my wizard's blacksmithing, Banded didn't take you up nearly as high. Then there was a patch that shifted the various trivials up. I also might be misremembering exactly how high I got his smithing; what I know is that I trivialed some, but not all, fine plate combines.

Yeah, if they were using the live trivial levels for awhile that would make sense. They definitely lowered the banded trivial at some point on live making leveling smithing a nightmare. I'm glad they moved it back to the original trivial levels on p99 cause we don't need every trade to be as expensive as jewelcraft lol.

[maskedmelon]

Must one be of the relevant race to craft a particular cultural item, or is the culture crafting station and imbued materials all that is required?

[wormed]

Is the Cultural Armor bad at end game? The best stuff looks half decent.

[cubiczar]

Originally Posted by maskedmelon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Must one be of the relevant race to craft a particular cultural item, or is the culture crafting station and imbued materials all that is required?

Pretty sure you have to be of that race to do the combines (maybe even use the forge?) but honestly I don't think I've tried it myself. My main point was to look at your cultural options for your race to see if anything looked worth while. Most of the stuff looked like a bit of a pain to farm but if you are higher level maybe not?

Originally Posted by wormed [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Is the Cultural Armor bad at end game? The best stuff looks half decent.

I haven't looked at all of it to be honest, I have a high elf enchanter and initially started smithing to do some of the cultural stuff for him. Didn't realize that the gem component to the spell still existed on this server but I didn't go past banded trivial so didn't waste much time on it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] For high elf stuff it is at least one blue diamond per armor slot so you are talking a min of 2kp per piece and that can buy some pretty good dropped gear [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Salahdin]

All good info, thank you again.

Will be doing bs on my his paladin soon. Seems that if you do it smart will cost about 2-3k.

Will report back with progress so it's documented.