Carpentry and General Crafting Question

NoBogui · 02-03-2007, 01:50 PM

If I'm heading towards carpenter from artificer, what secondary skills should I neglect? Sculpting? Sculpting tools? Sculpting Utilities? Or should I balance them all? I finally figured out I needed to leave out minerology completely

Ysharros · 02-03-2007, 05:28 PM

Mineralogy is the only one you can leave low. The terminology is a little misleading, but you'll need all the other skills. On the skills pane of the crafting equipment / skills / attributes, the top two listings relate to refining skills and the bottom two relate to finishing skills, regardless which speciality you end up choosing. In the Mineralogy / Carpentry / Artificing group, you'll want to leave one 0 or low if you intend to specialise, which most do - in your case, you'd ignore Mineralogy and let the other two max out.

Balancing them, however, seems to be less useful for most than trying to keep one or two relatively high and leaving one to lag behind somewhat. Bear in mind that you will never have enough points to max out all 3 skills in a group. I tend to let utilities max out because it's what's used to maximise quality (and because it's used so much it tends to go up more/faster than the others anyway). After that I try to get station skills (the one not utilities or tools) get pretty high, because aside from helping on station actions, it also helps reduce the incidence of complications... though I'm not convinced it's working all that well lately. ;-) I leave tools the lowest in both finishing and refining partly because it's hard to raise, and I figure I can plug the gap with gear that will enhance related attributes and the abilities themselves.

That, however, is just how I like to do it. I'm sure others will chime in with their own strategies.

NoBogui · 02-04-2007, 02:00 AM

Hmmmm so you think that having all my refining skills equal is a not so good strategy? I like the logic behind it, but I haven't had the chance to test it myself, all my skills are even now. Well I'm only level 7 now but I'll give it a try.

SwordMage · 02-04-2007, 03:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NoBogui

Hmmmm so you think that having all my refining skills equal is a not so good strategy? I like the logic behind it, but I haven't had the chance to test it myself, all my skills are even now. Well I'm only level 7 now but I'll give it a try.

Since you can control where skill points are allocated (in any one group, e.g., station/tool/utility for refining) and even force them to transfer from one skill to another, there is no long term problem with experimenting with various configuations to see which one works best for you.

I will probably try out several approaches on my different crafters so that I can do side by side comparisons before tentitively settling on my ideal configuration, which will probably change every couple of months.

Ysharros · 02-04-2007, 07:21 AM

What SwordMage said. The way I allocate mine works for me, and in the current "whap! Have another complication!" climate, I'd rather get less of those so I'm making sure station & utilities skills stay high. I can see how a really high tools skill could be useful too though - lots of complication remedies are tool-based, and if it only took me 1 action to clear them instead of 2 or 3 I might actually be saving myself more points than trying to not get them in the first place. Right now, it's hard to tell how effective my avoidance techniques are.

As Sword says, you can fiddle your skills around pretty easily, so experimenting with an allocation that works for you is quite possible.

Zing · 02-05-2007, 10:58 AM

I have tested and decided that Ysharros' strategy is definitely the best (at least through my current level 12). I wanted to see how much of an impact the skills actually had. I figured I have to grind anyway so I took turns maxing out the station skill, the utility skill and the tool skill. It took two levels worth of grinding to switch them all around three times.

The uility and the station skills definitely net you the biggest bang for your buck. The tool skill is alright but (at least at my level 12) all tool skills that raise quality also raise progress. So you end up having to use the utility skill anyway because you can only get at most 1/4 a bar of quality from tool skills. If you max the utility skill you can get all your quality with utility skills and just blow through the tool section with the cheap action that only nets progress.

What I have found is that there is a balance you can reach by experimenting with the number of times you have to click each action. It's hard to explain but since "extra" progress doesn't carry over into new sections it makes sense to have your skills just high enough to utilize ALL the progress you create. So right now I have my station skills at 100%, utility at around 80% and tools at around 50%. This balance makes it so it takes 3 actions to fill up my utility progress and 4 actions to fill up my tools progress. I found that if I min/max my tools and utility it still ends up taking 3 actions to fill up my utility but 5 to fill up my tools. So there is balance you can only find by experimenting. I'm sure the balance changes as you level but if you find that you are typically wasting a whole action to fill up 2% of your bar at the end of some step, it's probably a good idea to bump up the skill governing that step so you fill up the bar without that extra click.

Since I plan on leaving the tool skill low and like Ysharros said the tool skill governs most complication actions, I plan on putting most of my attribute points in problem solving. I figure a high problem solving attribute and good +tools will make up for a low tool skill.

Speaking of attributes though, how does everyone plan on distributing their points and why?