If you using crafting items for training then the last imbue which you do 18-19 times per item will be the same.
Also a new player could save much more money by not using crafting items for training.
What you said makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.
Yes, the last 18-19 times will be the same imbue repeated. That's part of the point
I was making.
THOSE ARE THE ONES THAT COST MORE FOR THE GARGOYLE, to achieve the same difficulty!
You just countered my argument by saying the equivalent of "the reason why it's black is that it's so bright white you can't look at it". (does impression of AFLAC duck listening to Yogi Berra)
To achieve the same difficulty chance (And therefore the same gain chance), the first (and second, if a 3-part imbue) will be relatively unchanged for all races.
ALL OTHER IMBUES (the last one that's repeated until 20 successes hit), will have to be about 10-20% higher total intensity for a gargoyle, to have to same gain chance as a human or elf.
That ALWAYS amounts to a 1-3 normal gem increase PER IMBUE, as well as a 0-2 residue increase per imbue.
That amounts to 18 to 57 additional gems per item (minimum 1 @ 18 imbues, maximum 3 @ 19), depending on the property & item being added, and as much as 38 additional residue.
So, a difference of thousands of additional gems and about half as much additional residue, for the same skill gains.
And, yes, a new player COULD theoretically gain more cheaply by imbuing loot - it would just take a LOT longer to do it.
The recommended training method, on the other hand, is very quick.
1. Smith with ASH & talisman sufficient to be 100% exceptional: select jingasa, select make number ->20
(1 minute, including arranging the 20 in a container to where each is easily targeted, if in the CC, or using the freeform container in EC).
2. Open imbuing gump, select first item, first property (luck), and 89 or 90 intensity (89 is slightly cheaper):
(15 seconds)
3. Select imbue last property and target next 19 items to repeat
(roughly 1 minute to do all 19)
4. on item 20, after imbuing the luck, select imbue last item, switch to the second property and intensity, imbue it on item #20
(10-20 seconds, depending on success chance)
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(skip steps 5 & 6 if only imbuing 2 properties)
5. Go back through the other 19 items in reverse order, using imbue last property
(1-2 minutes total, depending on the success chance)
6. now back on item 1, Select Last item & change to the 3rd property to imbue
(10-15 seconds)
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7. use imbue last on the item until you hit 20 successes, then start going through the other 19 items with last property, then last item, until all 20 done.
(5-10 minutes)
8. when all done, unravel container to get residue back to use for next batch, which will have a slightly higher total intensity imbued as the last step than the previous batch (by either adding the 3rd imbued property, or upping the last property imbued's value). In fact, you might gain so fast that you may want to take an extra 10-15 seconds during the middle and adjust the last property up one or two steps (if advancing 2 steps costs the same as only going up one, go for the higher difficulty at same cost).
Note that you are making FOUR-property items in this method (including the Mage Armor), and the Mage Armor allows you to not waste an imbue on a first property you have no chance to gain on.
Total: 10-15 minutes for 400 successful imbues.
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With only doing loot items, you'll have to change the target imbues for each item, based on their intensity and existing properties.
Your costs and chances to gain will be all over the place, unless you spend more time sorting the stuff by base intensity, than you would have to do the recommended alternative of making the items on a set pattern & schedule.
The items also don't come with a free 100% in one property already (like the jingasa do), and could require an extra imbue just to get to being the equivalent of one before doing any further imbues to try to gain.
You'd be better off, time and resource wise, just unraveling most of it for residue (and gains), or smelting it for ingots to make the Jingasa.
However, with a truly neophyte crafter with no outside help (extremely rare these days), the piecemeal "imbue loot for gains" might be an option, as it gives the person time to accumulate the gems from mining & monster loot. Just be prepared for it to take weeks or months to reach 120, instead of days (if not hours).
Last I checked, if one upgrades to SA, you still get race change tokens (is it 2 or 3?). So, needing a token to change after training should really only be an issue to someone starting a new account, and even those may get the tokens (not started a new SA account to find out).
You'll save enough gold training as a human, vs. as a gargoyle, to BUY a race change token, if you don't have one, on most shards. The tokens might be 1.5 to 2 million on some shards on vendors in Luna, but I've seen them go unsold on my shard for 250k (from working at an in-game auction, where things like that often end up when they don't sell on vendors after too long). For that matter, most established accounts by this point have at least one soulstone, so you could train it up on a human and transfer it to a gargoyle when done, with the only limiter being the requirement of both being scrolled to 120 (and, if you want to play stonecrafting runic roulette, you'll have plenty of scrolls to combine into multiple 120s).