Ancient Smith Hammers increase your crafting success chance for normal and exceptional items, see here: http://uo.stratics.com/content/skills/blacksmithing.php. A legendary blacksmith (@ 120.0 skill) cannot make all of the items 100% of the time without the use of an ASH and/or talisman.Since it is possible to now use Forged Metal of Artifacts when enhancing, is there still any practical use for Ancient Smith Hammers ? If so, for what ?
Thanks.
Dragon barding for instance, a stable in any proper tank class's defensive arsenal, at 120 smith + a good talisman is still only ~85% or something to make exceptional. Exceptional armor soaks more damage than non-exceptional. As far as I know, they cannot be smelted, so any ones that turn out normal are basically a waste of 750 ingots. 120 smithy + talisman + 15ASH I believe gives 100% exceptional chance, I believe.
Alternately, lets say you wanted to fill a LBOD for a valorite hammer. 120 smithy + talisman doesn't give you 100% exceptional chance on the tunics. Every "wasted" valorite ingot costs 1500 gold. Every smelting only returns 75% ingots. So every valorite tunic made non-exceptionally = 9k gp wasted.
Or, lets just assume that you want to enhance stuff, but would rather not spend real world money on the forged metal...
Those are exact all ways how I use them.Dragon barding for instance, a stable in any proper tank class's defensive arsenal, at 120 smith + a good talisman is still only ~85% or something to make exceptional. Exceptional armor soaks more damage than non-exceptional. As far as I know, they cannot be smelted, so any ones that turn out normal are basically a waste of 750 ingots. 120 smithy + talisman + 15ASH I believe gives 100% exceptional chance, I believe.
Alternately, lets say you wanted to fill a LBOD for a valorite hammer. 120 smithy + talisman doesn't give you 100% exceptional chance on the tunics. Every "wasted" valorite ingot costs 1500 gold. Every smelting only returns 75% ingots. So every valorite tunic made non-exceptionally = 9k gp wasted.
Or, lets just assume that you want to enhance stuff, but would rather not spend real world money on the forged metal...
Before the Forged Metal tool, it was all there was to help with the odds. The odds to enhance any piece of armor have always been poor, at best.The thing is, that the odds for enhancing using an ancient smith are very low and since enhancing is the very last step after reforging, powdering and imbuing, who'd want to take much risks enhancing a piece that already used up so much cost in runics, materials, time ?
Once you get into regularly filling Blacksmith BODs, you will have so many ASH's of all types, they are almost unavoidable (see here:So, I am really not sure why one would want to get Ancient Smith Hammers nowadays....